THE YOUNGER PITT

William Pitt was the second son of the first Earl of Chatham, he was born May 28, 1759, the year of his father's crowning glory, when it was said that Englishmen opened their newspapers every morning to read of the latest triumph of their country's arms. Men attributed these victories over the ancient enemy to the inspiring leadership of The Great Commoner, the man with the face of an eagle and the heart of a lion. We should also remember that Pitt and his generation had seen the catastrophe of the Gordon Riots of 1780. London was in flames, and at the mercy of a roaring, drunken, looting populace for six dreadful days and nights. Long before the revolution in Paris, Europe had come to regard London as the natural home of mob-violence. The age was a corrupt one the ancient regime throughout contemporary Europe was marked by personal greed, habitual graft and cheerful coarseness of fibre in everything concerning the public service. Whatever may be said for the wisdom of Walpole - and there is much that can be said - it remains true that he found political morality at a very low ebb and left it where he found it.

To the Pitts we owe the change that occurred. It was this, as much as the husbanding of England's material resources and the scientific organization of public finance, that enabled England to meet and defeat the revolutionary tyranny of the Jacobins, the Directory and Napoleon.

Of all the achievements of Pitt the Elder, one of the most important for his country was the siring and rearing of Pitt the Younger, who showed early signs of his intellectual brilliance. As a child he was dubbed "the philosopher." After being educated by tutors he entered Cambridge University at the age of 14. He was called to the bar in 1780, and entered parliament the following year as member for Appleby, one of the pocket boroughs - When the young man made his maiden speech in the House of Commons, Edmund Burke exclaimed:

" He is not a chip of the old block ; it is the old block itself " This was true. Young William's nose turned up, whereas his father's had turned down; his genius lay in the management of finance rather than in the wielding of a war-machine; his temper was far more cold than choleric. But he inherited his father's wide ranging grasp of big issues, his capacity to exercise political power as if it were a limb of his own body, his utterly single-minded devotion to an ideal that contained within its broad scope the purposes of a whole generation of men.

Pitt revealed his independent spirit in his first few years in Parliament. Although he joined liberals such as Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox in denouncing the American war ("conceived in injustice., nurtured and brought forth in folly"), he refused to become tied to their party. He differed from them sharply in his respect for the king's traditional rights to veto legislation and appoint ministers.

His success in the house was one of unparalleled rapidity, Pitt's almost instinctive mastery of parliamentary tactics was never exhibited with greater brilliance than during the three years that intervened between his election to Parliament and his assumption of the office of Prime Minister. In those three years - the shortest time for such a journey on record - he played a waiting game with such skill and patience, that Fox and his friends damned themselves with a thoroughness that consigned them for more than twenty years to the political wilderness. He supported Burke's financial reform bill, and spoke in favour of parliamentary reform; became chancellor of the exchequer at twenty-three, under the Earl of Shelburne.Given enough rope, Pitt would seem to have argued, Fox would hang himself And that is what he did. By going into coalition with Lord North, the man who for more than twelve years had been the principal target of his attack as the head and front of royal misgovernment, Fox destroyed his own public character as no mere party rival could have done. Moreover, the Coalition brought to a head all that the English people had grown to detest in parliamentary life for half a century. That "unnatural alliance" seemed to epitomize the jobbery, corruption, intrigue and fractiousness of the ancient régime.

When an election was held, in 1783, it was as carefully managed by the King and his Treasury as any election of the century. But it was still true, as a contemporary observed, that "the Public, and the Public only, enabled Pitt to defeat the powerful phalanx drawn up against him."

Pitt was appointed First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer - in effect, prime minister - of a new government. He was only 25, when he came to power, he was supported by the sovereign, but opposed by a large majority of the House of Commons.The King called Pitt to office, and kept him there for many months in defiance of the crowded and frantic ranks of the opposition.

Pitt was always a Whig in that he stood for responsible ministerial government in the tradition of the Glorious Revolution; but then, so were the Tories. Perhaps his Whiggery comes out more strongly in his devotion to the interests of the City of London and the commercial community in general. Disraeli and Cobbett alike were to denounce him for opening too wide the door that led from the counting-house to the House of Lords. Retrospectively, however, he appears a Tory, the founder of the great anti-Jacobin party which was to rule England in the age of Liverpool and Castlereagh. In his relations with George III he was neither Whig nor Tory, but the trusted intermediary between King and Parliament in a delicately balanced system of constitutional government. George III soon learned, however, that the young man who had saved him from Fox was no latter-day Lord North. Pitt had first made his name in Parliament by his ardent participation in the typically Wing activity of striving to limit the royal influence in politics by " Economical Reform." He was not prepared to rule England either for or against the King, only to rule with the King. He controlled his Cabinet like a modem Prime Minister, standing between his colleagues and the royal master, personally representing the royal master to them and to Parliament. George III knew that he could not dispense with Pitt; and Pitt knew that he must always persuade the King that his policy was in accordance with the best intentions of a patriotic monarch, His management of King George's well-intentioned, but often perverse, will was superb. Out of this situation - the King's necessities and his own indispensability - he forged something recognizably like our modern system of Cabinet government. The keynote of the whole was discipline. It was because Pitt's public life was his only life, because he was prepared to be the King's first minister twenty-four hours a day, to see to everything himself and to maintain a god-like omniscience and ubiquity, that he was able to make the greatest contribution of any single man to Cabinet government as we see it today.

A dissolution took place in March 1786. At the general election which followed the voice of the nation appeared decidedly in his favour, and some of the strongest aristocratically interests in the country were defeated, Pitt himself being returned by the University of Cambridge. Englishmen believed that the affairs of their country would be safe in his hands, that moral probity which had somehow become synonymous with the name of Pitt was the substantial basis of his authority. Nor is this judgment impaired by the indubitable fact that Pitt the Younger was among the most ambitious and skillfully Machiavellian of the ministers who have held power in England.

His fist measure was the passing of his India Bill, establishing the board of control, to supervise the Company's rule in India. this system remained in operation until the Indian Mutiny, 60 years later.

A believer in free trade, he slashed the exorbitant customs duties that had made smuggling such a lucrative business. At the same time he established new taxes and greatly increased revenues by there collection. The 1786 economic treaty he concluded with France proved very advantageous to Britain. The establishment of the delusive scheme of a sinking fund followed, and his Regency Bill in 1788.

For more than ten years, Pitt stood at the heart of an England beset by mortal danger. Yet, unlike Chatham and Churchill, he was not one to revel in danger; indeed, he was for long accused of undue complacency. It could not be said of him, as it was said of Burke, that, when he spoke of the French Revolution, his face assumed "the expression of a man who is going to defend himself against murderers." He had never shared the ignorant animosity of Englishmen towards France and the French. " To suppose that any nation can be unalterably the enemy of another is weak and childish," he told the House of Commons in 1787, when his opponents attacked the Eden Treaty which was designed to promote freer commercial intercourse with our "traditional enemy." Such a notion, he went on, " has its foundation neither in the experience of nations nor in the history of man, It is a libel on the constitution of political societies and supposes the existence of diabolical malice in the original frame of man."

Pitt seems to have taken little stock in the doctrine of original sin as applied to whole nations; and he was never greatly impressed by what publicists call "the logic of events" or by any other form of historical determinism. To him, France was a good customer for English textiles and an exporter of excellent wines. As a disciple of Adam Smith and a believer in the theory of comparative costs, he wished to promote a freer exchange between the two countries in those commodities which I they could produce best and most cheaply. France, moreover, was an exporter of excellent ideas. The teaching of Adam Smith owed much to the French Physiocrats; intellectual free trade between the two peoples was something that Pitt had learnt to prize from experience. True, he was a little alarmed 'when, on the eve of the Revolution, M. Necker seemed likely to restore France's financial stability and thus enable her to rival England in the trade of the East ; but it is as well to remember that France was at that time a vastly more populous and potentially more wealthy country than England, and much given to aggression at English expense. There was in Pitt's England a good deal of rancour against France for her part in assisting the revolt of the American colonies. Many were ready to see, in the French Revolution, the hand of vengeance falling upon the fomenter of rebellion. Pitt was wiser. He shared the more enlightened view of those who saw in the events of 1789 the prospect of constitutional government in France, the kind of government that might lend a stable and pacific character to her policy. The trouble with French foreign policies under the widen régime had been their recklessness, malice and unpredictability. With a constitutional system answerable to the needs of the nation, there would be hope of peace and friendship. It was the attitude of Dr. Price, not of Burke; and if it was an illusion, it was a generous one. The charge against Pitt, should a charge be brought, cannot be that of Francophobia. Up to the last possible moment, he sought friendship with France, and. only went to war against the Revolution after it had struck the first blow. Then he saw it as a war for national survival against an arrogant nationalism which threatened to overturn the balance of power in Europe, and to bold a pistol to the head of England by conquest of the Low Countries.

As for the Jacobins at home, Pitt allowed them no mercy; his name has always been associated with the stern policy of repression which became a Tory tradition down to the year of Peterloo, and even beyond. "They thought they were imitating Mr. Pitt, because they mistook disorganization for sedition," wrote Disraeli of the Tories of Lord Liverpool's government, at the safe distance of a quarter of a century. For many years, no epithet was too venomous among English Radicals for "that bloody-handed tool of tyranny, William Pitt." He was accused of inventing revolutionary plots, in order to repress more savagely the champions of reform and make his own tenure of office appear indispensable. The severity of his measures cannot be denied ; but the nature of the problem with which they were intended to deal has often been misunderstood. The question is not whether there really existed in England a widespread revolutionary conspiracy. Pitt was faced with something far more dangerous because far less susceptible of detection. He knew - and Lord Liverpool knew, and said - that revolutions are not made they happen. It was not the multitude that was dangerous; nor even the few bold and fanatical agitators. At a time of national crisis and economic distress, the peril lay in the ubiquity of reformist associations, linked by "correspondence" and at the mercy of unscrupulous men; in the assumption of quasi-sovereign pretensions by "Conventions," claiming the status of "shadow-parliaments"; in the snowball process by which multifarious innocent activities could accumulate the weight of an avalanche.

The French Revolution had provoked different responses in Britain, but Pitt was resolutely committed to non-intervention, so long as the revolution remained a purely French affair, Britain would not interfere. The French advance into the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) in 1792 drew a sharp warning from the British Government.

Early in 1793, France announced the annexation of Belgium and declared war on both Holland and Britain, a conflict which brought great responsibility on Pitt and sacrifice for his country. He was not an outstanding war minister, and for some years the conflict went badly for Britain. But he worked tirelessly to build coalitions against the French.

Pitt fought the war with France on two fronts - " malice domestic" was, or seemed to be, as menacing as "foreign levy" ; until, with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the threat to national survival and the likelihood of imminent invasion served to drive all but a handful of the most hardened Francophiles into the solidarity of patriotic endeavour. Then it was that the work of the Pitts, father and son, bore fruit in the devotion and sacrifice of a regenerated people. In particular, the Younger Pitt's great financial reforms, his pacification of the Empire, and his nourishment of trade and industry, proved their worth by helping England to build up the war-chest that was to finance coalition after coalition until the hour of victory. "Pitt's Gold " became a legend among England's allies, and an excuse for her thwart enemies. Pitt made mistakes ; he was not, like his father, a genius of war.

Meanwhile another crisis loomed. The Irish increasingly restive under a parliament responsible neither to themselves nor to Westminster - organized a rebellion. Despite some French support, Irish union was accomplished in 1800. Pitt hoped to solve the Irish problem by uniting the country with Britain and giving the vote to the Catholic majority, his Union bill passed through Parliament, but then George III. was as stubborn as ever. In 1801 after the opposition of the king to all further concession to the Irish Catholics Pitt resigned his post.

The Peace of Amiens succeeded; and the Addington administration, concluded it, which Pitt supported for a time, and then joined the opposition. The new minister, had renewed the war, but was unable to maintain his ground, and resigned;

In 1804 Pitt resumed his post at the treasury, the war against France imposed a huge burden on the British exchequer, so Pitt introduced new taxes to pay for it. His imposition of income tax was particularly resented, even though the rate was a mere 4 pence (six old pence) in the Pound and only the well to do paid it.

He had returned to power just as Napoleon Bonaparte was preparing an invasion of Britain, he exerted all the energy of his character to render the contest successful, and found means to engage the two great military powers of Russia and Austria in a new coalition. This was intended to defeat Napoleon on land while the British Navy defeated him at sea. Only the second half of his strategy was successful. Pitt's fiscal policies had helped strengthen the British fleet, which under Nelson's command, inflicted a crushing defeat on the French. .Soon after receiving the news of Nelson's victory at Trafalgar in 1805, Pitt learned that Napoleon had overwhelmed the Austrian forces at Ulm. News of the Russians' shattering defeat at Austerlitz quickly followed.

He had forestalled the invasion but failed to stop Napoleon's advance through Europe, his constitution, weakened by hereditary gout rapidly yielded to the joint attack of disease and anxiety, even, in this dark hour his steadfast courage and endless resourcefulness had put his country on the path to victory. Those who came after him were not, for the most part, big enough to wear his mantle; but the very cut and rig of the garment supported them in their flounderings upon the tide that swept forward to Salamanca, Leipzig, and the final field of Waterloo. As he lay dying in the dark January days of 1806, Pitt cried out in agony upon the situation of his country ; but it was he, and he alone, who had taught England to save herself by her exertions and to save Europe by her example. Even on his death-bed, he is said to have said "Oh, my country! How I leave my country" and cried not upon the mercy of God but upon the House of Commons. "Hear - hear!" were the words that escaped his lips in his last delirium. He died January 23, 1806, a public funeral was decreed to his honour by parliament, and a grant of £40,000 to pay his debts.

Biographers naturally differ as to his merits as a statesman; some assign him a most exalted place, while others represent him as entirely destitute of great ideas, as a man of expedients instead of principles, as a lover of place and royal favour.

A prime minister can usually rely on support in the House of Commons. Pitt had to back down on several of his policies. Parliamentary reform was one of them. The overwhelming majority of the Commons would not countenance making the electoral system more truly representative, and thus putting their seats at risk. The first Reform Act was not passed until 1832. The abolition of the slave trade, which Pitt joined his friend William Wilberforce in supporting, was blocked for many years by commercial interests represented in Parliament

What he believed about man's final purpose and destiny he kept to himself, as he kept so much else. As his dear friend, William Wilberforce, tells us, Pitt always said less on these subjects than he thought. A true son of his age, he despised "enthusiasm," contenting himself with the formal observance of the rites and consolations of the established Church. Yet, somewhere within that spare and frigid form, there lived the invincible peace of a quiet spirit. "God bless you, my dear Pitt, and carry you through all your difficulties," Wilberforce once wrote to him. "You may reckon yourself most fortunate in that cheerfulness of mind which enables you to throw off your load for a few hours and rest yourself. I fancy it must be this which, when I am with you, prevents my considering you as an object of compassion tho' Prime Minister of England ....."

Pitt loved power with the consuming passion that excludes all other appetites. His personal rectitude, his abstention from almost all forms of self-indulgence which engage the mind and senses of ordinary humanity - these were sacrifices made for the sake of whole-time absorption in his master-passion : politics. He was, as Coleridge rather unkindly put it, "a young man whose feet had never wandered, whose very eye had never turned to the right or to the left, whose whole track had been as curveless as the motion of a fascinated reptile !" Thus Coleridge accounts for his solitude : " It was a young man whose heart was solitary, because he had existed always amid objects of futurity ......." To Pitt futurity meant the government of England by himself; the good government of England, certainly, but always by Pitt. He never said, as his father had said: I know that I can save this country, and that no one else can." Instead, he declared : " I place much dependence upon my new colleagues ; I place still more dependence on myself." He could depend upon himself because he knew himself; he knew what he wanted. Moreover, be knew how to get what he wanted knew exactly what kind of minister the English people would trust, what interests he must cherish, what aspirations must be sacrificed - and at what point they must be sacrificed - if his authority was to be maintained. On this last point, his great rival, Charles James Fox, is our best authority.

"He is very civil and obliging, profuse of compliments in public," Fox wrote of his young friend ;

" but he has more than once taken a line that has alarmed me, especially when he dissuaded against going into any inquiries that might produce heats and differences ......."

Fox, the man of generous enthusiasm, the great tribune of opposition, had laid his finger on the truth about Pitt. Pitt would never die, politically speaking, for a principle. Every measure that he produced was designed to avoid affront to established interests, to avoid "heats and differences." There was to be parliamentary reform with generous compensation for the owners of disfranchised boroughs; the East India Company was to be " nationalized" without injury to the Directors ; the slave-trade was to be abolished without loss to the slavers; Irish Union was to be achieved without injury to the Protestant ascendancy. If these things could only be done by engendering "heats and differences," Pitt preferred that they should not be done at all. Thus, both parliamentary reform and the abolition of the slave-trade had to await the coming of other days and other men.

		With an imperious off-handedness that infuriated not only his enemies but many of his friends, Pitt was always prepared to withdraw an offending measure and go on to something else. If politics is the art of the possible, Pitt was its most accomplished master. But it is the pursuit of the impossible, or at least the perilous and difficult, that wins the hearts and imaginations of men. Pitt remains a cold, lofty, monumental figure, seeming to stare down the forces of domestic malice and foreign enmity as if they were personal affronts to his severe and disdain spirit. The best-known portraits of the man tell the same tale, whether we look at Gainsborough's elegant rendering of the youthful Chancellor of the Exchequer or at Hoppner's dark portrait, executed when Pitt was forty-seven, of the worn and weary man within a year of his death. Even in Hickel's picture of Pitt addressing the House of Commons, the Prime Minister stands Cut from his followers like a solitary crow among a covey of partridges. This air of solitude is no illusion conceived by posterity ; and our attempts to modify it are as mistaken as they are futile.
" The Giant Factotum Amusing Himself " - a cartoon by Gillray satirizes Pitt's taxation policy.		Better to face the fact than try to fathom its significance.

The truth is that Pitt's solitude was the solitude of superiority, of a transcendent greatness of ability and character - no easy admission in an age that likes to describe itself as one of the Common Man, an age that would prefer to believe that greatness is a product of circumstances, and those chiefly economic. Today, the notion that the greatness of a great man does honour to our common human nature appears to have escaped us.