He takes to task the statesmen of Britain for using the law to suit their own ends and thereby wiping out that precious liberty it had taken centuries to acquire. But he cautions that as a liberal, he bent over backward and endorsed unsound notions simply because the conservatives denounced them. He calls them deluded who prophesy disaster wherever the republican cause is not turned back. He scoffs at what he considers the futile attempts of British conservatives to stem the tide of progress and reform. The government and senate seem ineffectual, but Wordsworth's hope is in the people. There is very little in the scene to encourage the idealist nevertheless, the poet is optimistic. In particular, it features the poet's account of his struggle to find a middle road between the sanguine radicalism of the revolutionary movement in France and the timidity, hesitancy, and slowness of liberal reform in England. Much of this book deals with political science, and it shows the change which is beginning to take place in Wordsworth's political philosophy.
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