Page:Life of William Shelburne (vol 1).djvu/50

24 figure and petulant address was admirably calculated, but it failed of his object.

"It would be worth examining how it was possible under such circumstances for the Whigs to maintain their ground. The Queen was undoubtedly disposed to favour a second restoration, but however she may have loved her family, she loved herself more, and was afraid of risking her own power while she lived. Much is to be laid to the account of the character of the deposed family, who were from the beginning to the end a most infatuated race.

"'s trial was a curious picture of the principles of the two parties, and deserves to be read with all attention and considered. People talk of public opinion; and what creates or constitutes public opinion? Numbers certainly do not. Sacheverel's trial gives a just notion of what is called the constitution, which degenerated in the reigns of George I. and into a systematic false government; and is to be found described and detailed in the Walpole Papers, till there appeared with  a new epoch, which it will be the business of these memorandums to illustrate: to state in the first place the new impulse which was imperceptibly given to things, and the trifling incidents which afterwards originated the greater events. 'Born and bred in this country, George the Third gloried in the name of Briton.'

"The foreign affairs during this period and till after the, have been fully laid open in a variety of memoirs and collections of different sorts, French and English, which only serve to prove the ignorance of all. Kingdoms, principalities, islands, were handed from one Power to another, with far less examination than a private estate is bought or sold. The people were as little consulted as the sheep or the oxen which pass from one landed proprietor to another, indeed, much less considered; for, in the one case, they are counted and valued, but in the other, they are thrown in as a makeweight into one or other scale, without the least examination or regard to their inclinations or separate interests,