landowners because of the horrors of the Reign of Terror. Even a
Legitimist would not now base a moral claim to an estate on the ground
that his grandfather was deprived of it through confiscation and murder.
But rhetoric is not governed by the laws of logic, and insistence on the
corruption or the criminality by which the Act of Union was carried is
an effective method of conciliating popular sentiment to the cause of
repeal. No notion again has been more widely circulated or put forward
on higher authority than that past reforms have been due in the main to
the enthusiasm of the masses. But no notion is more directly at variance
with the lessons of history. In the eighteenth century the enlightenment
of the Whig aristocracy was England's safeguard against the Jacobitism
and the bigotry of the crowd. Every effort in favour of religious
liberty was till recently the work of an educated minority who opposed
popular prejudice. In the last century popular sentiment would have
denied all rights to Jews; in 1780 Lord George Gordon was the hero of
the people of England, and even more emphatically of the people of
Scotland. And Burke was forced to present an elaborate defence to his
constituents at Bristol for taking part in an attempt to mitigate the
penal laws against the Roman Catholics. There is every reason to suppose
that even in 1829 a _plébiscite_, had one been possible, would have
negatived the Catholic Relief Bill. The mitigation again of the Criminal
Law was the work of thinkers like Romilly and Bentham. These eminent
reformers would have been much surprised to have been told that the
uneducated masses were their staunch supporters. One of the greatest
improvements ever effected by legislation was the reform in the
administration of parochial relief. The new poor law was essentially
unpopular; its principles were established by economists; its enactment
was due to the Whigs, supported, as it should always be remembered to
his credit, by the Duke of Wellington. It may be conjectured from recent
legislation that at this very moment an indiscriminate renewal of