178 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 
For some years past there had been growing up in 
England a new party of Whigs very different from 
the country squires who so long had ruled the land. 
They represented the trades and industries of modern 
imperial England, they entertained many democratic - 
ideas, and were disposed to be intolerant of ancient 
abuses. They saw that the whole body politic was 
poisoned by the rotten boroughs, and they knew that 
unless this source of corruption could be stopped 
there was an end of English freedom. Accordingly, 
in-1745 these New Whigs, under the lead of William 
Pitt, began the great agitation for Parliamentary Re- — 
form which only achieved its first grand triumph with 
Earl Grey and Lord John Russell in 1832. When 
the Stamp Act was repealed, in 1766, the question 
of Parliamentary Reform had been before the public 
for twenty-one years, and it largely determined the 
character of the speeches and votes upon that memo- 
rable occasion. : 
The resolutions of Patrick Henry and Samuel 
Adams and the New York congress asserted in the 
boldest language the principle of “no taxation with- 
out representation.” That was one of the watchwords 
of the New Whigs, and hence Pitt in urging the 
repeal of the Stamp Act adopted the American posi- 
tion in full. None could deny that it was a funda- 
mental and long-established principle of English 
liberty. It had been asserted by Simon de Mont- 
fort’s Parliament in 1265; it had been expressly ad- 
mitted by Edward I. in 1301; and since then it had 
never been directly impugned with success, though 
some kings had found ways of partially evading it, as, 
for instance, in the practice of benevolences which 
