Front matter (continued 6)

Pitt and America.

The Congress was the beginning of American union. "There ought to be no New Englandman, no New Yorker known on this continent," said one of its members, "but all of us Americans." The news of its assembly reached England at the end of the year and perplexed the ministry, two of whose members now declared themselves in favour of repealing the Acts. But Rockingham would promise at most no more than suspension; and when the Houses met in the spring of 1766 no voice but Shelburne's was raised in the Peers for repeal. In the Commons however the news at once called Pitt to the front. As a minister he had long since rejected a similar scheme for taxing the Colonies. He had been ill and absent from Parliament when the Stamp Act was passed. But he adopted to the full the constitutional claim of America. He gloried in a resistance, which was denounced in Parliament as rebellion. "In my opinion," he said, "this kingdom has no right to lay a tax on the Colonies.... America is obstinate! America is almost in open rebellion! Sir, I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest." "He spoke," said a looker-on, "like a man inspired," and he ended by a demand for the absolute, total, and immediate repeal of the Acts. It is from this moment that the bitter hatred of George the Third to Pitt may be dated. In an outburst of resentment the king called him a trumpet of sedition, and openly wished for his death. But the general desire that he should return to office was quickened by the sense of power which spoke in his words, and now that the first bitterness of finding himself alone had passed away, Pitt was willing to join the Whigs. Negotiations were opened for this purpose; but they at once broke down. Weak as they felt themselves, Rockingham and his colleagues now shrank from Pitt, as on the formation of their ministry Pitt had shrunk from them. Personal feeling no doubt played its part; for in any united administration Pitt must necessarily take the lead, and Rockingham was in no mood to give up his supremacy. But graver political reasons, as we have seen, co-operated with this jealousy and distrust; and the blind sense which the Whigs had long had of a radical difference between their policy and that of Pitt was now defined for them by the keenest political thinker of the day.

Edmund Burke.

At this moment Rockingham was in great measure guided by the counsels of his secretary, Edmund Burke. Burke had come to London in 1750 as a poor and unknown Irish adventurer. But the learning which at once won him the friendship of Johnson, and the imaginative power which enabled him to give his learning a living shape, soon promised him a philosophical and literary career. Instinct however drew Burke not to literature but to politics. He became secretary to Lord Rockingham, and in 1765 entered Parliament under his patronage. His speech on the repeal of the Stamp Acts at once lifted him into fame. The heavy Quaker-like figure, the scratch wig, the round spectacles, the cumbrous roll of paper which loaded Burke's pocket, gave little promise of a great orator and less of the characteristics of his oratory—its passionate ardour, its poetic fancy, its amazing prodigality of resources; the dazzling succession in which irony, pathos, invective, tenderness, the most brilliant word-pictures, the coolest argument followed each other. It was an eloquence indeed of a wholly new order in English experience. Walpole's clearness of statement, Pitt's appeals to emotion, were exchanged for the impassioned expression of a distinct philosophy of politics. "I have learned more from him than from all the books I ever read," Fox cried at a later time, with a burst of generous admiration. The philosophical cast of Burke's reasoning was unaccompanied by any philosophical coldness of tone or phrase. The groundwork indeed of his nature was poetic. His ideas, if conceived by the reason, took shape and colour from the splendour and fire of his imagination. A nation was to him a great living society, so complex in its relations, and whose institutions were so interwoven with glorious events in the past, that to touch it rudely was a sacrilege. Its constitution was no artificial scheme of government, but an exquisite balance of social forces which was in itself a natural outcome of its history and developement. His temper was in this way conservative, but his conservatism sprang not from a love of inaction but from a sense of the value of social order, and from an imaginative reverence for all that existed. Every institution was hallowed to him by the clear insight with which he discerned its relations to the past and its subtle connexion with the social fabric around it. To touch even an anomaly seemed to Burke to be risking the ruin of a complex structure of national order which it had cost centuries to build up. "The equilibrium of the constitution," he said, "has something so delicate about it, that the least displacement may destroy it." "It is a difficult and dangerous matter even to touch so complicated a machine."

Burke and politics.

Perhaps the readiest refutation of such a theory was to be found in its influence on Burke's practical dealing with politics. In the great question indeed which fronted him as he entered Parliament, it served him well. No man has ever seen with deeper insight the working of those natural forces which build up communities, or which group communities into empires; and in the actual state of the American Colonies, in their actual relation to the mother country, he saw a result of such forces which only madmen and pedants would disturb. To enter upon "grounds of Government," to remodel this great structure of empire on a theoretical basis, seemed to him a work for "metaphysicians," and not for statesmen. What statesmen had to do was to take this structure as it was, and by cautious and delicate adjustment to accommodate from time to time its general shape and the relations of its various parts to the varying circumstances of their natural developement. Nothing, in other words, could be truer than Burke's political philosophy when the actual state of things was good in itself, and its preservation a recognition of the harmony of political institutions with political facts. But nothing could be more unwise than his philosophy when he applied it to a state of things which in itself was evil, and which was in fact a defiance of the natural growth and adjustment of political power. It was thus that he applied it to politics at home. He looked on the Revolution of 1688 as the final establishment of English institutions. His aim was to keep England as the Revolution had left it, and under the rule of the great nobles who were faithful to the Revolution. Such a conviction left him hostile to all movement whatever. He gave his passionate adhesion to the inaction of the Whigs. He made an idol of Lord Rockingham, an honest man, but the weakest of party leaders. He strove to check the corruption of Parliament by a bill for civil retrenchment, but he took the lead in defeating all plans for its reform. Though he was one of the few men in England who understood the value of free industry, he struggled bitterly against all proposals to give freedom to Irish trade, and against the Commercial Treaty which the younger Pitt concluded with France. His work seemed to be that of investing with a gorgeous poetry the policy of timid content which the Whigs believed they inherited from Sir Robert Walpole; and the very intensity of his trust in the natural developement of a people rendered him incapable of understanding the good that might come from particular or from special reforms.

It was this temper of Burke's mind which estranged him from Pitt. His political sagacity had discerned that the true basis of the Whig party must henceforth be formed in a combination of that "power drawn from popularity" which was embodied in Pitt with the power which the Whig families drew from political "connexion." But with Pitt's popular tendencies Burke had no real sympathy. He looked on his eloquence as mere rant; he believed his character to be hollow, selfish, and insincere. Above all he saw in him with a true foreboding the representative of forces before which the actual method of government must go down. The popularity of Pitt in face of his Parliamentary isolation was a sign that the House of Commons was no real representative of the English people. Burke foresaw that Pitt was drifting inevitably to a demand for a reform of the House which should make it representative in fact as in name. The full issues of such a reform, the changes which it would bring with it, the displacement of political power which it would involve, Burke alone of the men of his day understood. But he understood them only to shrink from them with horror, and to shrink with almost as great a horror from the man who was leading England on in the path of change.

Repeal of the Stamp Act.

At this crisis then the temper of Burke squared with the temper of the Whig party and of Rockingham; and the difference between Pitt's tendencies and their own came to the front on the question of dealing with the troubles in America. Pitt was not only for a repeal of the Stamp Acts, but for an open and ungrudging acknowledgement of the claim to a partial independence which had been made by the colonists. His genius saw that, whatever were the legal rights of the mother country, the time had come when the union between England and its children across the Atlantic must rest rather on sentiment than on law. Such a view was wholly unintelligible to the mass of the Whigs or the ministry. They were willing, rather than heighten American discontent, to repeal the Stamp Acts; but they looked on the supremacy of England and of the English Parliament over all English dependencies as a principle absolutely beyond question. From the union, therefore, which Pitt offered Rockingham and his fellow-ministers stood aloof. They were driven, whether they would or no, to a practical acknowledgement of the policy which he demanded; but they resolved that the repeal of the Stamp Acts should be accompanied by a formal repudiation of the principles of colonial freedom which Pitt had laid down. A declaratory act was first brought in, which asserted the supreme power of Parliament over the Colonies "in all cases whatsoever." The declaration was intended no doubt to reassure the followers of the ministry as well as their opponents, for in the assertion of the omnipotence of the two Houses to which they belonged Whig and Tory were at one. But it served also as a public declaration of the difference which severed the Whigs from the Great Commoner. In a full house Pitt found but two supporters in his fierce attack upon the declaratory bill, which was supported by Burke in a speech which at once gave him rank as an orator; while Pitt's lieutenant, Shelburne, found but four supporters in a similar attack in the Lords. The passing of the declaratory act was followed by the introduction of a bill for the repeal of the Stamp Acts; and in spite of the resistance of the king's friends, a resistance instigated by George himself, the bill was carried in February 1766 by a large majority.

The Chatham Ministry.

As the members left the House of Commons, George Grenville, whose resistance had been fierce and dogged, was hooted by the crowd which waited to learn the issue without. Before Pitt the multitude reverently uncovered their heads and followed him home with blessings. It was the noblest hour of his life. For the moment indeed he had "saved England" more truly than even at the crisis of the Seven Years' War. His voice had forced on the ministry and the king a measure which averted, though but for a while, the fatal struggle between England and her Colonies. Lonely as he was, the ministry which had rejected his offers of aid found itself unable to stand against the general sense that the first man in the country should be its ruler; and bitter as was the king's hatred of him, Rockingham's resignation in the summer of 1766 forced George to call Pitt into office. His acceptance of the king's call and the measures which he took to construct a ministry showed a new resolve in the great statesman. He had determined to break finally with the political tradition which hampered him, and to set aside even the dread of Parliamentary weakness which had fettered him three years before. Temple's refusal of aid, save on terms of equality which were wholly inadmissible, was passed by, though it left Pitt without a party in the House of Commons. In the same temper he set at defiance the merely Parliamentary organization of the Whigs by excluding Newcastle, while he showed his wish to unite the party as a whole by his offer of posts to nearly all the members of the late administration. Though Rockingham stood coldly aside, some of his fellow-ministers accepted Pitt's offers, and they were reinforced by Lords Shelburne and Camden, the young Duke of Grafton, and the few friends who still clung to the Great Commoner. Such a ministry however rested for power not on Parliament but on public opinion. It was in effect an appeal from Parliament to the people; and it was an appeal which made such a reform in Parliament as would bring it into unison with public opinion a mere question of time. Whatever may have been Pitt's ultimate designs, however, no word of such a reform was uttered by any one. On the contrary, Pitt stooped to strengthen his Parliamentary support by admitting some even of the "king's friends" to a share in the administration. But its life lay really in Pitt himself, in his immense popularity, and in the command which his eloquence gave him over the House of Commons. His popularity indeed was soon roughly shaken; for the ministry was hardly formed when it was announced that its leader had accepted the earldom of Chatham. The step removed him to the House of Lords, and for a while ruined the public confidence which his reputation for unselfishness had aided him to win. But it was from no vulgar ambition that Pitt laid down his title of the Great Commoner. The nervous disorganization which had shown itself three years before in his despair upon Temple's desertion had never ceased to hang around him, and it had been only at rare intervals that he had forced himself from his retirement to appear in the House of Commons. It was the consciousness of coming weakness that made him shun the storms of debate. But in the Cabinet he showed all his old energy. The most jealous of his fellow-ministers owned his supremacy. At the close of one of his earliest councils Charles Townshend acknowledged to a colleague "Lord Chatham has just shown to us what inferior animals we are!" Plans were at once set on foot for the better government of Ireland, for the transfer of India from the Company to the Crown, and for the formation of an alliance with Prussia and Russia to balance the Family Compact of the House of Bourbon. The alliance was foiled for the moment by the coldness of Frederick of Prussia. The first steps towards Indian reform were only taken by the ministry under severe pressure from Pitt. Petty jealousies, too, brought about the withdrawal of some of the Whigs, and the hostility of Rockingham was shown by the fierce attacks of Burke in the House of Commons. But secession and invective had little effect on the ministry. "The session," wrote Horace Walpole to a friend at the close of 1766, "has ended triumphantly for the Great Earl"; and when Chatham withdrew to Bath to mature his plans for the coming year his power remained unshaken.

END OF VOL. VII.