Thy father’s fame with thine fair Truth shall blend.
His vigour saved from foreign foes the land,
Thy prudence makes each foreign foe a friend.
Rev. W. Mason to Pitt, 1786.
The nation is but the family writ large; and, just as families after a ruinous quarrel sometimes win their way back towards prudence and friendliness, so too nations now and again feel the force of the sociable instincts. Such a time was now at hand for Great Britain and France. The eight years of the American War of Independence had increased the debt of the Island Power by £115,000,000;[450] and so wasteful had been the conduct of the war by France that in the years 1778–1783, she had exceeded the total of her already large peace expenditure by £66,000,000.[451] Further, as that struggle brought to her few results beyond the satisfaction of rending the British Empire in twain, she was scarcely the better for it. In truth, while defeat led patriotic Britons to tread the humble paths of retrenchment and reform, the triumph of France allured her politicians into the stately avenues ending in bankruptcy and Revolution.
During the period of war, philosophy, science, and industry had been waging their peaceful campaigns; and now in the exhaustion or quiescence which beset both peoples, the still small voice of reason was heard. The responsiveness of thought in England and France is one of the most remarkable facts in the eighteenth century. Though political rivalry had five times over embroiled those peoples in deadly strife, yet their thinkers had never ceased to feel the thrill of sympathetic ideas, originated by “the natural enemy,” which proved to be no less potent than the divulsive forces of statecraft. The Marconigrams of thought pass through storms, whether atmospheric or political; and it may be that finally the nations will become sounding-boards responding more and more to progressive ideas, and less and less to the passions of mankind.
Certainly the mental sympathy of England and France in that century was strongly marked. As is well known, the philosophy of Locke supplied Voltaire and Rousseau with most of the weapons of their intellectual armoury. From the English constitution Montesquieu drew many of the contentions which lend significance to his Esprit des Lois. The ideas of naturalism and sensibility were wafted hither from the garner of Rousseau. Philanthropy became a force in both lands about the same time but in diverse ways. In France it was in the main anti-clerical, springing from the indignant protests of Voltaire against atrocities such as that inflicted by the Church on Calas. In this land it may be traced to the Wesleyan revival, the motive which impelled Howard, Clarkson, and Wilberforce being distinctly religious.
On a lower plane we notice the immense vogue of English fashions in France, and of French modes in England. Grands seigneurs sought to copy our field sports, swathed themselves in English redingotes, and rose in the stirrups à l’Anglaise. The Duc de Chartres (the future Philippe Egalité) set the rage for English ways and fabrics, so that French industries seriously suffered. In 1785 the French Minister complained to our envoy that French draperies could not be sold unless they looked like English stuffs.[452] Britons returned the compliment. They swarmed into France. We find our envoy complaining that English families were settling in every French town, so that it might be well to devise an absentee tax which would drive them homewards.[453]
But no influence helped on the new cosmopolitanism so much as the spread of ideas of Free Trade. Here the honours lie with French thinkers. It was by residence in France and contact with the Economistes, Quesnay and Turgot, that Adam Smith was able to formulate the ideas soon to be embodied in the “Wealth of Nations.” Here we may note a curious paradox. The practical islanders supplied their neighbours with political ideas which, when barbed by Voltaire and Rousseau, did much to gall France into violent action. On the other hand, the more nimble-witted people gave to its trading rival the fiscal principles (neglected at home) which furthered the extension of its commerce. Venomous use might be made of this contrast by that fast diminishing band of Anglophobes who see in all British actions perfidious attempts to ruin France; but it must be remembered that everything depends on the men who introduce and apply the new ideas, and that, whereas France was unfortunate in the men who promulgated and worked the political principles learnt in England, the islanders on the contrary had the wisest of counsellors. Contrast Voltaire, Rousseau, and Robespierre with Adam Smith and Pitt, and the riddle is solved at once.
Amidst the exhaustion of war, both nations were now ready to listen to all that was most convincing in the arguments of the Economistes and of Adam Smith. These exponents of the nascent science of Economics rendered a memorable service to the cause of peace by urging nations, like sensible traders, to rejoice in the prosperity of their neighbours, not in their poverty. Propinquity, said they, should be an incentive to free intercourse, not to hatred. Adam Smith pointed out in his “Wealth of Nations” (1776) that France could offer us a market eight times as populous as that of our North American colonies, and twenty-four times as advantageous if the frequency of the returns were reckoned. The British market, he said, would be equally profitable to France. He laughed to scorn the notion that France would always drain Great Britain of her specie, and showed that the worship of the “balance of trade” was accountable for much folly and bloodshed.[454] It is difficult to say whether these views had much hold on the English people. If we may judge from the passions aroused by Pitt’s Irish Resolutions, it was slight. On the other hand the absence of any vehement opposition to the commercial treaty with France a year later, shows either that public opinion here was moving forwards, or that the Opposition felt it impossible to bring to bear on the absolute government of Louis XVI those irritating arguments which had had so potent an influence on the Irish people.