II


The fall of Walpole, indeed, released no energies for political thought;
the system continued, though the men were different. What alone can be
detected is the growth of a democratic opinion which found its
sustenance outside the House of Commons, the opinion the strength of
which was later to force the elder Pitt upon an unwilling king. An able
pamphlet of the time shows us the arrival of this unlooked-for portent.
_Faction detected by the Evidence of Facts_ (1742) was, though it is
anonymous,[16] obviously written by one in touch with the inner current
of affairs. The author had hoped for the fall of Walpole, though he sees
the chaos in its result. "A republican spirit," he says, "has strangely
arisen"; and he goes on to tell how the electors of London and
Westminster were now regarding their members as delegates to whom
instructions might be issued. "A new party of malcontents" had arisen,
"assuming to themselves, though very falsely, the title of the People."
They affect, he tells us, "superiority to the whole legislature ... and
endeavor in effect to animate the people to resume into their own hands
that vague and loose authority which exists (unless in theory) in the
people of no country upon earth, and the inconvenience of which is so
obvious that it is the first step of mankind, when formed into society,
to divest themselves of it, and to delegate it forever from themselves."
The writer clearly foreshadows, even in his dislike, that temper which
produced the Wilkes affair, and made it possible for Cartwright and
Horne Tooke and Sir Thomas Hollis to become the founders of English
radicalism.

[Footnote 16: It was probably written by Lord Egmont.]