[51] Vide “Chartism,” p. 35.
[52] Contarini Fleming. For a like passage of about the same date, cf. ante, p. 48.
[53] And cf. post at the opening of Chapter VI.
[54] The Spirit of Whiggism.
[55] Cf. his fine speech on “Agricultural Distress,” April 29, 1879. He urged the same, almost in the same words, on February 17, 1863.
[56] Letter to Lord Lyndhurst. So, too, in his early Spirit of Whiggism. In a speech of 1865 he defines an Estate as “a political body invested with political power for the government of the country and for the public good,” and “therefore a body founded upon privilege and not upon right,” and “in the noblest and properest sense of the term an aristocratic body.” Under the Plantagenets it was at one time mooted whether the Law should not be raised into such an “Estate.” He says the same in a letter of explanation to Lord Malmesbury.
[57] “Our constituent body should be numerous enough to be independent, and select enough to be responsible.” In 1865 he distinguished between the constitution, absorbing the best from each class, and a “democracy”—“the tyranny of one class.”
[58] Runnymede Letters.
[59] In 1733 Walpole objected to the repeal of the Septennial Act precisely on the grounds that it would involve over-confidence in the people, and democratise England.
[60] “... He (Pitt) created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy. He made peers of second-rate squires and fat graziers. He caught them in the alleys of Lombard Street, and clutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill....”—Sybil.