ever of culture and fashion allied itself to the cause of its own political party.

It was in the atmosphere of this society that the lot of young Fox was cast. The eldest son was afflicted with a nervous disease which impaired his faculties, and consequently all the hopes of the house were concentrated upon Charles. The father's ambition for his son was twofold: He desired that his boy should become at once a great orator and a leader in the fashionable and dissolute society of the day. In the one interest he furnished him with the most helpful and inspiring instruction; in the other he personally introduced him to the most famous gambling-houses in England and on the continent. The boy profited by this instruction. He made extraordinary progress. His biographer tells us that before he was sixteen he was so thoroughly acquainted with Greek and Latin, that he read them as he read English, and took up Demosthenes and Cicero as he took up Chatham and Burke. The father paid his gambling bills with as much cheerful

ness as he heard him recite an ode of Horace or the funeral oration of Pericles. At the university the young scholar furnished his mind with abundant stores of literature and history, but he paid no attention to those great economic questions which, under the influence of Adam Smith were then beginning to play so large a part in national affairs. Even late in life he confessed that he had never read the "Wealth of Nations."

Leaving Oxford at seventeen, Fox went to the continent, where the prodigal liberality of his father encouraged him in a life of unbounded indulgence. He not only lost enormous sums of ready money, but his father was obliged to pay debts amounting to a hundred thousand pounds. To distract the boy's attention from further excesses, Lord Holland resolved to put him into the House of Commons. The system of pocket boroughs made the opportunity easy; and, as no troublesome questions were asked, the young profligate took his seat in May of 1768, a year and eight months before he arrived at the eligible age.

By education and early political alliance Fox was a Tory, and it is not singular therefore that the Government of Lord North hastened to avail itself of his talents.

In 1770 he was made a Junior Lord of the Admiralty, and a little later found a seat on the bench of the Treasury. But his wayward spirit would not brook control. He even went so far as to take the floor in opposition to the Prime-Minister. This violation of party discipline brought its natural result, and in 1774 Fox was contemptuously dismissed.

The blow was deserved, and was even needed for the saving of Fox himself. His excesses in London and on the continent had become so notorious that the public were fast coming to regard him simply as a reckless gambler, whose favor and whose opposition were alike of no importance. It was this contempt on the part of the ministry and the public which stung him into something like reform. Though he did not entirely abandon his old methods, he devoted himself to his work in the House with

extraordinary energy. All his ambition was now directed to becoming a powerful debater. He afterward remarked that he had literally gained his skill "at the expense of the House," for he had sometimes tasked himself to speak on every question that came up, whether he was interested in it or not, and even whether he knew any thing about it or not. The result was that in certain important qualities of a public speaker, he excelled all other men of his time. Burke even said of him, that "by slow degrees he rose to be the most brilliant and accomplished debater the world ever saw.'

While this process of rising "by slow degrees" was going on, Fox was also acquiring fixed ideas in regard to governmental affairs. The contemptuous dismissal of Lord North probably stimulated his natural inclinations to go into the opposition. As the American question was gradually developed, Fox found himself in warm sympathy with the colonial cause. He denied the right of the mother country to inflict taxation, and was the first to denounce

the policy of the Government in the House of Commons. He enjoyed the friendship of the ablest men among the Whigs, and he resorted to them, especially to Burke, for every kind of political knowledge. Indeed, his obligations to that great political philosopher were such, that in 1791, at the time of their alienation on the question of England's attitude toward the French Revolution, he declared in the House that "if he were to put all the political information which he had learned from books, all he had gained from science, and all which any knowledge of the world and its affairs had taught him, into one scale, and the improvement which he had derived from his right honorable friend's instruction and conversation in the other, he should be at a loss to decide to which to give the preference." Under this influence all his aspirations came to be devoted, as he once said "to widen the basis of freedom, -to infuse and circulate the spirit of liberty." This subject it was that in one form or another drew forth the most inspiring strains of his eloquence.