BLINDNESS OF ITS ENEMIES.

3

compensated for injuries which after all were temporary. But we must not blame the men who saw the process without foreseeing the result, if they took alarm at what seemed to them the subversion of the entire fabric of social order. From the statesmen of Europe we might, without injustice, have expected the calmness and moderation indicative of the philosophical mind. But they were overborne by the influence of a terrified aristocracy and the pressure of clerical bigotry; partly also, by the excesses of the Revolutionary leaders, which did, indeed, give a show of reasonableness to the terror with which the New Movement was regarded. We believe that Pitt, at the outset, was content to look on, and await the time when France should have regained her self-possession. But he was carried away by a burst of national feeling, provoked by the mistaken eloquence of one great orator and statesman, and apparently justified by the violence and aggressiveness of the French Convention.

That one great orator and writer to whom we must ascribe England's participation in the European crusade against the liberty and independence of France, was Edmund Burke. We have already recorded with what vehemence he threw himself on the side of reac tion; and the success with which, by the publication of his' Reflections on the French Revolution,' he roused the passions and awoke the prejudices of the British public. That success was all the more signal because Burke had always been identified with the principles of religious and civil freedom; was supposed to sympathise with reform, and to approve of considerable administrative changes.

4

BURKE'S FANATICISM.

But Burke, a middle-class statesman with aristocratic tendencies, an enthusiast for things as they were, for a constitution with artfully adjusted balances, for an established Church acting as a kind of State police, could see only the Reign of Terror and not the Revolution; could hear only the clang of the knife of the blood-stained guillotine, and not the voices that told of human brotherhood and national morality. His imagination, always too powerful for his judgment, became disordered by the number and horror of its visions. It pictured Europe as one vast shambles; and even England, though separated from the Revolutionary area by a silver streak of sea, as given over to rapine and massacre. It was haunted by lurid images of kings beheaded, of nobles and prelates abandoned to the fury of sans-culotte mobs. Burke's whole soul was so filled with adoration of precedent, and order, and longestablished custom, that the spectre of the Revolution almost drove him mad. "He who could not endure," says Mr. Morley, "that a few clergymen should be allowed to subscribe to the Bible instead of to the Articles, saw the ancient Church of Christendom prostrated, its possessions confiscated, its priests proscribed, and Christianity itself officially superseded. The economical reformer, who, when his zeal was hottest, declined to discharge a tide-waiter or a scullion in the royal kitchen, who had acquired the shadow of a vested interest in his post, beheld two great orders stripped of all their privileges and deprived of all their lands, though the possession in each case had been sanctified by the prescription of many centuries, and by the express voice of the laws. He, who was full of apprehension and anger at the pro

CONDUCT OF PITT AND FOX.

5

posal to take away a member of Parliament from St. Michael's or Old Sarum, had to look on while the most august monarchy in Europe was deliberately overturned. The man who dreaded fanatics, hated atheists, despised political theorizers, and was driven wild at the notion. of applying metaphysical rights and abstract doctrines to public affairs, was confident that he saw a vast kingdom given finally up to fanatics, atheists, and theorizers, who talked of nothing but the rights of man, and made it their chief aim to set as wide a gulf as ruin and bloodshed could make, between themselves and every incident or institution in their own history, or in that of every other country."

Pitt had not the political knowledge and temperate sagacity which could withstand the torrent of Burke's inflammatory eloquence, and the impetuosity of the national fear and apprehension. Perhaps he was influenced, unconsciously to himself, by the attitude which his great rival, the Whig leader, assumed. If Fox stood forward as the advocate and apologist of the Revolution, Pitt naturally became its enemy. What English statesmen most needed at this juncture was moderation, and this supreme quality of statesmanship neither Fox nor Pitt exhibited. The former went as far in one direction as the latter in another. Fox refused to see the clouds on the sky; Pitt was not less blind to the brightness on the eastern horizon. The former failed to exert his power over his party and the country to repress those outbreaks of prejudice, and to check the growth of that war-fever to which England is always dangerously liable. The latter allowed his fervid sympathies to predominate

6

THE TWO EXTREMES.

over his discretion, and in his enthusiastic delight at the benefits to spring from the Revolution failed to censure its excesses. Had he been moderate, Pitt might have been moderate, or at least, would have been less passionate; and the two statesmen, united, could have successfully withstood the military tendencies of the Court and the unreasoning ardour of the country. But his Whiggism for awhile wandered on the very verge of Jacobinism; and Pitt, throwing aside, probably with a pang of regret, his pacific projects and financial reforms, yielded to the ignorance of his party, and became the leader and prophet of Absolutism. His course was easy enough when his rival could profess that the bloody despotism of Robespierre was better than the restoration of the Bourbons. His course was easy enough when the Whig leader, the leader of a party whose chief glory was based on its achievement of the peaceful Revolution of 1688, could defend the dark deed of "the Tenth of August" (1792). His course was easy enough, when Fox, the leader of a party which had striven nobly and successfully on behalf of Constitutional Government, and opposed to the uttermost the despotic pretensions of the Crown, could speak with approval of a military usurper like Bonaparte.

Impelled in a reactionary direction by the extravagance of the Opposition, as well as by the pressure of the Court and the nation, which had absorbed Burke's anti-revolutionary fever, Pitt gradually abandoned his stronghold of peace and economy. His downward movement was indicated by various measures; futile in themselves, yet injurious as parts of a bad policy; a

MISTAKEN POLICY OF PITT.

7

royal proclamation against seditious writings, an Alien Bill aimed at the supposed propagators of French revolutionary principles, another Bill forbidding the circulation of assignats, and yet another which prohibited the exportation of corn and flour to France. He refused to acknowledge the Republican Government; and the Republican Government in its turn vowed vengeance against England as the defender of monarchical tyranny. After the execution of Lewis the 16th, peace became impossible; though while rightly condemning and protesting against such an act of cruelty, it was clearly not the duty of England to interfere in behalf of a dynasty that France had rejected. Had the British Government been patient and watchful, the excesses of the Revolution would have been disowned by the French themselves; but the coalition into which it flung all its energies provoked them to undertake a wild and fanatical propagandism, and to treat every country with a monarchical government as an enemy. "There must be no more kings in Europe," exclaimed Danton, "one king would be sufficient to endanger the general liberty; and I request that a committee be established for the purpose of promoting a general insurrection among all peoples against kings." A prudent statesman might well have treated such ravings with contempt; but Pitt had gone too far by this time to recede, and had entered on the later and darker period of his Ministerial career. From the 19th of November, 1792, when the National Convention issued its famous decree, "offering fraternity and assistance" to any nation that desired to recover its freedom, Pitt appears to have resolved upon war. He adopted Burke's