Pitt and the king.
Thus began the long and eventful ministry which was to last for the next seventeen years. With the triumph of Pitt English politics are lifted to a higher level, and lose the mean and petty aspect which they had displayed ever since the days of Walpole. For the first time since the century began, England was in the hands of a minister of a spotless personal integrity, who possessed broad views and a definite political programme. His power was enormous, for, in return for having delivered the king from his hated enemies the Whigs, Pitt was granted the royal support even for measures which his narrow-minded sovereign hardly understood and could not love. George tolerated in him a policy which would have maddened him if it had been pursued by the Whigs. In return the minister treated the king with a loyalty and a personal regard which were perhaps hardly deserved by his master.
The new Tory party.
Pitt took from the elder Tories the loyalty which they had degraded into subservience, and from the Whigs the liberal and reforming principles and hatred of corruption which they had preached but not practised. On the basis of the two combined, he strove to build up a party, new in fact if not in name, from the scattered knots and sections of politicians who had united to oppose the iniquitous coalition of Fox and North. The wonderful success of the earlier years of his administration fixed him firmly in his seat, and enabled him to carry out his policy.
The financial situation.
He found the country still in the depths of the depression caused by the American war, with a deficit of £12,000,000, and a National Debt which had just mounted up to what was then considered the crushing sum of £200,000,000. So low was public credit that Consols only stood at 60. Yet in five years Pitt could show a prosperous balance-sheet, a revenue rapidly increasing without any additional taxation, a scheme—if a faulty one—for extinguishing the National Debt, and the 3 per cents. at par.
The fact was that in 1784 the state of England was not so bad as it appeared. Financially, the American war failed to ruin the country, because new sources of wealth were developed exactly at the moment when they were wanted. To replace the comparatively small commercial profit which we had been wont to draw from our lost Western colonies, a sudden increase of wealth came flooding in from our new Eastern empire in India. Nor was this all. Even more important were the new channels of profit opened by the development of our home manufactures.
Improved communications.
We have already spoken of the symptoms of an approaching development in our domestic industries which were beginning to be felt toward the end of the reign of George II. This movement came to maturity in the earlier years of George III. While the king was wrangling with the Whigs, and sowing the seeds of the American war, a revolution was quietly transforming the character of English trade. Between 1760 and 1780 a network of canals had been constructed to connect the centres of manufacturing life. The muddy lanes, which England had hitherto called roads, began at last to disappear, and a multitude of turnpike Acts created new highways along which traffic could readily make its way. The fast-travelling coach superseded the lumbering stage-waggons, which had crept from town to town.
Development of the North.