Still more excellent was his plan of legislation for Ireland. Irishmen
had taken advantage of the weakness of England during
the American War to enforce upon the ministry of the day, in
1780 and 1782, an abandonment of all claim on the part of the
English government and the English judges to interfere in any
way with Irish affairs. From 1782, therefore, there were two
independent legislatures within the British Isles—the one sitting
at Westminster and the other sitting in Dublin. With these
political changes Fox professed himself to be content. Pitt, whose
mind was open to wider considerations, proposed to throw open
commerce to both nations by removing all the restrictions placed
on the trade of Ireland with England and with the rest of the
world. The opposition of the English parliament was only
removed by concessions continuing some important restrictions
upon Irish exports, and by giving the English parliament the
right of initiation in all measures relating to the regulation of
the trade which was to be common to both nations. The Irish
parliament took umbrage at the superiority claimed by England,
and threw out the measure as an insult, though, even as it stood,
it was undeniably in favour of Ireland. The lesson of the incompatibility
of two coordinate legislatures was not thrown
away upon Pitt.
In 1786 the commercial treaty with France opened that country to English trade, and was the first result of the theories laid down by Adam Smith ten years previously. The first attack upon the horrors of the slave-trade was made in 1788; and in the same year, in the debates on the Regency Bill caused by the king’s insanity, Pitt defended against Fox the right of parliament to make provision for the exercise of the powers of the crown when the wearer was permanently or temporarily disabled from exercising his authority.
When the king recovered, he went to St Paul’s to return thanks on the 23rd of April 1789. The enthusiasm with which he was greeted showed how completely he had the nation on his side. All the hopes of liberal reformers were now with him. All the hopes of moral and religious men were on his side as well. The seed sown by Wesley had grown to be a great tree. A spirit of thoughtfulness in religious matters and of moral energy was growing in the nation, and the king was endeared to his subjects, as much by his domestic virtues as by his support of the great minister who acted in his name. The happy prospect was soon to be overclouded. On the 4th of May, eleven days after the appearance of George III. at St Paul’s, the French states-general met at Versailles.
By the great mass of intelligent Englishmen the change was greeted with enthusiasm. It is seldom that one nation understands the tendencies and difficulties of another; and the mere fact that power was being transferred from an absolute monarch to a representative assembly The French Revolution; English feeling. led superficial observers to imagine that they were witnessing a mere repetition of the victory of the English parliament over the Stuart kings. In fact, that which was passing in France was of a totally different nature from the English struggle of the 17th century. In England, the conflict had been carried on for the purpose of limiting the power of the king. In France, it was begun in order to sweep away an aristocracy in church and state which had become barbarously oppressive. The French Revolution was not, therefore, a conflict for the reform of the political organization of the state, but one for the reorganization of the whole structure of society; and in proportion as it turned away from the path which English ignorance had marked out for it, Englishmen turned away from it in disgust. As they did not understand the aims of the French Revolutionists, they were unable to make that excuse for even so much of their conduct as admits of excuse. Three men, Fox, Burke and Pitt, however, represented three varieties of opinion into which the nation was very unequally divided.
Fox, generous and trustful towards the movements of large masses of men, had very little intellectual grasp of the questions at issue in France. He treated the struggle as one simply for the establishment of free institutions; and when at last the crimes of the leaders became patent to the world, he contented himself with lamenting the unfortunate fact, and fell back on the argument that though England could not sympathize with the French tyrants, there was no reason why she should go to war with them.
Burke, on the other hand, while he failed to understand the full tendency of the Revolution for good as well as for evil, understood it far better than any Englishman of that day understood it. He saw that its main aim was equality, not liberty, and that not only would the French nation be ready, in pursuit of equality, to welcome any tyranny which would serve its purpose, but would be the more prone to acts of tyranny over individuals. This would arise from the remodelling of institutions, with the object of giving immediate effect to the will of the masses, which was especially liable to be counterfeited by designing and unscrupulous agitators. There is no doubt that in all this Burke was in the right, as he was in his denunciation of the mischief certain to follow when a nation tries to start afresh, and to blot out all past progress in the light of simple reason, which is often most fallible when it believes itself to be most infallible. Where he went wrong was in his ignorance of the special circumstances of the French nation, and his consequent blindness to the fact that the historical method of gradual progress was impossible where institutions had become so utterly bad as they were in France, and that consequently the system of starting afresh, to which he reasonably objected, was to the French a matter not of choice but of necessity. Nor did he see that the passion for equality, like every great passion, justified itself, and that the problem was, not how to obtain liberty in defiance of it, but how so to guide it as to obtain liberty by it and through it.
Burke did not content himself with pointing out speculatively the evils which he foreboded for the French. He perceived clearly that the effect of the new French principles could no more be confined to French territory than the principles of Protestantism in the 16th century could be confined to Saxony. He knew well that the appeal to abstract reason and the hatred of aristocracy would spread over Europe like a flood, and, as he was in the habit of considering whatever was most opposed to the object of his dislike to be wholly excellent, he called for a crusade of all established governments against the anarchical principles of dissolution which had broken loose in France.
Pitt occupied ground apart from either Fox or Burke. He had neither Fox’s sympathy for popular movements, nor Burke’s intellectual appreciation of the immediate tendencies of the Revolution. Hence, whilst he pronounced against any active interference with France, he was an advocate of peace, not because he saw more than Fox or Burke, but because he saw less. He fancied that France would be so totally occupied with its own troubles that it would cease for a long time to be dangerous to other nations.
This view was soon to be stultified by the effect of the coalition
against France in 1792 of Prussia and Austria. The proclamation
of the allies calling on the French to restore the royal
authority was answered by a passionate outburst of
defiance. The king himself was suspected of complicity
Beginning
of the rev-olutionary wars.
with the invaders of his country, and the rising
of the 10th of August was followed by the proclamation of the
republic and by the awful “September massacres” of helpless
prisoners, guilty of no crime but noble birth, and therefore presumably
of attachment to the old régime, and treason towards
the new. This passionate attachment to the Revolution, which
in France displayed itself in a carnival of insane suspicion and
cruelty, inspired on the frontiers an astonishing patriotic resistance.
Before the end of the year the invasion was repulsed,
and the ragged armies of the Revolution had overrun Savoy
and the Austrian Netherlands, and were threatening the aristocratic
Dutch republic.
Very few governments in Europe were so rooted in the affections of their people as to be able to look without terror on the challenge thus thrown out to them. The English government was one of those very few. No mere despotism was here exercised by the king. No broad impassable line here divided
