three remarks are preserved. Pitt told the French that "You have no political liberty, but as to civil liberty you have more of it than you suppose." He predicted that "the part of our Constitution which will first perish is the prerogative of the King and the authority of the House of Peers." And again, replying to some one who marvelled that Fox, a man of so little character, should wield so great an influence, he said, "The remark is just, but then you have not been under the wand of the magician." Not all the magic of the eloquence of Fox could save the Coalition Government from overthrow. Mr. Fox's India Bill led to the overthrow of the Government.

PRIME MINISTER AT TWENTY-FIVE.

The King resumed the seals of his Ministers, anc in December, 1783, Mr. Pitt, then only twenty-five, began a Prime Ministership which lasted seventeen years. His appointment was received with derision. The fallen Ministers did not think his Administration would last as many days as it lasted years. His Government was a procession of ornamental phantoms.

He secured indeed the scowling hypocrisy of Thurlow and the naval fame of Howe, bnt the one was insidious and the other dumb (p. 40).

Pitt was gasping in a famine of incapacity, but he refused to offer office to Shelburne, whose good faith was always exemplary but always in need of explanation.

WILLIAM PITT.

Then ensued three stormy months, full of debates of fiery eloquence, which, like the wars of Marlborough and Turenne, are

splendid achievements which light up the epoch, without exercising a permanent influence on the world; to us, at any rate, the sheet lightning of history (p. 53).

Pitt held his own and more than held his own, although young, unaided, and alone. His refusal to appoint himself to the sinecure Clerkship of the Pells, an office worth £3,000, delighted the nation, and a narrow escape from death at the hands of an ambuscade of blackguards opposite Brooks's, completed his conquest of popular sympathy. On March 25th Parliament was dissolved. Pitt came

back with a triumphant majority. The public, in despair at the decadence of the country, recognised with enthusiasm the advent of Chatham's son, "rich with lofty eloquence and heir to an immortal name," who showed a supreme disdain for the material prizes of political life apart from his own great qualities. The strength of Pitt lay in the aversion of both King and people for Fox.

HIS EARLY ADMINISTRATION.

I pass by in a few sentences the first years of his administration, with his India Bill, his Budgets, and his attempt to establish a commercial union with Ireland. He succeeded with the former, he was defeated on the last. "It is difficult to avoid the impression that there has been throughout the past history of England and Ireland a malignant fate waving away every auspicious chance and blighting every opportunity of beneficence as it arises" (p. 75). The constitution of Parliament in those days, as Lord Rosebery points out, was very different from what it is to-day.

The composition of a Parliamentary majority at that time was that of a feudal or Highland army. It was an aggregate of the followings of a few great chiefs, of whom the King himself was the chief. What Clanronald or Lochiel had been in a military, Lord Lonsdale or the Duke of Norfolk were in a political campaign (p. 77).

Government under such conditions was necessarily carried on under difficulties.

WARREN HASTINGS.

In 1786, after the establishment of the famous Sinking Fund

The most striking feature of the session is the opening of that long campaign against Warren Hastings, which, as regards its duration and the forces brought into play, resembles rather some historic siege of ancient times than the judicial investigation into the conduct of an individual (p. 83).

Hastings at first seemed secure. "Except the leader of the Opposition, his only enemy seemed to be his own intolerable agent. But he was ambushed by the undying rancour of Francis and the sleepless humanity of Burke." Pitt, however, put himself in antagonism to Hastings on one point, and immense was the hubbub. "We can imagine the hum and buzz of political insects." Pitt's speech in favour of the Begum charge made impeachment inevitable. Nothing illustrates more forcibly the authority of Pitt.

He gave his decision as calmly as a judge in chambers; while Britain and India abided meekly by the decision of this young gentleman of twenty-eight (p. 88).

The first Regency Debates bring us to the verge of the French Revolution:

Elsewhere the fates were spinning new threads, scheming new combinations, and shifting in their most tragic mood the cicumstances and destiny of the world. The cauldron was simmering into which all parties and politics and Pitt himself were to be plunged, to emerge in new shape (p. 94).

HIS POLICY OF NON-INTERVENTION.

Pitt, however, was deaf to the shrieks of rage and panic that arose from the convulsions of France. Let France settle her internal affairs as she chooses was his unvarying principle. In Parliament for the two or three following years

all was tranquillity, which was only occasionally interrupted by the sonorous voice of the Minister proclaiming, as from a muezzin's minaret, the continued peace and prosperity of the Empire (p. 96).

Pitt was nursing England into convalescence after the exhaustion of the American war.

"Even in those days of exhaustion," says Lord Rosebery, "our means were less inadequate to our ends than now; we were less scattered over the world; and our army relatively to those on the Continent, was respectable and even powerful."

Which is no longer the case. Pitt spent £3,000,000 in making ready a fleet to coerce the Spaniards. Then came the Russian armament.

The instinct of self-preservation guides the European powers with the same certainty as weather moves sheep on the hill (p. 104).

THE DIVINE RIGHT OF THE WHIGS.

But Pitt, being isolated and almost inaccessible, was not in touch with his colleagues, still less with the pulse of the people. Hence, after proposing to declare war against Russia, he had to eat his own proposals, recall his ultimatum, and abandon Ocksakoff to its fate. The Duke of Leeds retired. His place was taken by Grenville, the typical Whig of the day, whose appointment leads Lord Rosebery to say some witty and not altogether kindly things concerning the Whigs, these sublime personages who hated extremes, and whose creed "lay in a triple divine right, the divine right of the Whig families to govern the Empire, to be maintained by the Empire, to prove their superiority by humbling and bullying the sovereign of the Empire (p. 113). From which it may be seen that Lord Rosebery has not sat in vain at the feet of Lord Beaconsfield.

HIS DEVOTION TO PEACE.

The shadow of the French Revolution fell over the land. Pitt, whose enthusiasm was all for peace, retrenchment, reform, and free-trade, was doomed to drag out the remainder of his life in darkness and dismay, in wrecking his whole financial edifice to find funds for incapable generals and for foreign statesmen more capable than honest, in postponing, and, indeed, repressing all his proposed reforms (p. 117). To no human being did war ever come with such a curse as to Pitt; by none was it more hated and shunned. This carried him so far that, in 1792, on the very eve of the great European convulsion, he reduced the vote for the navy by 2,000 men, and declared in his place in Parlia

ment

Unquestionably there never was a time in the history of our country when, from the situation of Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace than at the present moment (p. 121).

Even after the execution of Louis XVI. Pitt was still anxious for peace.

There is something pathetic in this flash of light thrown upon the lonely figure, clinging to hope with the tenacity of despair. As it fades, the darkness closes, and the Pitt of peace, prosperity, and reform disappears for ever (p. 125). Whether he was a great War Minister or an incapable Minister, "he is certainly the most strenuous Peace Minister that ever held office in this country."

AT WAR WITH THE REVOLUTION.

When war began Pitt believed it would be over in a few months. The French, he said, had no money. It lasted till long after his death. Lord Rosebery, in a rapid condensed narrative, tells the story of that dolorous time, rightly making the Mutiny of the Nore the crowning moment of despair. Pitt, however, never despaired. He pursued his policy of subsidies and his policy of naval warfare to the end with undoubted resolution. It is true that

there were military expeditions which up to the peace of Amiens had cost us 1,350 officers and 60,000 men without achieving any considerable result. But his chief reliance was in the fleet, and that was uniformly successful, and upon subsidies. The net total of the war burden imposed by Pitt in his first and main administration was £292,009,604, of which he only received in cash about £200,000,000. In January, 1797, the Three per Cents. fell to 47. Lord Rosebery thinks that Pitt's finance was well and wisely managed. As a War Minister he had peculiar difficulties to contend with. Europe was rotten. He was dealing with dupes, or invalids, or self-seekers on the one hand, and with cosmopolitan convulsion embodied in a secular genius on the other. He was, as it were, heading a crusade with a force of camp-followers.

It is probable that some Pompeians saw in the great eruption an admirable opportunity for shop-lifting; so it was, but it cost the depredators their lives. Pitt saw the real peril, but the princes of Europe deceived him and themselves and were overthrown (p. 157).

HIS FAILURE.

Our own forces were as useless against Napoleon as the forces of the Courts of Europe. Our army was an aristocratic body which had to be led by a prince of the blood. The navy was a democratic force.

Collingwood was the son of a Newcastle merchant, Jervis of a country lawyer, Nelson of a country parson (p. 159), whereas a military command seemed to require nothing more than exalted rank, or the seniority which often spelt senility (p. 159).

Our army was composed, as Wellington said, of the scum of the earth-the mere scum of the earth. Largely recruited from the refuse of humanity, it was scourged and bullied and abused as if outside humanity. These were the soldiers we opposed to the regiments in which Ney and Hoche and Masséna were serving as privates.

Pitt was foredoomed to failure. In all probability, the greatest of War Ministers, Chatham and Bismarck, would equally have failed. For

it must be repeated again that, locked in a death grapple with the French Revolution, he was struggling with something superhuman, immeasurable, incalculable. We do not read that the wisest and the mightiest in Egypt were able to avail when the light turned to darkness and the rivers to blood (p. 160).

PITT AS SOCIAL REFORMER.

The story of the domestic policy of Pitt during these years of war is dark and dismal reading, but it is relieved by one notable episode, which Lord Rosebery has done well to rescue from oblivion. Pitt, confronted by the appalling misery of the poor, brought in a Bill which Mr. Chamberlain may some day revive and carry into law. By this Bill Pitt proposed to deal with the question of the unemployed in a fashion that would have delighted the heart of the Fabian Society.

A vast new system was to be created-a hierarchy of In every parish or justices and wardens and guardians. group of parishes were to be established schools of industry, which were, in fact, what we have since known as Ateliers Nationaux. Their conditions were to be settled to some extent by parish councils; but they were in all cases to furnish work for the destitute poor. The justices and other authorities were to have merely the powers of a private employer of labour in regard to them. They were to buy materials, they were to sell the manufactured article, they were to fix the rate of wages. They could build or hire warehouses; they could buy or hire land; they could enclose and cultivate commons for support of the workers of the Schools of Industry. Moreover, in every parish or union, a friendly society was to be established. Persons also having more than two children, or, in

It is easy on the brink of the twentieth century to censure much in the eighteenth; but is it candid to do so without placing oneself as far as possible in the atmosphere, circumstances, and conditions of the period which one is considering? To Pitt alone is meted out a different measure. He alone is judged, not by the end of the eighteenth, but by the end of the nineteenth century. And why? Because the Irish question which he attempted to settle is an unsettled question still. He alone of the statesmen of the eighteenth century, with the exception of Burke and perhaps Chesterfield, saw its importance and grappled with it manfully. Since then many Ministers have nibbled at it whose efforts are buried in decent obscurity. But Pitt's career is still the battlefield of historians and politicians, because he is responsible for the Treaty of Union; and because he resigned and did not do something, neither known nor specified, but certainly impossible, to carry what remained of Catholic Emancipation.

HIS HEALING POLICY IN IRELAND.

As for the corruption by which the Union was accomplished, that was inevitable. No other means existed whereby what appeared a necessary end under the cırcumstances could be achieved. The Union, however, was but one part, and a small part, of Pitt's scheme.

Pitt never thought, as some seem since to have thought, that the Union could stand alone; he never deemed it a divine instrument, admirable and venerable by its own natural essence. He considered it as only a part, and not even the most important part, of a great healing policy in Ireland; and that almost, if not quite, simultaneously, the other parts should be applied-the last limitations of the Catholics removed; the clergy other than those of the Established Church provided with stipends; the oppression of tithe abolished. These were inseparable constituents of his scheme. Had his hands been free, he might possibly have reven dealt with the evils of the land system, at least as legards absenteeism. Who will say that, followed up by arge, spontaneous, and simultaneous concessions of this kind, the policy of the Union might not have been a success?

The Union was to pave the way and conciliate British opinion. "The word Union," Pitt's Lord Lieutenant wrote, as he was passing the measure, "will not cure the evils of this wretched country; it is a necessary preliminary, but a great deal more remains to be done." That was Pitt s view. But on this necessary preliminary or foundation succeeding Ministries reared either structures he had never contemplated, or no structure at all. He passed the Union with one object; it has been diverted to another.

But all that man could do was done to obliterate the rest of Pitt's policy. Addington's Irish Government went over with express instructions to do nothing for the Catholics, nothing for the Dissenters, but to push and promote theEstablished Church in every way. Nothing but the Union remained even to indicate what Pitt's plan had been; and that was a misleading indication. Catholic emancipation waited for thirty, and tithe reform waited for near forty, embittered and envenomed years. The time for ecclesiastical stipends provided by the State passed away for ever. The bright promises of financial improvement that had been held out to Ireland faded away into bankruptcy. Seventy years afterward the Jrish Church Establishment, which it had been one of the main objects of the treaty to preserve, suddenly toppled over and disappeared. With it went the keystone of the Union. And so it is Pitt's sinister destiny to be judged by the petty fragment of a large policy which he did not live to carry out a policy unhappy in execution and result, but which was, it may be fairly maintained, as generous and comprehensive in conception as it was patriotic in motive. It was, at any rate, worth trying where so many had failed. But it had no trial; the experiment was scarcely even commenced; and the ruinous part that remains, exposed as it has been to the harshest storms of nine decades, is judged and venerated as if it were the entire structure.

Partisans will find some difficulty in extracting from these passages any indication as to the bias of their author in favour of this, that, or the other scheme of Home Rule.

HIS LAST MINISTRY.

With the Union Pitt's Ministry came to an end. When he began to prepare to commute tithes his colleagues intrigued against him, the King remonstrated, and Pitt resigned. He could not do justice to the Catholics, and so he abandoned office. That was in 1801. After spending three years in retirement he came back as Prime Minister in 1804, and at once set himself to bring about the Third Coalition. Napoleon was threatening England with invasion, but Nelson being too much for Villeneuve off Cadiz, the Emperor posted off to Austria, and at Ulm and Austerlitz shattered Pitt's last great Coalition. Austerlitz was his death-blow. When he came home to his villa. at Putney to die

As he entered his house his eye rested upon the map of Europe. "Roll up that map," he said, "it will not be wanted these ten years" (p. 256).

His last speech had been delivered a few weeks before at the Lord Mayor's Banquet. It was brief and to the point. The city was in a furore of enthusiasm

Unfriendly critics said that his voice sounded as if he had worsted in his mouth; but the general testimony is that it was rich and sonorous. Fox never used notes, and Pitt rarely; a specimen of these is given by Lord Stanhope. His eloquence must have greatly resembled that with which Mr. Gladstone has fascinated two generations, not merely in pellucid and sparkling statement, but in those rolling and interminable sentences which come thundering in mighty succession, like the Atlantic waves on the Biscayan coast. And as a constant weapon, too often used, he had an endless command of freezing, bitter, scornful sarcasm, "which tortured to madness" (p. 271).

When they were discussing in his presence what was the quality most required in a prime minister

While one said eloquence, another knowledge, and another toil, Pitt said patience.

Rose, after a close intimacy, private and official, of twenty years, never once knew him to have been out of temper.

Lord Rosebery publishes several letters, hitherto unpublished, which go to show that Pitt was less stern and forbidding in private life than might have been inferred from his austere demeanour in public. One more extract, and I have done with this interesting book. Speaking of Pitt, he says:

His sympathies, his views, his policy were all with the

middle classes, which then represented the idea of the people. By a strange accident he became the leader of the aristocracy, but they supported him on their necks, for his foot was there. They were the puppets through whicn he conducted the administration, but he scorned them, and snubbed them, and flooded their blue blood with a plentiful administration of an inferior element. He was willing to give a peerage to any decent possessor of £10,000 a year. As for the baronets, their name was legion, and his knights were as the sands of the sea. But he had no sympathy with their sympathies, and regarded their aspiration with a sort of puzzled scorn. He considered the peers as his election agents, therefore the more the better A minister of this temper may gratify, but he is not likely to strengthen an aristocracy.

CONCLUSION.

Lord Rosebery has done good service to himself and to his country by writing this book. The next Liberal Administration will be stronger from a literary point of view than most of its predecessors. Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Morley, Sir George Trevelyan, and, we must now add, Lord Rosebery, form a team of four whom it would be hard to beat in any English Administration. Lord Rosebery having begun to write, will, we hope, not allow his pen to be idle. He will be writing despatches, no doubt, in less than a twelvemonth; but he has more stuff in him than will ever find expression in Blue-books. If his return to office were not so close at hand, I wish he would devote himself to telling the story of the last 150 years of Britain's foreign policy. It is a study that he is well qualified to undertake. It would necessitate research which would yield no one more valuable results. In that century and a half this Empire of ours came into being, and contrived to survive even the catastrophe of the loss of the American Colonies. To trace the method in which that gigantic new birth of time got itself born into the world without being summarily throttled by its powerful neighbours, or being asphyxiated by the blundering stupidity of its own Ministers, is a task which might well challenge the ambition of the latest biographer and future successor of Willlam Pitt.