Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/380

Rh 360 ENGLAND [HISTORY. Commer cial treaty with France. The Re- The kinj at St Paul s. The French Revolu tion. tion of the English parliament was only removed by conces sions continuing some important restrictions upon Irish, ex ports, and by giving the English parliament the right of ini tiation in all measures relating to the regulation of the trade which was to be common to both nations. The Irish parlia ment took umbrage at the superiority claimed by England, and threw out the measure as an insult, which, even as it stood, was undeniably in favour of Ireland. The lesson of the incompatibility of two co-ordinate legislatures was not thrown away upon Pitt. In 1786 the commercial treaty with France opened that country to English, trade, and was the first result of the theories laid down by Adam Smith ten years previously. The first attack upon the horrors of the slave-trade was made in 1788 ; and in the same year, in the debates on the Regency Bill caused by the king s insanity, Pitt defended against Fox the right of parliament to make provision for the exercise of the powers of the crown when the wearer was permanently or temporarily disabled from exercising his authority. When the king recovered, he went to St Paul s to return thanks, on the 23d of April 1789. The enthusiasm with which he was greeted showed how completely he had the nation on his side. All the hopes of liberal reformers were now on his side. All the hopes of moral and religious men were on his side as well. The seed sown by Wesley had grown to be a great tree. A spirit of thoughtfulness in religious matters and of moral energy was growing in the nation, and the king was endeared to his subjects as much by his domestic virtues as by his support of the great minister who acted in his name. The happy prospect was soon to be overclouded. On the 4th of May, eleven days after the appearance of George III. at St Paul s, the French States General met at Versailles. By the great mass of intelligent Englishmen the change was greeted with enthusiasm. It is seldom that one nation understands the tendencies and difficulties of another ; and the mere fact that power was being transferred from an absolute monarch to a representative assembly led super ficial observers to imagine that they were witnessing a mere repetition of the victory of the English parliament over the Stuart kings. In fact, that which was passing in France was of a totally different nature from the English struggle of the 17th century. In England, the conflict had been carried on for the purpose of limiting the power of the king. In France, it was begun in order to sweep away an aristocracy in church and state which had become bar barously oppressive. It was not therefore a conflict touch ing simply on the political organization of the state. The whole social organization of the country was at stake, and the struggle would be carried on at every point of the territory, and would involve every class of society. In such a conflict, therefore, there was nothing necessarily antagonistic to the maintenance of the most absolute royal power. If there had been a king on the throne who had understood the needs of the times, and who could have placed himself without afterthought at the head of the national movement, he would have been stronger for all good purposes than Lewis XIV. had ever been. Un happily, it was not in Lewis XVI. to do anything of the kind. Well intentioned and desirous to effect the good of his people, he was not clear-headed enough, to understand how it was to be done, or strong-willed enough to carry out any good resolutions to which he might be brought. The one thing impossible for a king was to be neutral in the great division which was opening in French society ; and Lewis was too much a creature of habit to throw off the social ties which united him to the aristocracy. It was the knowledge that the king was in heart on the wrong side that made his continuance to rule impossible. Un doubtedly the best thing that the French could have done.. after the king s leanings were known, would have been to dethrone him. But this was not a step which any nation was likely to take in a hurry ; and the constitution drawn up by the States General after it passed into the form of the National Assembly was necessarily grounded on suspicion. The one indispensable requisite for the working of a constitution is that it shall be possible to maintain a certain degree of harmony between the various func tionaries who are intrusted with the work. Such a harmony was impossible between Lewis and the French nation. Amongst tha higher order of minds there might be a desire for liberty, and the word liberty was on the lips of every one. But the thought of liberty was rarely to be found. It was by the passion of equality that the nation was possessed. For the new spirit it was necessary to find new institutions. The old ones had broken down from absolute rottenness, and if they had been other than they were, they were certain to be used on the anti- national side. The force must be given to the nation, not to the aristocracy not to the king, the ally of the aristocracy. Yet all this had to be done when the mass of the nation was rude and uneducated, ignorant and unversed in political life to the last degree, and when, too, it hud been taught by the long course of monarchial government to see force placed above right, and was there fore all the more inclined to solve its difficulties by force. What wonder, therefore, if violence took the place of argument, if mob-rule stepped in to enforce the popular over the unpopular reasoning, and the king soon found that he was practically a prisoner in the hands of his subjects. In proportion as the French Revolution turned away from the path which English ignorance had marked ouc for feeling.. it, Englishmen turned away from it in disgust. As they did not understand the aims of the French Revolutionists, they were unable to make that excuse for even so much of their conduct as admits of excuse. Three men, Fox, Burke, and Pitt, however, represented three varieties of opinion into which the nation was very unequally divided. Fox, generous and trustful towards the movements of View c large masses of men, had very little intellectual grasp of the questions at issue in France. He treated the struggle as one simply for the establishment of free institutions ; and when at last the crimes of the leaders became patent to the world, he contented himself with lamenting the unfortunate fact, and fell back on the argument that though England could not sympathize with the French, tyrants, there was no reason why she should go to war with them. Burke, on the other hand, while he failed to understand of Bur the full tendency of the Revolution for good as well as for evil, understood it far better than any Englishman of that day understood it. He saw that its main aim was equality, not liberty, and that not only would the French nation be ready, in pursuit of equality, to welcome any tyranny which would serve its purpose, but would be the more prone to acts of tyranny over individuals from the complete remodellingof institutions, with the object of giving immediate effect to the will of the ignorant masses, which was especially liable to be counterfeited by designing and unscrupulous agitators. There is no doubt tha^in all this Burke was in the right, as he was in his denunciation of the mischief certain to follow when a nation tries to start afresh, and to blot out all past progress in the light of simple reason, which is often most fallible when it believes itself to be most infallible. Where he went wrong was in his ignorance of the special circumstances of the French nation, and his consequent blindness to the fact that the historical method of gradual progress was impossible where institutions had become so utterly bad as they were iu