he affixed to our trade and plantations, the humiliation of France, the glory of Britain carried under his administration to a pitch at which it never had arrived—and all this is exactly true. Samuel Johnson is reported to have said that "Walpole was a minister given by the king to the people, but Pitt was a minister given by the people to the king", and the remark correctly indicated Chatham's distinctive place among English statesmen. He was the first minister whose main strength lay in the support of the nation at large as distinct from its representatives in the Commons, where his personal following was always small. He was the first to discern that public opinion, though generally slow to form and slow to act, is in the end the paramount power in the state; and he was the first to use it not in an emergency merely, but throughout a whole political career. Chatham marked the commencement of that vast change in the movement of English politics by which it came about that the sentiment of the great mass of the people then told effectively on the action of the government from day to day—almost from hour to hour. He was well fitted to secure the sympathy and admiration of his countrymen, for his virtues and his failings were alike English. He was often inconsistent, he was generally intractable and overbearing, and he was always pompous and affected to a degree which, as Macaulay remarked, seemed scarcely compatible with true greatness. Of the last quality evidence was furnished in the stilted style of his letters, and in the fact recorded by Thomas Seward that he never permitted his under-secretaries to sit in his presence. Burke spoke of "some significant, pompous, creeping, explanatory, ambiguous matter, in the true Chathamic style". But these defects were known only to the inner circle of his associates. To the outside public he was endeared as a statesman who could do or suffer "nothing base", and who had the rare power of transfusing his own indomitable energy and courage into all who served under him. "A spirited foreign policy" has always been popular in England, and Pitt was the most popular of English ministers, because he was the most successful exponent of such a policy. In domestic affairs his influence was small and almost entirely indirect. He himself confessed his unfitness for dealing with questions