peace for the moment was not popular; a scapegoat was desired, and Shelburne was the scapegoat. It had been easy to denounce the war; it was now equally easy to denounce the peace, and the passions of the hour had been worked with the utmost skill by the Whig pamphleteers, for whom no misrepresentation was too gross, no slander too base, so long as it served the object of blackening the character of their former ally in Opposition. The virulence of their language may be gathered from the fact that a scurrilous publication by Dennis O'Brien, entitled, A Defence of Lord Shelburne, was popularly attributed to Burke or Sheridan.[1] As Thurlow observed with bitter irony during the last debate in the House of Lords, "When the Opposition apprehended that the difficult task of making peace would fall upon themselves, then our condition was painted in all, and perhaps in more than its real gloom; and their Lordships were depressed and tortured with the accounts which were given of our navy and our resources. Then any peace, it was declared, would be a good one. A peace for a year even, nay for a month, for a day, was coveted. Anything that would just give us breathing time, and serve to break the dangerous confederacy against us, would be a prosperous event. But when the grievous task was shifted to others, how did the language differ! The navy grew as it were by magic. The resources of the State became immense. The condition of the country flourishing; and the Ministry were to be tried by the strictest and most rigid law."
There was yet another reason against dissolution. Shelburne's extensive ideas of Reform had alarmed many of his own colleagues and had probably frightened the King himself. The main object at which he proposed to aim, and he did not conceal it, was to abolish "the false system of Government," which had grown up under the circumstances described in the Autobiography since the accession to the throne of the House of Hanover.[2] The Crown and Parliament were each to be restored to the sphere to
- ↑ Walpole, Journals, ii. 570. Wraxall's Posthumous Memoirs, i. 230.
- ↑ Morellet, Notes of Conversations in 1783, where he quotes the actual words to be found in the Autobiography. See Vol. I. Ch. I. p. 16 et seq.
