Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/155

Rh PITT 145 or stic far exceeding the expenditure of the American War, of the Seven Years War, of the War of the Austrian Succession, and of the War of the Spanish Succession united, the English army under Pitt was the laughing-stock of all Europe. It could not boast of one single brilliant exploit. It had never shown itself on the Continent but to be beaten, chased, forced to re-embark, or forced to capitu late. To take some sugar island in the West Indies, to scatter some mob of half-naked Irish peasants such were the most splendid victories won by the British troops under Pitt s auspices. The English navy no mismanagement could ruin. But during a long period whatever mismanagement could do was done. The earl of Chatham, without a single qualification for high public trust, was made, by fraternal partiality, first lord of the admiralty, and was kept in that great post during two years of a war in which the very existence of the state depended on the efficiency of the fleet. He continued to doze away and trifle away the time which ought to have been devoted to the public service, till the whole mercantile body, though generally disposed to support the Government, com plained bitterly that our flag gave no protection to our trade. Fortunately he was succeeded by George, Earl Spencer, one of those chiefs of the Whig party who, in the great schism caused by the French Revolution, had followed Burke. Lord Spencer, though inferior to many of his colleagues as an orator, was decidedly the best administrator among them. To him it was owing that a long and gloomy succession of days of fasting, and most emphatically of humiliation, was interrupted, twice in the short space of eleven months, by days of thanksgiving for great victories. It may seem paradoxical to say that the incapacity which Pitt showed in all that related to the conduct of the war is, in some sense, the most decisive proof that he was a man of very extra ordinary abilities. Yet this is the simple truth. For assuredly one-tenth part of his errors and disasters would have been fatal to the power and influence of any minister who had not possessed, in the highest degree, the talents of a parliamentary leader. While his schemes were confounded, while his predictions were falsified, while the coalitions which he had laboured to form were falling to pieces, while the expeditions which he had sent forth at enormous cost were ending in rout and disgrace, while the enemy against whom he was feebly contending was subjugating Flanders and Brabant, the electorate of Mainz and the electorate of Treves, Holland, Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, his authority over the House of Commons was constantly becoming more and more absolute. There was his empire. There were his victories his Lodi and his Arcola, his Rivoli and his Marengo. If some great misfortune, a pitched battle lost by the allies, the annexation of a new department to the French republic, a sanguinary insurrection in Ireland, a mutiny in the fleet, a panic in the city, a run on the bank, had spread dismay through the ranks of his majority, that dismay lasted only till he rose from the treasury bench, drew up his haughty head, stretched his arm with commanding gesture, and poured forth, in deep and sonorous tones, the lofty language of inextinguishable hope and inflexible resolution. Thus, through a long and calamitous period, every disaster that happened with out the walls of parliament was regularly followed by a triumph within them. At length he had no longer an Opposition to en counter. Of the great party which had contended against him dur ing the first eight years of his administration more than one-half now marched under his standard, with his old competitor the duke of Portland at their head ; and the rest had, after many vain struggles, quitted the field in despair. Fox had retired to the shades of St Anne s Hill, and had there found, in the society of friends whom no vicissitude could estrange from him, of a woman whom he teaulerly loved, and of the illustrious dead of Athens, of Rome, and of Florence, ample compensation for all the misfortunes of his public life. Session followed session with scarcely a single division. In the eventful year 1799 the largest minority that could be mustered against the Government was twenty-five. In Pitt s domestic policy there was at this time assuredly no want of vigour. While he offered to French Jacobinism a resist ance so feeble that it only encouraged the evil which he wished to suppress, he put down English Jacobinism with a strong hand. The Habeas Corpus Act was repeatedly suspended. Public meet ings were placed under severe restraints. The Government obtained from parliament power to send out of the country aliens who were suspected of evil designs ; and that power was not suffered to be idle. Writers who propounded doctrines adverse to monarchy and aristocracy were proscribed and punished without mercy. It was hardly safe for a republican to avow his political creed over his beefsteak and his bottle of port at a chop-house. The old laws of Scotland against sedition, laws which were considered by English men as barbarous, and which a succession of Governments had suffered to rust, were now furbished up and sharpened anew. Men of cultivated minds and polished manners were, for offences which at Westminster would have been treated as mere misde meanours, sent to herd with felons at Botany Bay. Some reformers, whose opinions were extravagant, and whose language was intemperate, but who had never dreamed of subverting the government by physical force, were indicted for high treason, and were saved from the gallows only by the righteous verdicts of juries. This severity was at the time loudly applauded by alarmists whom fear had made cruel, but will be seen in a very different light by posterity. The truth is that the Englishmen who wished lor a revolution were, even in number, not formidable, and in every thing but number a faction utterly contemptible, without arms, or funds, or plans, or organization, or leader. There can be no doubt that Pitt, strong as he was in the support of the great body of the nation, might easily have repressed the turbulence of the discon-- tented minority by firmly yet temperately enforcing the ordinary law. Whatever vigour he showed during this unfortunate part of his life was vigour out of place and season. He was all feebleness and languor in his conflict with the foreign enemy who was really to be dreaded, and reserved all his energy and resolution for the domestic enemy who might safely have been despised. One part only of Pitt s conduct during the last eight years of Irish the 18th century deserves high praise. He was the first English policy, minister who formed great designs for the benefit of Ireland. The manner in which the Roman Catholic population of that unfortunate country had been kept down during many generations seemed to him unjust and cruel ; and it was scarcely possible for a man of his abilities not to perceive that, in a contest against the Jacobins, the Roman Catholics were his natural allies. Had he been able to do all that he wished, it is probable that a wise and liberal policy would have averted the rebellion of 1798. But the difficulties which he encountered were great, perhaps insurmountable ; and the Roman Catholics were, rather by his misfortune than by his fault, thrown into the hands of Jacobins. There was a third great rising of the Irishry against the Englishry, a rising not less formid able than the risings of 1641 and 1689. The Englishry remained victorious ; and it was necessary for Pitt, as it had been necessary for Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange before him, to consider how the victory should be used. It is only just to his memory to say that he formed a scheme of policy so grand and so simple, so righteous and so humane, that it would alone entitle him to a high place among statesmen. He determined to make Ireland one kingdom with England, and, at the same time, to relieve the Roman Catholic laity from civil disabilities, and to grant a public maintenance to the Roman Catholic clergy. Had he been able to carry these noble designs into effect, the Union would have been a union indeed. It would have been inseparably associated in the minds of the great majority of Irishmen with civil and religious freedom ; and the old parliament in College Green would have been regretted only by a small knot of discarded jobbers and oppressors, and would have been remembered by the body of the nation with the loathing and contempt due to the most tyrannical and the most corrupt assembly that had ever sat in Europe. But Pitt could execute only one half of what he had projected. He succeeded in obtaining the consent of the parliaments of both kingdoms to the Union ; but that reconciliation of races and sects without which the Union could exist only in name was not accom plished. He was well aware that he was likely to find difficulties in the closet. But he flattered himself that, by cautious and dex terous management, those difficulties might be overcome. Un happily, there were traitors and sycophants in high place who did not suffer him to take his own time and his own way, but pre maturely disclosed his scheme to the king, and disclosed it in the manner most likely to irritate and alarm a weak and diseased mind. His Majesty absurdly imagined that his coronation oath bound him to refuse his assent to any bill for relieving Roman Catholics from civil disabilities. To argue with him was impossible. Dundas tried to explain the matter, but was told to keep his Scotch meta physics to himself. Pitt and Pitt s ablest colleagues resigned their Resigns offices. It was necessary that the king should make a new ar- office, rangement. But by this time his anger and distress had brought March 14, back the malady which had, many years before, incapacitated him 1801 for the discharge of his functions. He actually assembled his family, read the coronation oath to them, and told them that, if he broke it, the crown would immediately pass to the house of Savoy. It was not until after an interregnum of several weeks that he re gained the full use of his small faculties, and that a ministry after his own heart was at length formed. The materials out of which he had to construct a Government were neither solid nor splendid. To that party, weak in numbers, but strong in every kind of talent, which was hostile to the domestic and foreign policy of his late advisers, he could not have recourse. For that party, while it differed from his late advisers on every point on which they had been honoured with his approbation, cordially agreed with them as to the single matter which had brought on them his displeasure. All that was left to him was to call up the rear ranks of the old ministry to form the front rank of a new ministry. In an age pre-eminently fruitful of parliamentary talents, a cabinet was formed containing hardly a single man who in parliamentary talents could be considered as even of the second rate. The most important offices in the state were bestowed on decorous and laborious mediocrity. Henry Addington was at the XIX. 19