The Reign of George III. (Continued.) page 16

Before separating, this most important meeting appointed a committee of correspondence, consisting of sixty-one gentlemen, to carry out the objects of the petition, and still further to prepare the plan of a national association for the promotion of the great business of reform. This was following so directly in the steps of the Americans as to strike a new and yet unknown terror into all the hearts of the corruptionists, and of ministers their fosterers. Even some of the friends of reform, the marquis of Carmarthen amongst them, were startled at these committees of correspondence, recollecting what an engine of agitation they had proved in the United States. But, spite of all timid tremors, and of all interested opposition, the petition of Yorkshire received eight thousand signatures. The contagion spread rapidly; in numbers of other counties, and in many of the leading cities, similar petitions were got up, and committees of correspondence formed. In various counties violent opposition was made by leading noblemen and gentlemen. Lord Sandwich tried this at Huntingdon, but only to rouse a more determined spirit. The great landowners, in many places, when they saw their efforts to quash such petitions fail, entered public protests against them, insisting that the whole matter should be left to the wisdom of parliament. In vain; the great reformers were at their posts encouraging the public. Conspicuous amongst these were lord Rockingham, in Yorkshire, lord Shelburne, in Buckinghamshire, and lord Mahon, the son-in-law of Chatham, in Kent.

The result was that very soon, in the counties of Middlesex, Chester, Hants, Hertford, Sussex, Huntingdon, Surrey, Cumberland, Bedford, Essex, Gloucester, Somerset, Wilts, Dorset, Devon, Norfolk, Berks, Bucks, Nottingham, Kent, Northumberland, Suffolk, Hereford, Cambridge, Derby, Northampton, and the towns of York and Bristol, Cambridge, Nottingham, Newcastle, Reading, and Bridgewater, petitions were prepared, and in most of them corresponding committees organised.

This terminated the year 1779. It closed amid very gloomy circumstances and auguries. The nation was involved in a dreadful and wide-spread war; was on the eve of losing its most valuable colonies; was ruled by a king, who, whatever domestic virtues he might possess, had neither the capacity to manage his own affairs nor those of the kingdom, and by a ministry which had all the qualities necessary for the ruin of a great people. No imbecility, no amount of mismanagement, no career of loss, and blunders, and damaging incapacity ever induced that king to dismiss such ministers, and there was no power in the nation to unseat them, because, with the money which the people furnished to maintain the domestic government, and prosecute those luckless wars, they hired standing majorities to sanction all their proceedings. But, at this moment, as good comes out of evil, as day springs out of night, the necessity of an extirpation of this odious system was forcing itself on the more reflective and honest minds. We owe it to the duke of Richmond, to the earl of Shelburne, and pre-eminently to Edmund Burke, that the nation was now taught that the funds of a nation are not raised to maintain a greedy and lazy brood of aristocrats, and contractors, and parliamentary adventurers, but are raised for the discharge of the necessary business of the community. It has taken a long time to inculcate effectively this lesson. We are fast hastening to the completion of a century, and it is not yet accomplished, and never will be accomplished till the people are really the controllers of their representatives; but that day is hastening on, and no future government of England will, in the course of a hundred and fifty years, be able to spend three thousand millions sterling, nominally in wars, but of which a large part was really expended in feeding a more ravenous brood of placemen, contractors, aristocrats, and all their progeny and kin, than the world ever saw.