William Pitt complained that European politics offers only a choice of inhospitable extremes.
In 1793, Prime Minister William Pitt spoke about the French Revolution and the recent assassination of King Louis XVI. He reminded the country how fortunate Britain was to possess a Constitution designed to prevent the country lurching from one extreme politics to another.
The French revolution failed because real liberty cannot be enforced overnight, or indeed enforced at all.
By 1793, William Pitt, Prime Minister for ten years, was thoroughly disillusioned with the French Revolution. The kind of liberty Pitt enjoyed at home, Sir Reginald Coupland reminds us, comes from peoples and not from governments, and takes centuries and not days to mature.