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History of the English People, Volume VIII

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Title: History of the English People, Volume VIII

Author: John Richard Green


        
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HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

by

JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.
Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford

VOLUME VIII

MODERN ENGLAND. 1760-1815.







London
MacMillan and Co., Ltd.
New York: The MacMillan Co.
1896

First Edition, 1879; Reprinted 1882, 1886, 1891.
Eversley Edition, 1896.




CONTENTS


   BOOK IX

   MODERN ENGLAND. 1760-1815.


     CHAPTER II
                                                           PAGE
     THE INDEPENDENCE OF AMERICA. 1767-1782                   1


     CHAPTER III

     INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND. 1782-1792                           45


     CHAPTER IV

     ENGLAND AND REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE. 1792-1801             97


     CHAPTER V

     ENGLAND AND NAPOLEON. 1801-1815                        144




MAPS


    I. THE COLONIES OF NORTH AMERICA AT THE
           DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE        _To face p._ 1

   II. EUROPE AFTER THE PEACE OF LUNEVILLE, 1801         146

  III. EUROPE AFTER THE PEACE OF TILSIT, 1807            158




[Illustration: THE COLONIES OF NORTH AMERICA at the Declaration of
Independence]

CHAPTER II

THE INDEPENDENCE OF AMERICA

1767-1782


[Sidenote: Growing influence of public opinion.]

The Chatham ministry marked a new phase in the relation of public
opinion to the government of the State. In 1766 as in 1756 Pitt had been
called into office by "the voice of the people" at large. But in his
former ministry the influence he drew from popularity could only make
itself effective through an alliance with the influence which was drawn
from political connexion; and when the two elements of the
administration became opposed the support of the nation gave Pitt little
strength of resistance against the Whigs. Nor had the young king had
much better fortune as yet in his efforts to break their rule. He had
severed them indeed from Pitt; and he had dexterously broken up the
great party into jealous factions. But broken as it was, even its
factions remained too strong for the king. His one effort at
independence under Bute hardly lasted a year, and he was as helpless in
the hands of Grenville as in the hands of Rockingham. His bribery, his
patronage, his Parliamentary "friends," his perfidy and his lies, had
done much to render good government impossible and to steep public life
in deeper corruption, but they had done little to further the triumph of
the Crown over the great houses. Of the one power indeed which could
break the Whig rule, the power of public opinion, George was more
bitterly jealous than even of the Whigs themselves. But in spite of his
jealousy the tide of opinion steadily rose. In wise and in unwise ways
the country at large showed its new interest in national policy, its new
resolve to have a share in the direction of it. It showed no love for
the king or the king's schemes. But it retained all its old disgust for
the Whigs and for the Parliament. It clung to Pitt closer than ever, and
in spite of his isolation from all party support raised him daily into a
mightier power. It was the sense that a new England was thus growing up
about him, that a new basis was forming itself for political action,
which at last roused the Great Commoner to the bold enterprise of
breaking through the bonds of "connexion" altogether. For the first time
since the Revolution a minister told the peers in their own house that
he defied their combinations.

[Sidenote: Chatham's withdrawal.]

The ministry of 1766 in fact was itself such a defiance; for it was an
attempt to found political power not on the support of the Whigs as a
party, but on the support of national opinion. But as Parliament was
then constituted, it was only through Chatham himself that opinion could
tell even on the administration he formed; and six months after he had
taken office Chatham was no more than a name. The dread which had driven
him from the stormy agitation of the Lower House to the quiet of the
House of Peers now became a certainty. As winter died into the spring of
1767 his nervous disorganization grew into a painful and overwhelming
illness which almost wholly withdrew him from public affairs; and when
Parliament met again he was unable either to come to town or to confer
with his colleagues. It was in vain that they prayed him for a single
word of counsel. Chatham remained utterly silent; and the ministry which
his guidance had alone held together at once fell into confusion. The
Earl's plans were suffered to drop. His colleagues lost all cohesion,
and each acted as he willed. Townshend, a brilliant but shallow
rhetorician whom Pitt had been driven reluctantly to make his Chancellor
of the Exchequer, after angering the House of Commons by proposals for
an increase of the land-tax, strove to win back popularity among the
squires by undertaking to raise a revenue from America. That a member of
a ministry which bore Pitt's name should have proposed to reopen the
question of colonial taxation within a year of the repeal of the Stamp
Acts was strange enough to the colonists; and they were yet more
astonished when, on its neglect to make provision for compensating those
who had suffered from the recent outbreak in due conformity to an Act of
the British Parliament, the Assembly of New York was suspended, and when
Townshend redeemed his pledge by laying duties on various objects
brought into American ports. But these measures were the result of
levity and disorganization rather than of any purpose to reopen the
quarrel. Pitt's colleagues had as yet no design to reverse his policy.
The one aim of the ministry which bore his name, and which during his
retirement looked to the Duke of Grafton as its actual head, was simply
to exist. But in the face of Chatham's continued withdrawal, of
Townshend's death in 1767, and of the increasing hostility of the
Rockingham Whigs, even existence was difficult; and Grafton saw himself
forced to a union with the faction which was gathered under the Duke of
Bedford, and to the appointment of a Tory noble as Secretary of State.

[Sidenote: His resignation.]

Such measures however only showed how far the ministry had drifted from
the ground on which Pitt took his stand in its formation; and the very
force on which he had relied turned at once against it. The elections
for the new Parliament which met in 1768 were more corrupt than any
that had as yet been witnessed; and even the stoutest opponents of
reform shrank aghast from the open bribery of constituencies and the
prodigal barter of seats. How bitter the indignation of the country had
grown was seen in its fresh backing of Wilkes. Wilkes had remained in
France since his outlawry; but he seized on the opening afforded by the
elections to return and offer himself as a member for the new
Parliament. To the surprise and dismay of the ministers he was returned
for Middlesex, a county the large number of whose voters made its choice
a real expression of public opinion. The choice of Wilkes at such a
moment was in effect a public condemnation of the House of Commons and
the ministerial system. The ministry however and the House alike shrank
from a fresh struggle with the agitator. But the king was eager for the
contest. After ten years of struggle and disappointment George had all
but reached his aim. The two forces which had as yet worsted him were
both of them paralysed. The Whigs were fatally divided, and discredited
in the eyes of the country by their antagonism to Pitt. Pitt on the
other hand was suddenly removed from the stage. The ministry was without
support in the country; and for Parliamentary support it was forced to
lean more and more on the men who looked for direction to the king
himself. At a moment when all hope of exerting any influence seemed
crushed by the return of Chatham to power, George found his influence
predominant as it had never been before. One force of opposition alone
remained in the public discontent; and at this he struck more fiercely
than ever. "I think it highly expedient to apprise you," he wrote to
Lord North, "that the expulsion of Mr. Wilkes appears to be very
essential, and must be effected." The ministers and the House of Commons
bowed to his will. By his non-appearance in court when charged with
libel, Wilkes had become an outlaw, and he was now thrown into prison on
his outlawry. Dangerous riots broke out in London and over the whole
country at the news of his arrest; and continued throughout the rest of
the year. In the midst of these tumults the ministry itself was torn
with internal discord. The adherents of Chatham found their position in
it an intolerable one; and Lord Shelburne announced his purpose of
resigning office. The announcement was followed in the autumn by the
resignation of Chatham himself. Though still prostrated by disease, the
Earl was sufficiently restored to grasp the actual position of the
Cabinet which traded on his name, and in October 1768 he withdrew
formally from the ministry.

The withdrawal of Chatham however, if it shook the ministry, only
rendered it still more dependent on the king; and in spite of its
reluctance George forced it to plunge into a decisive struggle with the
public opinion which was declaring itself in tumult and riot against the
system of government. The triumph of Wilkes had been driven home by the
election of a nominee of the great agitator as his colleague on a fresh
vacancy in the representation of Middlesex. The Government met the blow
by a show of vigour, and by calling on the magistrates of Surrey to
disperse the mobs; a summons which ended in conflicts between the crowd
and the soldiers, in which some of the rioters were slain. Wilkes at
once published the letter of the Secretary of State with comments on it
as a cause of bloodshed; and the ministry accepted the step as a
challenge to combat. If his comments were libellous, the libel was
cognizable in the ordinary courts of law. But no sooner had Parliament
assembled in 1769 than the House of Commons was called to take the
matter into its own hands. Witnesses were examined at its bar: the forms
of a trial were gone through; and as Wilkes persisted in his charge, he
was expelled as a libeller. Unluckily the course which had been adopted
put the House itself on trial before the constituencies. No sooner was
the new writ issued than Wilkes again presented himself as a candidate,
and was again elected by the shire of Middlesex. Violent and oppressive
as the course of the House of Commons had been, it had as yet acted
within its strict right, for no one questioned its possession of a
right of expulsion. But the defiance of Middlesex led it now to go
further. It resolved, "That Mr. Wilkes having been in this session of
Parliament expelled the House, was and is incapable of being elected a
member to serve in the present Parliament"; and it issued a writ for a
fresh election. Middlesex answered this insolent claim to limit the free
choice of a constituency by again returning Wilkes; and the House was
driven by its anger to a fresh and more outrageous usurpation. It again
expelled the member for Middlesex; and on his return for the third time
by an immense majority it voted that the candidate whom he had defeated,
Colonel Luttrell, ought to have been returned, and was the legal
representative of Middlesex. The Commons had not only limited at their
own arbitrary discretion the free election of the constituency, but they
had transferred its rights to themselves by seating Luttrell as member
in defiance of the deliberate choice of Wilkes by the freeholders of
Middlesex. The country at once rose indignantly against this violation
of constitutional law. Wilkes was elected an Alderman of London; and the
Mayor, Aldermen, and Livery petitioned the king to dissolve the
Parliament. A remonstrance from London and Westminster mooted a far
larger question. It said boldly that "there is a time when it is clearly
demonstrable that men cease to be representatives. That time is now
arrived. The House of Commons do not represent the people." Meanwhile a
writer who styled himself Junius attacked the Government in letters,
which, rancorous and unscrupulous as was their tone, gave a new power to
the literature of the Press by their clearness and terseness of
statement, the finish of their style, and the terrible vigour of their
invective.

[Sidenote: Parliamentary Reform.]

The storm however beat idly on the obstinacy of the king. The printer of
the bold letters was prosecuted, and the petitions and remonstrances of
London were haughtily rejected. The issue of the struggle verified the
forebodings of Burke. If, as Middlesex declared, and as the strife
itself proved, the House of Commons had ceased to represent the English
people, it was inevitable that men should look forward to measures that
would make it representative. At the beginning of 1770 a cessation of
the disease which had long held him prostrate enabled Chatham to
reappear in the House of Lords. He at once denounced the usurpations of
the Commons, and brought in a bill to declare them illegal. But his
genius made him the first to see that remedies of this sort were
inadequate to meet evils which really sprang from the fact that the
House of Commons no longer represented the people of England; and he
mooted a plan for its reform by an increase of the county members, who
then formed the most independent portion of the House. Further he could
not go, for even in the proposals he made he stood almost alone. The
Tories and the king's friends were not likely to welcome proposals which
would lessen the king's influence. On the other hand the Whigs under
Lord Rockingham had no sympathy with Parliamentary reform. As early as
1769, in his first political publication, their one philosophic thinker,
Edmund Burke, had met a proposal to enlarge the number of constituents
by a counter-proposal to lessen them. "It would be more in the spirit of
our constitution, and more agreeable to the fashion of our best laws,"
he said, "by lessening the number to add to the weight and independency
of our voters." Nor did the Whigs shrink with less haughty disdain from
the popular agitation in which public opinion was forced to express
itself, and which Chatham, while censuring its extravagance, as
deliberately encouraged. It is from the quarrel between Wilkes and the
House of Commons that we may date the influence of public meetings on
English politics. The gatherings of the Middlesex electors in his
support were preludes to the great meetings of Yorkshire freeholders in
which the question of Parliamentary reform rose into importance; and it
was in the movement for reform, and the establishment of corresponding
committees throughout the country for the purpose of promoting it, that
the power of political agitation first made itself felt. Political
societies and clubs took their part in this quickening and organization
of public opinion: and the spread of discussion, as well as the
influence which now began to be exercised by the appearance of vast
numbers of men in support of any political movement, proved that
Parliament, whether it would or no, must soon reckon with the sentiments
of the people at large.

[Sidenote: Publication of debates.]

But an agent far more effective than popular agitation was preparing to
bring the force of public opinion to bear directly on Parliament itself.
We have seen how much of the corruption of the House of Commons sprang
from the secrecy of Parliamentary proceedings, but this secrecy was the
harder to preserve as the nation woke to a greater interest in its own
affairs. From the accession of the Georges imperfect reports of the more
important discussions began to be published under the title of "The
Senate of Lilliput," and with feigned names or simple initials to denote
the speakers. The best known reports of this kind were those contributed
by Samuel Johnson to the _Gentleman's Magazine_. Obtained by stealth and
often merely recalled by memory, such reports were naturally inaccurate;
and their inaccuracy was eagerly seized on as a pretext for enforcing
the rules which guarded the secrecy of proceedings in Parliament. In
1771 the Commons issued a proclamation forbidding the publication of
debates; and six printers, who set it at defiance, were summoned to the
bar of the House. One who refused to appear was arrested by its
messenger; but the arrest brought the House into conflict with the
magistrates of London. The magistrates set aside its proclamation as
without legal force, released the printers, and sent the messenger to
prison for an unlawful arrest. The House sent the Lord Mayor to the
Tower, but the cheers of the crowds which followed him on his way told
that public opinion was again with the Press, and the attempt to hinder
its publication of Parliamentary proceedings dropped silently on his
release at the next prorogation. Few changes of equal importance have
been so quietly brought about. Not only was the responsibility of
members to their constituents made constant and effective by the
publication of their proceedings, but the nation itself was called in to
assist in the deliberations of its representatives. A new and wider
interest in its own affairs was roused in the people at large, and a new
political education was given to it through the discussion of every
subject of national importance in the Houses and the Press. Stimulated
and moulded into shape by free discussion, encouraged and made conscious
of its strength by public meetings, and gathered up and represented on
all its sides by the journals of the day, public opinion became a force
in practical statesmanship, influenced the course of debates, and
controlled, in a closer and more constant way than even Parliament
itself had been able to do, the actions of the Government. The
importance of its new position gave a weight to the Press which it had
never had before. The first great English journals date from this time.
With the _Morning Chronicle_, the _Morning Post_, the _Morning Herald_,
and the _Times_, all of which appeared in the interval between the
opening years of the American War and the beginning of the war with the
French Revolution, journalism took a new tone of responsibility and
intelligence. The hacks of Grub Street were superseded by publicists of
a high moral temper and literary excellence; and philosophers like
Coleridge or statesmen like Canning turned to influence public opinion
through the columns of the Press.

[Sidenote: Renewed strife with America.]

But great as the influence of opinion was destined to become, it was
feebly felt as yet; and George the Third was able to set Chatham's
policy disdainfully aside and to plunge into a contest far more
disastrous than his contest with the Press. In all the proceedings of
the last few years, what had galled him most had been the act which
averted a war between England and her colonies. To the king the
Americans were already "rebels," and the great statesman whose eloquence
had made their claims irresistible was a "trumpet of sedition." George
deplored in his correspondence with his ministers the repeal of the
Stamp Acts. "All men feel," he wrote, "that the fatal compliance in 1766
has increased the pretensions of the Americans to absolute
independence." But in England generally the question was regarded as
settled, while in America the news of the repeal had been received with
universal joy, and taken as a close of the strife. On both sides however
there remained a pride and irritability which only wise handling could
have allayed; and in the present state of English politics wise handling
was impossible. Only a few months indeed passed before the quarrel was
again reopened; for no sooner had the illness of Lord Chatham removed
him from any real share in public affairs than the wretched
administration which bore his name suspended the Assembly of New York on
its refusal to provide quarters for English troops, and resolved to
assert British sovereignty by levying import duties of trivial amount at
American ports. The Assembly of Massachusetts was dissolved on a
trifling quarrel with its Governor, and Boston was occupied for a time
by British soldiers. It was without a thought of any effective struggle
however that the Cabinet had entered on this course of vexation; and
when the remonstrances of the Legislatures of Massachusetts and
Virginia, coupled with a fall in the funds, warned the ministers of its
danger, they hastened to withdraw from it. In 1769 the troops were
recalled, and all duties, save one, abandoned. But with a fatal
obstinacy the king insisted on retaining the duty on tea as an
assertion of the supremacy of the mother country. Its retention was
enough to prevent any thorough restoration of good feeling. A series of
petty quarrels went on in almost every colony between the popular
assemblies and the Governors appointed by the Crown, and the colonists
persisted in their agreement to import nothing from the mother country.
As yet however there was no prospect of serious strife. In America the
influence of George Washington allayed the irritation of Virginia; while
Massachusetts contented itself with quarrelling with its Governor and
refusing to buy tea so long as the duty was levied.

The temper of the colonists was in the main that of the bulk of English
statesmen. Even George Grenville, though approving the retention of the
duty in question, abandoned all dream of further taxation. But the king
was now supreme. The reappearance and attack of Chatham at the opening
of 1770 had completed the ruin of the ministry. Those of his adherents
who still clung to it, Lord Camden, the Chancellor, Lord Granby, the
Commander-in-Chief, Dunning, the Solicitor-General, resigned their
posts. In a few days they were followed by the Duke of Grafton, who
since Chatham's resignation had been nominally the head of the
administration. All that remained of it were the Bedford faction and the
dependents of the king; but George did not hesitate to form these into a
ministry, and to place at its head the former Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Lord North, a man of some administrative ability, but
unconnected with any political party, steadily opposed to any
recognition of public opinion, and of an easy and indolent temper which
yielded against his better knowledge to the stubborn doggedness of the
king. The instinct of the country at once warned it of the results of
such a change; and the City of London put itself formally at the head of
the public discontent. In solemn addresses it called on George the Third
to dismiss his ministers and to dissolve the Parliament; and its action
was supported by petitions to the same effect from the greater counties.
In the following year it fought, as we have seen, a battle with the
House of Commons which established the freedom of the press. But the
efforts of the country failed before the paralysis of political action
which resulted from the position of the Whigs and the corruption of
Parliament. The deaths of Grenville and Bedford broke up two of the Whig
factions. Rockingham with the rest of the party held aloof from the
popular agitation, and drew more and more away from Chatham as he
favoured it. The Parliament remained steady to the king, and the king
clung more and more to the ministry. The ministry was in fact a mere
cloak for the direction of public affairs by George himself. "Not only
did he direct the minister," a careful observer tells us, "in all
important matters of foreign and domestic policy, but he instructed him
as to the management of debates in Parliament, suggested what motions
should be made or opposed, and how measures should be carried. He
reserved for himself all the patronage, he arranged the whole cast of
administration, settled the relative places and pretensions of ministers
of State, law officers, and members of the household, nominated and
promoted the English and Scotch judges, appointed and translated bishops
and deans, and dispensed other preferments in the Church. He disposed of
military governments, regiments, and commissions; and himself ordered
the marching of troops. He gave and refused titles, honours, and
pensions." All this immense patronage was persistently used for the
creation and maintenance in both Houses of Parliament of a majority
directed by the king himself; and its weight was seen in the steady
action of such a majority. It was seen yet more in the subjection to
which the ministry that bore North's name was reduced. George was in
fact the minister through the years of its existence; and the shame of
the darkest hour of English history lies wholly at his door.

[Sidenote: The Boston tea-riots.]

His fixed purpose was to seize on the first opportunity of undoing the
"fatal compliance of 1766." A trivial riot gave him at last the handle
he wanted. In December 1773 the arrival of some English ships laden with
tea kindled fresh irritation in Boston, where the non-importation
agreement was strictly enforced; and a mob in the disguise of Indians
boarded the vessels and flung their contents into the sea. The outrage
was deplored alike by the friends of America in England and by its own
leading statesmen; and both Washington and Chatham were prepared to
support the Government in its looked-for demand of redress. But the
thought of the king was not of redress but of repression, and he set
roughly aside the more conciliatory proposals of Lord North and his
fellow-ministers. They had already rejected as "frivolous and vexatious"
a petition of the Assembly of Massachusetts for the dismissal of two
public officers whose letters home advised the withdrawal of free
institutions from the colonies. They now seized on the riot as a pretext
for rigorous measures. A bill introduced into Parliament in the
beginning of 1774 punished Boston by closing its port against all
commerce. Another punished the State of Massachusetts by withdrawing the
liberties it had enjoyed ever since the Pilgrim Fathers landed on its
soil. Its charter was altered. The choice of its Council was transferred
from the people to the Crown, and the nomination of its judges was
transferred to the Governor. In the Governor too, by a provision more
outrageous than even these, was vested the right of sending all persons
charged with a share in the late disturbances to England for trial. To
enforce these measures of repression troops were sent to America, and
General Gage, the commander-in-chief there, was appointed Governor of
Massachusetts. The king's exultation at the prospect before him was
unbounded. "The die," he wrote triumphantly to his minister, "is cast.
The colonies must either triumph or submit." Four regiments would be
enough to bring the Americans to their senses. They would only be "lions
while we are lambs." "If we take the resolute part," he decided
solemnly, "they will undoubtedly be very meek."

[Sidenote: American resistance.]

Unluckily the blow at Massachusetts was received with anything but
meekness. The jealousies between colony and colony were hushed by a
sense that the liberties of all were in danger. If the British
Parliament could cancel the charter of Massachusetts and ruin the trade
of Boston, it could cancel the charter of every colony and ruin the
trade of every port from the St. Lawrence to the coast of Georgia. All,
therefore, adopted the cause of Massachusetts; and all their
Legislatures save that of Georgia sent delegates to a Congress which
assembled on the 4th of September at Philadelphia. Massachusetts took a
yet bolder course. Not one of its citizens would act under the new laws.
Its Assembly met in defiance of the Governor, called out the militia of
the State, and provided arms and ammunition for it. But there was still
room for reconciliation. The resolutions of the Congress had been
moderate, for Virginia was the wealthiest and most influential among
the States who sent delegates, and though resolute to resist the new
measures of the government, Virginia still clung to the mother country.
At home the merchants of London and Bristol pleaded loudly for
reconciliation; and in January 1775 Chatham again came forward to avert
a strife he had once before succeeded in preventing. With characteristic
largeness of feeling he set aside all half-measures or proposals of
compromise. "It is not cancelling a piece of parchment," he insisted,
"that can win back America: you must respect her fears and her
resentments." The bill which he introduced in concert with Franklin
provided for the repeal of the late Acts and for the security of the
colonial charters, abandoned the claim of taxation, and ordered the
recall of the troops. A colonial assembly was directed to meet and
provide means by which America might contribute towards the payment of
the public debt.

[Sidenote: Washington.]

Chatham's measure was contemptuously rejected by the Lords, as was a
similar measure of Burke's by the House of Commons, and a petition of
the City of London in favour of the Colonies by the king himself. With
the rejection of these efforts for conciliation began the great struggle
which ended eight years later in the severance of the American Colonies
from the British Crown. The Congress of delegates from the Colonial
Legislatures at once voted measures for general defence, ordered the
levy of an army, and set George Washington at its head. No nobler figure
ever stood in the forefront of a nation's life. Washington was grave and
courteous in address; his manners were simple and unpretending; his
silence and the serene calmness of his temper spoke of a perfect
self-mastery. But there was little in his outer bearing to reveal the
grandeur of soul which lifts his figure with all the simple majesty of
an ancient statue out of the smaller passions, the meaner impulses, of
the world around him. What recommended him for command was singly his
weight among his fellow-landowners of Virginia, and the experience of
war which he had gained by service in border contests with the French
and the Indians, as well as in Braddock's luckless expedition against
Fort Duquesne. It was only as the weary fight went on that the colonists
discovered, however slowly and imperfectly, the greatness of their
leader, his clear judgement, his heroic endurance, his silence under
difficulties, his calmness in the hour of danger or defeat, the patience
with which he waited, the quickness and hardness with which he struck,
the lofty and serene sense of duty that never swerved from its task
through resentment or jealousy, that never through war or peace felt the
touch of a meaner ambition, that knew no aim save that of guarding the
freedom of his fellow-countrymen, and no personal longing save that of
returning to his own fireside when their freedom was secured. It was
almost unconsciously that men learned to cling to Washington with a
trust and faith such as few other men have won, and to regard him with a
reverence which still hushes us in presence of his memory. But even
America hardly recognised his real greatness while he lived. It was only
when death set its seal on him that the voice of those whom he had
served so long proclaimed him "the man first in war, first in peace, and
first in the hearts of his fellow-countrymen."

[Sidenote: Declaration of Independence,]

Washington more than any of his fellow-colonists represented the
clinging of the Virginian landowners to the mother country, and his
acceptance of a military command proved that even the most moderate
among the colonists had no hope now save in arms. The struggle opened
with a skirmish between a party of English troops and a detachment of
militia at Lexington on the nineteenth of April 1775; and in a few days
twenty thousand colonists appeared before Boston. The Congress
reassembled, declared the States they represented "The United Colonies
of America," and undertook the work of government. Meanwhile ten
thousand fresh English troops landed at Boston. But the provincial
militia, in number almost double that of the British force which
prepared to attack them, seized a neck of ground which joins Boston to
the mainland; and though on the 17th of June they were driven from the
heights of Bunker's Hill which commanded the town, it was only after a
desperate struggle in which their bravery put an end for ever to the
taunts of cowardice which had been levelled against the colonists. "Are
the Yankees cowards?" shouted the men of Massachusetts as the first
English attack rolled back baffled down the hill-side. But a far truer
courage was shown in the stubborn endurance with which Washington's raw
militiamen, who gradually dwindled from sixteen thousand to ten,
ill-fed, ill-armed, and with but forty-five rounds of ammunition to each
man, cooped up through the winter a force of ten thousand veterans in
the lines of Boston. The spring of 1776 saw them force these troops to
withdraw from the city to New York, where the whole British army,
largely reinforced by mercenaries from Germany, was concentrated under
General Howe. Meanwhile a raid of the American General Arnold nearly
drove the British troops from Canada; and though his attempt broke down
before Quebec, it showed that all hope of reconciliation was over. The
colonies of the south, the last to join in the struggle, had in fact
expelled their Governors at the close of 1775; at the opening of the
next year Massachusetts instructed its delegates to support a complete
repudiation of the king's government by the Colonies; while the American
ports were thrown open to the world in defiance of the Navigation Acts.
These decisive steps were followed by the great act with which American
history begins, the adoption on the 4th of July 1776 by the delegates in
Congress after a fierce resistance from those of Pennsylvania and South
Carolina, and in spite of the abstention of those of New York, of a
Declaration of Independence. "We," ran its solemn words, "the
representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our
intentions, solemnly publish and declare that these United Colonies are,
and of right ought to be, Free and Independent States."

[Sidenote: Saratoga.]

But the earlier successes of the colonists were soon followed by
suffering and defeat. Howe, an active general with a fine army at his
back, cleared Long Island in August by a victory at Brooklyn; and
Washington, whose force was weakened by withdrawals and defeat and
disheartened by the loyal tone of the State in which it was encamped,
was forced in the autumn of 1776 to evacuate New York and New Jersey,
and to fall back first on the Hudson and then on the Delaware. The
Congress prepared to fly from Philadelphia, and a general despair showed
itself in cries of peace. But a well-managed surprise and a daring march
on the rear of Howe's army restored the spirits of Washington's men, and
forced the English general in his turn to fall back on New York.
England however was now roused to more serious efforts; and the
campaign of 1777 opened with a combined attempt for the suppression of
the revolt. An army which had assembled in Canada under General Burgoyne
marched in June by way of the Lakes to seize the line of the Hudson.
Howe meanwhile sailed up the Chesapeake and advanced on Philadelphia,
the temporary capital of the United States and the seat of the Congress.
The rout of his little army of seven thousand men at Brandywine forced
Washington to abandon Philadelphia, and after a bold but unsuccessful
attack on his victors to retire into winter quarters on the banks of the
Schuylkill, where the unconquerable resolve with which he nerved his
handful of beaten and half-starved troops to face Howe's army in their
camp at Valley Forge is the noblest of his triumphs. But in the north
the war had taken another colour. Burgoyne's movement had been planned
in view of a junction with at least a part of Howe's army from New York;
a junction which would have enabled him to seize the line of the Hudson
and thus cut off New England from her sister provinces. But Howe was
held fast by Washington's resistance and unable to send a man to the
north; while the spirit of New England, which had grown dull as the war
rolled away from its borders, quickened again at the news of invasion
and of the outrages committed by the Indians employed among the English
troops. Its militia hurried from town and homestead to a camp with
which General Gates had barred the road to Albany; and after a fruitless
attack on the American lines, Burgoyne saw himself surrounded on the
heights of Saratoga. On the 17th of October his whole force was
compelled to surrender.

[Sidenote: France and America.]

The news of this calamity gave force to the words with which Chatham at
the very time of the surrender was pressing for peace. "You cannot
conquer America," he cried when men were glorying in Howe's successes
over Washington. "If I were an American as I am an Englishman, while a
foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my
arms--never, never, never!" Then, in a burst of indignant eloquence he
thundered against an outrage which was at that moment nerving New
England to its rally against Burgoyne, the use of the Indian with his
scalping-knife as an ally of England against her children. The proposals
which Chatham brought forward might perhaps in his hands even yet have
drawn America and the mother country together. His plan was one of
absolute conciliation. He looked forward to a federal union between the
settlements and Great Britain which would have left the Colonies
absolutely their own masters in all matters of internal government, and
linked only by ties of affection and loyalty to the general body of the
Empire. But the plan met with the same scornful rejection as his
previous proposals. Its rejection was at once followed by the news of
Saratoga, and by the yet more fatal news that this disaster had roused
the Bourbon Courts to avenge the humiliation of the Seven Years' War.
Crippled and impoverished as she was at its close, France could do
nothing to break the world-power which was rising in front of her; but
in the very moment of her defeat, the foresight of Choiseul had seen in
a future straggle between England and her Colonies a chance of ruining
the great fabric which Pitt's triumphs had built up. Nor was Pitt blind
to the steady resolve of France to renew the fight. In every attempt
which he had made to construct a Ministry he had laid down as the
corner-stone of his foreign policy a renewal of that alliance with the
Protestant States of North Germany against the House of Bourbon which
could alone save England from the dangers of the Family Compact. But his
efforts had been foiled alike by the resistance of the king, the timid
peacefulness of the Whigs, and at last by the distrust of England which
had been rooted in the mind of Frederick the Great through the treachery
of Lord Bute.

[Sidenote: Death of Chatham.]

The wisdom of his policy was now brought home by the coming of the
danger he had foreseen when the foresight of Choiseul was justified by
the outbreak of strife between England and America. Even then for a
while France looked idly on. Her king, Lewis the Sixteenth, was averse
from war; her treasury was empty; her government, scared by the growth
of new movements towards freedom about it, and fearful of endangering
the monarchy by the encouragement these would receive from a union with
the revolted Colonies, still doubted whether America had any real power
of resisting Britain. It was to no purpose that from the moment when
they declared themselves independent, the United States called on France
for aid; or that Franklin pressed their appeal on its government. A year
in fact passed without any decisive resolution to give aid to the
colonists. But the steady drift of French policy and the passion of the
French people pressed heavier every day on the hesitation of their
government; and the news of Saratoga forced its hand. The American
envoys at last succeeded in forming an alliance; and in February 1778 a
treaty offensive and defensive was concluded between France and America.
Lord North strove to meet the blow by fresh offers of conciliation, and
by a pledge to renounce for ever the right of direct taxation over the
Colonies; but he felt that such offers were fruitless, that the time for
conciliation was past, while all hope of reducing America by force of
arms had disappeared. In utter despair he pressed his resignation on the
king. But George was as obstinate for war as ever; and the country,
stung to the quick by the attack of France, backed passionately the
obstinacy of the king. But unlike George the Third, it instinctively
felt that if a hope still remained of retaining the friendship of the
Colonies and of baffling the efforts of the Bourbons, it lay in Lord
Chatham; and in spite of the king's resistance the voice of the whole
country called him back to power. The danger indeed which had scared
Lord North into resignation, and before which a large party of the Whigs
now advocated the acknowledgement of American independence, only woke
Chatham to his old daring and fire. He had revolted from a war against
Englishmen. But all his pride in English greatness, all his confidence
in English power, woke afresh at the challenge of France. His genius saw
indeed in the new danger a means of escape from the old. He would have
withdrawn every soldier from America, and flung the whole force of
Britain into the conflict with France. He believed that in the splendour
of triumphs over her older enemy England might be brought to terms of
amity which would win back the Colonies, and that the English blood of
the colonists themselves would be quickened to a fresh union with the
mother country by her struggle against a power from which she had so
lately rescued them. Till such a trial had been made, with all the
advantages that the magic of his name could give it in England and
America alike, he would not bow to a need that must wreck the great
Empire his hand had built up. Even at this hour there was a chance of
success for such a policy; but on the eve of Chatham's return to office
this chance was shattered by the hand of death. Broken with age and
disease, the Earl was borne to the House of Lords on the seventh of
April to utter in a few broken words his protest against the proposal to
surrender America. "I rejoice," he murmured, "that I am still alive to
lift up my voice against the dismemberment of this ancient and noble
monarchy. His Majesty succeeded to an Empire as great in extent as its
reputation was unsullied. Seventeen years ago this people was the terror
of the world." He listened impatiently to the reply of the Duke of
Richmond, and again rose to his feet. But he had hardly risen when he
pressed his hand upon his heart, and falling back in a swoon was borne
home to die.

[Sidenote: England against Europe.]

How well founded was Chatham's faith in the power of Britain was seen in
the strife that now opened. From the hour of his death England entered
on a conflict with enemies whose circle gradually widened till she stood
single-handed against the world. At the close of 1778 the Family Compact
bore its full fruit; Spain joined the league of France and America
against her; and in the next year the joint fleets of the two powers
rode the masters of the Channel. They even threatened a descent on the
English coast. But dead as Chatham was, his cry woke a new life in
England. "Shall we fall prostrate," he exclaimed with his last breath,
"before the House of Bourbon?" and the divisions which had broken the
nation in its struggle with American liberty were hushed in the presence
of this danger to its own existence. The weakness of the Ministry was
compensated by the energy of England itself. For three years, from 1779
to 1782, General Elliott held against famine and bombardment from a
French and Spanish army the rock fortress of Gibraltar. Although a
quarrel over the right of search banded Holland and the Courts of the
North in an armed neutrality against her, and added the Dutch fleet to
the number of her assailants, England held her own at sea. In her
Eastern dependency, where France sought a counterpoise to the power of
Britain in that of the Mahrattas, freebooters of Hindoo blood whose
tribes had for a century past carried their raids over India from the
hills of the Western coast, and founded sovereignties in Guzerat, Malwa,
and Tanjore, the tenacity and resource of Warren Hastings, the first
Governor-General of British India, wrested victory from failure and
defeat. Though the wide schemes of conquest which he formed were for the
moment frustrated, the annexation of Benares, the extension of British
rule along the Ganges, the reduction of Oudh to virtual dependence, the
appearance of English armies in Central India, and the defeat of the
Sultan of Mysore, laid the foundation of an Indian Empire which his
genius was bold enough to foresee. Even in America the fortune of the
war seemed for a while to turn. After Burgoyne's surrender the English
generals had withdrawn from Pennsylvania, and bent all their efforts on
the Southern States, where a strong Royalist party still existed. The
capture of Charlestown and the successes of Lord Cornwallis in 1780 were
rendered fruitless by the obstinate resistance of General Greene; but
the United States remained weakened by bankruptcy and unnerved by hopes
of aid from France.

[Sidenote: America and Ireland.]

Hardly a year however had passed when the face of the war in America was
changed by a terrible disaster. Foiled in an attempt on North Carolina
by the refusal of his fellow-general, Sir Henry Clinton, to assist him,
Cornwallis fell back in 1781 on Virginia, and entrenched himself in the
lines of York Town. A sudden march of Washington brought him to the
front of the English troops at a moment when the French fleet held the
sea, and the British army was driven by famine in October to a surrender
as humiliating as that of Saratoga. The news fell like a thunderbolt on
the wretched Minister, who had till now suppressed at his master's order
his own conviction of the uselessness of further bloodshed. Opening his
arms and pacing wildly about the room, Lord North exclaimed, "It is all
over," and resigned. At this moment indeed the country seemed on the
brink of ruin. Humiliating as it was, England could have borne fifty
such calamities as the surrender at York Town. But in the very crisis of
the struggle with America she found herself confronted with a danger
nearer home. The revolt of one great dependency brought with it a
threatened revolt from another. In Ireland, as in the Colonies, England
had shrunk from carrying out either a national or an imperial policy.
She might have recognised Ireland as a free nationality, and bound it to
herself by federal bonds; or she might have absorbed it, as she had
absorbed Scotland, into the general mass of her own national life. With
a perverse ingenuity she had not only refrained from taking either of
these courses, but she had deliberately adopted the worst features of
both. Ireland was absolutely subject to Britain, but she formed no part
of it, she shared neither in its liberty nor its wealth. But on the
other hand she was allowed no national existence of her own. While all
the outer seeming of national life was left, while Ireland possessed in
name an army, a Parliament, a magistracy, the mass of the Irish people
was as strange to all this life as the savages of Polynesia. Every
Catholic Irishman, and there were five Irish Catholics to every Irish
Protestant, was treated as a stranger and a foreigner in his own
country. The House of Lords, the House of Commons, the magistracy, all
corporate offices in towns, all ranks in the army, the bench, the bar,
the whole administration of government or justice, were closed against
Catholics. The very right of voting for their representatives in
Parliament was denied them. Few Catholic landowners had been left by the
sweeping confiscations which had followed the successive revolts of the
island, and oppressive laws forced even these few with scant exceptions
to profess Protestantism. Necessity indeed had brought about a practical
toleration of their religion and their worship; but in all social and
political matters the native Catholics, in other words the immense
majority of the people of Ireland, were simply hewers of wood and
drawers of water for Protestant masters, for masters who still looked on
themselves as mere settlers, who boasted of their Scotch or English
extraction, and who regarded the name of "Irishman" as an insult.

[Sidenote: Irish Government.]

But small as was this Protestant body, one-half of it fared little
better as far as power was concerned than the Catholics. The
Presbyterians, who formed the bulk of the Ulster settlers, were shut out
by law from all civil, military, and municipal offices. The
administration and justice of the country were thus kept rigidly in the
hands of members of the Established Church, a body which comprised
about a twelfth of the population of the island, while its government
was practically monopolised by a few great Protestant landowners. The
rotten boroughs, which had originally been created to make the Irish
Parliament dependent on the Crown, had by this time fallen under the
influence of the adjacent landlords, whose command of these made them
masters of the House of Commons while they themselves formed in person
the House of Peers. To such a length had this system been carried that
at the time of the Union the great majority of the boroughs lay in the
hands of a very few families. Two-thirds of the House of Commons, in
fact, was returned by a small group of nobles, who were recognised as
"parliamentary undertakers," and who undertook to "manage" Parliament on
their own terms. Irish politics was for these men a mere means of public
plunder; they were glutted with pensions, preferments, and bribes in
hard cash, in return for their services; they were the advisers of every
Lord-Lieutenant and the practical governors of the country. The results
were what might have been expected. For more than a century Ireland was
the worst governed country in Europe. That its government was not even
worse than it was, was due to its connection with England and the
subordination of its Parliament to the English Privy Council. The Irish
Parliament had no power of originating legislative or financial
measures, and could only say "yes" or "no" to Acts laid before it by
the Privy Council in England. The English Parliament too claimed the
right of binding Ireland as well as England by its enactments, and one
of its statutes transferred the appellate jurisdiction of the Irish
Peerage to the English House of Lords. Galling as these restrictions
were to the plundering aristocracy of Ireland, they formed a useful
check on its tyranny. But as if to compensate for the benefits of this
protection, England did her best from the time of William the Third to
annihilate Irish commerce and to ruin Irish agriculture. Statutes passed
by the jealousy of English landowners forbade the export of Irish cattle
or sheep to English ports. The export of wool was forbidden lest it
might interfere with the profits of English wool-growers. Poverty was
thus added to the curse of misgovernment; and poverty deepened with the
rapid growth of the native population, a growth due in great part to the
physical misery and moral degradation of their lives, till famine turned
the country into a hell.

[Sidenote: The Volunteers.]

The bitter lesson of the last conquest however long sufficed to check
all dreams of revolt among the native Irish; and the outbreaks which
sprang from time to time out of the general misery and discontent were
purely social in their character, and were roughly repressed by the
ruling class. When political revolt at last threatened English
supremacy over Ireland, the threat came from the ruling class itself.
Some timid efforts made by the English Government at the accession of
George the Third to control its tyranny were resented by a refusal of
money bills, and by a cry for the removal of the checks imposed on the
independence of the Irish Parliament. But it was not till the American
war that this cry became a political danger. The threat of a French
invasion and the want of any regular force to oppose it compelled the
Government to call on Ireland to provide for its own defence, and in
answer to its call forty thousand volunteers appeared in arms in 1779.
The force was wholly a Protestant one, commanded by Protestant officers,
and it was turned to account by the Protestant oligarchy. Threats of an
armed revolt backed the eloquence of two Parliamentary leaders, Grattan
and Flood, in their demand for the repeal of Poynings' Act, which took
all power of initiative legislation from the Irish Parliament, and for
the recognition of the Irish House of Lords as an ultimate Court of
Appeal. But the Volunteers were forced to bid for the support of the
native Catholics, who looked with indifference on these quarrels of
their masters, by claiming for them a relaxation of the penal laws
against the exercise of their religion and of some of their most
oppressive disabilities. So real was the danger that England was forced
to give way. The first demands were in effect a claim for national
independence. But there were no means of resisting them, for England was
without a soldier to oppose the Volunteers, while she was pressed hard
by the league of Europe and America against her. In the face of such a
rising close at home, it became plain even to the most dogged of Tories
that it was impossible to continue a strife across three thousand miles
of sea; and to deal with the attitude of Ireland became even a more
pressing need of the Ministry which followed that of Lord North than the
need of dealing with America.

[Sidenote: End of the war.]

The blow which had shattered the attempt of England to wield an
autocratic power over her Colonies had shattered the attempt of its king
to establish an autocratic power over England itself. The Ministry which
bore the name of Lord North had been a mere screen for the
administration of George the Third, and its ruin was the ruin of the
system he had striven to build up. Never again was the Crown to possess
such a power as he had wielded during the past ten years. For the moment
however there was nothing to mark so decisive a change; and both to the
king and his opponents it must have seemed only a new turn in the
political game which they were playing when in March 1782 the Whigs
returned to office. Rockingham was still at the head of the party; and
on Rockingham fell the double task of satisfying Ireland and of putting
an end, at any cost, to the war with the United States. The task
involved in both quarters a humiliating surrender; for neither Ireland
nor America would be satisfied save by a full concession of their
claims. It needed the bitter stress of necessity to induce the English
Parliament to follow Rockingham's counsels, but the need was too urgent
to suffer their rejection. The Houses therefore abandoned by a formal
statute the judicial and legislative supremacy they had till then
asserted over the Parliament of Ireland; and from this moment England
and Ireland were simply held together by the fact that the sovereign of
the one island was also the sovereign of the other. The grant of
independence to the one great dependency made it easier to recognise the
freedom of the other. Rockingham in fact took office with the purpose of
winning peace by a full acknowledgement of the independence of the
United States, and negotiations were soon entered into for that purpose.

[Sidenote: The Peace.]

But America was bound by its league with the Bourbon Courts to make no
peace save one common to its allies, and from its allies peace was hard
to win without concessions which would have stripped from England all
that remained of her older greatness. With the revolt of Ireland and the
surrender of Cornwallis the hopes of her enemies rose high. Spain
refused to suspend hostilities at any other price than the surrender of
Gibraltar; while France proposed that England should give up all her
Indian conquests save Bengal. The triumph of the Bourbons indeed seemed
secure. If terms like these were accepted the world-empire of Britain
was at an end. Stripped of her Colonies in America, stripped of her rule
in India, matched on the very ocean by rival fleets, England sank back
into a European State, into the England of the first Georges. And yet
there seemed little chance of her holding out against the demands of
such a league as fronted her at a moment when her military power was
paralysed by the attitude of Ireland. But the true basis of her
world-power lay on the sea. It was by her command of the sea that such
an empire could alone be possible; nor was it possible so long as she
commanded the sea for all the armies of the Bourbon powers to rob her of
it. And at this moment the command of the seas again became her own. On
the 16th of January 1780 Admiral Rodney, the greatest of English seamen
save Nelson and Blake, encountered the Spanish fleet off Cape St.
Vincent, and only four of its vessels escaped to Cadiz. At the opening
of 1782 the triumphs of the French admiral De Grasse called him to the
West Indies; and on the 12th of April a manoeuvre which he was the
first to introduce broke his opponent's line, and drove the French fleet
shattered from the Atlantic. With Rodney's last victory the struggle of
the Bourbons was really over, for no means remained of attacking their
enemy save at Gibraltar, and here a last attack of the joint force
gathered against it was repulsed by the heroism of Elliott. Nor would
America wait any longer for the satisfaction of her allies. In November
her commissioners signed the preliminaries of a peace in which Britain
reserved to herself on the American continent only Canada and the island
of Newfoundland; and acknowledged without reserve the independence of
the United States.

[Sidenote: England and the United States.]

The action of America ended the war; and the treaty of peace with the
United States was a prelude to treaties of peace with the Bourbon
powers. Their actual gains were insignificant. France indeed won nothing
in the treaties with which the war ended; Spain gained only Florida and
Minorca. Nor could they feel even in this hour of their triumph that the
end at which they aimed had been fully reached. In half their great
effort against the world-power of Britain they had utterly failed. She
had even won ground in India. In America itself she still retained the
northern dominion of Canada. Her West Indian islands remained intact.
Above all, she had asserted more nobly than ever her command of the sea,
and with it the possibility of building up a fresh power in such lands
as Cook had called her to. But at the close of the war there was less
thought of what she had retained than of what she had lost. She was
parted from her American Colonies; and at the moment such a parting
seemed to be the knell of her greatness. In wealth, in population, the
American Colonies far surpassed all that remained of her Empire; and the
American Colonies were irrecoverably gone. It is no wonder that in the
first shock of such a loss England looked on herself as on the verge of
ruin, or that the Bourbon Courts believed her position as a world-power
to be practically at an end. How utterly groundless such a conception
was the coming years were to show. The energies of England were in fact
spurred to new efforts by the crisis in her fortunes. The industrial
developement which followed the war gave her a material supremacy such
as she had never known before, and the rapid growth of wealth which this
industry brought with it raised her again into a mother of nations as
her settlers built up in the waters of the Pacific Colonies as great as
those which she had lost on the coast of America. But if the Bourbons
overrated their triumph in one way, they immensely underrated it in
another. Whatever might be the importance of American independence in
the history of England, it was of unequalled moment in the history of
the world. If it crippled for a while the supremacy of the English
nation, it founded the supremacy of the English race. From the hour of
American Independence the life of the English People has flowed not in
one current, but in two; and while the older has shown little signs of
lessening, the younger has fast risen to a greatness which has changed
the face of the world. In 1783 America was a nation of three millions of
inhabitants, scattered thinly along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. It
is now a nation of forty millions, stretching over the whole continent
from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In wealth and material energy, as in
numbers, it far surpasses the mother country from which it sprang. It is
already the main branch of the English People; and in the days that are
at hand the main current of that people's history must run along the
channel not of the Thames or the Mersey, but of the Hudson and the
Mississippi. But distinct as these currents are, every year proves more
clearly that in spirit the English People is one. The distance that
parted England from America lessens every day. The ties that unite them
grow every day stronger. The social and political differences that
threatened a hundred years ago to form an impassable barrier between
them grow every day less. Against this silent and inevitable drift of
things the spirit of narrow isolation on either side the Atlantic
struggles in vain. It is possible that the two branches of the English
People will remain for ever separate political existences. It is likely
enough that the older of them may again break in twain, and that the
English People in the Pacific may assert as distinct a national life as
the two English Peoples on either side the Atlantic. But the spirit,
the influence, of all these branches will remain one. And in thus
remaining one, before half-a-century is over it will change the face of
the world. As two hundred millions of Englishmen fill the valley of the
Mississippi, as fifty millions of Englishmen assert their lordship over
Australasia, this vast power will tell through Britain on the old world
of Europe, whose nations will have shrunk into insignificance before it.
What the issues of such a world-wide change may be, not even the wildest
dreamer would dare to dream. But one issue is inevitable. In the
centuries that lie before us, the primacy of the world will lie with the
English People. English institutions, English speech, English thought,
will become the main features of the political, the social, and the
intellectual life of mankind.




CHAPTER III

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.




CHAPTER IV

ENGLAND AND REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE

1792-1801


[Sidenote: England and the Revolutionists.]

That the war with Germany would widen into a vast European struggle, a
struggle in which the peoples would rise against their oppressors, and
the freedom which France had won diffuse itself over the world, no
French revolutionist doubted for an hour. Nor did they doubt that in
this struggle England would join them. It was from England that they had
drawn those principles of political and social liberty which they
believed themselves to be putting into practice. It was to England that
they looked above all for approbation and sympathy, and on the aid of
England that they confidently counted in their struggle with a despotic
and priest-ridden Europe. Absorbed in the mighty events about them, and
utterly ignorant of the real set of English feeling or the real meaning
of Pitt's policy, they were astonished and indignant at his firm refusal
of their alliance and his resolve to stand apart from the struggle. It
was in vain that Pitt strove to allay this irritation by demanding only
that Holland should remain untouched, and promising neutrality even
though Belgium should be occupied by a French army, or that he
strengthened these pledges by a reduction of military forces, and by
bringing forward in 1792 a peace-budget which rested on a large
remission of taxation. To the revolutionists at Paris the attitude of
England remained unintelligible and irritating. Instead of the aid they
had counted on, they found but a cold neutrality. In place of the
sympathy on which they reckoned, they saw, now that they looked coolly
across the Channel, a reserve passing into disapproval. The pen of Burke
was denouncing the Revolution as the very negation of those principles
on which English liberty rested. The priests and nobles who had fled
from the new France were finding pity and welcome on English shores. And
now that France flung herself on an armed Europe to win freedom for its
peoples from their kings, England stood coldly apart. To men frenzied
with a passionate enthusiasm, and frenzied yet more with a sudden terror
at the dangers they were encountering, such an attitude of neutrality in
such a quarter seemed like a stab in the back.

[Sidenote: Their efforts in England.]

But that this attitude was that of the English people as a whole was
incredible to the French enthusiasts. Conscious as no Englishman could
be conscious of the great evils they had overthrown, of the great
benefits they had won for their country, they saw in the attitude of
England only the sympathy of an aristocracy with the aristocracy they
had struck down. The cries for a parliamentary reform which reached them
across the Channel became in their ears cries of a people as powerless
and oppressed as the people of France had been. They still clung to the
hope of England's aid in the emancipation of Europe from despotism and
superstition, but they came now to believe that England must itself be
emancipated before such an aid could be given. Their first work
therefore they held to be the bringing about a revolution in England
which might free the people from the aristocracy and the aristocratic
government which held it down. But this was far from being all the work
they looked to accomplishing. The aristocracy which oppressed the people
at home oppressed, as they believed, great peoples beyond the bounds of
England itself. It was subjecting to its sway nation after nation in
India. Its rule over Ireland was a masterpiece of tyranny. To rouse
India, to rouse Ireland to a struggle which should shake off the English
yoke, became necessary steps to the establishment of freedom in England
itself. From the moment therefore that the opposition between the two
countries declared itself, French agents were busy "sowing the
revolution" in each quarter. In Ireland they entered into communication
with the United Irishmen. In India they appeared at the courts of the
native princes, and above all at the court of Mysore. Meanwhile in
England itself they strove through a number of associations, which had
formed themselves under the name of Constitutional Clubs, to rouse the
same spirit which they had roused in France; and the French envoy,
Chauvelin, protested warmly against a proclamation which denounced this
correspondence as seditious.

[Sidenote: The Coalition attacks France.]

Such a course could only knit men of all parties together in a common
resentment; and the effect of these revolutionary efforts on the friends
of the Revolution was seen in a declaration which they wrested from Fox,
that at such a moment even the discussion of parliamentary reform was
inexpedient. A far worse result was the new strength they gave to its
foes. Burke was still working hard in writings whose extravagance of
style was forgotten in their intensity of feeling to spread alarm
throughout Europe. He had from the first encouraged the emigrant princes
to take arms, and sent his son to join them at Coblentz. "Be alarmists,"
he wrote to them; "diffuse terror!" But the royalist terror which he
sowed would have been of little moment had it not roused a revolutionary
terror in France itself. At the threat of war against the Emperor the
two German Courts had drawn together, and reluctantly abandoning all
hope of peace with France, gathered eighty thousand men under the Duke
of Brunswick, and advanced slowly in August 1792 on the Meuse. France,
though she had forced on the struggle, was really almost defenceless;
her forces in Belgium broke at the first shock of arms into shameful
rout; and the panic, as it spread from the soldiery to the nation at
large, took violent and horrible forms. At the first news of Brunswick's
advance the mob of Paris broke into the Tuileries on the 10th of August;
and at its demand Lewis, who had taken refuge in the Assembly, was
suspended from his office and imprisoned in the Temple. In the following
September, while General Dumouriez by boldness and adroit negotiations
was arresting the progress of the Allies in the defiles of the Argonne,
bodies of paid murderers butchered the royalist prisoners who crowded
the gaols of Paris, with a view of influencing the elections to a new
Convention which met to proclaim the abolition of royalty. The retreat
of the Prussian army, whose numbers had been reduced by disease till an
advance on Paris became impossible, and a brilliant victory won by
Dumouriez at Jemappes which laid the Netherlands at his feet, turned the
panic of the French into a wild self-confidence. In November the
Convention decreed that France offered the aid of her soldiers to all
nations who would strive for freedom. "All governments are our enemies,"
cried its President; "all peoples are our allies." In the teeth of
treaties signed only two years before, and of the stipulation made by
England when it pledged itself to neutrality, the French Government
resolved to attack Holland, and ordered its generals to enforce by arms
the opening of the Scheldt.

[Sidenote: France declares war with England.]

To do this was to force England into war. Public opinion was already
pressing every day harder upon Pitt. The horror of the massacres of
September, the hideous despotism of the Parisian mob, did more to
estrange England from the Revolution than all the eloquence of Burke.
But even while withdrawing our Minister from Paris on the imprisonment
of the king, to whose Court he had been commissioned, Pitt clung
stubbornly to a policy of peace. His hope was to bring the war to an end
through English mediation, and to "leave France, which I believe is the
best way, to arrange its own internal affairs as it can." No hour of
Pitt's life is so great as the hour when he stood lonely and passionless
before the growth of national passion, and refused to bow to the
gathering cry for war. Even the news of the September massacres could
only force from him a hope that France might abstain from any war of
conquest and might escape from its social anarchy. In October the French
agent in England reported that Pitt was about to recognize the Republic.
At the opening of November he still pressed on Holland a steady
neutrality. It was France, and not England, which at last wrenched peace
from his grasp. The decree of the Convention and the attack on the Dutch
left him no choice but war, for it was impossible for England to endure
a French fleet at Antwerp, or to desert allies like the United
Provinces. But even in December the news of the approaching partition of
Poland nerved him to a last struggle for peace; he offered to aid
Austria in acquiring Bavaria if she would make terms with France, and
pledged himself to France to abstain from war if that power would cease
from violating the independence of her neighbour states. But desperately
as Pitt struggled for peace, his struggle was in vain. Across the
Channel his moderation was only taken for fear, while in England the
general mourning which followed on the news of the French king's
execution showed the growing ardour for the contest. The rejection of
his last offers indeed made a contest inevitable. Both sides ceased from
diplomatic communications, and in February 1793 France issued her
Declaration of War.

[Sidenote: The Panic.]

From that moment Pitt's power was at an end. His pride, his immoveable
firmness, and the general confidence of the nation, still kept him at
the head of affairs; but he could do little save drift along with a tide
of popular feeling which he never fully understood. Around him the
country broke out in a fit of passion and panic which rivalled the
passion and panic over sea. The confidence of France in its illusions
as to opinion in England deluded for the moment even Englishmen
themselves. The partisans of Republicanism were in reality but a few
handfuls of men who played at gathering Conventions, and at calling
themselves citizens and patriots, in childish imitation of what was
going on across the Channel. But in the mass of Englishmen the dread of
these revolutionists passed for the hour into sheer panic. Even the bulk
of the Whig party believed property and the constitution to be in peril,
and forsook Fox when he still proclaimed his faith in France and the
Revolution. The "Old Whigs," as they called themselves, with the Duke of
Portland, Earls Spencer and Fitzwilliam, and Mr. Windham at their head,
followed Burke in giving their adhesion to the Government. Pitt himself,
though little touched by the political reaction which was to constitute
the creed of those who represented themselves as "Pittites," was shaken
by the dream of social danger, which was turning the wisest heads about
him. For a moment at least his cool good sense bent to believe in the
existence of "thousands of bandits" who were ready to rise against the
throne, to plunder every landlord, and to sack London. "Paine is no
fool," he said to his niece, who quoted to him a passage from the
_Rights of Man_, in which that author had vindicated the principles of
the Revolution. "He is perhaps right; but if I did what he wants I
should have thousands of bandits on my hands to-morrow and London
burnt." It was this sense of social danger which alone reconciled him to
the war. It would have been impossible indeed for Pitt, or for any other
English statesman, to have stood idly by while France annexed the
Netherlands and marched to annex Holland. He must in any case have
fought even had France not forced him to fight by her declaration of
war. But bitter as the need of such a struggle was to him, he accepted
it with the less reluctance that war, as he trusted, would check the
progress of "French principles" in England itself.

The worst issue of this panic was the series of legislative measures in
which it found expression. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, a bill
against seditious assemblies restricted the liberty of public meeting,
and a wider scope was given to the Statute of Treasons. Prosecution
after prosecution was directed against the Press; the sermons of some
dissenting ministers were indicted as seditious; and the conventions of
sympathizers with France were roughly broken up. The worst excesses of
this panic were witnessed in Scotland, where young Whigs, whose only
offence was an advocacy of parliamentary reform, were sentenced to
transportation, and where a brutal Judge openly expressed his regret
that the practice of torture in seditious cases should have fallen into
disuse. But the panic soon passed away for sheer want of material to
feed on. The bloodshed and anarchy of the Jacobin rule disgusted the
last sympathizers with France. To staunch Whigs like Romilly, the
French, after the massacres of October, seemed a mere "nation of
tigers." The good sense of the nation discovered the unreality of the
dangers which had driven it to its short-lived frenzy; and when the
leaders of the Corresponding Society, a body which expressed sympathy
with France, were brought to trial in 1794 on a charge of high treason,
their acquittal told that all active terror was over. So far indeed was
the nation from any danger of social overthrow that, save for occasional
riots to which the poor were goaded by sheer want of bread, no social
disturbance troubled England during the twenty years of struggle which
lay before it. But though the public terror passed, it left a terrible
legacy behind. The blind reaction against all reform which had sprung
from the panic lasted on when the panic was forgotten. For nearly a
quarter of a century it was hard to get a hearing for any measure which
threatened change to an existing institution, beneficial though the
change might be. Even the philanthropic movement which so nobly
characterized the time found itself checked and hampered by the dread of
revolution.

Easy however as Pitt found it to deal with "French principles" at home,
he found it less easy to deal with French armies abroad. The very
excellences of his character indeed unfitted him for the conduct of a
war. He was at heart a Peace Minister; he was forced into war by a panic
and enthusiasm which he shared in a very small degree; and he was
utterly destitute of his father's gift of entering instinctively into
the sympathies and passions around him, and of rousing passions and
sympathies in return. At first indeed all seemed to go ill for France.
When the campaign of 1793 opened she was girt in along her whole
frontier by a ring of foes. The forces of the House of Austria, of the
Empire, and of the King of Prussia, pressed her to the north and the
east; those of Spain and Sardinia attacked her in the south; and the
accession of England to this league threatened to close the sea against
her. The efforts of these foreign foes were seconded too by civil war.
The peasants of Poitou and Brittany, estranged from the revolution by
its attack on the clergy, rose in revolt against the government at
Paris; while Marseilles and Lyons were driven into insurrection by the
violent leaders who now seized on power in the capital. The campaign
opened therefore with a series of terrible reverses. In spite of the
efforts of General Dumouriez the French were foiled in their attack on
Holland and driven, after a disastrous defeat at Neerwinden, from the
Netherlands. At the moment when the Duke of York with ten thousand
English troops joined the Austrian army on the northern border of
France, a march upon Paris would have crushed the revolution. But the
chance was lost. At this moment indeed the two German powers were far
from wishing honestly for the suppression of the Republic and the
re-establishment of a strong monarchy in France. Such a restoration
would have foiled their projects of aggrandizement in Eastern Europe.
The strife on the Rhine had set Russia free, as Pitt had foreseen, to
carry out her schemes of aggression; and Austria and Prussia saw
themselves forced, in the interest of a balance of power, to share in
her annexations at the cost of Poland. But this new division of Poland
would have become impossible had France been enabled by a restoration of
its monarchy to take up again its natural position in Europe, and to
accept the alliance which Pitt would in such a case have offered her.
The policy of the German courts therefore was to prolong an anarchy
which left them free for the moment to crush Poland, and which they
counted on crushing in its turn at a more convenient time; and the
allied armies which might have marched upon Paris were purposely
frittered away in sieges in the Netherlands and the Rhine.

[Sidenote: The revival of France.]

Such a policy gave France all that she needed to recover from the shock
of her past disasters: it gave her time. Whatever were the crimes and
tyranny of her leaders, the country felt in spite of them the value of
the Revolution, and rallied enthusiastically to its support. The
strength of the revolt in La Vendee was broken. The insurrection in the
south was drowned in blood. The Spanish invaders were held at bay at the
foot of the Pyrenees, and the Piedmontese were driven from Nice and
Savoy. At the close of the year a fresh blow fell upon the struggling
country in the revolt of Toulon, the naval station of its Mediterranean
fleet. The town called for foreign aid against the government at Paris;
and Lord Hood entered the port with an English squadron, while a force
of 11,000 men, gathered hastily from every quarter, was despatched under
General O'Hara as a garrison. But the successes against Spain and Savoy
freed the hands of France at this critical moment: the town was at once
invested, and the seizure of a promontory which commanded the harbour, a
step counselled by a young artillery officer, Napoleon Buonaparte,
brought about the withdrawal of the garrison and the surrender of
Toulon. The success was a prelude of what was to come. At the opening of
1794 a victory at Fleurus, which again made the French masters of the
Netherlands, showed that the tide had turned. France was united within
by the cessation of the Terror and of the tyranny of the Jacobins, while
on every border victory followed the gigantic efforts with which she
met the coalition against her. The coalition indeed was fast breaking
up. Spain sued for peace. Prussia, more intent on her gains in the east
than on any battle with the revolution on the west, prepared to follow
Spain's example by the withdrawal of her armies from the Rhine. It was
only by English subsidies that Austria and Sardinia were still kept in
the field; and the Rhine provinces were wrested from the first, while
the forces of Sardinia were driven back from the Riviera and the
Maritime Alps into the plain of Piedmont. Before the year ended Holland
was lost. Pichegru crossed the Waal in midwinter with an overwhelming
force, and the wretched remnant of ten thousand men who had followed the
Duke of York to the Netherlands, thinned by disease and by the hardships
of retreat, re-embarked for England.

[Sidenote: Howe's victory.]

In one quarter only had the fortune of war gone against the French
republic. The victories of Rodney at the close of the strife with
America had concentrated English interest on the fleet. Even during the
peace, while the army was sacrificed to financial distress, great
efforts were made to preserve the efficiency of the navy; and the recent
alarms of war with Russia and Spain had ended in raising it to a
strength which it had never reached before. But France was as eager as
England herself to dispute the sovereignty of the seas, and almost
equal attention had been bestowed on the navy which crowded the great
harbours of Toulon and Brest. In force as in number of ships it was
equal in effective strength to that of England; and both nations looked
with hope to the issue of a contest at sea. No battle marked the first
year of the war; but, as it ended, the revolt of Toulon gave a fatal
wound to the naval strength of France in the almost total destruction of
her Mediterranean fleet. That of the Channel however remained unhurt;
and it was this which Lord Howe at last encountered, off Brest in 1794,
in the battle which is known by the name of the day on which it was
fought--The "First of June." The number of ships on either side was
nearly the same, and the battle was one of sheer hard fighting, unmarked
by any display of naval skill. But the result was a decisive victory for
England, and the French admiral, weakened by a loss of seven vessels and
three thousand men, again took refuge in Brest.

[Sidenote: Break-up of the Coalition.]

The success of Lord Howe did somewhat to counteract the discouragement
which sprang from the general aspect of the war. At the opening of 1795
the coalition finally gave way. Holland had been detached from it by
Pichegru's conquest, and the Batavian republic which he set up there was
now an ally of France. In the spring Prussia bought peace at Basle by
the cession of her possessions west of the Rhine. Peace with Spain
followed in the summer, while Sweden and the Protestant cantons of
Switzerland recognized the republic. These terrible blows were hardly
met by the success of the Austrian army in relieving Maintz, or by the
colonial acquisitions of England. The latter indeed were far from being
inconsiderable. Most of the West-Indian Islands which had been held by
France now fell into British hands; and the alliance of Holland with the
French threw open to English attack the far more valuable settlements of
the Dutch. The surrender of Cape Town in September gave England the
colony of the Cape of Good Hope, the nucleus of what has since grown
into a vast southern settlement which is destined to play a great part
in the history of Africa. At the close of the year the Island of Ceylon
was added to our Indian dependencies. Both of these acquisitions were
destined to remain permanently attached to England, though at the moment
their value was eclipsed by the conquest of the Dutch colonies in the
Pacific, the more famous Spice Islands of the Malaccas and Java. But,
important as these gains were in their after issues, they had no
immediate influence on the war. The French armies prepared for the
invasion of Italy; while in France itself discord came well-nigh to an
end. A descent by a force of French emigrants on the coast of Brittany
ended in their massacre at Quiberon and in the final cessation of the
war in La Vendee; while the royalist party in Paris was crushed as soon
as it rose against the Convention by the genius of Napoleon Buonaparte.

[Sidenote: Pitt's effort for peace.]

But the fresh severities against the ultra-republicans which followed on
the establishment of a Directory after this success indicated the
moderate character of the new government, and Pitt seized on this change
in the temper of the French Government as giving an opening for peace.
The dread of a Jacobin propagandism was now all but at an end. In spite
of an outbreak of the London mob, whose cries meant chiefly impatience
of dear bread, but which brought about a fresh suspension of the Habeas
Corpus Act and the introduction of a Bill "for the prosecution of
seditious meetings," the fear of any social disturbance or of the spread
of "French principles" in England was fast passing away from men's
minds. The new constitution which France accepted in 1795 showed that
the tendencies of the French themselves were now rather to order than to
freedom. The old grounds for the struggle therefore had ceased to exist;
while the pressure of it grew hourly more intolerable. Pitt himself was
sick of the strife. The war indeed had hardly begun when he found
himself without the means of carrying it on. The English navy was in a
high state of efficiency; but the financial distress which followed the
American war had brought with it a neglect of the army. The army was not
only small, but without proper equipment; and the want of military
experience among its soldiers was only equalled by the incapacity of
their leaders. "We have no general," Lord Grenville wrote bitterly, "but
some old woman in a red riband." Wretched, too, as had been the conduct
of the war, its cost was already terrible; for if England was without
soldiers she had wealth, and in default of nobler means of combating the
revolution Pitt had been forced to use wealth as an engine of war. He
became the paymaster of the coalition, and his subsidies kept the allied
armies in the field. But the immense loans which these called for, and
the quick growth of expenditure, undid all the financial reforms on
which the young minister prided himself. Taxation, which had reached its
lowest point at the outbreak of the contest, mounted ere a few years
were past to a height undreamed of before. The debt rose by leaps and
bounds. In three years nearly eighty millions had been added to it, a
sum greater than that piled up by the whole war with America, and in the
opening of 1796 votes were taken for loans which amounted to twenty-five
millions more.

[Sidenote: The dogged temper of England.]

Nor was this wreck of his financial hopes Pitt's only ground for
desiring a close of the war. From the first, as we have seen, he had
been keenly sensitive to the European dangers which the contest
involved; nor had he shown, even in his moment of social panic, the
fanatical blindness of men like Burke to the evils which had produced
the revolution, or to the good which it had wrought. But he could only
listen in silence while the Marquis of Lansdowne, the Lord Shelburne of
earlier days and the successor of Chatham as the advocate of a more
liberal policy, met the rhetoric of Burke by a cool demonstration of the
benefit which the recent change had brought to the mass of the French
people, and by pointing to the profit which Russia was drawing from the
struggle in the west. In their wide-reaching view of European affairs,
in their justice to the revolution, Shelburne and Pitt stood alone.
Around them men were hardened and blinded by passion. The old hatred
between nation and nation, which Pitt had branded as irrational, woke up
fiercer than ever at the clash of arms, for with it was blended a
resentment that had smouldered in English breasts ever since the war
with America at the blow which France had dealt England in that hour of
her weakness, and a disgust which only slowly grew fainter at her
overthrow of every social and political institution that Englishmen held
dear. On the dogged temper of the nation at large the failure of the
coalition produced little effect. It had no fear of fighting France
single-handed, nor could it understand Pitt's suggestion that a time
had come for opening negotiations with a view to peace. Public opinion
indeed went hotly with Burke in his denunciation of all purpose of
relaxing England's hostility against the revolution, a denunciation
which was embodied in his "Letters on a Regicide Peace," the last outcry
of that fanaticism which had done so much to plunge the world in blood.

[Sidenote: The Irish danger.]

But though Pitt stood all but alone, he was firm in his purpose to bring
the war, if he could, to a close. What specially moved him was not the
danger on the Continent, whether that danger sprang from French
victories or from aggression in the east. It was a danger in the west.
Vain as the expectations of the French revolutionists had proved in the
case of England, they had better ground for their hopes elsewhere. Even
before the outbreak of the war Pitt had shown how keen was his sense of
a possible danger from Ireland. In that wretched country the terrible
fruits of a century of oppression and wrong were still to reap. From the
close of the American war, when her armed Volunteers had wrung
legislative independence from the Rockingham ministry, Ireland had
continued to be England's difficulty. She was now "independent"; but her
independence was a mere name for the uncontrolled rule of a few noble
families. The victory of the Volunteers had been won simply to the
profit of "undertakers," who returned a majority of members in the
Irish House of Commons, while they themselves formed the Irish House of
Lords. The suspension of any effective control or interference from
England left Ireland at these men's mercy, and they soon showed that
they meant to keep it for themselves. When the Catholics claimed
admission to the franchise or to equal civil rights as a reward for
their aid in the late struggle, their claim was rejected. A similar
demand of the Presbyterians, who had formed a good half of the
Volunteers, for the removal of their disabilities was equally set aside.
Even Grattan, when he pleaded for a reform which would make the
Parliament at least a fair representative of the Protestant Englishry,
utterly failed. The ruling class found government too profitable to
share it with other possessors. It was only by hard bribery that the
English viceroys could secure their co-operation in the simplest
measures of administration. "If ever there was a country unfit to govern
itself," said Lord Hutchinson, "it is Ireland. A corrupt aristocracy, a
ferocious commonalty, a distracted Government, a divided people!"

[Sidenote: Irish Emancipation.]

The real character of this Parliamentary rule was seen in the rejection
of Pitt's offer of free trade. In Pitt's eyes the danger of Ireland lay
above all in the misery of its people. Although the Irish Catholics were
held down by the brute force of their Protestant rulers, he saw that
their discontent was growing fast into rebellion, and that one secret
at any rate of their discontent lay in Irish poverty, a poverty
increased if not originally brought about by the jealous exclusion of
Irish products from their natural markets in England itself. One of his
first commercial measures therefore, as we have seen, aimed at putting
an end to this exclusion by a bill which established freedom of trade
between the two islands. But though he met successfully the fears and
jealousies of the English farmers and manufacturers he was foiled by the
factious ignorance of the Irish landowners, and his bill was rejected by
the Irish Parliament. So utterly was he discouraged that for the moment
he ceased from all further attempts to improve the condition of Ireland.
But the efforts which the French revolutionists made to excite rebellion
amongst the Irish roused him to fresh measures of conciliation and good
government. The hopes of some reform of the Irish Parliament had been
fanned by the eloquence of Grattan and by the pressure of the United
Irishmen, an association which had sprung up in Ulster, where Protestant
dissenters, who were equally excluded with Catholics from any share in
political power, formed the strongest part of the population. These
hopes however were growing every day fainter. To the Irish aristocracy
parliamentary reform meant the close of a corrupt rule which had gone on
unchecked since the American war. But to the Irish Catholic it meant
far more; it meant his admission, not only to the electoral franchise,
but in the end to all the common privileges of citizenship from which he
was excluded, his "emancipation," to use the word which now became
common, from the yoke of slavery which had pressed on him ever since the
Battle of the Boyne.

[Sidenote: The United Irishmen.]

To such an emancipation Pitt was already looking forward. In 1792, a
year before the outbreak of war with France, he forced on the Irish
Parliament measures for the admission of Catholics to the electoral
franchise and to civil and military office within the island, which
promised a new era of religious liberty. But the promise came too late.
The hope of conciliation was lost in the fast rising tide of religious
and social passion. As the dream of obtaining Parliamentary reform died
away the United Irishmen of the North drifted into projects of
insurrection and a correspondence with France. The news of the French
Revolution fell with a yet more terrible effect on the Catholic
peasantry, brooding over their misery and their wrongs. Their discontent
broke out in social disorder, in the outrages of secret societies of
"Defenders" and "Peep o' Day Boys," which spread panic among the ruling
classes. It was only by sheer terror and bloodshed that the Protestant
landowners, who banded together in "Orange" societies to meet the secret
societies about them, could hold the country down. Outrages on the one
side, tyranny on the other, deepened the disorder and panic every day,
and the hopes of the reformers grew fainter as the terror rose fast
around them. The maddened Protestants scouted all notions of further
concessions to men whom they looked upon as on the verge of revolt; and
Grattan's motions for reform were defeated by increasing majorities. On
the other hand the entry of the anti-revolutionary Whigs into Pitt's
ministry revived Grattan's hopes, for Burke and his followers were
pledged to a liberal policy towards Ireland, and Lord Fitzwilliam, who
came over as viceroy in 1794, encouraged Grattan to bring in a bill for
the entire emancipation of the Catholics at the opening of the next
year. Such a step can hardly have been taken without Pitt's assent; but
the minister was now swept along by a tide of feeling which he could not
control. The Orangemen threatened revolt, the Tories in Pitt's own
Cabinet recoiled from the notion of reform, and Lord Fitzwilliam was not
only recalled, but replaced by Lord Camden, an avowed enemy of all
change or concession to the Catholics. From that moment the United
Irishmen became a revolutionary society; and one of their leaders, Wolfe
Tone, made his way to France, in the spring of 1796, to seek aid in a
national rising.

[Sidenote: France and Ireland.]

It is probable that Tone's errand was known to Pitt; it is certain that
Lord Edward Fitzgerald, another of the patriot leaders, who had been
summoned to carry on more definite negotiations in Basle, revealed
inadvertently as he returned the secret of his hopes to an agent of the
English Cabinet. Vague as were the offers of the United Irishmen, they
had been warmly welcomed by the French Government. Masters at home, the
Directory were anxious to draw off the revolutionary enthusiasm which
the French party of order dreaded as much as Burke himself to the
channels of foreign conquest. They were already planning that descent of
their army in the Alps upon Lombardy which was to give a fatal blow to
one of their enemies, Austria; and they welcomed the notion of a French
descent upon Ireland and an Irish revolt, which would give as fatal a
blow to their other enemy, England. An army of 25,000 men under General
Hoche was promised, a fleet was manned, and preparations were being made
for the expedition during the summer. But the secret was ill kept, and
the news of such an attempt was, we can hardly doubt, the ground of the
obstinacy with which Pitt persisted in the teeth of the national feeling
and of Burke's invectives in clinging to his purpose of concluding a
peace. In October 1796 Lord Malmesbury was despatched to Paris and
negotiations were finally opened for that purpose. The terms which Pitt
offered were terms of mutual restitution. France was to evacuate
Holland and to restore Belgium to the Emperor. England on the other hand
was to restore the colonies she had won to France, Holland, and Spain.
As the English Minister had no power of dealing with the territories
already ceded by Prussia and other states, such a treaty would have left
France, as her eastern border, the line of the Rhine. But even had they
desired peace at all, the Directors would have scorned it on terms such
as these. While Malmesbury was negotiating indeed France was roused to
new dreams of conquest by the victories of Napoleon Buonaparte. The
genius of Carnot, the French Minister of War, had planned a joint
advance upon Vienna by the French armies of Italy and the Rhine, the one
under Buonaparte, the other under Moreau. The plan was only partly
successful. Moreau, though he pushed forward through every obstacle to
Bavaria, was compelled to fall back by the defeat of a lieutenant; and
was only enabled by a masterly retreat through the Black Forest to reach
the Rhine. But the disaster of Moreau was more than redeemed by the
victories of Buonaparte. With the army which occupied the Riviera and
the Maritime Alps the young general marched on Piedmont at the opening
of the summer, separated its army from the Austrian troops, and forced
the king of Sardinia to conclude a humiliating peace. A brilliant
victory at the bridge of Lodi brought him to Milan, and drove the
Austrians into the Tyrol. Lombardy was in the hands of the French, the
Duchies south of the Po pillaged, and the Pope driven to purchase an
armistice at enormous cost, before the Austrian armies, raised to a
force of 50,000 men, again descended from the Tyrol for the relief of
Mantua. But a fatal division of their forces by the Lake of Garda
enabled Buonaparte to hurl them back broken upon Trent, and to shut up
their general, Wurmser, in Mantua with the remnant of his men; while
fresh victories at the bridge of Arcola and at Bassano drove back two
new Austrian armies who advanced to Wurmser's rescue.

[Sidenote: The Terror of Ireland.]

It was the success of Buonaparte which told on the resolve of the
Directory to reject all terms of peace. After months of dilatory
negotiations the offers of Lord Malmesbury were definitely declined, and
the English envoy returned home at the end of the year. Every hour of
his stay in Paris had raised higher hopes of success against England in
the minds of the Directory. At the moment of his arrival Spain had been
driven to declare war as their ally against Britain; and the Spanish and
Dutch fleets were now at the French service for a struggle at sea. The
merciless exactions of Buonaparte poured gold into the exhausted
treasury; and the energy of Hoche rapidly availed itself of this supply
to equip a force for operations in Ireland. At the opening of December
he was ready to put to sea with a fleet of more than forty sail and
25,000 men; and the return of Lord Malmesbury was the signal for the
despatch of his expedition from Brest. The fleet at Toulon, which was
intended to co-operate with that at Brest, and which had sailed through
the Straits of Gibraltar for that purpose, was driven into Port l'Orient
by an English squadron: but contrary winds baffled the fleet which was
watching Hoche, and his armament slipped away with little hindrance
towards the Irish coast. Had it reached Ireland unbroken and under such
a general, the island might well have been lost to the English Crown.
But the winds fought against France, as they had fought against the
Armada of Spain; and the ships were parted from one another by a gale
which burst on them as they put to sea. Seventeen reached Bantry Bay,
but hearing nothing of their leader or of the rest, they sailed back
again to Brest, in spite of the entreaties of the soldiers to be
suffered to land. Another division reached the Shannon to be scattered
and driven home again by a second storm. Twelve vessels were wrecked or
captured, and the frigate in which Hoche had embarked returned to port
without having seen any of its companions. The invasion had failed, but
the panic which it roused woke passions of cruelty and tyranny which
turned Ireland into a hell. Soldiers and yeomanry marched over the
country torturing and scourging the "croppies," as the Irish peasantry
were termed from their short-cut hair; robbing, ravishing, and murdering
at their will. The lightest suspicion, the most unfounded charges, were
taken as warrants for bloodshed. So hideous were these outrages that the
news of them as it reached England woke a thrill of horror in the minds
of even the blindest Tories; but by the landowners who formed the Irish
Parliament they were sanctioned in a Bill of Indemnity and protected for
the future by an Insurrection Act. The terror however only woke a
universal spirit of revolt. Ireland drank in greedily that hatred of
England and of English rule which all the justice and moderation of
later government has failed to destroy; and the United Irishmen looked
with more passionate longing than ever to France.

[Sidenote: The struggle for the Sea.]

Nor had France abandoned the design of invasion; while her victories
made such a design every day more formidable. The war was going steadily
in her favour. A fresh victory at Rivoli, the surrender of Mantua, and
an advance through Styria on Vienna, enabled Buonaparte to wring a peace
from England's one ally, Austria. The armistice was concluded in April
1797, and the final treaty which was signed at Campo Formio in October
not only gave France the Ionian Islands, a part of the old territory of
Venice (whose Italian possessions passed to the Emperor), as well as the
Netherlands and the whole left bank of the Rhine, but united Lombardy
with the Duchies south of the Po and the Papal States as far as the
Rubicon into a "Cisalpine Republic," which was absolutely beneath her
control. The withdrawal of Austria left France without an enemy on the
Continent, and England without an ally. The stress of the war was
pressing more heavily on her every day. A mutiny in the fleet was
suppressed with difficulty. The news of Hoche's expedition brought about
a run for gold which forced on the Bank a suspension of specie payments.
It was in this darkest hour of the struggle that Burke passed away,
protesting to the last against the peace which, in spite of his previous
failure, Pitt was again striving to bring about by fresh negotiations at
Lille. Peace seemed more needful than ever to him now that France was
free to attack her enemy with the soldiers who had fought at Arcola and
Rivoli. Their way, indeed, lay across the sea, and at sea Britain was
supreme. But her supremacy was threatened by a coalition of naval forces
such as had all but crushed her in the American war. Again the Dutch and
Spanish fleets were allied with the fleets of France; and it was
necessary to watch Cadiz and the Scheldt as well as Brest and Toulon. A
single victory of the three confederates, or even such a command of the
Channel as they had held for months during the war with America, would
enable the Directory to throw overwhelming armies not only on the shores
of England, but on the shores of Ireland, and whatever might be the
fate of the one enterprise, there could be little doubt of the success
of the other. The danger was real; but it had hardly threatened England
when it was dispelled by two great victories. The Spanish fleet, which
put out to sea with twenty-seven sail of the line, was met on the
fourteenth of February 1797 by Admiral Jervis off Cape St. Vincent with
a force of but fifteen; and driven back to Cadiz with a loss of four of
its finest vessels. Disheartened as they were, however, their numbers
still exceeded that of the force which blockaded them; and France
counted with confidence on the fleet of Holland, which was ordered to
join its own fleet at Brest. The aim of this union was to protect a
fresh force in its descent upon Ireland, where the United Irishmen now
declared themselves ready for revolt. But a yet sterner fortune awaited
the Dutch than that which had fallen on the Spaniards. Their admiral, De
Winter, who had quitted the Texel during a storm with eleven sail of the
line and four frigates, fell in on the eleventh of October with a far
larger fleet under Admiral Duncan off Camperdown. The Hollanders fought
with a stubborn courage worthy of their old renown, and it was only when
their ships were riddled with shot into mere wrecks that they fell into
the hands of the English.

[Sidenote: The Irish Rising.]

The French project for an expedition to Ireland hung on the junction of
the Dutch fleet with that of Brest, and the command of the Channel
which this junction would have given them. Such a command became
impossible after the defeat of Camperdown. But the disappointment of
their hopes of foreign aid only drove the adherents of revolt in Ireland
to a rising of despair. The union of the national party, which had
lasted to some extent from the American war, was now broken up. The
Protestants of Ulster still looked for aid to France. The Catholics, on
the other hand, were alienated from the French by their attack on
religion and the priesthood; and the failure of the French expedition,
while it damped the hopes of the Ulstermen, gave force to the demands of
the Catholic party for a purely national rising. So fierce was this
demand that the leaders of the United Irishmen were forced to fix on the
spring of 1798 for the outbreak of an insurrection, in which Lord Edward
Fitzgerald, who had some small military experience, was to take the
command. But while yielding on this point to the Catholic section of
their party they conciliated the Protestants by renewed appeals for aid
to the Directory. In spite of its previous failures France again
promised help; and a division was prepared during the winter for service
in Ireland. But the passion of the nation was too intense to wait for
its arrival. The government too acted with a prompt decision in face of
the danger, and an arrest of Lord Edward Fitzgerald with three of their
chief leaders in February 1798 broke the plans of the insurgents. On the
23rd of May, however, the day fixed for the opening of the revolt, the
Catholic peasantry of the south rose in arms. Elsewhere their disorderly
gatherings were easily dispersed by the yeomanry; but Wexford
surrendered to 14,000 insurgents who marched on it, headed by a village
priest, and the town at once became the centre of a formidable revolt.

[Sidenote: Its failure.]

Fortunately for the English rule the old religious hatred which had so
often wrecked the hopes of Ireland broke out in the instant of this
triumph. The Protestant inhabitants of Wexford were driven into the
river or flung into prison. Another body of insurgents, frenzied by the
cruelties of the royal troops, massacred a hundred Protestants in cool
blood. The atrocities of the soldiers and the yeomanry were avenged with
a fiendish ruthlessness. Loyalists were lashed and tortured in their
turn, and every soldier taken was butchered without mercy. The result of
these outrages was fatal to the insurrection. The Ulster Protestants,
who formed the strength of the United Irishmen, stood sullenly aloof
from rebels who murdered Protestants. The Catholic gentry threw
themselves on the side of the government against a rising which
threatened the country with massacre and anarchy. Few in fact had joined
the insurgents in Wexford when Lord Lake appeared before their camp
upon Vinegar Hill with a strong force of English troops on the 21st of
May. The camp was stormed, and with the dispersion of its defenders the
revolt came suddenly to an end. But its suppression came only just in
time to prevent greater disasters; for a few weeks after the close of
the rebellion the long-expected aid arrived from France. The news of the
outbreak had forced the armament which was being equipped in the French
ports to put to sea with forces utterly inadequate to the task it had
set itself, but fresh aid was promised to follow, and the nine hundred
soldiers who landed in August under General Humbert on the coast of Mayo
showed by their first successes how formidable a centre they would have
given to the revolt had the revolt held its ground. But in the two
months which had passed since Vinegar Hill all trace of resistance to
the English rule had been trodden out in blood, and Humbert found
himself alone in a country exhausted and panic-stricken. He marched
however boldly on Castlebar, broke a force of yeomanry and volunteers
three times his number, and only surrendered when Lord Cornwallis, who
had succeeded to the Lord-Lieutenancy, faced him with thirty thousand
men.

[Sidenote: French designs on India.]

Of the threefold attack on which the Directory had relied for the ruin
of England two parts had now broken down. Humbert's surrender and the
failure of the native insurrection left little hope for future attack
on the side of Ireland. The naval confederacy which was to rob England
of the command of the seas had been foiled by the utter wreck of the
Dutch fleet, and the imprisonment of the Spanish fleet in Cadiz. But the
genius of Buonaparte had seized on the schemes for a rising against the
English rule in Hindostan, and widened them into a project of all but
world-wide conquest. At this time the strongest and most vigorous of the
Indian powers was that of Mysore, at the southern extremity of the
peninsula, where a Mussulman state had been built up by the genius of an
adventurer, Hyder Ali. In the days when the English were winning their
supremacy over the Carnatic, Hyder had been their chief difficulty; and
his attack had once brought them to the verge of ruin. The hostility of
his son Tippoo was even more bitter; but the victories of Lord
Cornwallis had taught the Sultan of Mysore that he was no match for the
British power single-handed; and his hopes, like those of the United
Irishmen, were fixed upon France. He was striving to get aid from the
Afghans and from the Nizam, but what he most counted on for the
expulsion of the English from the Carnatic was a force of thirty
thousand French soldiers. Letters requesting such a force were
despatched by him to France in 1797. Buonaparte had already fixed on
Mysore as a basis of operations against the British rule in Hindostan;
and after dismissing as impracticable a project suggested to him on his
return from Italy after the treaty of Campo Formio for a descent upon
England itself, he laid before the Directory a plan for the conquest and
occupation of Egypt as a preliminary to a campaign in Southern India.
Utterly as this plan was foiled in the future, it was far from being the
wild dream which it has often been considered. Both the Ministry and
East Indian Directors were roused into anxiety by the first news of
Buonaparte's expedition. The Earl of Mornington, Governor-General of
British India, was warned of a possible attack from the Red Sea. Four
thousand soldiers were hurried off to reinforce his army; while the
English fleet watched anxiously in the Mediterranean. But so perfect was
the secrecy with which the French plans were combined that Buonaparte
was able to put to sea in May 1798 with a force of 30,000 veterans drawn
from the army of Italy, and making himself master of Malta as he passed
to land near Alexandria at the close of June.

[Sidenote: The battle of the Nile.]

The conquest of Egypt proved as easy and complete as Buonaparte had
hoped. The Mamelukes were routed in the battle of the Pyramids; Cairo
was occupied; and the French troops pushed rapidly up the valley of the
Nile. Their general meanwhile showed his genius for government by a
masterly organization of the conquered country, by the conciliation of
his new subjects, and by measures for the enrolment of native soldiers
which would in a short time have placed him at the head of a formidable
army. Of his ultimate aim there can be little doubt; for he had hardly
landed at Alexandria when he despatched the news of his arrival and
promises of support to Tippoo. All chance however of success in his
projects hung on the maintenance of communications with France. With
Italy, with the Ionian Islands, with Alexandria in French holding, it
was all but impossible to prevent supplies of men and arms from being
forwarded to Egypt, so long as the French fleet remained in the waters
of the Mediterranean and kept the English force concentrated by the
necessity of watching its movements. But the French were hardly masters
of Egypt when their fleet ceased to exist. The thirteen men-of-war which
had escorted the expedition were found by Admiral Nelson in Aboukir Bay,
moored close to the coast in a line guarded at either end by gunboats
and batteries. Nelson resolved to thrust his ships between the French
and the shore. On the morning of the 1st of August his own flag-ship led
the way in this attack; and after a terrible fight of twelve hours, nine
of the French vessels were captured and destroyed, two were burned, and
five thousand French seamen were killed or made prisoners. "Victory,"
cried Nelson, "is not a name strong enough for such a scene." Few
victories indeed in history have produced more effective results than
the battle of the Nile. The French flag was swept from the waters of the
Mediterranean. All communication between France and Buonaparte's army
was cut off; and his hopes of making Egypt a starting-point for the
conquest of India fell at a blow. To hold Egypt itself soon became
difficult, for a desperate revolt broke out at the news of Nelson's
victory in the streets of Cairo, and a Turkish army advanced from Syria
to recover the valley of the Nile.

[Sidenote: France and Europe.]

Secure against invasion at home as against rebellion in Ireland, secure
too against the dangers that threatened her rule in India, and mistress
of the seas, England was free in her turn to attack the assailant who
had so long threatened her very existence. And in such an attack she was
aided at this moment by the temper of the European powers, and by the
ceaseless aggressions of France. The treaties of Basle and Campo Formio
were far from being accepted by the Directory as a final settlement of
the relations of France with Europe. Some faint remnant of the older
dreams of freeing oppressed peoples may have lingered in the aid which
it gave to the rising of the subject districts of Basle and Vaud against
their Bernese masters in the opening of 1798. But mere greed of gold was
seen in the plunder of the treasury of Berne, a plunder which served to
equip the army that sailed with Buonaparte to the shores of Egypt, and
to recruit the exhausted treasury of the Directory; and an ambition, as
reckless as this greed, broke out in an attack on the mountain cantons,
states whose democratic institutions gave no such excuse for hostility
as had been afforded by the aristocracy of Berne. A French decree
abolished the Swiss Confederation, and the independence of its several
states, and established in their place an Helvetic Republic modelled on
a plan sent from Paris, and placed under the protection of France. The
mountain cantons rose against this overthrow of a freedom compared with
which the freedom of France was but of yesterday; but desperate as was
their struggle they were overwhelmed by numbers, and the men of Uri, of
Unterwalden and of Schwytz bowed for the first time to a foreign
conqueror.

[Sidenote: Russia and France.]

The overthrow of this immemorial house of freedom opened the eyes of the
blindest enthusiast to the real character of the French aggressions.
Even in the group of young English poets, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and
Southey, who had clung till now to the dream of the Revolution, of a
Europe freed and regenerated by the arms of the new republic, all belief
in such a dream passed finally away. But the France of the Directory
would have cared little for this alienation of the peoples, had it not
been backed by the revived hostility of their kings. What England
counted on in her efforts for a revival of the coalition was the
resentment of Austria at the aggressions which the Directory had ever
since the peace of Campo Formio been carrying on in Italy. In the
opening of 1798 a French force entered Rome, set up a Roman republic,
and carried off Pius VI. a prisoner to Siena; while the king of Sardinia
was driven to admit French garrisons into his fortresses. Austria
however was still too weak after her defeats to listen to Pitt's
advances, had Pitt stood alone. But Russia was now about to take a new
part in European affairs. Under Catharine the Second this power had
availed itself of the war against France in the west to carry out its
own projects of conquest in eastern Europe; and, as we have seen, Pitt
had watched its advance at the opening of the Revolution with far
greater dread than the movements in France. It was in fact the need
which the two German states felt of balancing the Russian annexations in
Poland by annexations of their own which had paralysed their armies on
the Rhine and saved France at the moment of her greatest danger in 1793.
It is probable that the Directory still counted on the persistence of
Russia in a similar policy, and believed that Catharine would see in
their attack on Egypt and the Turks only a fresh opportunity for
conquests on the Danube. But the sudden greatness of France had warned
Russia that its policy of selfishness had been carried too far. It had
allowed the Republic to tower into supremacy over the Continent, and if
once such a supremacy was firmly established it would prove a fatal
obstacle to the Russian advance. France would again, as under the
monarchy, aim at the restoration of Poland; she would again bar the way
to Constantinople; and her action would be backed by the weight of all
western Europe, which had been thrown into her scale by the policy of
the very state she defied. To avert such a result it was necessary to
restore that balance of the Continent by which France and the German
powers held one another in check; and with a view to this restoration
Russia suddenly declared itself an enemy of France. Catharine's
successor, the Czar Paul, set aside the overtures of the Directory. A
close alliance was formed with Austria, and while an Imperial army
gathered on the Bavarian frontier Russian troops hurried to the west.

[Sidenote: The Union with Ireland.]

The appearance of this new element in the struggle changed its whole
conditions; and it was with renewed hope that Pitt lavished subsidies on
the two allies at the close of 1798. But his preparations for the new
strife were far from being limited to efforts abroad. In England he had
found fresh resources in an Income-Tax, from which he anticipated an
annual return of ten millions. Heavy as the tax was, and it amounted to
ten per cent on all incomes above L200 a year, the dogged resolution of
the people to fight on was seen in the absence of all opposition to
this proposal. What was of even greater importance was to remove all
chance of fresh danger from Ireland. Pitt's temper was of too
statesmanlike a mould to rest content with the mere suppression of
insurrection or with the system of terrorism which for the moment held
the country down. His disgust at "the bigoted fury of Irish Protestants"
had backed Lord Cornwallis in checking the reprisals of his troops and
of the Orangemen; but the hideous cruelty which he was forced to witness
brought about a firm resolve to put an end to the farce of
"Independence" which left Ireland helpless in such hands. The political
necessity for a union of the two islands had been brought home to every
English statesman by the course of the Irish Parliament during the
disputes over the Regency. While England repelled the claims of the
Prince of Wales to the Regency as of right, the legislature of Ireland
admitted them. As the only union left between the two peoples since the
concession of legislative independence was their obedience to a common
ruler, such an act might conceivably have ended in their entire
severance; and the sense of this danger secured a welcome in England for
the proposal which Pitt made at the opening of 1799 to unite the two
Parliaments. The opposition of the Irish borough-mongers was naturally
stubborn and determined, and when the plan was introduced into the
Parliament at Dublin, it was only saved from rejection by a single
vote. But with men like these it was a sheer question of gold; and their
assent was bought with a million in money, and with a liberal
distribution of pensions and peerages. Base and shameless as were such
means, Pitt may fairly plead that they were the only means by which the
bill for the Union could have been passed. As the matter was finally
arranged in June 1800, one hundred Irish members became part of the
House of Commons at Westminster, and twenty-eight temporal peers chosen
by their fellows for life, with four spiritual peers succeeding in a
fixed rotation, took their seats in the House of Lords. Commerce between
the two countries was freed from all restrictions, and every trading
privilege of the one thrown open to the other, while taxation was
proportionately distributed between the two peoples.

[Sidenote: France and the Coalition.]

While the Union was being pushed slowly forward, the struggle abroad was
passing through strange vicissitudes. At the opening of 1799 the efforts
of the new coalition were crowned with success in every quarter. Though
Naples had been turned into a Parthenopean Republic at the close of the
previous year, and the French supremacy extended over the whole
peninsula, the descent of an Austrian army from the Tyrol at the end of
March, and a victory of the Russian and Austrian forces at Cassano,
compelled the French army to evacuate Southern Italy and Lombardy,
while a fresh defeat

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