Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 31, 2024
Roederer, whom the strange vicissitudes of the crisis had for the moment rendered the king's chief adviser, though there seems no reason to doubt his good faith, was not a man of that fiery courage which hopes against hope, and can stimulate waverers by its example.
Thenceforth Napoleon was not troubled by Bourbon plotters; and doubtless the skill with which his agents had nursed this silly plot and sought to entangle all waverers did far more than the strokes of the guillotine to procure his future immunity. Men trembled before a union of immeasurable power with unfathomable craft such as recalled the days of the Emperor Tiberius.
Notwithstanding, therefore, the opposition of the Duke of Wellington and of Lord Lyndhurst, the Waverers carried the second reading of the Reform Bill; and then, scared at the consequences of their own headstrong timidity, they went in a fright to the Duke and his able adviser to extricate them from the inevitable result of their own conduct.
Chief among the waverers were those who had come to America with visions of a fortune, who had practised a repulsive thrift in order to acquire real estate, who carried in their pockets dog-eared bank books recording payments already made.
As little of importance resulted from their well-meant efforts, and as nearly all the supposed "waverers," including the bishops, drifted into open opposition, it is the less necessary to dwell at length on a very tedious chapter in the history of parliamentary reform.
The man who had twice steered the ship of state under Napoleon's guns might do it again; and both England and Russia waited to see some irrevocable step taken before they again risked an army for that prince of waverers. Grenville rather tardily sent Lord Morpeth to arrange an alliance, but only after he should receive a solemn pledge that Hanover would be restored.
Has the creation of a new political machinery which gives a vastly enlarged scope to the activities of Indian constitutional reformers, definitely rallied the waverers and restored courage and confidence to the representatives of sober and law-abiding opinion, or will they continue to follow the lead of impatient visionaries clamouring, as Lord Morley once put it, for the moon which we cannot give them?
King William is believed, at one time, to have set hopes on the efforts of the Waverers, and to have cherished a gladsome belief that they might get him out of his difficulties about the Reform Bill; as indeed it will be seen they did in the end, though not quite in the way which he would have desired. Lord Grey introduced the third Reform Bill on March 27, 1832.
It was for him to plan and carry out, to negotiate with princes, to organize troops, to raise money, to compose jealousies, to rouse the lukewarm and appeal to the waverers. Every detail, great and small, had to be elaborated by him. So far it was not the Netherlands, it was William of Orange alone who opposed himself to the might of the greatest power in Europe.
Apart from these two great standing armies, there is a shifting body of free-lances, guerrillas, Jacks-o'-both-sides, call them what you will waverers who have too much conscience or too little, who are swayed by their reason or their pocket, or who are gullible enough to believe that the opposition will do better, or sportsmen enough to desire fair play and a chance for the other side, and who are found fighting now in this camp, now in that.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking