Page:1758, being a sketch of the founding of Pittsburgh.djvu/6

 hundred millions of treasure had been expended, yet everywhere the administration had met with defeat, except, as stated by Bancroft, "in the venal House of Commons." The English nation had been humbled into the dust.

Smarting under the years of disgrace, in December, 1756, with one voice the people called William Pitt to the helm to take the place of the Duke of Newcastle. Pitt was of good ancestry; his grandfather was Governor of Madras, and afterwards sat in the House of Commons; his wife was directly descended from the Earl of Murray, a natural son of James V of Scotland. Pitt's mother was the sister of an Irish peer, the Earl of Grandison. Pitt had been in the House of Commons since 1735, when he entered it as a young man of twenty-seven. He soon became the most powerful speaker in the House, in the days when there was no strict party organization, when votes were gained by a great speech, when men spoke to their hearers and not to the wider public outside. He feared neither king or nobles. His speeches against the Hanoverian policy of the king so offended the monarch, that after ten years of service in the House, when Henry Pelham became First Lord of the Treasury, and urged that Pitt be made Secretary of War, the king curtly refused to make the appointment. Without special social influence, aristocrat and commoner alike began recognizing his value to England. When Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, died, she bequeathed to him the sum of ten thousand pounds because of his efforts "to prevent the ruin of his country."

When he became Paymaster-General, Pitt's first act was to discard the customary but illegal expedient of all his predecessors in the office, whereby they charged a commission of one-half per cent on all moneys passing through their hands. The whole country applauded this act of honesty. He was generally in opposition, yet his power in the House of Commons was on the increase. The burden of his speeches was patriotism—he wanted England's glory restored to her. When all hope seemed to be lost, the nation turned to him for help. The king, who despised Pitt, very reluctantly listened to the voice of the people, and called him to form a cabinet.

But the old aristocracy died hard, and before Pitt was hardly in the saddle, in April, 1757, the king's old resentment against him was revived, and he dismissed him from office, the ostensible reason for the dismissal being Pitt's refusal to consent to the use of English money for the support of the Duke of Cumberland's army in Germany. As