policy, and by the firmness with which their party had stood by
them. There was peace abroad and at home. The sentinels had ceased
to watch by the beacons of Dorsetshire and Sussex. The merchant
ships went forth without fear from the Thames and the Avon.
Soldiers had been disbanded by tens of thousands. Taxes had been
remitted. The value of all public and private securities had
risen. Trade had never been so brisk. Credit had never been so
solid. All over the kingdom the shopkeepers and the farmers, the
artisans and the ploughmen, relieved, beyond all hope, from the
daily and hourly misery of the clipped silver, were blessing the
broad faces of the new shillings and half crowns. The statesmen
whose administration had been so beneficent might be pardoned if
they expected the gratitude and confidence which they had fairly
earned. But it soon became clear that they had served their
country only too well for their own interest. In 1695 adversity
and danger had made men amenable to that control to which it is
the glory of free nations to submit themselves, the control of
superior minds. In 1698 prosperity and security had made men
querulous, fastidious and unmanageable. The government was
assailed with equal violence from widely different quarters. The
opposition, made up of Tories many of whom carried Toryism to the
length of Jacobitism, and of discontented Whigs some of whom
carried Whiggism to the length of republicanism, called itself the
Country party, a name which had been popular before the words Whig
and Tory were known in England. The majority of the late House of
Commons, a majority which had saved the State, was nicknamed the
Court party. The Tory gentry, who were powerful in all the
counties, had special grievances. The whole patronage of the
government, they said, was in Whig hands. The old landed interest,
the old Cavalier interest, had now no share in the favours of the