The Whigs, under the influence of Dowdeswell and of Burke, would have none of either Wilkes' and Cartwright's principles, or of "demagogic" methods. The genius of Burke, reverencing the Constitution as almost a Divine gift to a chosen people, dreading organic change as the betrayal of a mighty heritage, and already, in 1780, scenting in the political theory of the American rebels and of the English Radicals the Jacobinical poison which the French Revolution was to let loose, saw in "economic reform" the supreme remedy for purging a sound organism afflicted by a temporary but paralysing disease in the corrupting influence of the Crown. The Yorkshire Association and the famous Yorkshire Petition of 178o were methods borrowed from the Radicals, but "the economic reform" for which they pressed kept clear of the Radical demand for or ganic reconstruction of the representative system. Burke and the Rockingham Whigs succeeded in disfranchising contractors and revenue officers, in abolishing sinecures and in reducing places and a swollen pension list, but in accomplishing this valuable result they had shot their bolt. They had not attempted to deal either with the legal disabilities which excluded whole classes from repre sentation, or with the rotten boroughs which were far more de moralizing and far-reaching in their control of parliament than the "corrupt influence" of the Crown.
The mantle of Chatham fell, and the hopes of Radicalism concentrated on Chatham's son, the younger Pitt, who, in 1781, moved for "a Committee to en quire into the Present State of the Representation" and was de feated only by 20 votes—the best division the Reformers had be tween 1780 and 1831. As prime minister, in 1785, Pitt endeavoured to introduce a Reform bill, his intention being to disfranchise 36 rotten boroughs, establish a fund of I I .000,000 for compensating the owners of borough "property," and assign the 72 seats set free by the disfranchised 36 boroughs to the counties, London, West minster and the chief unrepresented towns. "Leave to introduce" was, however, refused by a majority of 79 votes. Henceforward Pitt was lost to the Reform movement. It was his first and his last effort as a constructive Reformer and the French Revolution ' shortly converted him into an obstinate antagonist to all or any change.
The movement really gained in the long run by this set-back. Had Pitt's milk-and-water proposals been carried the old system would have been given a new lease of existence. Pitt, equally with Burke, accepted the in herited past, and his acceptance of the rotten boroughs as a form of property, the disfranchisement of which required compensation, was rightly rejected as immoral and indefensible on any theory of national representation, by the Reformers of 1831. The Whigs had never really believed in reform, and it now became the mo nopoly of the "doctrinaire Radicals." For seven years the stars
in their courses fought for Radicalism. The American War had given an immense stimulus to political thinking and a new school of political philosophy came into existence ; the Industrial Revolution was steadily sapping the bases of 18th century society and of the economic fabric. In 1788 the centenary of 1688 was celebrated by the ardent Radicals and the young minds of the country outside politics. In 1789 the outbreak of the French Revolution galvanized all these currents into enthusiastic activity, and The London Revolution Society—the leading organization of the Reformers, of which Price and Godwin were vigorous mem bers—entered into direct connection with the National Assembly in France and the Constitutional Revolutionists in Paris.
Fox, who hailed the French Revolution with joy, professed to be a Reformer, but he was in reality too deeply saturated with the old Whiggism to accept with conviction the new Radicalism. The real leaders in parliament were the young Charles Grey (the Earl Grey who carried the Reform Act in 1832) and Erskine. But all the ardent aspirations of 1789-91 were doomed to disas trous extinction, for which four main causes were responsible. First, the September massacres, the execution of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, and the Reign of Terror not only paralyzed the moderate Reformers with a chill of disillusionment, but sent a series of waves of panic through Great Britain. Reform was promptly identified with revolution on the French model. Sec ondly, once Great Britain was at war with France (1793), reform was regarded as sedition and treason. Even the mildest critic of existing institutions was denounced as a Jacobin and a traitor. Thirdly, the opposition to reform found in Burke a thinker of genius whose "Reflections on the French Revolution" became the Bible, not only of Toryism, but of three-fourths of thinking or unthinking England. To Burke the new democratic philosophy of Price, Goodwin and Paine, even of Bentham and Mackintosh, was anathema, and the "Rights of Man" were exposed as the pseudo-scientific basis of a creed which would logically end in the downfall of the monarchy, a Jacobin Reign of Terror and a mili tary dictatorship on the French model. The extremists on the Left of the Reform movement, with the bravado that extremists enjoy, were powerful allies of reaction. For 15 years Great Britain lived in the hurricane of a European convulsion, and Wyndham's phrase as to the folly "of repairing your house in the hurricane season," for all its shallowness, correctly summed up the mood of three-fourths of Great Britain, shown in the "loyalist" riots at Birmingham, Manchester and other industrial centres. Fourthly, the irreparable breach between Burke and Fox not only split the parliamentary opposition but drove one-half of the Whigs into coalition with Pitt and the Tory Party.