Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/381

Rh THE FRENCII REVOLUTION.] ENGLAND 361 jtt. i i n s t iince. ptories UK. mblic. ange in igland. France, and that consequently the system of starting afresh, to which he reasonably objected, was to the French a matter not of choice but of necessity. Nor did lie see that the passion for equality, like every great passion, justified itself, and that the problem was, not how to obtain liberty in defiance of it, but how so to guide it as to obtain liberty by it and through it. Burke did not content himself with pointing out speculatively the evils which he foreboded for the French. He perceived clearly that the effect of the new French principles could no more be confined to French territory than the principles of Protestantism in the 16th century could be confined to Saxony. He knew well that the appeal to abstract reason and the hatred of aristocracy would spread over Europe like a flood, and, as he was in the habit of considering whatever was most opposed to the object of his dislike to be wholly excellent, he called for a crusade of all established Governments against the anarchi cal principles of dissolution which had broken loose in Francs. Pitt occupied ground apart from either Fox or Burke. He had neither Fox s sympathy for popular movements nor Burke s intellectual appreciation of the immediate tendencies of the Revolution. Hence, whilst he pronounced against any active interference with France, he was an advocate of peace, not because he saw more than Fox or Burke, but because lie saw less. He fancied that France would be so totally occupied with its own troubles that it would cease for a long time to be dangerous to other nations. A resolution formed on grounds so hopelessly futile was not likely to stand the test of time. Even if France had been spared the trial of external pressure, it is almost certain that she would have roused resistance by soms attempt to maintain her new principles abroad. When the king of Prussia coalesced with the emperor in 1792 to force her to re-establish the royal authority, she broke out into a passion of self-asserting defiance. The king was dethroned, and preparations were made to try him for his life as an accomplice of the invaders. A republic was proclaimed, and in its name innocent persons, whose only crime was to belong to the noble class by birth and feeling, were massacred by hun dreds. The grim suspicion which clothed itself with cruelty in the capital became patriotic resistance ou the frontier. Before the end of the year the invasion was re pulsed, Savoy occupied, the Austrian Netherlands overrun, and the Dutch republic threatened. Very few Governments in Europe were so rooted in the affections of their people as to be able to look without terror on the challenge thus thrown out to them. The English Government was one of those very few. No mere despotism was here exercised by the king. No broad im passable line here divided the aristocracy from the people. The work of former generations of Englishmen had been too well done to call for that breach of historical continuity which was a dire necessity in France. There was much need of reform. There was no need of a revolution. The whole of the upper and middle classes, with few exceptions, clung together in a fierce spirit of resistance ; and the mass of the lower classes, especially in the country, were too well off to wish for change. The spirit of resistance to revolution quickly developed into a spirit of resistance to reform, and those who continued to advocate changes more or leas after the French model were treated as the enemies of mankind. A fierce hatred of France and of all that attached itself to France became the predominating spirit of the nation. Such a change in the national mind could not but affect the constitution of the Whig party. The reasoning of Burke would, in itself, have done little to effect its disrup tion. But the great landowners, who contributed so strong an element in it, composed the very class which had most to fear from the principles of the Revolution. The old questions which had divided them from the king and Pitt in 1783 had dwindled into nothing before the appalling question of the immediate present. They mads themselves the leaders of the war party, and they knew that that party comprised almost the whole of the parliamentary classes. What could Pitt do but surrender 1 The whole of tho intellectual basis of his foreign policy was swept away when it became evident that the Continental war would bring with it an accession of French territory. He did not abandon his opinions. His opinions rather abandoned him. A wider intelligence might have held that, let France gain what territorial aggrandizement it might upon the Con tinent, it was impossible to resist such changes until the opponents of France had so purified themselves as to obtain a hold upon the moral feelings of mankind. Pitt could not take this view, perhaps no man in his day could bo fairly expected to take it. He did not indeed declare war against France; but he sought to a set a limit to her con quests in the winter, though he had not sought to set a limit to the conquests of the coalesced sovereigns in the preceding summer. He treated with supercilious contempt the National Convention, which had dethroned the king and proclaimed a republic. Above all, he took up a declar ation by the Convention, that they would give help to all peoples struggling for liberty against their respective Governments, as a challenge to England. The horror caused in England by the trial and execution of Lewis XVI. completed the estrangement between the two countries, and though the declaration of war came from. France (1793), it had been in great part brought about by the bearing of England and its Government. In appearance the great Whig landowners gave their sup port to Pitt, and in 1794 some of their leaders, the duke of Portland, Lord Fitzwilliam, and Mr Wyndham, entered the cabinet to serve under him. In reality it was Pitt who had surrendered. The ministry and the party by which it was supported might call themselves Tory still. But the great reforming policy of 1784 was entirely at an end. Strong as it was, the Government did not know its own strength. It saw sedition and revolution everywhere. It twisted loose talk into criminal intent. It covered the country with its spies. The slightest attempts to concert measures for obtaining reform were branded as revolutionary violence. Men who would otherwise have been content with declaiming in favour of reform were goaded into actual sedi tion. The Government sought and obtained additional powers from parliament. Fine, imprisonment, and trans portation were dealt out by the law courts in lavish mea sure. The Reign of Terror in France was answered by a reign of violence in England, modified by the political habits of a nation trained to freedom, but resting on the same spirit of fear and intolerance. In November 1794 an attempt was made actually to shed blood. Hardy, Home Tooke, and Thelwall were brought to trial, on a charge of high treason, for issuing invitations to a national convention intended to promote changes of the greatest magnitude in the government. Happily the jury refused to see in this certainly dangerous proceeding a crime worthy of death, and its verdict of Not guilty saved the nation from the disgrace of meting out the extreme penalty of high treason to an attempt to hold a public meeting for the redress of grievances. The public feeling, in fact, regained its composure sooner than the ministry. The upper and middle classes became conscious of their own strength ; and though reform and reformers were as unpopular as ever, the instru ments by which reform might be gained hereafter were left VIII. -16 Division of the Whig party. Pitt and the seceding Whigs. Violence of the Govern ment.
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