Page:History of the Radical Party in Parliament.djvu/167

i822.] Death of George III. to the Death of Castlereagh. 153 liberty of the subject and the freedom of the press ; and many of them were willing to remove some of the barriers of religious intolerance. But all this they would do for, and not by and with the help of, the people. What slight constitutional modifications were necessary in order to replace an absolutely despotic Ministry by a moderately liberal one, the Whigs would support ; but to transfer the governing power from the hands of their own class to those of the hitherto unen- franchised masses, that was a proposition to which they could not listen. Their schemes of reform were of this feeble and limited character, and had never any real life in them, nor any chance of success. They awakened no popular enthusiasm, and they were contemptuously rejected by the Tory Government. The work, then, which Lambton, and men like him, had to perform was of a double kind. They had to convince the Whigs that without some real extension of popular power, the practical reforms at which their party aimed were absolutely unattainable ; and that policy, no less than justice, called for the enfranchisement of the people. Then, if they succeeded in this, and to the extent to which they did succeed, they had to form a medium of communication between the Whigs and the trusted leaders of the people. There was plenty of work to do in both directions. The ideas of the Whigs as to the amount of Parliamentary reform required were absurdly inadequate. The difference between their proposals and those which the Radicals advocated was marked distinctly in this year, 1821, in two main directions in the theoretical arguments of scholars and thinkers, and in the schemes sub- mitted to Parliament by the active politicians of the two sections. Sir James Mackintosh was one of the most Liberal, as he was certainly one of the most learned and accomplished, members of his party. To the Edinburgh Review, No. Ixi., he contributed an article on Parliamentary reform, which, although it was not without liberality of view, nevertheless missed the only reason why the nation required any change of