The disintegrating effects of the party system, or rather of its factious use by the Whig leaders, have been explained in these pages. Its first result was seen in the divergence of the careers of Pitt and Fox. The cause of Reform ought to have received their undivided support; but little by little they were edged apart, and their hostility was perhaps the most lasting of the many evils wrought by the unnatural Coalition of Fox and North. For a time Pitt gathered around him a national party, which became avowedly so on the junction of the Old Whigs in 1794. But in the last years of his life the denuding influences of partisan and personal feuds disastrously thinned his following. From the refusal of George to grant Catholic Emancipation, and the consequent resignation of Pitt in the spring of 1801, we may trace three sinister results. The Union with Ireland was bereft of its natural sequel, Catholic Emancipation; the Ministerial ranks were cleft in twain; and the crisis brought to the front Addington, a man utterly incapable of confronting Napoleon. Had Pitt remained in power, the Peace of Amiens would have been less one-sided, its maintenance more dignified; and the First Consul, who respected the strong but bullied the weak, would probably have acquiesced in a settlement consonant with the reviving prestige of England. But though the Union Jack won notable triumphs in the spring of 1801, yet at London everything went awry. Moved by consideration for the King, then recovering from lunacy, Pitt weakly promised not to bring forward Catholic Emancipation during his life, an act which annoyed the Grenville–Windham group. His rash promise to support Addington tied his hands in the following years; and even after the renewal of war he too scrupulously refrained from overthrowing a Ministry whose weakness had invited foreign aggressions and was powerless to avenge them. Finally, the Grenvilles joined Fox; and thus the King's perversity nullified the efforts of Pitt to form an Administration worthy to cope with Napoleon.
Nevertheless, the challenge flung down to England by the French regicides in 1793 was such as to enhance the person of the Monarch in these islands; and the Revolutionary War, which was fatal to several dynasties on the Continent, served to consolidate the power of the House of Brunswick. For, though Pitt sought to keep the war from becoming a royalist crusade, it almost inevitably assumed that character. During hostilities there can be but two sharply defined parties. Accordingly, Pitt, who opened his career with a bold attack upon the prerogatives of George III, ended it as his champion, even consenting to surrender a cherished conviction in order that the Monarch's peace of mind might not be troubled. Was ever a Minister beset by more baffling problems, by more hampering restrictions? Peace might have solved and shattered them. But peace he could not secure in the years 1796, 1797; and when finally it came it proved to be no peace, merely a pause before a still greater cycle of war.
The grandeur of Pitt's efforts for ensuring the independence of Europe has somewhat obscured his services as Empire builder. Yet, with the possible exception of Chatham, no statesman has exercised a greater influence on the destinies of the British race. On two occasions he sternly set his face against the cession of Gibraltar; he took keen interest in the settlement of New South Wales; his arrangements for the government of Canada deserve far higher praise than they have usually secured; and his firmness in repelling the archaic claims of Spain to the shores of the Northern Pacific gained for his people the future colony of British Columbia. Cherishing a belief in the pacific nature of Bonaparte's policy at the time of the Treaty of Amiens, he condoned the retrocession of the Cape of Good Hope and of Malta, on condition of the gain of Ceylon and Trinidad; but after the revival of French schemes of aggression in the East he saw the imperative need of planting or maintaining the Union Jack at those commanding points. He, who has been accused of excessive trust in allies, prepared to forego the alliance of Russia rather than give up Malta; and, even before Nelson gained the mastery at sea, Pitt sent forth an expedition to conquer the Cape. In his magnanimous desire of securing to Europe the blessings of a lasting peace he was ready to surrender maritime conquests of greater pecuniary value so long as England held the keys of the overland and sea routes to India. To that empire his just and statesmanlike policy brought a new sense of confidence and therefore a time of comparative rest, until the threatening orientation of Bonaparte's plans once more placed everything at hazard. Thanks to the exertions of Dundas and the Wellesleys, the crisis was averted; but the policy which assured British supremacy in the East was essentially that of Pitt.
It is far easier to assess the importance of the life work of Pitt than to set forth his character in living traits. Those who knew him well agree as the charm of his personality; but they supply few illuminating details, perhaps out of respect for the reserve which was his usual panoply. Like Chatham he rarely revealed his inmost self. The beauties of his conversation, informed with learning, sparkling with wit, always vivacious yet never spiteful, never appeared in their full glow except in the circle of his dearest friends; but by singular ill fortune they who could have handed on those treasures, were satisfied with entries such as: "Pitt talked a great deal among his friends"; or, "In society he was remarkably cheerful and pleasant, full of wit and playfulness";[786] or again, "His great delight was society. There he shone with a degree of calm and steady lustre which often astonished me more than his most splendid efforts in Parliament; ... he seemed utterly unconscious of his own superiority and much more disposed to listen than to talk; ... his appearance dispelled all care, his brow was never clouded even in the severest public trials."[787] These are only the hors d'œuvres of what must have been a feast of delight; but even they suffice to refute the Whig slanders as to Pitt's austerity and selfishness. Under happier auspices he would have been known as the most lovable of English statesmen; and his exceptional fondness for children would alone suffice to expose the falsity of his alleged reply to a manufacturer who complained that he could not get enough men—"Then you must take the children."[788] Cynicism at the expense of the weak was a trait utterly alien to him. It is also incorrect to assert, with Macaulay, that "pride pervaded the whole man, was written in the harsh rigid lines of his face, was marked by the way in which he walked, in which he sat, in which he stood, and, above all, in which he bowed." The Whig historian, here following the Whig tradition, formed his estimate of the whole man from what was merely a parliamentary mannerism. Pitt, as we have seen, was a prey to shyness and gaucherie; and the rigid attitude which he adopted for the House was not so much the outcome of a sense of superiority (though he had an able man's consciousness of worth) as a screen to hide those defects. A curiously stilted manner has been the bane of many gifted orators and actors; but the real test is whether they could throw it off in private. That Pitt threw it off in the circle of his friends they all agree. The only defects which Wilberforce saw in him were an inadequate knowledge of human nature, a too sanguine estimate of men and of the course of events, and, in later years, occasional displays of petulance in face of opposition.[789] The first are the defects of a noble nature, the last those of a man whose strength has long been overtaxed.
In fact, Pitt's constitution was unequal to the prolonged strain. In childhood his astonishingly precocious powers needed judicious repression. Instead, they were unduly forced by the paternal pride of Chatham. At Cambridge, at Lincoln's Inn, and in Parliament the intellectual pressure was maintained, with the result that his weakly frame was constantly overwrought and attenuated by a too active mind. Further, the pressure at Westminster was so continuous as to preclude all chance of widening his nature by foreign travel. He caught but a glimpse of the life of France in 1783; and his knowledge of other peoples and politics was therefore perforce derived from books. It is therefore surprising that the young Prime Minister displayed the sagacity and tolerance which marked his career.
But his faculties, though not transcendently great, were singularly well balanced, besides being controlled by an indomitable will and tact that rarely was at fault. In oratory he did not equal Sheridan in wit and brilliance, Burke in richness of thought and majesty of diction, or Fox in massive strength and debating facility; but, while falling little short of Fox in debate, he excelled him in elegance and conciseness, Burke in point and common sense, Sheridan in dignity and argumentative power, and all of them in the felicitous wedding of elevated thought or vigorous argument to noble diction. By the side of his serried yet persuasive periods the efforts of Fox seemed ragged, those of Burke philosophic essays, those of Sheridan rhetorical tinsel. And this harmony was not the effect of long and painful training. His maiden speech of 26th February 1781 displayed the grace and forcefulness which marked his classic utterance at the Lord Mayor's banquet ten weeks before his death.
Precocious maturity also characterized his financial plans, which displayed alike the shrewd common sense of those of Walpole and the wider aims of Adam Smith. Before his twenty-sixth year Pitt laid the basis of a system which, whatever its defects, ensured the speedy recovery of national credit and belied the spiteful croakings of foreign rivals. Four days after his death, Fox freely admitted that the establishment of the Sinking Fund had been most beneficial; and this belief, though we now see it to be ill-founded, certainly endowed the nation with courage to continue the struggle against the overgrown power of France. Scarcely less remarkable is his record of legislative achievement. His India Bill of 1784, his attempt to free Anglo-Irish trade from antiquated shackles, his effort to present to Parliament a palatable yet not ineffective scheme of Reform, raise him above the other law-givers of the eighteenth century in the grandeur of his aims if not in his actual achievements. By the India Bill of 1784 he reconciled the almost incompatible claims of eastern autocracy and western democracy. If he failed to carry fiscal and Parliamentary Reform, it was due less to tactical defects on his part than to prejudice and selfishness among those whom he sought to benefit.
On the other hand, his intense hopefulness often led him to overlook obstacles and to credit all men with his own high standard of intelligence and probity, a noble defect which not seldom marred his diplomatic and military arrangements during the Great War. At no point have I slurred over his mistakes, his diffusion of effort over too large an area of conflict, and his perhaps undue trust in doubtful allies. But, even so, as I have shown, a careful examination of all the available evidence generally reveals the reasons for his confidence; and failures due to this cause are far less disastrous, because less dispiriting to the nation, than those which are the outcome of sluggishness or cowardice. Of those unpardonable sins Pitt has never been accused even by his severest critics. After the repulse of his pacific overtures by the French Directory in September 1797 his attitude was one almost of defiance, witness his curt rejection of similar offers by Bonaparte early in 1800, which may be pronounced the gravest defect of his diplomatic career.
In that age the action of statesmen was often dilatory; and we must admit that in regard to the Act of Union with Ireland Pitt's procedure was halting and ineffective, so that finally he was driven to use corrupt means to force through the corrupt Irish Parliament a measure which in the autumn of 1798 would have been accepted thankfully by the dominant caste. His Bill of 1797 for the relief of the poor and his Land Tax Commutation Act of 1798 are examples of improvident legislation. But from a leader overburdened with the details of war and diplomacy we should not expect the keen foresight, the minute care as to details, which distinguished Gladstone. To compare the achievements of a statesman hard pressed by the problems of the Revolutionary Era with those of a peaceful age when the standard of legislative effort had been greatly raised is unfair; and the criticism of Pitt by a distinguished historian evinces partiality towards the Victorian statesman rather than an adequate appreciation of the difficulties besetting a Minister of George III in those times of turmoil.[790] It is true that Pitt did not inaugurate Factory legislation; that was the work of the Addington Cabinet in 1802; he did not link his name with the efforts of Romilly and others for the reform of the brutal Penal Code; and he did little for art and literature; but neither the personality of George nor the state of the national finances favoured the rise of a Maecenas.