created that new political antagonism in which, whether under the names of
Whig and Tory, or of Liberal and Conservative, two great parties have
contended, one for a series of beneficial changes, the other for the
preservation of the existing order. The convulsions of France and the dread
of revolutionary agitation in England transformed both Pitt and the Whigs
by whom he was opposed. Pitt sacrificed his schemes of peaceful progress to
foreign war and domestic repression, and set his face against the reform of
Parliament which he had once himself proposed. The Whigs broke up into two
sections, led respectively by Burke and by Fox, the one denouncing the
violence of the Revolution, and ultimately uniting itself with Pitt; the
other friendly to the Revolution, in spite of its excesses, as the cause of
civil and religious liberty, and identifying itself, under the healthy
influence of parliamentary defeat and disappointment, with the defence of
popular rights in England and the advocacy of enlightened reform.

[Burke's "Reflections," Oct. 1790.]

[Most of the Whigs support Pitt against France.]

The obliteration of the old dividing-line in English politics may be said
to date from the day when the ancient friendship of Burke and Fox was
bitterly severed by the former in the House of Commons (May 6, 1791). The
charter of the modern Conservative party was that appeal to the nation
which Burke had already published, in the autumn of 1790, under the title
of "Reflections on the French Revolution." In this survey of the political
forces which he saw in action around him, the great Whig writer, who in
past times had so passionately defended the liberties of America and the
constitutional tradition of the English Parliament against the aggression
of George III., attacked the Revolution as a system of violence and caprice
more formidable to freedom than the tyranny of any Crown. He proved that