chap. XI.} 1757. |
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their aid, not, indeed, the power of the people, but, at
least, influence with the people, in the person of William Pitt.
A private man in England, in middle life, with no fortune, with no party, with no strong family connections, having few votes under his sway in the House of Commons, and perhaps not one in the House of Lords,—a feeble valetudinarian, shunning pleasure and society, haughty and retired, and half his time disabled by the agonies of hereditary gout, was now the hope of the English world.
Assuming power, as with the voice of an archangel, he roused the states of Protestantism to wage a war for mastery against the despotic monarchy and the institutions of the Middle Ages, and to secure to humanity its futurity of freedom.
Protestantism is not humanity; its name implies a party struggling to throw off some burdens of the past, and ceasing to be a renovating principle when its protest shall have succeeded.
It was now for the last time, as a political element, summoned to appear upon the theatre of the nations, to control their alliances, and to perfect its triumph by leaving no occasion for its reappearance in arms.
Its final victorious struggle preceded the reddening in the sky of the morning of a new civilization.
Its last war was first in the series of the great wars of revolution that founded for the world of mankind the power of the people.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1859.
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