Pitt declined the offer. He had made up his mind that he would not accept a subordinate situation. Conscious of his ability, he was prepared to wait. He had not to wait long. During the four agitated months of life allowed to the Rockingham Administration Pitt distinguished himself by a motion for reform in the representative system which was applauded by Fox and by Sheridan, but which was defeated by twenty votes. Peace and reform were always passions deeply seated at the heart of Pitt; it was ironic chance that associated him hereafter so intimately with war and with antagonism to so many methods of reform in which he earnestly believed. When the quarrels {225} between Fox and Shelburne over the settlement of the American war ended after Rockingham's death in July, 1782, in the withdrawal from the Ministry of Fox, Burke, and the majority of the Rockingham party, Pitt rightly saw that his hour had come. Fox resigned rather than serve with Shelburne, Pitt accepted Shelburne, and made Shelburne's political existence possible a little longer. With the aid of Pitt, Shelburne could hold on and let Fox go; without Pitt, Fox would have triumphed over Shelburne. From this moment began the antagonism between Fox and Pitt which was to last for the remainder of their too brief lives. At the age of twenty-three Pitt found himself Chancellor of the Exchequer, and one of the most conspicuous men in the kingdom. Fox, who was ten years older, was defeated by the youth whose rivalry had been predicted to Fox when the youth was yet a child.
Pitt's triumph lasted less than a year. Fox, conscious of his own great purposes, and eager to return to office for their better advancement, was prepared to pay a gambler's price for power. To overthrow Shelburne and with Shelburne Pitt, he needed a pretext and an ally. The pretext was easy to find. He had but to maintain that the terms of the peace with America were not the best that the country had a right to expect. The ally was easy to find and disastrous to accept. Nothing in the whole of Fox's history is more regrettable than his unnatural alliance with Lord North. Ever since the hour when Fox had found his true self, and had passed from the ranks of the obedient servants of the King into the ranks of those who devoted themselves to the principles of liberty, there had been nothing and there could have been nothing in common between Fox and North. Everything that Fox held most dear was detestable to North, as North's political doctrines were now detestable to Fox. The political enmity of the two men had been bitter in the extreme, and Fox had assailed North with a violence which might well seem to have made any form of political reconciliation impossible. Yet North was now the man with whom Fox was content to throw in his lot in order to obtain the {226} overthrow of Shelburne and of Pitt. And Fox was not alone among great Whigs in this extraordinary transaction. He carried Burke with him in this unholy alliance between all that was worst and all that was best in English political life. The two men whose genius and whose eloquence had been the most potent factors in the fall of North a year before were now the means of bringing the discredited and defeated statesman back again into the exercise of a power which, as none knew better than they, he had so shamefully misused. Fox and North between them swept Shelburne out of the field. Fox and North between them were able to force a Coalition Ministry upon a reluctant and indignant King. The followers of Fox and the followers of North in combination formed so numerous and so solid a party that they were able to treat the sovereign with a lack of ceremony to which he was little used. Fox had gone out of office rather than admit that the right to nominate the first minister rested with the King instead of with the Cabinet. Now that he had returned to office, he showed his determination to act up to his principles by not permitting the King to nominate a single minister.
[Sidenote: 1783—Fox's coalition with Lord North]
The King's contempt for North since the failure to coerce America, the King's dislike of Fox since Fox became an advanced politician, were deepened now into uncompromising and unscrupulous enmity by the cavalier conduct of the coalition. The King, with his doggedness of purpose and his readiness to use any weapons against those whom he chose to regard as his enemies, was a serious danger even to a coalition that seemed so formidable as the coalition between Fox and North. Fox may very well have thought that his unjustifiable league with North would at least have the result of giving him sufficient time and sufficient influence to carry into effect some of those schemes for the good of the country which he had most nearly at heart. The statesman who makes some unhappy surrender of principle, some ignoble concession to opportunity in order to obtain power, makes his unworthy bargain from a conviction that his hold of office is essential to the welfare of the State, and that a little {227} evil is excusable for a great good. The sophistry that deceives the politician does not deceive the public. Fox gravely injured his position with the people who loved him by stooping to the pact with North, and he did not reap that reward of success in his own high-minded and high-hearted purposes which could alone have excused his conduct. The great coalition which was to stand so strong and to work such wonders was destined to vanish like a breath after accomplishing nothing, and to condemn Fox with all his hopes and dreams to a career of almost unbroken opposition for the rest of his life. If anything in Fox's checkered career could be more tragic than the degradation of his union with the politician whom he declared to be void of every principle of honor and honesty, it was the abiding consequences of the retribution that followed it. Fox had fought hard and with success to live down the follies of his youth. He had to fight harder and with far less success to live down what the world persisted in regarding as the infamy of his association with North.
It is difficult to realize the arguments which persuaded Fox, which persuaded Burke, to join their forces with the fallen minister whom their own mouths, but a little while before, had, in no measured terms, declared to be guilty of the basest conduct and deserving of the severest punishment. All that we know of Fox, all that we know of Burke—and it is possible to know them almost as well as if they were the figures of contemporary history—would seem to deny the possibility of their condescending to any act of conscious baseness. Stained and sullied as the youth of Fox had been with some of the more flagrant vices of a flagrantly vicious society, his record as gambler, as spendthrift, and as libertine seems relatively clean in comparison with this strange act of public treason to the chosen beliefs of his manhood, of public apostasy from those high and generous principles by whose strenuous advocacy he had redeemed his wasted youth. Fiery as Burke's temper had often proved itself to be, fantastic and grotesque as his obstinacy had often showed itself in {228} clinging defiantly to some crotchet or whimsey, that seemed to the spectator unworthy the adhesion of his great intellect, his most eccentric action, his most erratic impulse, appeared sweetly reasonable and serenely lucid when contrasted with the conduct that allowed him to guide or be guided by Fox in a course that proved as foolish as it looked disgraceful, to lead or to follow Fox into packing cards with their arch-enemy of the American war.
On the face of it there is nothing that seems not merely to justify, but even to palliate, the conduct of Fox and Burke. Ugly as the deed seemed to the men of their day, to the men who believed in them, trusted them, loved them, it seems no less ugly to those who at the distance of a century revere their memories and cherish their teachings. One thing may be, must be, assumed by those before whom the lives of Fox and Burke lie bare—that men so animated by high principles, so illuminated by high ideals, cannot deliberately, of set purpose, have sinned against the light. They must have felt, and strongly felt, their justification for entering on a course which was destined to prove so disastrous. Their justification probably was the conviction, nursed if not expressed, that to statesmen whose hands were so full of blessings, to statesmen whose hearts were so big with splendid enterprises, a trivial show of concession, a little paltering with the punctilio of honor, a little eating of brave words, and a little swallowing of principle, was a small price to pay and a price well worth paying for the immeasurable good that England was to gather from their supremacy.
Whatever may have been the motives which induced Fox and Burke to ally themselves with a discredited and defeated politician like Lord North, the results of that alliance were as unsatisfactory to the high contracting parties as the most rigid believer in poetic justice could desire. The Coalition Ministry was unlucky enough in its enterprises to satisfy George himself, who had talked of going back to Hanover rather than accept its services, and had only been dissuaded from self-exile by the sardonic reminder of Lord Thurlow that it might be easier for the {229} King to go to Hanover than to return again to England. Burke inaugurated his new career at the Pay Office by an unhappy act of patronage. He insisted upon restoring to their offices two clerks, named Powell and Bembridge, who had been removed and arraigned for malversation, and he insisted upon defending his indefensible action in the House of Commons with a fury that was as diverting to his opponents as it was distracting to his colleagues. Fox, who had earned so large a share of public admiration for his advocacy of what now would be called liberal opinions, was naturally held responsible by the public for the successful opposition of the Coalition Ministry to Pitt's plan of Parliamentary reform.
[Sidenote: 1783—Legislation of the Coalition Ministry]
Pitt's proposal was not very magnificent. He asked the House to declare that measures were highly necessary to be taken for the future prevention of bribery and expense at elections. He urged that for the future, when the majority of voters for any borough should be convicted of gross and notorious corruption before a select committee of the House appointed to try the merits of any election, such borough should be disfranchised and the minority of voters not so convicted should be entitled to vote for the county in which such borough should be situated. He suggested that an addition of knights of the shire and of the representatives of the metropolis should be made to the state of the representation. He left the number to the discussion and consideration of the House, but for his own part he stated that he should propose an addition of one hundred representatives. Pitt's scheme was scarcely a splendid measure of reform; but at least it was a measure of reform, and it met with small mercy at the hands of the coalition, being defeated by a majority of 293 to 149. This was not an auspicious beginning for the new Ministry, and it was scarcely surprising that many of Fox's adherents in the country should resent his employment of the swollen forces that were practically if not technically under his command to compass the defeat of a bill which, however inadequate, did at least endeavor to bring about a much-needed improvement.
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