Chapter III: Industrial England (1)

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.]