INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND
1782-1792
[Sidenote: England in the American War.]
That in the creation of the United States the world had reached one of
the turning-points in its history seems at the time to have entered into
the thought of not a single European statesman. What startled men most
at the moment was the discovery that England herself was far from being
ruined by the greatness of her defeat. She rose from it indeed stronger
and more vigorous than ever. Never had she shown a mightier energy than
in the struggle against France which followed only ten years after her
loss of America, nor did she ever stand higher among the nations than on
the day of Waterloo. Her internal developement was as imposing as her
outer grandeur. Weary and disgraceful indeed as was the strife with the
Colonies, the years of its progress were years of as mighty a revolution
for the mother country as for its child. The England that is about us
dates from the American War. It was then that the moral, the
philanthropic, the religious ideas which have moulded English society
into its present shape first broke the spiritual torpor of the
eighteenth century. It was then that with the wider diffusion of
intelligence our literature woke to a nobler and larger life which
fitted it to become the mouthpiece of every national emotion. It was
then that by a change unparalleled in history the country laid aside her
older agricultural character to develope industrial forces which made
her at a single bound the workshop of the world. Amidst the turmoil of
the early years of George the Third Brindley was silently covering
England with canals, and Watt as silently perfecting his invention of
the steam-engine. It was amidst the strife with America that Adam Smith
regenerated our economical, Gibbon our historical, and Burke our
political literature; and peace was hardly declared when the appearance
of Crabbe, Cowper, and Burns heralded a new birth of our poetry.
[Sidenote: The religious movement.]
No names so illustrious as these marked the more silent but even deeper
change in the religious temper of the country. It dates, as we have
seen, from the work of the Wesleys, but the Methodists themselves were
the least result of the Methodist revival. Its action upon the Church
broke the lethargy of the clergy; and the "Evangelical" movement, which
found representatives like Newton and Cecil within the pale of the
Establishment, made the fox-hunting parson and the absentee rector at
last impossible. In Walpole's day the English clergy were the idlest and
the most lifeless in the world. In our own time no body of religious
ministers surpasses them in piety, in philanthropic energy, or in
popular regard. But the movement was far from being limited to the
Methodists or the clergy. In the nation at large appeared a new moral
enthusiasm which, rigid and pedantic as it often seemed, was still
healthy in its social tone, and whose power showed itself in a gradual
disappearance of the profligacy which had disgraced the upper classes,
and the foulness which had infested literature ever since the
Restoration. A yet nobler result of the religious revival was the steady
attempt, which has never ceased from that day to this, to remedy the
guilt, the ignorance, the physical suffering, the social degradation of
the profligate and the poor. It was not till the Wesleyan impulse had
done its work that this philanthropic impulse began. The Sunday Schools
established by Mr. Raikes of Gloucester at the close of the century were
the beginnings of popular education. By writings and by her own personal
example Hannah More drew the sympathy of England to the poverty and
crime of the agricultural labourer. A passionate impulse of human
sympathy with the wronged and afflicted raised hospitals, endowed
charities, built churches, sent missionaries to the heathen, supported
Burke in his plea for the Hindoo, and Clarkson and Wilberforce in their
crusade against the iniquity of the slave trade.
[Sidenote: Howard.]
It is only the moral chivalry of his labours that amongst a crowd of
philanthropists draws us most to the work and character of John Howard.
The sympathy which all were feeling for the sufferings of mankind Howard
felt for the sufferings of the worst and most hapless of men. With
wonderful ardour and perseverance he devoted himself to the cause of the
debtor, the felon, and the murderer. An appointment to the office of
High Sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1774 drew his attention to the state of
the prisons which were placed under his care; and from that time the
quiet country gentleman, whose only occupation had been reading his
Bible and studying his thermometer, became the most energetic and
zealous of reformers. Before a year was over he had personally visited
almost every English gaol, and in nearly all of them he found frightful
abuses which had been noticed half-a-century before, but which had been
left unredressed by Parliament. Gaolers who bought their places were
paid by fees, and suffered to extort what they could. Even when
acquitted, men were dragged back to their cells for want of funds to
discharge the sums they owed to their keepers. Debtors and felons were
huddled together in the prisons which Howard found crowded by the
legislation of the day. No separation was preserved between different
sexes, no criminal discipline was enforced. Every gaol was a chaos of
cruelty and the foulest immorality, from which the prisoner could only
escape by sheer starvation or through the gaol-fever that festered
without ceasing in these haunts of misery. Howard saw everything with
his own eyes, he tested every suffering by his own experience. In one
prison he found a cell so narrow and noisome that the poor wretch who
inhabited it begged as a mercy for hanging. Howard shut himself up in
the cell and bore its darkness and foulness till nature could bear no
more. It was by work of this sort and by the faithful pictures of such
scenes which it enabled him to give that he brought about their reform.
The book in which he recorded his terrible experience and the plans
which he submitted for the reformation of criminals made him the father,
so far as England is concerned, of prison discipline. But his labours
were far from being confined to England. In journey after journey he
visited the gaols of Holland and Germany, till his longing to discover
some means of checking the fatal progress of the Plague led him to
examine the lazarettos of Europe and the East. He was still engaged in
this work of charity when he was seized by a malignant fever at Cherson
in Southern Russia, and "laid quietly in the earth," as he desired.
[Sidenote: Trial of Hastings.]
In Howard's later labours the new sentiment of humanity had carried him
far beyond the bounds of national sympathy; and forces at once of pity
and religion told more and more in begetting a consciousness of the
common brotherhood of man. Even at the close of the American war this
feeling had become strong enough to colour our political life. It told
on the attitude of England towards its great dependency of India.
Discussions over rival plans of Indian administration diffused a sense
of national responsibility for its good government, and there was a
general resolve that the security against injustice and misrule which
was enjoyed by the poorest Englishman should be enjoyed by the poorest
Hindoo. It was this resolve which expressed itself in 1786 in the trial
of Warren Hastings. Hastings returned from India at the close of the war
with the hope of rewards as great as those of Clive. He had saved all
that Clive had won. He had laid the foundation of a vast empire in the
East. He had shown rare powers of administration, and the foresight,
courage, and temperance which mark the born ruler of men. But with him
came rumours of tyranny and wrong. Even those who admitted the wisdom
and glory of his rule shrank from its terrible ruthlessness. He was
charged with having sold for a vast sum the services of British troops
to crush the free tribes of the Rohillas, with having wrung
half-a-million by extortion from the Rajah of Benares, with having
extorted by torture and starvation more than a million from the
Princesses of Oudh. He was accused of having kept his hold upon power by
measures as unscrupulous, and with having murdered a native who opposed
him by an abuse of the forms of English law. On almost all these charges
the cooler judgement of later inquirers has acquitted Warren Hastings of
guilt. Personally there can be little doubt that he had done much to
secure to the new subjects of Britain a just and peaceable government.
What was hardest and most pitiless in his rule had been simply a
carrying out of the system of administration which was native to India
and which he found existing there. But such a system was alien from the
new humanity of Englishmen; and few dared to vindicate Hastings when
Burke in words of passionate earnestness moved for his impeachment.
[Sidenote: The Slave-Trade.]
The great trial lingered on for years; and in the long run Hastings
secured an acquittal. But the end at which the impeachment aimed had
really been won. The attention, the sympathy of Englishmen had been
drawn across distant seas to a race utterly strange to them; and the
peasant of Cornwall or Cumberland had learned how to thrill at the
suffering of a peasant of Bengal. And even while the trial was going on
a yet wider extension of English sympathy made itself felt. The
hero-seamen of Elizabeth had not blushed to make gain out of kidnapping
negroes and selling them into slavery. One of the profits which England
bought by the triumphs of Marlborough was a right to a monopoly of the
slave-trade between Africa and the Spanish dominions; and it was England
that had planted slavery in her American colonies and her West Indian
islands. Half the wealth of Liverpool, in fact, was drawn from the
traffic of its merchants in human flesh. The horrors and iniquity of the
trade, the ruin and degradation of Africa which it brought about, the
oppression of the negro himself, had till now moved no pity among
Englishmen. But as the spirit of humanity told on the people this apathy
suddenly disappeared. Philanthropy allied itself with the new religious
movement in an attack on the slave-trade. At the close of the American
war its evils began to be felt so widely and deeply that the question
forced itself into politics. "After a conversation in the open air at
the root of an old tree, just above the steep descent into the Vale of
Keston," with the younger Pitt, his friend, William Wilberforce, whose
position as a representative of the evangelical party gave weight to his
advocacy of such a cause, resolved to bring in a bill for the abolition
of the slave-trade. The bill which he brought forward in 1788 fell
before the opposition of the Liverpool slave merchants and the general
indifference of the House of Commons. But the movement gathered fresh
strength in the country with every year; in spite of the absorption of
England in the struggle with the French Revolution, it succeeded at last
in forcing on Parliament the abolition of the traffic in slaves; and
this abolition was followed a few years later by the abolition of
slavery itself.
[Sidenote: English manufactures.]
Time was to show how wide were the issues to which this religious
developement and the sentiment of humanity which it generated were to
tend. But at the moment they told less directly and immediately on the
political and social life of England than an industrial revolution which
accompanied them. Though England already stood in the first rank of
commercial states at the accession of George the Third, her industrial
life at home was mainly agricultural. The growth of her manufactures was
steady, but it continued to be slow; they gave employment as yet to but
a small part of the population, and added in no great degree to the
national wealth. The wool-trade remained the largest, as it was the
oldest of them; it had gradually established itself in Norfolk, the West
Riding of Yorkshire, and the counties of the south-west; while the
manufacture of cotton was still almost limited to Manchester and Bolton,
and though winning on its rival remained so unimportant that in the
middle of the eighteenth century the export of cotton goods hardly
reached the value of fifty thousand a year. There was the same slow and
steady progress in the linen trade of Belfast and Dundee, and the silks
of Spitalfields. But as yet textile manufactures contributed little to
the national resources; nor did these resources owe much to the working
of our minerals. The coal trade was small, and limited by the cost of
carriage as well as by ignorance of any mode of employing coal in
iron-smelting. On the other hand the scarcity of wood, which was used
for that purpose, limited the production of iron. In 1750 only eighteen
thousand tons were produced in England; and four-fifths of its iron
goods were imported from Sweden. Nor did there seem any likelihood of a
rapid change. Skilled labour was scarce; and the processes of
manufacture were too rude to allow any large increase of production. It
was only where a stream gave force to turn a mill-wheel that the
wool-worker could establish his factory; and cotton was as yet spun by
hand in the cottages, the "spinsters" of the family sitting with their
distaffs round the weaver's hand-loom.
[Sidenote: Canals.]
But even had the processes of production become more efficient, they
would have been rendered useless by the inefficiency of the means of
distribution. The older main roads, which had lasted fairly through the
Middle Ages, had broken down in later times before the growth of traffic
and the increase of wagons and carriages. The new lines of trade lay
often along mere country lanes which had never been more than
horse-tracks, and to drive heavy wains through lanes like these was all
but impossible. Much of the woollen trade therefore had to be carried on
by means of long trains of pack-horses; and in most cases the cost of
carriage added heavily to the price of production. In the case of yet
heavier goods, such as coal, distribution was almost impracticable, save
along the greater rivers or in districts accessible from the sea. But at
the moment when England was just plunging into the Seven Years' War the
enterprise of a duke and a millwright solved this problem of carriage,
and started the country on a mighty course of industry which was to
change both its social and its political character. Francis, Duke of
Bridgewater, was a shy, dreamy man, whom a disappointment in love drove
to a life of isolation on his estates in the north. He was the possessor
of collieries at Worsley whose value depended on their finding a market
at the neighbouring town of Manchester; and it was to bring his coal to
this market that he resolved to drive a canal from the mine to the river
Irwell. With singular good luck he found the means of carrying out his
design in a self-taught mechanic, James Brindley. But in Brindley's mind
the scheme widened far beyond the plans of the duke. Canals, as he
conceived them, were no longer to serve as mere adjuncts to rivers; on
the contrary, "rivers were only meant," he said, "to feed canals"; and
instead of ending in the Irwell, he carried the duke's canal by an
aqueduct across that river to Manchester itself. What Brindley had
discovered was in fact the water-road, a means of carrying heavy goods
with the least resistance, and therefore the least cost, from the point
of production to the point of sale; and England at once seized on his
discovery to free itself from the bondage in which it had been held.
From the year 1767, when Brindley completed his enterprise, a network of
such water-roads was flung over the country; and before the movement had
spent its force Great Britain alone was traversed in every direction by
three thousand miles of navigable canals.
[Sidenote: Mineral developement.]
To English trade the canal opened up the richest of all markets, the
market of England itself. Every part of the country was practically
thrown open to the manufacturer: and the impulse which was given by this
facility of carriage was at once felt in a vast developement of
production. But such a developement would have been impossible had not
the discovery of this new mode of distribution been accompanied by the
discovery of a new productive force. In the coal which lay beneath her
soil England possessed a store of force which had hitherto remained
almost useless. But its effects were now to make themselves felt. The
first instance of the power of coal was shown in utilizing the stores
of iron which had lain side by side with it in the northern counties,
but which had lain there unworked through the scarcity of wood, which
was looked upon as the only fuel by which it could be smelted. In the
middle of the eighteenth century a process for smelting iron with coal
turned out to be effective; and the whole aspect of the iron-trade was
at once revolutionized. In fifty years the annual production of iron in
Great Britain rose from under twenty thousand to more than one hundred
and seventy thousand tons. During the fifty years that followed it rose
to six millions of tons. Iron was to become the working material of the
modern world; and it is its production of iron which more than all else
has placed England at the head of industrial Europe. But iron was not
the only metal which coal drew from the soil to swell the national
wealth. The increase in its production was rivalled by that of lead,
copper, and tin; and the "mining districts" soon gathered a population
which raised them into social as well as economical importance.
[Sidenote: The Steam Engine.]
But it was not in its direct application to metallurgy that coal was
destined to produce its most amazing effects. What was needed to turn
England into a manufacturing country was some means of transforming the
force stored up in coal into a labour force; and it was this
transformation which was now brought about through the agency of steam.
Engines in which steam was used as a means of draining mines had long
been in use; but the power relied on was mainly that of the weight of
the air pressing on a piston beneath which a vacuum had been created by
the condensation of steam; and the economical use of such engines was
checked by the waste of fuel which resulted from the cooling of the
cylinder at each condensation, and from the expenditure of heat in again
raising it to its old temperature before a fresh stroke of the piston
was possible. Both these obstacles were removed by the ingenuity of
James Watt. Watt was a working engineer at Glasgow, whose mind had for
some time been bent on the improvement of the steam-engine; but it was
not till the spring of 1765, amidst the political turmoil which
characterized the early reign of George the Third, that as he strolled
on a Sunday afternoon across the Green of Glasgow the means of effecting
it burst on him. "I had gone," he says, "to take a walk on a fine
Sabbath afternoon. I had entered the Green by the gate at the foot of
Charlotte Street, and had passed the old washing-house. I was thinking
upon the engine at the time, and had got as far as the herd's house,
when the idea came into my mind that as steam was an elastic body it
would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication were made between the
cylinder and an exhausted vessel it would rush into it, and might there
be condensed without cooling the cylinder. I had not walked farther
than the Golf-House when the whole thing was arranged in my mind." The
employment of a separate condenser, with the entire discarding of any
other force in its action save that of steam itself, changed the whole
conditions of the steam-engine. On the eve of the American war, in 1776,
its use passed beyond the mere draining of mines; and it was rapidly
adopted as a motive-force for all kinds of manufacturing industry.
[Sidenote: The Cotton manufactures.]
The almost unlimited supply of labour-power in the steam-engine came at
a time when the existing supply of manual labour was proving utterly
inadequate to cope with the demands of the manufacturer. This was
especially the case in textile fabrics. In its earlier stages the
manufacture of cotton had been retarded by the difficulty with which the
weavers obtained a sufficient supply of cotton yarn from the spinsters;
and this difficulty became yet greater when the invention of the
fly-shuttle enabled one weaver to do in a single day what had hitherto
been the work of two. The difficulty was solved by a Blackburn weaver,
John Hargreaves, who noticed that his wife's spindle, which had been
accidentally upset, continued to revolve in an upright position on the
floor, while the thread was still spinning in her hand. The hint led him
to connect a number of spindles with a single wheel, and thus to enable
one spinster to do the work of eight. Hargreaves's invention only
spurred the wits of a barber's assistant, Richard Arkwright, to yet
greater improvement in the construction of a machine for spinning by
rollers revolving at different rates of speed; and this in its turn was
improved and developed in the "mule" of a Bolton weaver, Samuel
Crompton. The result of these inventions was to reverse the difficulty
which hampered the trade, for the supply of yarn became so rapid and
unlimited as to outrun the power of the hand-loom weaver to consume it;
but a few years after the close of the American war this difficulty was
met by the discovery of the power-loom, which replaced the weaver by
machinery. Ingenious however as these inventions were, they would have
remained comparatively useless had it not been for the revelation of a
new and inexhaustible labour-force in the steam-engine. It was the
combination of such a force with such means of applying it that enabled
Britain during the terrible years of her struggle with France and
Napoleon to all but monopolise the woollen and cotton trades, and raised
her into the greatest manufacturing country that the world had seen.
How mighty a force this industrial revolution was to exert on English
politics and English society time was to show. By the transfer of wealth
and population from southern to northern England, and from the country
to the town, it was in the next fifty years to set on foot a revolution
in both, the results of which have still to be disclosed. Of such a
revolution no English statesman as yet had a glimpse; but already the
growth of industrial energy and industrial wealth was telling on the
conditions of English statesmanship. The manufacturer and the merchant
were coming fast to the front; and their temper was more menacing to the
monopoly of political power by the Whigs and the landed aristocracy whom
the Whigs represented than the temper of the king himself. Already
public opinion was finding in them a new concentration and weight; and
it was certain that as the representatives of public opinion they would
at last demand a share in the work of government. Such a demand might
have been delayed for a while had they been content with the way in
which England was governed. But they were far from being content with
it. To no class indeed could the selfishness, the corruption, the
factiousness, and the administrative inefficiency of the ruling order be
more utterly odious. Their tone was moral, and they were influenced more
and more by the religious and philanthropic movement about them. As men
of business, they revolted against the waste and mismanagement which
seemed to have become normal in every department of government. Their
patriotism, their pride in England's greatness, alienated them from men
who looked upon political eminence as a means of personal gain. Above
all their personal energy, their consciousness of wealth and power, and
to some extent the natural jealousy of the trader against the country
gentleman, urged them to press for an overthrow of the existing
monopoly, and for a fairer distribution of political influence. But such
a pressure could only bring them into conflict with the Whigs whom the
fall of Lord North had recalled to office. Though the Tories had now
grown to a compact body of a hundred and fifty members, the Whigs still
remained superior to their rivals in numbers and ability as well as in
distinctness of political aim; for the return of the Bedford section to
the general body of the party, as well as its steady opposition to the
American war, had restored much of their early cohesion. But this
reunion only strengthened their aristocratic and exclusive tendencies,
and widened the breach which was steadily opening on questions such as
Parliamentary Reform between the bulk of the Whigs and the small
fragment of their party which remained true to the more popular
sympathies of Chatham.
[Sidenote: William Pitt.]
Lord Shelburne stood at the head of the Chatham party, and it was
reinforced at this moment by the entry into Parliament of the second and
youngest son of Chatham himself. William Pitt had hardly reached his
twenty-second year; but he left college with the learning of a ripe
scholar, and his ready and sonorous eloquence had been matured by his
father's teaching. "He will be one of the first men in Parliament," said
a member to Charles Fox, the Whig leader in the Commons, after Pitt's
earliest speech in that house. "He is so already," replied Fox. Young as
he was, the haughty self-esteem of the new statesman breathed in every
movement of his tall, spare figure, in the hard lines of a countenance
which none but his closer friends saw lighted by a smile, in his cold
and repulsive address, his invariable gravity of demeanour, and his
habitual air of command. But none knew how great the qualities were
which lay beneath this haughty exterior; nor had any one guessed how
soon this "boy," as his rivals mockingly styled him, was to crush every
opponent and to hold England at his will. There was only a smile of
wonder when he refused any of the minor posts which were offered him in
the Rockingham administration, and the wonder passed into angry sarcasms
as soon as it was known that he claimed, if he took office at all, to be
at once admitted to the Cabinet. But Pitt had no desire to take office
under Rockingham. He was the inheritor of that side of his father's
policy which was most distasteful to the Whigs. To him as to Chatham the
main lesson of the war was the need of putting an end to those abuses in
the composition of Parliament by which George the Third had been enabled
to plunge the country into it. A thorough reform of the House of Commons
was the only effectual means of doing this, and Pitt brought forward a
bill founded on his father's plans for that purpose. But though a more
liberal section of the Whigs, with Charles Fox at their head, were
wavering round to a wish for reform, the great bulk of the party could
not nerve themselves to the sacrifice of property and influence which
such a reform would involve. Rockingham remained hostile to reform, and
Burke, whose influence still told much upon Rockingham, was yet more
hostile than his chief. Pitt's bill therefore was thrown out. In its
stead the Ministry endeavoured to weaken the means of corrupt influence
which the king had unscrupulously used by disqualifying persons holding
government contracts from sitting in Parliament, by depriving revenue
officers of the elective franchise (a measure which diminished the
weight of the Crown in seventy boroughs), and above all by a bill for
the reduction of the civil establishment, of the pension list, and of
the secret service fund, which was brought in by Burke. These measures
were to a great extent effectual in diminishing the influence of the
Crown over Parliament, and they are memorable as marking the date when
the direct bribery of members absolutely ceased. But they were utterly
inoperative in rendering the House of Commons really representative of
or responsible to the people of England.
[Sidenote: The Coalition.]
The jealousy which the mass of the Whigs entertained of the followers of
Chatham and their plans was more plainly shown however on the death of
Lord Rockingham in July. Shelburne, who had hitherto served as Secretary
of State, was called by the king to the head of the Ministry, a post to
which his eminent talents and the ability which he was showing in the
negotiations for the Peace clearly gave him a title. But Shelburne had
been hampered in these negotiations by the jealousy of Charles Fox, who
as joint Secretary of State with him claimed in spite of usage a share
in conducting them, and who persisted without a show of reason in
believing himself to have been unfairly treated. It was on personal
grounds therefore that Fox refused to serve under Shelburne; but the
refusal of Burke and the bulk of Rockingham's followers was based on
more than personal grounds. It sprang from a rooted distrust of the more
popular tendencies of which Shelburne was justly regarded as the
representative. To Pitt, on the other hand, these tendencies were the
chief ground of confidence in the new Ministry; and, young as he was, he
at once entered office as Chancellor of the Exchequer. But his tenure of
this post was a brief one. The Shelburne Ministry in fact only lasted
long enough to conclude the final peace with the United States on the
base of their independence; for in the opening of 1783 it was overthrown
by the most unscrupulous coalition known in our history, a union of the
Whig followers of Fox with the Tories who still clung to Lord North. In
Parliament such a coalition was irresistible, and the resignation of
Shelburne at once made way for an administration in which both the
triumphant parties were represented. But the effect on England at large
was very different. Whatever new credit the Whigs had gained with the
country during their long exclusion from office had been due to their
steady denunciation of the policy and temper of Lord North's
administration. That they should take office hand in hand with men whom
they had for years denounced as the worst of Ministers shocked even
their most loyal adherents; and the shock was the greater that a new
seriousness in politics, a longing for a deeper and more earnest
treatment of political questions, was making mere faction intolerable to
Englishmen. But behind all this was the sense that something more than
mere faction had really brought the two parties together. It was their
common dread of the popular tendencies which Shelburne's Ministry
represented, their common hatred of parliamentary reform, which hushed
for the moment the bitter hostility between the followers of Rockingham
and the followers of North. Yet never had the need of representative
reform been more clearly shown than by a coalition which proved how
powerless was the force of public opinion to check even the most
shameless faction in Parliament, how completely the lessening of royal
influence by the measures of Burke and Rockingham had tended to the
profit not of the people but of the borough-mongers who usurped its
representation. The turn of public opinion was quick in disclosing
itself. Fox was the most popular of the Whigs, but he was hooted from
the platform when he addressed his constituents at Westminster. Pitt, on
the other hand, whose attacks on the new union rose to a lofty and
indignant eloquence, was lifted by it into an almost solitary greatness.
[Sidenote: Fall of the Coalition.]
But in Parliament Pitt was as powerless as he was influential in the
country. His renewed proposal of Parliamentary Reform, though he set
aside the disfranchisement of rotten boroughs as a violation of private
property, and limited himself to the disfranchisement of boroughs
convicted of corruption, and to the addition of one hundred members to
the county representation, was rejected by a majority of two to one.
Secure in their parliamentary majority, and heedless of the power of
public opinion outside the walls of the House of Commons, the new
Ministers entered boldly on a greater task than had as yet taxed the
constructive genius of English statesmen. To leave such a dominion as
Warren Hastings had built up in India to the control of a mere Company
of traders was clearly impossible; and Fox proposed to transfer its
political government from the Directors of the Company to a board of
seven Commissioners. The appointment of the seven was vested in the
first instance in Parliament, and afterwards in the Crown; their office
was to be held for five years, but they were removable on address from
either House of Parliament. The proposal was at once met with a storm of
opposition. The scheme indeed was an injudicious one; for the new
Commissioners would have been destitute of that practical knowledge of
India which belonged to the Company, while the want of any immediate
link between them and the actual Ministry of the Crown would have
prevented Parliament from exercising an effective control over their
acts. But the real faults of this India Bill were hardly noticed in the
popular outcry against it. It had challenged the hostility of powerful
influences. The merchant-class was galled by the blow levelled at the
greatest merchant-body in the realm: corporations trembled at the
cancelling of a charter; the king viewed the measure as a mere means of
transferring the patronage of India to the Whigs. But it might have
defied the opposition of corporations and the king had it not had to
meet the bitter hostility of the nation at large. With the nation the
faults of the bill lay not in this detail or that, but in the character
of the Ministry which proposed it. To give the rule and patronage of
India over to the existing House of Commons was to give a new and
immense power to a body which misused in the grossest way the power it
possessed. It was the sense of this popular feeling which encouraged the
king to exert his personal influence to defeat the measure in the
Lords, and on its defeat to order his Ministers to deliver up the seals.
The unpopularity of Shelburne stood in the way of his resumption of
office, and in December 1783 Pitt accepted the post of First Lord of the
Treasury. His position would at once have been untenable had the country
gone with its nominal representatives. He was defeated again and again
by large majorities in the Commons; but the majorities dwindled as a
shower of addresses from every quarter, from the Tory University of
Oxford as from the Whig Corporation of London, proved that public
opinion went with the Minister and not with the House. It was the
general sense of this that justified Pitt in the firmness with which, in
the teeth of addresses for his removal from office, he delayed the
dissolution of Parliament for five months, and gained time for that
ripening of the national sentiment on which he counted for success. When
the election of 1784 came the struggle was at once at an end. The public
feeling took a strength which broke through the corrupt influences that
commonly governed its representation. Every great constituency, the
counties and the large towns, returned supporters of Pitt. Of the
majority which had defeated him in the Commons, a hundred and sixty
members were unseated. Fox hardly retained his seat for Westminster,
Burke lost his seat for Bristol, and only a fragment of the Whig party
was saved by its command of nomination boroughs.
[Sidenote: Pitt's temper.]
When Parliament came together after the overthrow of the Coalition, the
Minister of twenty-five was master of England as no Minister had been
before. Even George the Third yielded to his sway, partly through
gratitude for the triumph he had won for him, partly from a sense of the
madness which was soon to strike him down, but still more from a gradual
discovery that the triumph which he had won over his political rivals
had been won, not to the profit of the crown, but of the nation at
large. The Whigs, it was true, were broken, unpopular, and without a
policy; while the Tories, whom the Coalition had disgusted with Lord
North, as it had estranged Fox from their opponents, clung to the
Minister who had "saved the king." But it was the support of a new
political power that really gave his strength to the young Minister. The
sudden rise of English industry was pushing the manufacturer to the
front; and the manufacturer pinned his faith from the first in William
Pitt. All that the trading classes loved in Chatham, his nobleness of
temper, his consciousness of power, his patriotism, his sympathy with a
wider world than the world within the Parliament-house, they saw in his
son. He had little indeed of the poetic and imaginative side of
Chatham's genius, of his quick perception of what was just and what was
possible, his far-reaching conceptions of national policy, his outlook
into the future of the world. Pitt's flowing and sonorous commonplaces
rang hollow beside the broken phrases which still make his father's
eloquence a living thing to Englishmen. On the other hand he possessed
some qualities in which Chatham was utterly wanting. His temper, though
naturally ardent and sensitive, had been schooled in a proud
self-command. His simplicity and good taste freed him from his father's
ostentation and extravagance. Diffuse and commonplace as his speeches
seem to the reader, they were adapted as much by their very qualities of
diffuseness and commonplace as by their lucidity and good sense to the
intelligence of the classes whom Pitt felt to be his real audience. In
his love of peace, his immense industry, his despatch of business, his
skill in debate, his knowledge of finance, he recalled Sir Robert
Walpole; but he had virtues which Walpole never possessed, and he was
free from Walpole's worst defects. He was careless of personal gain. He
was too proud to rule by corruption. His lofty self-esteem left no room
for any jealousy of subordinates. He was generous in his appreciation of
youthful merits; and the "boys" he gathered round him, such as Canning
and Lord Wellesley, rewarded his generosity by a devotion which death
left untouched. With Walpole's cynical inaction Pitt had no sympathy
whatever. His policy from the first was a policy of active reform, and
he faced every one of the problems, financial, constitutional,
religious, from which Walpole had shrunk. Above all, he had none of
Walpole's scorn of his fellowmen. The noblest feature in his mind was
its wide humanity. His love for England was as deep and personal as his
father's love, but of the sympathy with English passion and English
prejudice which had been at once his father's weakness and strength he
had not a trace. When Fox taunted him with forgetting Chatham's jealousy
of France and his faith that she was the natural foe of England, Pitt
answered nobly that "to suppose any nation can be unalterably the enemy
of another is weak and childish."
[Sidenote: His statesmanship.]
The temper of the time, and the larger sympathy of man with man which
especially marks the eighteenth century as a turning-point in the
history of the human race, was everywhere bringing to the front a new
order of statesmen, such as Turgot and Joseph the Second, whose
characteristics were a love of mankind, and a belief that as the
happiness of the individual can only be secured by the general happiness
of the community to which he belongs, so the welfare of individual
nations can only be secured by the general welfare of the world. Of
these Pitt was one. But he rose high above the rest in the consummate
knowledge and the practical force which he brought to the realization of
his aims. His strength lay in finance; and he came forward at a time
when the growth of English wealth made a knowledge of finance essential
to a great Minister. The progress of the nation was wonderful.
Population more than doubled during the eighteenth century, and the
advance of wealth was even greater than that of population. Though the
war had added a hundred millions to the national debt, the burden was
hardly felt. The loss of America only increased the commerce with that
country, and industry, as we have seen, had begun that great career
which was to make England the workshop of the world. To deal wisely with
such a growth required a knowledge of the laws of wealth which would
have been impossible at an earlier time. But it had become possible in
the days of Pitt. If books are to be measured by the effect which they
have produced on the fortunes of mankind, the "Wealth of Nations" must
rank among the greatest of books. Its author was Adam Smith, an Oxford
scholar and a professor at Glasgow. Labour, he contended, was the one
source of wealth, and it was by freedom of labour, by suffering the
worker to pursue his own interest in his own way, that the public wealth
would best be promoted. Any attempt to force labour into artificial
channels, to shape by laws the course of commerce, to promote special
branches of industry in particular countries, or to fix the character of
the intercourse between one country and another, is not only a wrong to
the worker or the merchant, but actually hurtful to the wealth of a
state. The book was published in 1776, at the opening of the American
war, and studied by Pitt during his career as an undergraduate at
Cambridge. From that time he owned Adam Smith for his master; and he had
hardly become Minister before he took the principles of the "Wealth of
Nations" as the groundwork of his policy.
[Sidenote: Pitt and Parliamentary reform.]
It was thus that the ten earlier years of Pitt's rule marked a new point
of departure in English statesmanship. He was the first English Minister
who really grasped the part which industry was to play in promoting the
welfare of the world. He was not only a peace Minister and a financier,
as Walpole had been, but a statesman who saw that the best security for
peace lay in the freedom and widening of commercial intercourse between
nations; that public economy not only lessened the general burdens but
left additional capital in the hands of industry; and that finance might
be turned from a mere means of raising revenue into a powerful engine of
political and social improvement. That little was done by Pitt himself
to carry these principles into effect was partly owing to the mass of
ignorance and prejudice with which he had to contend, and still more to
the sudden break of his plans through the French Revolution. His power
rested above all on the trading classes, and these were still persuaded
that wealth meant gold and silver, and that commerce was best furthered
by jealous monopolies. It was only by patience and dexterity that the
mob of merchants and country squires who backed him in the House of
Commons could be brought to acquiesce in the changes he proposed. How
small his power was when it struggled with the prejudices around him was
seen in the failure of the first great measure he brought forward. The
question of parliamentary reform which had been mooted during the
American war had been coming steadily to the front. Chatham had
advocated an increase of county members, who were then the most
independent part of the Lower House. The Duke of Richmond talked of
universal suffrage, equal electoral districts, and annual Parliaments.
Wilkes anticipated the Reform Bill of a later time by proposing to
disfranchise the rotten boroughs, and to give members in their stead to
the counties and to the more populous and wealthy towns. William Pitt
had made the question his own by bringing forward a motion for reform on
his first entry into the House, and one of his earliest measures as
Minister was to bring in a bill in 1785 which, while providing for the
gradual extinction of all decayed boroughs, disfranchised thirty-six at
once, and transferred their members to counties. He brought the king to
abstain from opposition, and strove to buy off the borough-mongers, as
the holders of rotten boroughs were called, by offering to compensate
them for the seats they lost at their market-value. But the bulk of his
own party joined the bulk of the Whigs in a steady resistance to the
bill, while it received no effective support from the general opinion of
the people without. The more glaring abuses, indeed, within Parliament
itself, the abuses which stirred Chatham and Wilkes to action, had in
great part disappeared. The bribery of members had ceased. Burke's Bill
of Economical Reform had just dealt a fatal blow at the influence which
the king exercised by suppressing a host of useless offices, household
appointments, judicial and diplomatic charges, which were maintained for
the purpose of corruption. But what was probably the most fatal obstacle
to any pressure for reform was the triumph of public opinion to which
Pitt owed his power. The utter overthrow of the Coalition, the complete
victory of public opinion, had done much to diminish the sense of any
real danger from the opposition which Parliament had shown till now to
the voice of the nation. England, then as now, was indifferent to all
but practical grievances; and the nation cared little for anomalies in
the form of representation so long as it felt itself represented.
"Terribly disappointed and beat," as Wilberforce tells us Pitt was by
the rejection of his measure, the temper of the House and of the people
was too plain to be mistaken, and though his opinion remained unaltered,
he never brought it forward again.
[Sidenote: Pitt's finance.]
The failure of his constitutional reform was more than compensated by
the triumphs of his finance. When he entered office public credit was at
its lowest ebb. The debt had been doubled by the American war, yet large
sums still remained unfunded, while the revenue was reduced by a vast
system of smuggling which turned every coast-town into a nest of
robbers. The deficiency in the revenue was met for the moment by new
taxes, but the time which was thus gained served to change the whole
face of public affairs. The first of Pitt's financial measures--his plan
for gradually paying off the debt by a sinking fund--was undoubtedly an
error; but it had a happy effect in restoring public confidence. He met
the smuggler by a reduction of Custom-duties which made his trade
unprofitable. He revived Walpole's plan of an Excise. Meanwhile the
public expenses were reduced, and commission after commission was
appointed to introduce economy into every department of the public
service. The rapid developement of the national industry which we have
already noted no doubt aided the success of these measures. Credit was
restored. The smuggling trade was greatly reduced. In two years there
was a surplus of a million, and though duty after duty was removed the
revenue rose steadily with every remission of taxation. Meanwhile Pitt
was showing the political value of the new finance in a wider field.
Ireland, then as now, was England's difficulty. The tyrannous
misgovernment under which she had groaned ever since the battle of the
Boyne was producing its natural fruit; the miserable land was torn with
political faction, religious feuds, and peasant conspiracies; and so
threatening had the attitude of the Protestant party which ruled it
become during the American war that they had forced the English
Parliament to relinquish its control over their Parliament in Dublin.
Pitt saw that much at least of the misery and disloyalty of Ireland
sprang from its poverty. The population had grown rapidly, while culture
remained stationary and commerce perished. And of this poverty much was
the direct result of unjust law. Ireland was a grazing country, but to
protect the interest of English graziers the import of its cattle into
England was forbidden. To protect the interests of English clothiers and
weavers, its manufactures were loaded with duties. To redress this wrong
was the first financial effort of Pitt, and the bill which he introduced
in 1785 did away with every obstacle to freedom of trade between England
and Ireland. It was a measure which, as he held, would "draw what
remained of the shattered empire together," and repair in part the loss
of America by creating a loyal and prosperous Ireland; and, struggling
almost alone in face of a fierce opposition from the Whigs and the
Manchester merchants, he dragged it through the English Parliament,
though only to see it flung aside by the Protestant faction under
Grattan which then ruled the Parliament of Ireland. But the defeat only
spurred him to a greater effort elsewhere. If Ireland was England's
difficulty, France had been looked upon as England's natural enemy. We
have seen how nobly Pitt rebuked prejudices such as this; but he knew
that nothing could so effectively dispel it as increased intercourse
between nation and nation. In 1787 therefore he concluded a Treaty of
Commerce with France which enabled subjects of both countries to reside
and travel in either without licence or passport, did away with all
prohibition of trade on either side, and reduced every import duty.
[Sidenote: England and Europe.]
The immediate result of this treaty was a great increase of trade
between France and England; and brief as its course was fated to be, it
at once set Pitt on a higher level than any rival statesman of his time.
But the spirit of humanity which breathed through his policy had to
wrestle with difficulties both at home and abroad. No measure secured a
warmer support from the young Minister than the bill for the suppression
of the slave-trade; but in 1788 it was defeated by the vigorous
opposition of the trading classes and the prejudice of the people at
large. His efforts to sap the enmity of nation against nation by a freer
intercourse encountered a foe even more fatal than English prejudice, in
the very movement of which his measures formed a part. Across the
Channel this movement was growing into a revolution which was to change
the face of the world. That such a revolution must one day come, every
observer who had compared the state of Europe with that of England had
long seen to be inevitable. So far as England was concerned, the Puritan
resistance of the seventeenth century had in the end succeeded in
checking the general tendency of the time to religious and political
despotism. Since the Revolution of 1688 freedom of conscience and the
people's right to govern itself through its representatives in
Parliament had been practically established. Social equality had begun
long before. Every man from the highest to the lowest was subject to,
and protected by, the same law. The English aristocracy, though
exercising a powerful influence on government, were possessed of few
social privileges, and hindered from forming a separate class in the
nation by the legal and social tradition which counted all save the
eldest son of a noble house as commoners. No impassable line parted the
gentry from the commercial classes, and these again possessed no
privileges which could part them from the lower classes of the
community. Public opinion, the general sense of educated Englishmen, had
established itself after a short struggle as the dominant element in
English government. But in all the other great states of Europe the wars
of religion had left only the name of freedom. Government tended to a
pure despotism. Privilege was supreme in religion, in politics, in
society. Society itself rested on a rigid division of classes from one
another, which refused to the people at large any equal rights of
justice or of industry.
[Sidenote: France.]
We have already seen how alien such a conception of national life was
from the ideas which the wide diffusion of intelligence during the
eighteenth century was spreading throughout Europe; and in almost every
country some enlightened rulers were striving by administrative reforms
to satisfy in some sort the sense of wrong which was felt around them.
The attempts of sovereigns like Frederick the Great in Prussia and
Joseph the Second in Austria and the Netherlands were rivalled by the
efforts of statesmen such as Turgot in France. It was in France indeed
that the contrast between the actual state of society and the new ideas
of public right was felt most keenly. Nowhere had the victory of the
Crown been more complete. The aristocracy had been robbed of all share
in public affairs; it enjoyed social privileges and exemption from any
contribution to the public burdens without that sense of public duty
which a governing class to some degree always possesses. Guilds and
monopolies fettered the industry of the trader and the merchant, and cut
them off from the working classes, as the value attached to noble blood
cut off both from the aristocracy. If its political position indeed
were compared with that of most of the countries round it, France stood
high. Its government was less oppressive, its general wealth was larger
and more evenly diffused, there was a better administration of justice,
and greater security for public order. Poor as its peasantry seemed to
English eyes, they were far above the peasants of Germany or Spain. Its
middle class was the quickest and most intelligent in Europe. Under
Lewis the Fifteenth opinion was practically free, and a literary class
had sprung up which devoted itself with wonderful brilliancy and
activity to popularizing the ideas of social and political justice which
it learned from English writers, and in the case of Montesquieu and
Voltaire from personal contact with English life. The moral conceptions
of the time, its love of mankind, its sense of human brotherhood, its
hatred of oppression, its pity for the guilty and the poor, its longing
after a higher and nobler standard of life and action, were expressed by
a crowd of writers, and above all by Rousseau, with a fire and eloquence
which carried them to the heart of the people. But this new force of
intelligence only jostled roughly with the social forms with which it
found itself in contact. The philosopher denounced the tyranny of the
priesthood. The peasant grumbled at the lord's right to judge him in his
courts and to exact feudal services from him. The merchant was galled
by the trading restrictions and the heavy taxation. The country gentry
rebelled against their exclusion from public life and from the
government of the country. Its powerlessness to bring about any change
at home turned all this new energy into sympathy with a struggle against
tyranny abroad. Public opinion forced France to ally itself with America
in its contest for liberty, and French volunteers under the Marquis de
Lafayette joined Washington's army. But while the American war spread
more widely throughout the nation the craving for freedom, it brought on
the Government financial embarrassments from which it could only free
itself by an appeal to the country at large. Lewis the Sixteenth
resolved to summon the States-General, which had not met since the time
of Richelieu, and to appeal to the nobles to waive their immunity from
taxation. His resolve at once stirred into vigorous life every impulse
and desire which had been seething in the minds of the people; and the
States-General no sooner met at Versailles in May 1789 than the fabric
of despotism and privilege began to crumble. A rising in Paris destroyed
the Bastille, and the capture of this fortress was taken for the dawn of
a new era of constitutional freedom in France and through Europe. Even
in England men thrilled with a strange joy at the tidings of its fall.
"How much is this the greatest event that ever happened in the world,"
Fox cried with a burst of enthusiasm, "and how much the best!"
[Sidenote: Pitt and Russia.]
Pitt regarded the approach of France to sentiments of liberty which had
long been familiar to England with greater coolness, but with no
distrust. For the moment indeed his attention was distracted by an
attack of madness which visited George the Third in 1788, and by the
claim of a right to the Regency which was at once advanced by the Prince
of Wales. The Prince belonged to the Whig party; and Fox, who was
travelling in Italy, hurried home to support his claim in full belief
that the Prince's Regency would be followed by his own return to power.
Pitt successfully resisted the claim on the constitutional ground that
in such a case the right to choose a temporary Regent, under what
limitations it would, lay with Parliament; and a bill which conferred
the Regency on the Prince, in accordance with this view, was already
passing the Houses when the recovery of the king put an end to the long
dispute. Foreign difficulties, too, absorbed Pitt's attention. Russia
had risen into greatness under Catharine the Second; and Catharine had
resolved from the first on the annexation of Poland, the expulsion of
the Turks from Europe, and the setting up of a Russian throne at
Constantinople. In her first aim she was baffled for the moment by
Frederick the Great. She had already made herself virtually mistress of
the whole of Poland, her armies occupied the kingdom, and she had
seated a nominee of her own on its throne, when Frederick in union with
the Emperor Joseph the Second forced her to admit Germany to a share of
the spoil. If the Polish partition of 1773 brought the Russian frontier
westward to the upper waters of the Dwina and the Dnieper, it gave
Galicia to Maria Theresa, and West Prussia to Frederick himself. Foiled
in her first aim, she waited for the realization of her second till the
alliance between the two German powers was at an end through the
resistance of Prussia to Joseph's schemes for the annexation of Bavaria,
and till the death of Frederick removed her most watchful foe. Then in
1788 Joseph and the Empress joined hands for a partition of the Turkish
Empire. But Prussia was still watchful, and England was no longer
fettered as in 1773 by troubles with America. The friendship established
by Chatham between the two countries, which had been suspended by Bute's
treachery and all but destroyed during the Northern League of Neutral
Powers, had been restored by Pitt through his co-operation with the
successor of Frederick the Great in the restoration of the Dutch
Stadtholderate. Its political weight was now seen in an alliance of
England, Prussia, and Holland, in 1789, for the preservation of the
Turkish Empire. A great European struggle seemed at hand. In such a
struggle the sympathy and aid of France were of the highest importance;
and it was only as weakening her in face of such a crisis that Pitt
looked on the Revolution with any fear. But with the treaty the danger
passed away. In the spring of 1790 Joseph died broken-hearted at the
failure of his plans and the revolt of the Netherlands against his
innovations; Austria practically withdrew from the war with the Turks;
and the young Minister could give free expression to the sympathy with
which the French movement inspired him.
[Sidenote: The French Revolution.]
In France indeed things were moving fast. By breaking down the division
between its separate orders the States-General became a National
Assembly, which abolished the privileges of the provincial parliaments,
of the nobles, and the Church. In October 1789 the mob of Paris marched
on Versailles and forced both King and Assembly to return with them to
the capital; and a Constitution hastily put together was accepted by
Lewis the Sixteenth in the stead of his old despotic power. To Pitt the
tumult and disorder with which these great changes were wrought seemed
transient matters. In January 1790 he still believed that "the present
convulsions in France must sooner or later culminate in general harmony
and regular order," and that when her own freedom was established,
"France would stand forth as one of the most brilliant powers of
Europe." But the coolness and goodwill with which Pitt looked on the
Revolution were far from being universal in the nation at large. The
cautious good sense of the bulk of Englishmen, their love of order and
law, their distaste for violent changes and for abstract theories, as
well as their reverence for the past, were rousing throughout the
country a dislike of the revolutionary changes which were hurrying on
across the Channel; and both the political sense and the political
prejudice of the nation were being fired by the warnings of Edmund
Burke. The fall of the Bastille, though it kindled enthusiasm in Fox,
roused in Burke only distrust. "Whenever a separation is made between
liberty and justice," he wrote a few weeks later, "neither is safe." The
night of the fourth of August, when the privileges of every class were
abolished, filled him with horror. He saw, and rightly saw, in it the
critical moment which revealed the character of the Revolution, and his
part was taken at once. "The French," he cried in January, while Pitt
was foretelling a glorious future for the new Constitution, "the French
have shown themselves the ablest architects of ruin who have hitherto
existed in the world. In a short space of time they have pulled to the
ground their army, their navy, their commerce, their arts and their
manufactures."
[Sidenote: Pitt and France.]
But in Parliament Burke stood alone. The Whigs, though distrustfully,
followed Fox in his applause of the Revolution. The Tories, yet more
distrustfully, followed Pitt; and Pitt warmly expressed his sympathy
with the constitutional government which was ruling France. At this
moment indeed the more revolutionary party in that country gave a signal
proof of its friendship for England. Irritated by an English settlement
at Nootka Sound in California, Spain appealed to France for aid in
accordance with the Family Compact; and the French Ministry, with a
party at its back which believed things had gone far enough, resolved on
a war as the best means of checking the progress of the Revolution and
restoring the power of the Crown. The revolutionary party naturally
opposed this design; and after a bitter struggle the right of declaring
war, save with the sanction of the Assembly, was taken from the king.
With this vote all danger of hostilities passed away. "The French
Government," Pitt asserted, "was bent on cultivating the most unbounded
friendship for Great Britain," and he saw no reason in its revolutionary
changes why Britain should not return the friendship of France. What
told even more on his temper towards that country was a conviction that
nothing but the joint action of France and England would in the end
arrest the troubles of Eastern Europe. His intervention foiled for the
moment a fresh effort of Prussia to rob Poland of Dantzig and Thorn. But
though Russia was still pressing Turkey hard, a Russian war was so
unpopular in England that a hostile vote in Parliament forced Pitt to
discontinue his armaments; and a fresh union of Austria and Prussia,
which promised at this juncture to bring about a close of the Turkish
struggle, promised also a fresh attack on the independence of Poland. To
prevent a new partition without the co-operation of France was
impossible; and in the existing state of things Pitt saw nothing to
hinder the continuance of a friendship which would make such a
co-operation inevitable.
[Sidenote: Burke and the Revolution.]
But while Pitt was pleading for friendship between the two countries,
Burke was resolved to make friendship impossible. In Parliament, as we
have seen, he stood alone. He had long ceased, in fact, to have any hold
over the House of Commons. The eloquence which had vied with that of
Chatham during the discussions on the Stamp Act had become distasteful
to the bulk of its members. The length of his speeches, the profound and
philosophical character of his argument, the splendour and often the
extravagance of his illustrations, his passionate earnestness, his want
of temper and discretion, wearied and perplexed the squires and
merchants about him. He was known nowadays as "the dinner-bell of the
House," so rapidly did its benches thin at his rising. For a time his
energies found scope in the impeachment of Hastings; and the grandeur of
his appeals to the justice of England hushed detraction. But with the
close of the impeachment his repute had again fallen; and the approach
of old age, for he was now past sixty, seemed to counsel retirement from
an assembly where he stood unpopular and alone. But age and
disappointment and loneliness were forgotten as Burke saw rising across
the Channel the embodiment of all that he hated--a Revolution founded on
scorn of the past, and threatening with ruin the whole social fabric
which the past had reared; the ordered structure of classes and ranks
crumbling before a doctrine of social equality; a State rudely
demolished and reconstituted; a Church and a Nobility swept away in a
night. Against the enthusiasm of what he rightly saw to be a new
political religion he resolved to rouse the enthusiasm of the old. He
was at once a great orator and a great writer; and now that the House
was deaf to his voice, he appealed to the country by his pen. The
"Reflections on the French Revolution" which he published in October
1790 not only denounced the acts of rashness and violence which sullied
the great change that France had wrought, but the very principles from
which the change had sprung. Burke's deep sense of the need of social
order, of the value of that continuity in human affairs "without which
men would become like flies in a summer," blinded him to all but the
faith in mere rebellion and the yet sillier faith in mere novelty which
disguised a real nobleness of aim and temper even in the most ardent of
the revolutionists. He would see no abuses in the past, now that it had
fallen, or anything but the ruin of society in the future. He preached a
crusade against men whom he regarded as the foes of religion and
civilization, and called on the armies of Europe to put down a
Revolution whose principles threatened every state with destruction.
[Sidenote: His failure in Parliament.]
The great obstacle to such a crusade was Pitt: and one of the grandest
outbursts of the "Reflections" closed with a bitter taunt at the
Minister. "The age of chivalry," Burke cried, "is gone; that of
sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of
Europe is extinguished for ever." But neither taunt nor invective moved
Pitt from his course. At the moment when the "Reflections" appeared he
gave a fresh assurance to France of his resolve to have nothing to do
with any crusade against the Revolution. "This country," he wrote,
"means to persevere in the neutrality hitherto scrupulously observed
with respect to the internal dissensions of France; and from which it
will never depart unless the conduct held there makes it indispensable
as an act of self-defence." So far indeed was he from sharing the
reactionary panic which was spreading around him that he chose this time
for supporting Fox in his Libel Act, a measure which, by transferring
the decision on what was libellous in any publication from the judge to
the jury, completed the freedom of the press; and himself passed in 1791
a bill which, though little noticed among the storms of the time, was
one of the noblest of his achievements. He boldly put aside the dread
which had been roused by the American war, that the gift of
self-government to our colonies would serve only as a step towards their
secession from the mother country, and established a House of Assembly
and a Council in the two Canadas. "I am convinced," said Fox, who gave
the measure his hearty support, "that the only method of retaining
distant colonies with advantage is to enable them to govern themselves";
and the policy of the one statesman as well as the foresight of the
other has been justified by the later history of our dependencies. Nor
had Burke better success with his own party. Fox remained an ardent
lover of the Revolution, and answered a fresh attack of Burke upon it
with more than usual warmth. Till now a close affection had bound the
two men together; but no sooner had this defence been uttered than the
fanaticism of Burke declared their union to be over. "There is no loss
of friendship," Fox exclaimed, with a sudden burst of tears. "There is!"
Burke repeated. "I know the price of my conduct. Our friendship is at an
end."
[Sidenote: His success with the country.]
Within the walls of Parliament however Burke as yet stood utterly alone.
His "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs," in June 1791, failed to
detach a follower from Fox; while Pitt coldly counselled him rather to
praise the English Constitution than to rail at the French. "I have made
many enemies and few friends," Burke wrote sadly to the French princes
who had fled from their country and were gathering in arms at Coblentz,
"by the part I have taken." But the opinion of the people was slowly
drifting to his side; and a sale of thirty thousand copies showed that
the "Reflections" echoed the general sentiment of Englishmen. At this
moment indeed the mood of England was singularly unfavourable to any
fair appreciation of the Revolution across the Channel. Her temper was
above all industrial. Men who were working hard and fast growing rich,
who had the narrow and practical turn of men of business, looked angrily
at this sudden disturbance of order, this restless and vague activity,
these rhetorical appeals to human feeling, these abstract and often
empty theories. In England it was a time of political content and social
well-being, of steady economic progress, as well as of a powerful
religious revival; and an insular lack of imaginative interest in other
races hindered men from seeing that every element of this content, of
this order, of this peaceful and harmonious progress, of this
reconciliation of society and religion, was wanting abroad. The
sympathy which the first outbreak of the Revolution had roused among
Englishmen grew cooler in fact with every step which the Revolution
took. While the Declaration of the Rights of Man roused France to a
frenzy of enthusiasm, it was set aside as a dream by the practical
islanders who based their rights on precedent and not on theory. The
abolition of all social privileges on the 12th of August, the most
characteristic step in the French Revolution, was met with grave
disapproval by a people more alien from social equality than any people
in Europe. Every incident in the struggle between the French people and
their king widened the breach of feeling. The anarchy of the country,
the want of political sense in its Assembly, the paltry declamation of
its clubs, the exaggerated sentiment, the universal suspicion, the
suspension of every security for personal freedom, the arrests, the
murders, the overthrow of the Church, the ruin of the Crown, were
watched with an ever-growing severity by a nation whose chief instinct
was one of order, whose bent was to practical politics, whose temper was
sober and trustful, whose passionate love of personal liberty was only
equalled by its passionate abhorrence of bloodshed in civil strife, and
whose ecclesiastical and political institutions were newly endeared to
it by a fresh revival of religious feeling, and by the constitutional
attitude of its Government for a hundred years.
[Sidenote: The coalition against France.]
Sympathy in fact was soon limited to a few groups of reformers who
gathered in "Constitutional Clubs," and whose reckless language
quickened the national reaction. But in spite of Burke's appeals and the
cries of the nobles who had fled from France and longed only to march
against their country, Europe held back from any attack on the
Revolution, and Pitt preserved his attitude of neutrality, though with a
greater appearance of reserve. So anxious, in fact, did the aspect of
affairs in the East make him for the restoration of tranquillity in
France, that he foiled a plan which its emigrant nobles had formed for a
descent on the French coast, and declared formally at Vienna that
England would remain absolutely neutral should hostilities arise between
France and the Emperor. But the Emperor was as anxious to avoid a French
war as Pitt himself. Though Catharine, now her strife with Turkey was
over, wished to plunge the two German powers into a struggle with the
Revolution which would leave her free to annex Poland single-handed,
neither Leopold nor Prussia would tie their hands by such a contest. The
flight of Lewis the Sixteenth from Paris in June 1791 brought Europe for
a moment to the verge of war; but he was intercepted and brought back:
and for a while the danger seemed to incline the revolutionists in
France to greater moderation. Lewis too not only accepted the
Constitution, but pleaded earnestly with the Emperor against any armed
intervention as certain to bring ruin to his throne. In their conference
at Pillnitz therefore, in August, Leopold and the king of Prussia
contented themselves with a vague declaration inviting the European
powers to co-operate in restoring a sound form of government in France,
availed themselves of England's neutrality to refuse all military aid to
the French princes, and dealt simply with the affairs of Poland. But the
peace they desired soon became impossible. The Constitutional Royalists
in France availed themselves of the irritation caused by the Declaration
of Pillnitz to revive the cry for a war which, as they hoped, would give
strength to the throne. The more violent revolutionists, or Jacobins, on
the other hand, abandoned their advocacy of peace. Under the influence
of the "Girondists," the deputies from the south of France, whose aim
was a republic, and who saw in a great national struggle a means of
overthrowing the monarchy, they decided, in spite of the opposition of
their leader, Robespierre, on a contest with the Emperor. Both parties
united to demand the breaking up of an army which the emigrant princes
had formed on the Rhine; and though Leopold before his death assented to
this demand, France declared war against his successor, Francis, in
April 1792.