the country had long lost all habit of self-government; the King, owing to his weakness, was popular and unpopular by turns; with perhaps the exception of Mirabeau, there was not a single statesman capable of steering the vessel of the State between the Scylla of reaction and the Charybdis of anarchy; and a horrible material distress aggravated the difficulties of the situation. In England the King was popular, and a man of strong will; he had surrounded himself with the statesmen whom he had chosen in order to crush faction; an active and healthy love of improvement stirred the pulse of the national life; great reforms had been carried during the last five years, and the country was prosperous. There was no risk of a Terror, either Red or White. Pitt himself denied that any danger threatened England from the contagion of French principles. "Depend upon it," he said to Burke, "that we shall go on as we are till the day of judgment."[1]
"The only rock," Lord Lansdowne wrote to Morellet, "on which the French commons can split is pretending to too much. If the liberty of the press is secured, no pretext left for Lettres de cachet, the Provincial Assemblies established, and some bounds put to the expenditure, everything else must follow. But I cannot help coinciding most entirely with those who were for the union of the Orders, in consequence of my own experience of this constitution. I look upon M. Montesquieu to be a second saviour of the world, but I have long since considered what he says of our constitution to be very visionary. I imagine it is the natural progress of things to pass from ignorance to pedantry, and from pedantry to simplicity and truth. I have been an observer and some little actor in our government now for 30 years, and I have never seen any good result from the three Orders with us, except the delay, which gives time for the public opinion to operate, and I am sure the nobility in France will have twice the influence by mixing with the commons, and will do themselves more credit; I mean such as
- ↑ Life of Lord Sidmouth, i. 72.
