Still more serious, because more irremediable, in its origin, and disastrous in its effects, has been the change which has come over the public mind in a powerful and influential part of the nation. This has mainly arisen from the very magnitude of our former triumphs, and the long-continued peace to which it has given rise. The nation had gained such extraordinary successes during the war, and vanquished so formidable an opponent, that it had come to regard itself, not without a show of reason, as invincible; hostilities have been so long intermitted that the younger and more active, and therefore influential, part of the people, have generally embraced the idea that they would never be renewed. Here, as elsewhere, the wish became the father to the thought; the immediate interests of men determined their opinions and regulated their conduct. The pacific interests of the Empire had increased so immensely during the long peace; so many fortunes and establishments had become dependant on its continuance; exports, imports, and manufactures, had been so enormously augmented by the growth of our Colonial Empire, and the preservation of peace with the rest of the world, that all persons interested in those branches of industry turned with a shudder from the very thoughts of its interruption. To this class the Reform Bill, by giving a majority in the House of Commons, yielded the government of the State. To the astonishment of every thinking or well-informed man in the world, the doctrine was openly promulgated, to admiring and assenting audiences in Manchester and Glasgow, by the most popular orators of the day, that the era of war had passed away; that it was to be classed hereafter with the age of the mammoth and the mastodon; and that, in contemplation of the speedy arrival of the much-desired Millennium, our wisdom would be to disband our troops, sell our ships of the line, and trust to pacific interest in future to adjust or avert the differences of nations. The members for the boroughs--three-fifths of the House of Commons--openly embraced or in secret inclined to these doctrines; and how clearly soever the superior information of our rulers might detect their fallacy, the influence of their adherents was paramount in the Legislature, and Government was compelled, as the price of existence, in part at least, to yield to their suggestions.