to the independent part of the house and to the public at large for that acquittal from blame to which my innocence entitles me. My earliest impressions were in favor of the noblest and most disinterested modes of serving the public. These impressions I will cherish as a legacy infinitely more valuable than the greatest inheritance. You may take from me the privileges and emoluments of place, but you cannot, you shall not, take from me those habitual regards for the prosperity of Great Britain which constitute the honor, the happiness, the pride of my life. With this consolation, the loss of power and the loss of fortune, though I affect not to despise, I hope I shall soon be able to forget. I praise Fortune when constant; if she strikes her swift wing, I resign her gifts and seek upright, unportioned poverty."* The eloquence of Pitt, his wise conduct, and the purity of his morals, gained him the confidence to which Fox vainly aspired.† A majority of seventeen appearing against Shelburne, he resigned on the twenty-fourth; and by his advice the king on the same day offered to Pitt, though not yet twenty-four years old, the treasury, with power to form an administration and with every assurance of support. But the young statesman, obeying alike the dictates of prudence and the custom of the British constitution, would not accept office without a majority in the house of commons; and on the twenty-seventh, finding that such a majority could not be obtained but by the aid, or at least the neutrality, of Lord North, he refused the splendid offer, unalterably firm alike against the entreaties and the reproaches of the king. This moderation in a young man, panting with ambition and conscious of his powers, added new lustre to his fame. While the imperfect agreement between the members of the coalition delayed the formation of a ministry, on the third of March, Pitt, as chancellor of the exchequer, presented a bill framed after the liberal principles of Shelburne. Its preamble, which rightly described the Americans as aliens, declared * Almon, xxvi., 341, 352; Life of Romilly, i., 205. Moustier to Vergennes, 1 March 1783. MS. Fox in Moustier to Vergennes, 11 April 1783, MS.; Price in Life of A. Lee, ii., 349. "it highly expedient that the intercourse between Great Britain and the United States should be established on the most enlarged principles of reciprocal benefit;" and, as a consequence, not only were the ports of Great Britain to be opened to them on the same terms as to other sovereign states, but, alone of the foreign world, their ships and vessels, laden with the produce or manufactures of their own country, might as of old enter all British ports in America, paying no other duties than those imposed on British vessels. On the seventh Eden objected, saying: "The bill will introduce a total revolution in our commercial system. Reciprocity with the United States is nearly impracticable, from their provincial constitutions. The plan is utterly improper, for it completely repeals the navigation act. The American states lie so contiguous to our West Indian islands, they will supply them with provisions to the ruin of the provision trade with Ireland. We shall lose the carrying trade, for the Americans are to be permitted under this bill to bring West Indian commodities to Europe. The Americans on their return from our ports may export our manufacturing tools, and, our artifi cers emigrating at the same time, we shall see our manufactures transplanted to America. Nothing more should be done than to repeal the prohibitory acts and vest the king in council with powers for six months to suspend such laws as stand in the way of an amicable intercourse." Pitt agreed that "the bill was most complicated in its nature and most extensive in its consequences,' ," and, giving it but faint support, he solicited the assistance and the information of every one present to mould it, so that it might prove most useful at home and most acceptable in America. "While there is an immense extent of unoccupied territory to attract the inhabitants to agriculture," said Edmund Burke, "they will not be able to rival us in manufactures. Do not treat them as aliens. Let all prohibitory acts be repealed, and leave the Americans in every respect as they were before in point of trade." The clause authorizing direct intercourse between the United States and the British West India islands was allowed to remain in the report to the house.† Before the bill was discussed again, the coalition, after long delays caused by almost fatal dissensions among themselves, had been installed. In pursuit of an ascendency in the cabinet, Lord North plumed himself on having ever been a consistent whig; believing that "the appearance of power was all that a king of England could have;"* and insisting that during all his ministry "he had never attributed to the crown any other prerogative than it was acknowledged to possess by every sound whig and by all those authors who had written on the side of liberty." But he betrayed his friends by contenting himself with a subordinate office in a cabinet in which there would always be a majority against him, and, while Fox seized on the lead, the nominal chieftainship was left to the duke of Portland, who had neither capacity for business, nor activity, nor power as a speaker, nor knowledge of liberal principles. The necessity of accepting a ministry so composed drove the king to the verge of madness. He sorrowed over "the most profligate age; " "the most unnatural coalition;" and he was heard to use "strong expressions of personal abhorrence of Lord North, whom he charged with treachery and ingratitude of the blackest nature." # "Wait till you see the end,” | said the king to the representative of France at the next levee; and Fox knew that the chances in the game were against him, as he called to mind that he had sought in vain the support of Pitt; had defied the king; and had joined himself to colleagues whom he had taught liberal Englishmen to despise, and whom he himself could not trust. In the slowly advancing changes of the British constitution, the old whig party, as first conceived by Shaftesbury and Locke to resist the democratic revolution in England on the one side, and the claim of arbitrary sovereignty by the Stuarts on the other, was near its end. The time was coming for the people to share in power. For the rest of his life, Fox battled for the reform of the house of commons, so that it became the rallying cry of the liberal party in England. Russell's Memorials of Charles James Fox, ii., 38. A ministry di Almon, xxvi., 355. #Memorials of Fox, ii., 249. Moustier to Vergennes, 3 April 1783. MS. vided within itself by irreconcilable opinions, detested by the king, confronted by a strong and watchful and cautious opposition, was forced to follow the line of precedents. The settlement of the commercial relations to be established with the United States had belonged to the treasury; it was at once brought by Fox within his department, although, from his ignorance of political economy, he could have neither firm convictions nor a consistent policy. He was not, indeed, without glimpses of the benefit of liberty in trade. To him it was a problem how far the act of navigation had ever been useful, and what ought to be its fate; but the bill in which the late ministry had begun to apply the principle of free commerce with America he utterly condemned, "not," as he said, "from animosity toward Shelburne, but because great injury often came from reducing commercial theories to practice." More over, the house of commons would insist on much deliberation and very much inquiry before it would sacrifice the navigation act to the circumstances of the present crisis.t * In judging his conduct, it must be considered that the changes in the opinion of a people come from the slow evolution of thought in the public mind. One of the poets of England, in the flush of youth, had prophesied : "The time shall come when, free as seas or wind, And seas but join the regions they divide." More than half a century must pass away before the prophecy will come true by the efforts of statesmen, who, had they lived in the time of Fox, might have shared his indecision. The coalition cabinet at its first meeting agreed to yield no part of the navigation act, ‡ and, as a matter of policy, to put off the bill before parliament relating to commerce with America "till some progress should be made in a negotiation with the American commissioners at Paris." Thither without delay Fox sent, as minister on the part of Great Britain, David Hartley, a friend of Franklin and a well-wisher to the United States. * Moustier to Vergennes, 11 April 1783. MS. Fox to Hartley, 10 June 1783. MS. Fox to the king, Memorials of Fox, ii., 122. The avowed liberal opinions of Hartley raising distrust, Lord Sheffield, a supporter of the ministry, and, on trade with America, the master authority of that day for parliament, immediately sounded an alarm. "Let the ministers know," said he on the fifteenth, in the house of lords, "the country is as tenacious of the principle of the navigation act as of the principle of Magna Charta. They must not allow America to take British colonial produce to ports in Europe. They must reserve to our remaining dominions the exclusive trade to the West India islands; otherwise, the only use of them will be lost. If we permit any state to trade with our islands or to carry into this country any produce but its own, we desert the navigation act and sacrifice the marine of England. The peace is in comparison a trifling object." But there was no need of fear lest Fox should yield too much. In his instructions to Hartley, he was for taking the lion's share, as Vergennes truly said. He proposed that the manufactures of the thirteen states should as a matter of course be excluded from Great Britain, but that British manufactures should be admitted everywhere in the United States. While America was dependent, parliament had taxed importations of its produce, but British ships and manufactures entered the colonies free of duty. "The true object of the treaty in this business," so Fox enforced his plan, "is the mutual admission of ships and merchandise free from any new duty or imposition;"‡ that is, the Americans on their side should leave the British navigation act in full force and renounce all right to establish an act of navigation of their own; should continue to pay duties in the British ports on their own produce; and receive in their own. ports British produce and manufactures duty free. One subject appealed successfully to the generous side of his nature. To the earnest wish of Jay that British ships should have no right under the convention to carry into the states any slaves from any part of the world, it being the intention of the United States entirely to prohibit their importation,# Fox answered promptly: "If that be their policy, it never can be * Almon, xxvi., 615. + Works of John Adams, iii., 380. Fox to Hartley, 10 April 1783. MS. |