advantages and disadvantages. On the advantages there is no need to
dilate. The history of England during the hundred and seventy years
which have elapsed since the House of Commons became the most powerful
body in the state, her immense and still growing prosperity, her
freedom, her tranquillity, her greatness in arts, in sciences, and in
arms, her maritime ascendency, the marvels of her public credit, her
American, her African, her Australian, her Asiatic empires, sufficiently
prove the excellence of her institutions. But those institutions,
though excellent, are assuredly not perfect. Parliamentary government is
government by speaking. In such a government, the power of speaking
is the most highly prized of all the qualities which a politician
can possess: and that power may exist, in the highest degree, without
judgment, without fortitude, without skill in reading the characters of
men or the signs of the times, without any knowledge of the principles
of legislation or of political economy, and without any skill in
diplomacy or in the administration of war. Nay, it may well happen that
those very intellectual qualities which give a peculiar charm to the
speeches of a public man may be incompatible with the qualities
which would fit him to meet a pressing emergency with promptitude and
firmness. It was thus with Charles Townshend. It was thus with Windham.
It was a privilege to listen to those accomplished and ingenious
orators. But in a perilous crisis they would have been found far
inferior in all the qualities of rulers to such a man as Oliver
Cromwell, who talked nonsense, or as William the Silent, who did not
talk at all. When parliamentary government is established, a Charles
Townshend or a Windham will almost always exercise much greater
influence than such men as the great Protector of England, or as
the founder of the Batavian commonwealth. In such a government,
parliamentary talent, though quite distinct from the talents of a
good executive or judicial officer, will be a chief qualification for
executive and judicial office. From the Book of Dignities a curious list
might be made out of Chancellors ignorant of the principles of
equity, and First Lords of the Admiralty ignorant of the principles of
navigation, of Colonial ministers who could not repeat the names of
the Colonies, of Lords of the Treasury who did not know the difference
between funded and unfunded debt, and of Secretaries of the India Board
who did not know whether the Mahrattas were Mahometans or Hindoos. On
these grounds, some persons, incapable of seeing more than one side of a
question, have pronounced parliamentary government a positive evil, and
have maintained that the administration would be greatly improved if the
power, now exercised by a large assembly, were transferred to a single
person. Men of sense will probably think the remedy very much worse than
the disease, and will be of opinion that there would be small gain in
exchanging Charles Townshend and Windham for the Prince of the Peace, or
the poor slave and dog Steenie.
Pitt was emphatically the man of parliamentary government, the type of
his class, the minion, the child, the spoiled child, of the House of
Commons. For the House of Commons he had a hereditary, an infantine
love. Through his whole boyhood, the House of Commons was never out of
his thoughts, or out of the thoughts of his instructors. Reciting at his
father's knee, reading Thucydides and Cicero into English, analysing the
great Attic speeches on the Embassy and on the Crown, he was constantly
in training for the conflicts of the House of Commons. He was a
distinguished member of the House of Commons at twenty-one. The ability
which he had displayed in the House of Commons made him the most
powerful subject in Europe before he was twenty-five. It would have
been happy for himself and for his country if his elevation had been
deferred. Eight or ten years, during which he would have had leisure and
opportunity for reading and reflection, for foreign travel, for social
intercourse and free exchange of thought on equal terms with a great
variety of companions, would have supplied what, without any fault
on his part, was wanting to his powerful intellect. He had all the
knowledge that he could be expected to have; that is to say, all the
knowledge that a man can acquire while he is a student at Cambridge, and
all the knowledge that a man can acquire when he is First Lord of the
Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. But the stock of general
information which he brought from college, extraordinary for a boy, was
far inferior to what Fox possessed, and beggarly when compared with the
massy, the splendid, the various treasures laid up in the large mind of
Burke. After Pitt became minister, he had no leisure to learn more than
was necessary for the purposes of the day which was passing over him.
What was necessary for those purposes such a man could learn with little
difficulty. He was surrounded by experienced and able public servants.
He could at any moment command their best assistance. From the stores
which they produced his vigorous mind rapidly collected the materials
for a good parliamentary case; and that was enough. Legislation and
administration were with him secondary matters. To the work of framing
statutes, of negotiating treaties, of organising fleets and armies, of
sending forth expeditions, he gave only the leavings of his time and the
dregs of his fine intellect. The strength and sap of his mind were all
drawn in a different direction. It was when the House of Commons was to
be convinced and persuaded that he put forth all his powers.
Of those powers we must form our estimate chiefly from tradition; for of
all the eminent speakers of the last age Pitt has suffered most from
the reporters. Even while he was still living, critics remarked that
his eloquence could not be preserved, that he must be heard to be
appreciated. They more than once applied to him the sentence in which
Tacitus describes the fate of a senator whose rhetoric was admired in
the Augustan age: "Haterii canorum illud et profluens cum ipso simul
exstinctum est." There is, however, abundant evidence that nature had
bestowed on Pitt the talents of a great orator; and those talents had
been developed in a very peculiar manner, first by his education, and
secondly by the high official position to which he rose early, and in
which he passed the greater part of his public life.
At his first appearance in Parliament he showed himself superior to all
his contemporaries in command of language. He could pour forth a long
succession of round and stately periods, without premeditation, without
ever pausing for a word, without ever repeating a word, in a voice of
silver clearness, and with a pronunciation so articulate that not a
letter was slurred over. He had less amplitude of mind and less richness
of imagination than Burke, less ingenuity than Windham, less wit than
Sheridan, less perfect mastery of dialectical fence, and less of that
highest sort of eloquence which consists of reason and passion fused
together, than Fox. Yet the almost unanimous judgment of those who were
in the habit of listening to that remarkable race of men placed Pitt,
as a speaker, above Burke, above Windham, above Sheridan, and not below
Fox. His declamation was copious, polished, and splendid. In power of
sarcasm he was probably not surpassed by any speaker, ancient or modern;
and of this formidable weapon he made merciless use. In two parts of the
oratorical art which are of the highest value to a minister of state he
was singularly expert. No man knew better how to be luminous or how to
be obscure. When he wished to be understood, he never failed to make
himself understood. He could with ease present to his audience, not
perhaps an exact or profound, but a clear, popular, and plausible view
of the most extensive and complicated subject. Nothing was out of place;
nothing was forgotten; minute details, dates, sums of money, were all
faithfully preserved in his memory. Even intricate questions of finance,
when explained by him, seemed clear to the plainest man among his
hearers. On the other hand, when he did not wish to be explicit,--and no
man who is at the head of affairs always wishes to be explicit,--he
had a marvellous power of saying nothing in language which left on his
audience the impression that he had said a great deal. He was at once
the only man who could open a budget without notes, and the only man
who, as Windham said, could speak that most elaborately evasive and
unmeaning of human compositions, a King's speech, without premeditation.
The effect of oratory will always to a great extent depend on the
character of the orator. There perhaps never were two speakers whose
eloquence had more of what may be called the race, more of the flavour
imparted by moral qualities, than Fox and Pitt. The speeches of Fox owe
a great part of their charm to that warmth and softness of heart, that
sympathy with human suffering, that admiration for everything great and
beautiful, and that hatred of cruelty and injustice, which interest and
delight us even in the most defective reports. No person, on the other
hand, could hear Pitt without perceiving him to be a man of high,
intrepid, and commanding spirit, proudly conscious of his own rectitude
and of his own intellectual superiority, incapable of the low vices of
fear and envy, but too prone to feel and to show disdain. Pride, indeed,
pervaded the whole man, was written in the harsh, rigid lines of his
face, was marked by the way in which he walked, in which he sate,
in which he stood, and, above all, in which he bowed. Such pride, of
course, inflicted many wounds. It may confidently be affirmed that there
cannot be found, in all the ten thousand invectives written against Fox,
a word indicating that his demeanour had ever made a single personal
enemy. On the other hand, several men of note who had been partial to
Pitt, and who to the last continued to approve his public conduct and
to support his administration, Cumberland, for example, Boswell, and
Matthias, were so much irritated by the contempt with which he treated
them, that they complained in print of their wrongs. But his pride,
though it made him bitterly disliked by individuals, inspired the great
body of his followers in Parliament and throughout the country with
respect and confidence. They took him at his own valuation. They saw
that his self-esteem was not that of an upstart, who was drunk with
good luck and with applause, and who, if fortune turned, would sink from
arrogance into abject humility. It was that of the magnanimous man
so finely described by Aristotle in the Ethics, of the man who thinks
himself worthy of great things, being in truth worthy. It sprang from
a consciousness of great powers and great virtues, and was never so
conspicuously displayed as in the midst of difficulties and dangers
which would have unnerved and bowed down any ordinary mind. It was
closely connected, too, with an ambition which had no mixture of low
cupidity. There was something noble in the cynical disdain with which
the mighty minister scattered riches and titles to right and left among
those who valued them, while he spurned them out of his own way. Poor
himself, he was surrounded by friends on whom he had bestowed three
thousand, six thousand, ten thousand a year. Plain Mister himself, he
had made more lords than any three ministers that had preceded him. The
garter, for which the first dukes in the kingdom were contending, was
repeatedly offered to him, and offered in vain.
The correctness of his private life added much to the dignity of his
public character. In the relations of son, brother, uncle, master,
friend, his conduct was exemplary. In the small circle of his intimate
associates, he was amiable, affectionate, even playful. They loved him
sincerely; they regretted him long; and they would hardly admit that
he who was so kind and gentle with them could be stern and haughty with
others. He indulged, indeed, somewhat too freely in wine, which he had
early been directed to take as a medicine, and which use had made a
necessary of life to him. But it was very seldom that any indication of
undue excess could be detected in his tones or gestures; and, in truth,
two bottles of port were little more to him than two dishes of tea.
He had, when he was first introduced into the clubs of Saint James's
Street, shown a strong taste for play; but he had the prudence and the
resolution to stop before this taste had acquired the strength of habit.
From the passion which generally exercises the most tyrannical dominion
over the young he possessed an immunity, which is probably to be
ascribed partly to his temperament and partly to his situation. His
constitution was feeble; he was very shy; and he was very busy. The
strictness of his morals furnished such buffoons as Peter Pindar and
Captain Morris with an inexhaustible theme for merriment of no very
delicate kind. But the great body of the middle class of Englishmen
could not see the joke. They warmly praised the young statesman for
commanding his passions, and for covering his frailties, if he had
frailties, with decorous obscurity, and would have been very far indeed
from thinking better of him if he had vindicated himself from the taunts
of his enemies by taking under his protection a Nancy Parsons or a
Marianne Clark.
No part of the immense popularity which Pitt long enjoyed is to be
attributed to the eulogies of wits and poets. It might have been
naturally expected that a man of genius, of learning, of taste,
an orator whose diction was often compared to that of Tully, the
representative, too, of a great university, would have taken a peculiar
pleasure in befriending eminent writers, to whatever political party
they might have belonged. The love of literature had induced Augustus
to heap benefits on Pompeians, Somers to be the protector of nonjurors,
Harley to make the fortunes of Whigs. But it could not move Pitt to show
any favour even to Pittites. He was doubtless right in thinking that,
in general, poetry, history, and philosophy ought to be suffered, like
calico and cutlery, to find their proper price in the market, and
that to teach men of letters to look habitually to the state for their
recompense is bad for the state and bad for letters. Assuredly nothing
can be more absurd or mischievous than to waste the public money in
bounties for the purpose of inducing people who ought to be weighing out
grocery or measuring out drapery to write bad or middling books. But,
though the sound rule is that authors should be left to be remunerated
by their readers, there will, in every generation, be a few exceptions
to this rule. To distinguish these special cases from the mass is an
employment well worthy of the faculties of a great and accomplished
ruler; and Pitt would assuredly have had little difficulty in finding
such cases. While he was in power, the greatest philologist of the age,
his own contemporary at Cambridge, was reduced to earn a livelihood by
the lowest literary drudgery, and to spend in writing squibs for the
"Morning Chronicle" years to which we might have owed an all but
perfect text of the whole tragic and comic drama of Athens. The greatest
historian of the age, forced by poverty to leave his country, completed
his immortal work on the shores of Lake Leman. The political heterodoxy
of Porson, and the religious heterodoxy of Gibbon, may perhaps be
pleaded in defence of the minister by whom those eminent men were
neglected. But there were other cases in which no such excuse could be
set up. Scarcely had Pitt obtained possession of unbounded power when
an aged writer of the highest eminence, who had made very little by his
writings, and who was sinking into the grave under a load of infirmities
and sorrows, wanted five or six hundred pounds to enable him, during the
winter or two which might still remain to him, to draw his breath more
easily in the soft climate of Italy. Not a farthing was to be obtained;
and before Christmas the author of the English Dictionary and of the
Lives of the Poets had gasped his last in the river fog and coal smoke
of Fleet Street. A few months after the death of Johnson appeared the
Task, incomparably the best poem that any Englishman then living had
produced--a poem, too, which could hardly fail to excite in a well
constituted mind a feeling of esteem and compassion for the poet, a man
of genius and virtue, whose means were scanty, and whom the most
cruel of all the calamities incident to humanity had made incapable
of supporting himself by vigorous and sustained exertion. Nowhere had
Chatham been praised with more enthusiasm, or in verse more worthy of
the subject, than in the Task. The son of Chatham, however, contented
himself with reading and admiring the book, and left the author to
starve. The pension which, long after, enabled poor Cowper to close his
melancholy life, unmolested by duns and bailiffs, was obtained for him
by the strenuous kindness of Lord Spencer. What a contrast between the
way in which Pitt acted towards Johnson and the way in which Lord
Grey acted towards his political enemy Scott, when Scott, worn out by
misfortune and disease, was advised to try the effect of the Italian
air! What a contrast between the way in which Pitt acted towards Cowper
and the way in which Burke, a poor man and out of place, acted towards
Crabbe! Even Dundas, who made no pretensions to literary taste, and
was content to be considered as a hardheaded and somewhat coarse man of
business, was, when compared with his eloquent and classically educated
friend, a Maecenas or a Leo. Dundas made Burns an exciseman, with
seventy pounds a year; and this was more than Pitt, during his long
tenure of power, did for the encouragement of letters. Even those who
may think that it is, in general, no part of the duty of a government to
reward literary merit will hardly deny that a government, which has much
lucrative church preferment in its gift, is bound, in distributing that
preferment, not to overlook divines whose writings have rendered great
service to the cause of religion. But it seems never to have occurred to
Pitt that he lay under any such obligation. All the theological works of
all the numerous bishops whom he made and translated are not, when
put together, worth fifty pages of the Horae Paulinae, of the Natural
Theology, or of the View of the Evidences of Christianity. But on Paley
the all-powerful minister never bestowed the small benefice. Artists
Pitt reasoned as contemptuously as writers. For painting he did simply
nothing. Sculptors, who had been selected to execute monuments voted by
Parliament, had to haunt the ante-chambers of the Treasury during many
years before they could obtain a farthing from him. One of them, after
vainly soliciting the minister for payment during fourteen years, had
the courage to present a memorial to the King, and thus obtained tardy
and ungracious justice. Architects it was absolutely necessary to
employ; and the worst that could be found seem to have been employed.
Not a single fine public building of any kind or in any style was
erected during his long administration. It may be confidently affirmed
that no ruler whose abilities and attainments would bear any comparison
with his has ever shown such cold disdain for what is excellent in arts
and letters.
His first administration lasted seventeen years. That long period is
divided by a strongly marked line into two almost exactly equal parts.
The first part ended and the second began in the autumn of 1792.
Throughout both parts Pitt displayed in the highest degree the talents
of a parliamentary leader. During the first part he was a fortunate and,
in many respects, a skilful administrator. With the difficulties which
he had to encounter during the second part he was altogether incapable
of contending: but his eloquence and his perfect mastery of the tactics
of the House of Commons concealed his incapacity from the multitude.
The eight years which followed the general election of 1784 were as
tranquil and prosperous as any eight years in the whole history of
England. Neighbouring nations which had lately been in arms against
her, and which had flattered themselves that, in losing her American
colonies, she had lost a chief source of her wealth and of her power,
saw, with wonder and vexation, that she was more wealthy and more
powerful than ever. Her trade increased. Her manufactures flourished.
Her exchequer was full to overflowing. Very idle apprehensions were
generally entertained, that the public debt, though much less than a
third of the debt which we now bear with ease, would be found too heavy
for the strength of the nation. Those apprehensions might not perhaps
have been easily quieted by reason. But Pitt quieted them by a juggle.
He succeeded in persuading first himself, and then the whole nation,
his opponents included, that a new sinking fund, which, so far as it
differed from former sinking funds, differed for the worse, would, by
virtue of some mysterious power of propagation belonging to money, put
into the pocket of the public creditor great sums not taken out of the
pocket of the tax-payer. The country, terrified by a danger which was no
danger, hailed with delight and boundless confidence a remedy which was
no remedy. The minister was almost universally extolled as the greatest
of financiers. Meanwhile both the branches of the House of Bourbon
found that England was as formidable an antagonist as she had ever been.
France had formed a plan for reducing Holland to vassalage. But England
interposed; and France receded. Spain interrupted by violence the trade
of our merchants with the regions near the Oregon. But England armed;
and Spain receded. Within the island there was profound tranquillity.
The King was, for the first time, popular. During the twenty-three years
which had followed his accession he had not been loved by his subjects.
His domestic virtues were acknowledged. But it was generally thought
that the good qualities by which he was distinguished in private
life were wanting to his political character. As a Sovereign, he was
resentful, unforgiving, stubborn, cunning. Under his rule the country
had sustained cruel disgraces and disasters; and every one of those
disgraces and disasters was imputed to his strong antipathies, and
to his perverse obstinacy in the wrong. One statesman after another
complained that he had been induced by royal caresses, intreaties,
and promises, to undertake the direction of affairs at a difficult
conjuncture, and that, as soon as he had, not without sullying his
fame, and alienating his best friends, served the turn for which he
was wanted, his ungrateful master began to intrigue against him, and
to canvass against him. Grenville, Rockingham, Chatham, men of widely
different characters, but all three upright and high-spirited, agreed
in thinking that the Prince under whom they had successively held the
highest place in government was one of the most insincere of mankind.
His confidence was reposed, they said, not in those known and
responsible counsellors to whom he had delivered the seals of office,
but in secret advisers who stole up the back stairs into his closet. In
Parliament his ministers, while defending themselves against the attacks
of the opposition in front, were perpetually, at his instigation,
assailed on the flank or in the rear by a vile band of mercenaries who
called themselves his friends. These men constantly, while in possession
of lucrative places in his service, spoke and voted against bills which
he had authorised the First Lord of the Treasury or the Secretary of
State to bring in. But from the day on which Pitt was placed at the
head of affairs there was an end of secret influence. His haughty and
aspiring spirit was not to be satisfied with the mere show of power.
Any attempt to undermine him at Court, any mutinous movement among his
followers in the House of Commons, was certain to be at once put down.
He had only to tender his resignation; and he could dictate his own
terms. For he, and he alone, stood between the King and the Coalition.
He was therefore little less than Mayor of the Palace. The nation loudly
applauded the King for having the wisdom to repose entire confidence
in so excellent a minister. His Majesty's private virtues now began to
produce their full effect. He was generally regarded as the model of a
respectable country gentleman, honest, good-natured, sober, religious.
He rose early: he dined temperately: he was strictly faithful to his
wife: he never missed church; and at church he never missed a response.
His people heartily prayed that he might long reign over them; and they
prayed the more heartily because his virtues were set off to the best
advantage by the vices and follies of the Prince of Wales, who lived in
close intimacy with the chiefs of the opposition.