Note 207 — Chapter XV · ON THE REIGN OF WILLIAM III.

"The elections fell generally," says Burnet, "on men who were in the interest of government; many of them had indeed some popular notions, which they had drank in under a bad government, and thought this ought to keep them under a good one; so that those who wished well to the public did apprehend great difficulties in managing them." Upon which Speaker Onslow has a very proper note: "They might happen to think," he says, "a good one might become a bad one, or a bad one might succeed to a good one. They were the best men of the age, and were for maintaining the revolution government by its own principles, and not by those of a government it had superseded." "The elections," we read in a letter of Mr. Montague, Aug. 1698, "have made a humour appear in the counties that is not very comfortable to us who are in business. But yet after all, the present members are such as will neither hurt England nor this government, but I believe they must be handled very nicely." Shrewsbury Correspondence, 551. This parliament, however, fell into a great mistake about the reduction of the army; as Bolingbroke in his Letters on History very candidly admits, though connected with those who had voted for it.