powers, whether hostile or neutral, with slaves. The employment of British vessels, seamen, and capital in the foreign slave trade was absolutely prohibited. No foreign slave ship was allowed to be fitted out in British ports, and the Order of Council which had been issued preventing the importation of negroes into the Dutch settlements was ratified and extended. Another Act, designed to prevent any sudden temporary increase of the British slave trade that might arise either from the restriction of the foreign trade or from the prospect of the speedy suppression of the British trade, forbade the employment in the traffic of any British shipping not already engaged in it. A Resolution, moved by Fox, was then carried through both Houses, pledging Parliament to proceed with all practicable expedition to the total abolition of the British slave trade, and an address was presented to the King requesting him to negotiate with foreign powers for the purpose of obtaining the total abolition of the slave trade. Fox died almost immediately after, but Lord Grenville, who succeeded him, lost no time in fulfilling the pledge, and the measure which Pitt during so many years had refrained from carrying, was carried in 1807, with little or no difficulty, by one of the weakest ministries of the nineteenth century.

The Irish policy of Pitt will be fully examined in another portion of this work, and we shall find, I think, that it exhibits in an aggravated form the worst features of his English policy. It is a history of eminently wise and enlightened ideas abandoned at the first sign of difficulty or unpopularity, deliberately sacrificed whenever they appeared likely to weaken or embarrass the Ministry. This was the character of his policy about commercial liberty. This was the character of his policy about Catholic emancipation, which has had consequences of evil that it is scarcely possible to over-estimate. It is not too much to say that the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam at a time when the hopes of the Catholics were raised to the highest point, and when the Irish Parliament was perfectly ready to carry Catholic emancipation, was the chief cause of the rebellion of 1798, and that the weakness, if not treachery, with which Pitt, after the Union, abandoned the Catholic cause, created resentments which are felt to the present hour.

It must not, however, be forgotten that the legislative union with Ireland is the one great domestic measure of Pitt's ministry that remains, and Lord Macaulay, whose estimate of Pitt's Irish policy is widely different from mine, has pronounced its original conception to be Pitt's chief title to fame. It is only just to his memory,' writes Macaulay, 'to say that Pitt formed a scheme of policy so grand and so simple, so righteous and so humane, that it would alone entitle him to a high place among statesmen. He determined to make Ireland one kingdom with England, and at the same time to relieve the Catholic laity from civil disabilities, and to grant a public maintenance to the Roman Catholic clergy. Had he been able to carry these noble designs into effect the Union would have been a union indeed.'

It appears to me scarcely possible to form a more erroneous judgment. A legislative union had long been a familiar subject of political discussion, and Pitt, like Fox and almost all the more conspicuous Irish politicians, had long seen the necessity of carrying Catholic emancipation. That measure had year after year been debated in the Irish Parliament, and the favourite argument against it had been the danger of Catholic preponderance in a separate Parliament. The payment of the priests had been also more than once discussed in the Irish Parliament. The three measures were in fact among the commonplaces of Irish political speculation, and the idea of combining them was so far from being a sign of extraordinary original genius, that it could hardly have been missed by the most incapable statesman. The Union was a measure which gave great scope for statesmanship, but this was not in its conception but in its execution. Had the extinction of the Irish Legislature been effected without exciting sentiments of resentment and humiliation in the country; had the difficult task of bringing the Catholics within the circle of the Constitution been promptly, prudently, and successfully accomplished, the measure would indeed have been a feat of the highest statesmanship. But judged by such tests as these the legislative union of 1800 was the most miserable of failures. Carried by gross corruption, at a time when the country was under martial law, without a dissolution, and in opposition to evident manifestations of popular opinion, it arrayed against itself almost all

the genius, patriotism, and virtue of Ireland, and it left enduring animosities behind it. One class was, however, in some degree in its favour. Hopes amounting to a pledge had been held out to the Catholic priests that the Union would be immediately followed by emancipation. At the time when Pitt authorised these communications to be made he was perfectly aware of the sentiments of the King on the subject, and he communicated with the Catholics without the knowledge of the King, and without having taken any measure to secure the accomplishment of his pledge. There is no doubt that he sincerely desired to fulfil it, but when the Union was carried he found the obstacles to emancipation greater than he supposed. The King's mind especially was so set against it that the mere agitation of it produced a temporary return of his insanity. Very reluctantly, and probably chiefly under the influence of Lord Grenville, Pitt recognised the plain and stringent obligation of honour, and resigned his office, but a month had not passed before he promised the King that he would abandon the cause of the Catholics, and when he returned to power it was as a determined adversary of their emancipation. From that day their alienation from England was complete.

The evil effects of Pitt's Irish policy it seems to me difficult to exaggerate. In Ireland he had to deal with social and political conditions wholly different from those to which he was accustomed, and he conspicuously failed to master them. In the French Revolution he had to deal with a new and unexampled phenomenon, and it will now be scarcely disputed that he totally misunderstood its character and its importance. In the conduct of the war, the strength of his character and the confidence he inspired proved of great value; but he had nothing of his father's skill, nothing of that intuitive perception of character by which his father brought so many men of daring and ability to the forefront, and until his death English operations on the Continent present few features except those of extreme costliness and almost uniform failure. Few English campaigns have been more deplorable than those of the Duke of York in 1794 and 1799, and it was not until Pitt was in his grave that the English army recovered its ancient vigour. The navy, it is true, more than sustained its former reputation, but no part of

the merit belongs to Pitt. During two most critical years, when the whole safety of the country depended on the navy, he maintained at the head of the Admiralty his perfectly inefficient brother, Lord Chatham; and Lord St. Vincent, who was the one really great naval minister during the war, owed his position not to Pitt, but to Addington.

Pitt was, in truth, beyond all things a parliamentary minister, and in provinces that lay outside the parliamentary arena he showed very little real superiority. The great social problems arising from the sudden development of the factory system, which began in his time, never appear to have for a moment occupied his thoughts. To the terrible and growing evils of the English Poor Law system he was so blind that he urged that parish relief should be given as 'a matter of right or honour,' in proportion to the number of children of the recipient. In this way, he said, a large family will become a blessing and not a curse, and 'a proper line of distinction' will be drawn 'between those who are able to provide for themselves by their labour, and those who, after having enriched their country with a number of children, have a claim upon its assistance for their support.'1

In the disposal of his vast and various patronage, no minister showed himself more perfectly and uniformly indifferent to the interests of science and literature. The touching and discriminating kindness with which Sir Robert Peel so often turned aside in the most anxious moments of his career to smoothe, by judicious patronage, or out of the small funds at his disposal, the path of struggling or neglected genius, was wholly alien to the character of Pitt. In his relations with those with whom he came in immediate contact, he was an amiable and kindly man, but he never showed the slightest wish to recognise any form of struggling talent, or to employ his patronage for any other object than the support of his political interests, or the gratification of his political friends. He had himself some literary tastes, but they appear to have only touched the surface of his nature. No man knew better the art of embellishing a peroration or pointing a repartee with a Latin

' Parl. Hist. xxxii. 710. See too Wade's Hist. of the Middle and Working Classes, pp. 90-95.

quotation, and in the parliamentary circles of the eighteenth century this art was prized as the very highest result of education, but he was quite without Fox's power of casting off the ambitions of politics and finding in books a sufficient aliment for his nature. He was a politician and nothing more. Office was to him the all in all of life; not its sordid fruits, for to these he was wholly indifferent; not the opportunity which it gives of advocating and advancing great causes; for this he cared much too little; but the excitement and exultation which the possession and skilful exercise of power can give was to him the highest of pleasures. It was, as he truly said, 'the pride of his heart and the pleasure of his life.'

Parliamentary talents under a parliamentary government are often extravagantly overrated, and the type which I have endeavoured to describe, though combining great qualities both of intellect and character, is not, I think, of the very highest order. Under such a government Pitt was indeed pre-eminently formed to be a leader of men, capable alike of directing, controlling and inspiring, of impressing the imagination of nations, of steering the bark of the State in times of great difficulty and danger. He was probably the greatest of English parliamentary leaders; he was one of the greatest of parliamentary debaters; he was a very considerable Finance Minister, and he had a sane, sound judgment of ordinary events. But his eye seemed always fixed on the immediate present or on the near future. His mind, though quick, clear, and strong, was narrow in its range, and neither original nor profound, and though his nature was pure, lofty, and magnanimous, there were moral as well as mental defects in his statesmanship. Of his sincere

My old friend Mr. William Brooke (late Master of Chancery in Ireland) took down in 1816, from a Mr. Armitage who lived much in London political society in the first years of the century, the following anecdote, which has not, I think, appeared in print. In the debates which followed the Peace of Amiens, the Opposition had taunted Pitt with having failed in the avowed objects of the war-the restoration of the Bourbons and the destruction of the Revolution. Pitt in his reply began to

quote the lines of Virgil (Æn. iv.340), Me si fata meis paterentur ducere vitam Auspiciis, et sponte meà componere curas, Urbem Trojanam primum, dulcesque meorum Reliquias colerem, Priami tecta alta manerent, Et recidiva manu posuissem Pergama victis. In the middle of the quotation, however, his memory failed him. He hesitated and paused, when Fox, bending forward from the Opposition bench, prompted his rival to the end of the passage. The speech and the quotation will be found in Parl. Hist. xxxvi. 69.