Page:History of the Radical Party in Parliament.djvu/26

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long reign of the Whigs was shaken by the defeat of Walpole, but it was shaken by a coalition of which Whigs like Pulteney and were leading members. It was restored apparently with all its old force under the Pelhams, but the Patriots had appealed to a power with which the party managers could not ultimately deal. That public opinion which had led to the dethronement of Walpole, afterwards forced Pitt upon an unwilling monarch and an unfriendly Cabinet; and Pitt was determined to rely not upon the placemen who merely tolerated him, but upon the people who really trusted and loved him. Throughout his whole career he declared his intention to break the trammels of party. There were occasions on which this resolution seemed to act disastrously for the interests of the nation, as when he refused to ally himself with the Rockingham Whigs. There is no doubt that Burke's argument in favour of party allegiance under a Parliamentary system is unanswerable. Representative government will be impossible if men who are generally of the same way of thinking will not consent to so far modify their individual views as, whilst preserving their principles, will enable them to agree upon the details in which those principles are to be embodied. But the circumstances of the time were peculiar, and, in Pitt's opinion, the rule of the Whig oligarchy was as much opposed to political freedom as would have been an absolute monarchy itself.