DIGITISED MANUSCRIPTS

ti ‘a_i ea) I need not give you the date of its birth. Party spirit ran then as high, if not higher, than it does now. A contemporary writer says that, ‘even cats and dogs were infected with the animosity of the Whigs and Tories.’ The origin of the names of the two great parties of the State is to be traced to that same feeling of hatred of the foreigner to which I have previously alluded. The ‘Tory’ was originally a term for an Irish robber. The term was afterwards extended to the Irish Catholic friends of James the Second, and soon became a designation for the whole body of his parliamentary supporters. The term ‘Whig’ was a nickname applied to the Scotch Presbyterians. It was derived, according to some authorities, from the whey or refuse milk which their poverty obliged them to use; or, according to others, from ‘ whiggam,’ a word employed by the Scotch cattle-drovers of the West in driving their horses. But I consider that the chief interests of the reign of Queen Anne lie less in the parliamentary debate than in the military events and social peculiarities of the day. There was one man who towered like a giant over all his contemporaries, and whose mili- tary genius placed England in the foremost rank of nations. John Churchill, subsequently Lord Churchill, then Earl and Duke of Marlborough, was born in 1650. The