238 History of the Radical Party in Parliament. [1833- as Roebuck, Faithful, Buckingham, Major Beauclerk, etc. (most of whom have totally failed in point of speaking) bent upon doing all the mischief they can, and incessantly active." * What we may call the official Whig view may come next. Sir Erskine May says of the Radicals, " Without organization or unity of purpose, and with little confidence in one another, they were often found in combination against the Government. And, in addition to this body, the great towns recently enfran- chised, and places suddenly relieved from the thraldom of patronage and close corporations, had returned a new class of reformers, having little sympathy with the old Whigs. These men had sprung from a different source ; they had no connec- tion with the aristocracy, and no respect for the constitutional Whig party. Their political view r s were founded upon prin- ciples more democratic, and experience of the restraints and compromises of public affairs had not yet taught them moderation." t Let us turn to an account more philosophical, and which, even if it be somewhat too eulogistic, had the essential truth only to be gained by some sympathy with the principles which actuated the Radicals and the objects for which they were striving. Harriet Martineau writes " These Radical reform members were men of conscience, of enlightenment, of intellectual ability and moral earnestness, of good station, and, generally speaking, of independent fortune. They were so unlike the vulgar Tory misrepresentation of them so far from being destructives and demagogues that the sober- minded of the community might more reasonably trust them for the conservation of property than either the Conservatives or the Whigs. . . . There was no other party which, in 1837, was known to include such men as Grote, and Molesworth, and Roebuck, and Colonel Thompson, and Joseph Hume, and William Ewart, and Charles Buller, and Ward, and Villiers, and Bulwer, and Strutt ; such a phalanx of strength
- " Greville Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 360.
t "Constitutional History of England," vol. ii. pp. 60, 61.
