[Son of the Earl of Chatham, born 1759, died 1806, and hardly less distinguished than his father as a statesman and orator. He became prime minister at the age of twenty-five, and showed a genius as parliamentary leader which has never been surpassed and rarely equaled, retaining him in power in spite of his feebleness in the conduct of war and diplomacy. His great talents found their most congenial field in the management of home affairs, being the prototype of Mr. Gladstone in this respect. It is the younger Pitt’s glory that with no able man in his own party to support him, he held power so long unshaken by the incessant assaults of such men as Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and Lord North.]
When Parliament came together after the overthrow of the Coalition, the minister of twenty-five was master of England as no minister had been before. Even the king yielded to his sway, partly through gratitude for the triumph he had won for him over the Whigs, partly from a sense of the madness which was soon to strike him down, but still more from a gradual discovery that the triumph which he had won over his political rivals had been won, not to the profit of the crown, but of the nation at large. The Whigs, it was true, were broken, unpopular, and without a policy, while the Tories clung to the minister who had “saved the king.” But it was the support of a new political power that really gave his strength to the young minister. The sudden rise of English industry was pushing the manufacturer to the front; and all that the trading classes loved in Chatham, his nobleness of temper, his consciousness of power, his patriotism, his sympathy with a wider world than the world within the Parliament house, they saw in his son. He had little indeed of the poetic and imaginative side of Chatham’s genius, of his quick perception of what was just and what was possible, his far-reaching conceptions of national policy, his outlook into the future of the world.
Pitt’s flowing and sonorous commonplaces rang hollow beside the broken phrases which still make his father’s eloquence a living thing to Englishmen. On the other hand, he possessed some qualities in which Chatham was utterly wanting. His temper, though naturally ardent and sensitive, had been schooled in a proud self-command. His simplicity and good taste freed him from his father’s ostentation and extravagance. Diffuse and commonplace as his speeches seem, they were adapted as much by their very qualities of diffuseness and commonplace as by their lucidity and good sense to the intelligence of the middle classes whom Pitt felt to be his real audience. In his love of peace, his immense industry, his dispatch of business, his skill in debate, his knowledge of finance, he recalled Sir Robert Walpole; but he had virtues which Walpole never possessed, and he was free from Walpole’s worst defects. He was careless of personal gain. He was too proud to rule by corruption. His lofty self-esteem left no room for any jealousy of subordinates. He was generous in his appreciation of youthful merits; and the “boys” he gathered round him, such as Canning and Lord Wellesley, rewarded his generosity by a devotion which death left untouched. With Walpole’s cynical inaction Pitt had no sympathy whatever. His policy from the first was one of active reform, and he faced every one of the problems, financial, constitutional, religious, from which Walpole had shrunk. Above all, he had none of Walpole’s scorn of his fellow-men. The noblest feature in his mind was its wide humanity.
His love for England was as deep and personal as his father’s love, but of the sympathy with English passion and English prejudice which had been at once his father’s weakness and strength he had not a trace. When Fox taunted him with forgetting Chatham’s jealousy of France and his faith that she was the natural foe of England, Pitt answered nobly that “to suppose any nation can be unalterably the enemy of another is weak and childish.” The temper of the time and the larger sympathy of man with man, which especially marks the eighteenth century as a turning-point in the history of the human race, was everywhere bringing to the front a new order of statesmen, such as Turgot and Joseph II, whose characteristics were a love of mankind and a belief that as the happiness of the individual can only be secured by the general happiness of the community to which he belongs, so the welfare of individual nations can only be secured by the general welfare of the world. Of these Pitt was one. But he rose high above the rest in the consummate knowledge, and the practical force which he brought to the realization of his aims.
Pitt’s strength lay in finance; and he came forward at a time when the growth of English wealth made a knowledge of finance essential to a great minister. The progress of the nation was wonderful. Population more than doubled during the eighteenth century, and the advance of wealth was even greater than that of population. The war had added a hundred millions to the national debt, but the burden was hardly felt. The loss of America only increased the commerce with that country; and industry had begun that great career which was to make Britain the workshop of the world. Though England already stood in the first rank of commercial states at the accession of George III, her industrial life at home was mainly agricultural. The wool-trade had gradually established itself in Norfolk, the West Riding of Yorkshire, and the counties of the southwest; while the manufacture of cotton was still almost limited to Manchester and Bolton, and remained so unimportant that in the middle of the eighteenth century the export of cotton goods hardly reached the value of fifty thousand a year. There was the same slow and steady progress in the linen trade of Belfast and Dundee and the silks of Spitalfields. The processes of manufacture were too rude to allow any large increase of production. It was only where a stream gave force to turn a mill-wheel that the wool-worker could establish his factory; and cotton was as yet spun by hand in the cottages, the “spinsters” of the family sitting with their distaffs round the weaver’s handloom. But had the processes of manufacture been more efficient, they would have been rendered useless by the want of a cheap and easy means of transport. The older main roads, which had lasted fairly through the middle ages, had broken down in later times before the growth of traffic and the increase of wagons and carriages.
The new lines of trade lay often along mere country lanes which had never been more than horse-tracks. Much of the woolen trade, therefore, had to be carried on by means of long trains of pack-horses; and in the case of yet heavier goods, such as coal, distribution was almost impracticable, save along the greater rivers or in districts accessible from the sea. A new era began when the engineering genius of Brindley joined Manchester with its port of Liverpool in 1767, by a canal which crossed the Irwell on a lofty aqueduct; the success of the experiment soon led to the universal introduction of water-carriage, and Great Britain was traversed in every direction by three thousand miles of navigable canals. At the same time a new importance was given to the coal which lay beneath the soil of England. The stores of iron which had lain side by side with it in the northern counties had lain there unworked through the scarcity of wood, which was looked upon as the only fuel by which it could be smelted.
In the middle of the eighteenth century a process for smelting iron with coal turned out to be effective; and the whole aspect of the iron trade was at once revolutionized. Iron was to become the working material of the modern world; and it is its production of iron which more than all else has placed England at the head of industrial Europe. The value of coal as a means of producing mechanical force was revealed in the discovery by which Watt in 1765 transformed the steam-engine from a mere toy into the most wonderful instrument which human industry has ever had at its command. The invention came at a moment when the existing supply of manual labor could no longer cope with the demands of the manufacturers. Three successive inventions in twelve years, that of the spinning-jenny in 1764 by the weaver Hargreaves, of the spinning-machine in 1768 by the barber Arkwright, of the “mule” by the weaver Crompton in 1776, were followed by the discovery of the power-loom. But these would have been comparatively useless had it not been for the revelation of a new and inexhaustible labor-force in the steam-engine. It was the combination of such a force with such means of applying it that enabled Britain during the terrible years of her struggle with France and Napoleon to all but monopolize the woolen and cotton trades, and raised her into the greatest manufacturing country that the world had seen.
To deal wisely with such a growth required a knowledge of the laws of wealth which would have been impossible at an earlier time. But it had become possible in the days of Pitt. If books are to be measured by the effect which they have produced on the fortunes of mankind the “Wealth of Nations” must rank among the greatest of books. Its author was Adam Smith, an Oxford scholar and a professor at Glasgow. Labor, he contended, was the one source of wealth, and it was by freedom of labor, by suffering the worker to pursue his own interest in his own way, that the public wealth would best be promoted. Any attempt to force labor into artificial channels, to shape by laws the course of commerce, to promote special branches of industry in particular countries, or to fix the character of the intercourse between one country and another, is not only a wrong to the worker or the merchant, but actually hurtful to the wealth of a state. The book was published in 1776, at the opening of the American war, and studied by Pitt during his career as an undergraduate at Cambridge. From that time he owned Adam Smith for his master. He had hardly become minister before he took the principles of the “Wealth of Nations” as the groundwork of his policy. The ten earlier years of his rule marked a new point of departure in English statesmanship. Pitt was the first English minister who really grasped the part which industry was to play in promoting the welfare of the world. He was not only a peace minister and a financier, as Walpole had been, but a statesman who saw that the best security for peace lay in the freedom and widening of commercial intercourse between nations; that public economy not only lessened the general burdens but left additional capital in the hands of industry; and that finance might be turned from a mere means of raising revenue into a powerful engine of political and social improvement.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.
By LOUIS ADOLPHE THIERS.
[Emperor of France, born in Corsica 1769, died a prisoner on the island of St. Helena in 1821. Educated at the military schools of Brienne and Paris, Napoleon became a sous-lieutenant of artillery at the age of sixteen. He had become a captain when the revolution reached its height in the Reign of Terror. Though never an actor in the horrors of Jacobin rule, he was supposed to have been a warm friend of Robespierre. After the fall of the terrorists Napoleon took the side of the convention, and at the head of its troops dispersed the infuriated mob of Montagnards with the famous “whiff of grapeshot” which blew up the last remains of the party of 1793. After his marriage with Josephine Beauharnais, the young soldier was appointed to the command of the army of Italy. In two years Napoleon, in a series of splendid battles, annihilated four Austrian armies, liberated Italy, and forced Austria to a humiliating peace. After the failure of the Egyptian expedition Napoleon returned to France, and by the coup d’état of December, 1799, attained supreme power as first consul. The second Italian campaign of 1800 was no less brilliant than the first, culminating in the battle of Marengo. In 1802 Napoleon was made life-consul, “the swelling prologue of the imperial theme,” for nine months later he assumed the title of emperor, and was crowned by Pope Pius VII at Notre Dame. The year 1812 was the beginning of the disasters which finally dethroned him. The terrible Russian campaign, and the utter defeat of his arms in Spain by Lord Wellesley, afterward Duke of Wellington, marked a change in the clock of destiny. The great European coalition of 1813 brought overwhelming forces against him, resulting in the great battle of Dresden, lasting three days—October 16th, 17th, and 18th—which broke the French power. The allies entered Paris, March 31, 1814, and Napoleon abdicated on April 11th. His exile in Elba lasted less than ten months, and on his return to France two hundred thousand men rallied to him at his call. The battle of Waterloo, fought on June 15, 1815, ended in his overwhelming defeat at the hands of the Duke of Wellington, assisted by Marshal Blücher. Napoleon’s second abdication was followed by his surrender to the English, and his exile to St. Helena for the rest of his life.]