Volume Vii Part 9 (1/2)
Nor were these triumphs less momentous to Britain. The Seven Years' War is in fact a turning-point in our national history, as it is a turning-point in the history of the world. Till now the relative weight of the European states had been drawn from their possessions within Europe itself. Spain, Portugal, and Holland indeed had won a dominion in other continents; and the wealth which two of these nations had derived from their colonies had given them for a time an influence among their fellow-states greater than that which was due to their purely European position. But in the very years during which her rule took firm hold in South America, Spain fell into a decay at home which prevented her empire over sea from telling directly on the balance of power; while the strictly commercial character of the Dutch settlements robbed them of political weight. France in fact was the first state to discern the new road to greatness which lay without European bounds; and the efforts of Dupleix and Montcalm aimed at the building up of an empire which would have lifted her high above her European rivals. The ruin of these hopes in the Seven Years' War was the bitterest humiliation to which French ambition has ever bowed. But it was far from being all that France had to bear. For not only had the genius of Pitt cut her off from the chance of rising into a world-power, and prisoned her again within the limits of a single continent, but it had won for Britain the position that France had lost. From the close of the Seven Years' War it mattered little whether England counted for less or more with the nations around her. She was no longer a mere European power; she was no longer a rival of Germany or France. Her future action lay in a wider sphere than that of Europe. Mistress of Northern America, the future mistress of India, claiming as her own the empire of the seas, Britain suddenly towered high above nations whose position in a single continent doomed them to comparative insignificance in the after-history of the world.
[Sidenote: England in the Pacific.]
It is this that gives William Pitt so unique a position among our statesmen. His figure in fact stands at the opening of a new epoch in English history--in the history not of England only, but of the English race. However dimly and imperfectly, he alone among his fellows saw that the struggle of the Seven Years' War was a struggle of a wholly different order from the struggles that had gone before it. He felt that the stake he was playing for was something vaster than Britain's standing among the powers of Europe. Even while he backed Frederick in Germany, his eye was not on the Weser, but on the Hudson and the St.
Lawrence. ”If I send an army to Germany,” he replied in memorable words to his a.s.sailants, ”it is because in Germany I can conquer America!” But greater even than Pitt's statesmans.h.i.+p was the conviction on which his statesmans.h.i.+p rested. He believed in Englishmen, and in the might of Englishmen. At a moment when few hoped that England could hold her own among the nations of Europe, he called her not only to face Europe in arms, but to claim an empire far beyond European bounds. His faith, his daring, called the English people to a sense of the destinies that lay before it. And once roused, the sense of these destinies could never be lost. The war indeed was hardly ended when a consciousness of them showed itself in the restlessness with which our seamen penetrated into far-off seas. With England on one side and her American colonies on the other, the Atlantic was dwindling into a mere strait within the British Empire; but beyond it to the westward lay a reach of waters where the British flag was almost unknown. The vast ocean which parts Asia from America had been discovered by a Spaniard and first traversed by a Portuguese; as early indeed as the sixteenth century Spanish settlements spread along its eastern sh.o.r.e and a Spanish galleon crossed it year by year from Acapulco to the Philippines. But no effort was made by Spain to explore the lands that broke its wide expanse; and though Dutch voyagers, coming from the eastward, penetrated its waters and first noted the mighty continent that bore from that hour the name of New Holland, no colonists followed in the track of Tasman or Van Diemen. It was not till another century had gone by indeed that Europe again turned her eyes to the Pacific. But in the very year which followed the Peace of Paris, in 1764, two English s.h.i.+ps were sent on a cruise of discovery to the Straits of Magellan.
[Sidenote: Captain Cook.]
”Nothing,” ran the instructions of their commander, Commodore Byron, ”nothing can redound more to the honour of this nation as a maritime power, to the dignity of the Crown of Great Britain, and to the advancement of the trade and navigation thereof, than to make discoveries of countries. .h.i.therto unknown.” Byron himself hardly sailed beyond Cape Horn; but three years later a second English seaman, Captain Wallis, succeeded in reaching the central island of the Pacific and in skirting the coral-reefs of Tahiti, and in 1768 a more famous mariner traversed the great ocean from end to end. At first a mere s.h.i.+p-boy on a Whitby collier, James Cook had risen to be an officer in the royal navy, and had piloted the boats in which Wolfe mounted the St. Lawrence to the Heights of Abraham. On the return of Wallis he was sent in a small vessel with a crew of some eighty men and a few naturalists to observe the transit of Venus at Tahiti, and to explore the seas that stretched beyond it. After a long stay at Tahiti Cook sailed past the Society Isles into the heart of the Pacific and reached at the further limits of that ocean the two islands, as large as his own Britain, which make up New Zealand. Steering northward from New Zealand over a thousand miles of sea he touched at last the coast of the great ”Southern Land” or Australia, on whose eastern sh.o.r.e, from some fancied likeness to the district at home on which he had gazed as he set sail, he gave the name of New South Wales. In two later voyages Cook traversed the same waters, and discovered fresh island groups in their wide expanse. But his work was more than a work of mere discovery. Wherever he touched, in New Zealand, in Australia, he claimed the soil for the English Crown. The records which he published of his travels not only woke the interest of Englishmen in these far-off islands, in their mighty reaches of deep blue waters, where lands as big as Britain die into mere specks on the huge expanse, in the coral-reefs, the palms, the bread-fruit of Tahiti, the tattooed warriors of New Zealand, the gum-trees and kangaroos of the Southern Continent, but they familiarized them more and more with the sense of possession, with the notion that this strange world of wonders was their own, and that a new earth was open in the Pacific for the expansion of the English race.
[Sidenote: Britain and its Empire.]
Cook in fact pointed out the fitness of New Holland for English settlement; and projects of its occupation, and of the colonization of the Pacific islands by English emigrants, became from that moment, in however vague and imperfect a fas.h.i.+on, the policy of the English crown.
Statesmen and people alike indeed felt the change in their country's att.i.tude. Great as Britain seemed to Burke, it was now in itself ”but part of a great empire, extended by our virtue and our fortune to the furthest limits of the east and the west.” Its parliament no longer looked on itself as the local legislature of England and Scotland; it claimed, in the words of the same great political thinker, ”an imperial character, in which as from the throne of heaven she superintends all the several inferior legislatures, and guides and controls them all, without annihilating any.” Its people, steeped in the commercial ideas of the time, saw in the growth of such a dominion, the monopoly of whose trade was reserved to the mother country, a source of boundless wealth. The trade with America alone was, in 1772, within less than half-a-million of being equal to what England carried on with the whole world at the beginning of the century. So rapid had been its growth that since the opening of the eighteenth century it had risen from a value of five hundred thousand pounds to one of six millions, and whereas the colonial trade then formed but a twelfth part of English commerce, it had now mounted to a third. To guard and preserve so vast and lucrative a dominion, to vindicate its integrity alike against outer foes and inner disaffection, to strengthen its unity by drawing closer the bonds, whether commercial or administrative, which linked its various parts to the mother country, became from this moment not only the aim of British statesmen, but the resolve of the British people.
[Sidenote: England and America.]
And at this moment there were grave reasons why this resolve should take an active form. Strong as the attachment of the Americans to Britain seemed at the close of the war, keen lookers-on like the French minister, the Duc de Choiseul, saw in the very completeness of Pitt's triumph a danger to their future union. The presence of the French in Canada, their designs in the west, had thrown America for protection on the mother country. But with the conquest of Canada all need of protection was removed. The att.i.tude of England towards its distant dependency became one of simple possession; and the differences of temper, the commercial and administrative disputes, which had long existed as elements of severance, but had been thrown into the background till now by the higher need for union, started into a new prominence. Day by day indeed the American colonies found it harder to submit to the meddling of the mother country with their self-government and their trade. A consciousness of their destinies was stealing in upon thoughtful men, and spread from them to the ma.s.ses around them. At this very moment the quick growth of population in America moved John Adams, then a village schoolmaster of Ma.s.sachusetts, to lofty forebodings of the future of the great people over whom he was to be called to rule.
”Our people in another century,” he wrote, ”will be more numerous than England itself. All Europe will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us.” The sense that such an independence was drawing nearer spread even to Europe.
”Fools,” said a descendant of William Penn, ”are always telling their fears that the colonies will set up for themselves.” Philosophers however were pretty much of the same mind on this subject with the fools. ”Colonies are like fruits,” wrote the foreseeing Turgot, ”which cling to the tree only till they ripen. As soon as America can take care of itself it will do what Carthage did.” But from the thought of separation almost every American turned as yet with horror. The Colonists still looked to England as their home. They prided themselves on their loyalty; and they regarded the difficulties which hindered complete sympathy between the settlements and the mother country as obstacles which time and good sense could remove. England on the other hand looked on America as her n.o.blest possession. It was the wealth, the growth of this dependency which more than all the victories of her arms was lifting her to a new greatness among the nations. It was the trade with it which had doubled English commerce in half-a-century. Of the right of the mother country to monopolize this trade, to deal with this great people as its own possession, no Englishman had a doubt. England, it was held, had planted every colony. It was to England that the Colonists owed not their blood only, but the free inst.i.tutions under which they had grown to greatness. English arms had rescued them from the Indians, and broken the iron barrier with which France was holding them back from the West. In the war which was drawing to a close England had poured out her blood and gold without stint in her children's cause.
Of the debt which was mounting to a height unknown before no small part was due to her struggle on behalf of America. And with this sense of obligation mingled a sense of ingrat.i.tude. It was generally held that the wealthy Colonists should do something to lighten the load of this debt from the shoulders of the mother country. But it was known that all proposals for American taxation would be bitterly resisted. The monopoly of American trade was looked on as a part of an Englishman's birthright.
Yet the Colonists not only murmured at this monopoly but evaded it in great part by a wide system of smuggling. And behind all these grievances lay an uneasy sense of dread at the democratic form which the government and society of the colonies had taken. The governors sent from England wrote back words of honest surprise and terror at the ”levelling principles” of the men about them. To statesmen at home the temper of the colonial legislatures, their protests, their bickerings with the governors and with the Board of Trade, the constant refusal of supplies when their remonstrances were set aside, seemed all but republican.
[Sidenote: George the Third.]
To check this republican spirit, to crush all dreams of severance, and to strengthen the unity of the British Empire by drawing closer the fiscal and administrative bonds which linked the colonies to the mother country, was one of the chief aims with which George the Third mounted the throne on the death of his grandfather George the Second, in 1760.
But it was far from being his only aim. For the first and last time since the accession of the House of Hanover England saw a king who was resolved to play a part in English politics; and the part which George succeeded in playing was undoubtedly a memorable one. During the first ten years of his reign he managed to reduce government to a shadow, and to turn the loyalty of his subjects at home into disaffection. Before twenty years were over he had forced the American colonies into revolt and independence, and brought England to what then seemed the brink of ruin. Work such as this has sometimes been done by very great men, and often by very wicked and profligate men; but George was neither profligate nor great. He had a smaller mind than any English king before him save James the Second. He was wretchedly educated, and his natural powers were of the meanest sort. Nor had he the capacity for using greater minds than his own by which some sovereigns have concealed their natural littleness. On the contrary, his only feeling towards great men was one of jealousy and hate. He longed for the time when ”decrepitude or death” might put an end to Pitt; and even when death had freed him from ”this trumpet of sedition,” he denounced the proposal for a public monument to the great statesman as ”an offensive measure to me personally.” But dull and petty as his temper was, he was clear as to his purpose and obstinate in the pursuit of it. And his purpose was to rule. ”George,” his mother, the Princess of Wales, had continually repeated to him in youth, ”George, be king.” He called himself always ”a Whig of the Revolution,” and he had no wish to undo the work which he believed the Revolution to have done. But he looked on the subjection of his two predecessors to the will of their ministers as no real part of the work of the Revolution, but as a usurpation of that authority which the Revolution had left to the crown. And to this usurpation he was determined not to submit. His resolve was to govern, not to govern against law, but simply to govern, to be freed from the dictation of parties and ministers, and to be in effect the first minister of the State.
[Sidenote: Importance of his action.]
How utterly incompatible such a dream was with the Parliamentary const.i.tution of the country as it had received its final form from Sunderland it is easy to see; and the effort of the young king to realize it plunged England at once into a chaos of political and social disorder which makes the first years of his reign the most painful and humiliating period in our history. It is with an angry disgust that we pa.s.s from the triumphs of the Seven Years' War to the miserable strife of Whig factions with one another or of the whole Whig party with the king. But wearisome as the story is, it is hardly less important than that of the rise of England into a world-power. In the strife of these wretched years began a political revolution which is still far from having reached its close. Side by side with the gradual developement of the English Empire and of the English race has gone on, through the century that has pa.s.sed since the close of the Seven Years' War, the transfer of power within England itself from a governing cla.s.s to the nation as a whole. If the effort of George failed to restore the power of the Crown, it broke the power which impeded the advance of the people itself to political supremacy. Whilst labouring to convert the aristocratic monarchy of which he found himself the head into a personal sovereignty, the irony of fate doomed him to take the first step in an organic change which has converted that aristocratic monarchy into a democratic republic, ruled under monarchical forms.
[Sidenote: The Revolution and the nation.]
To realize however the true character of the king's attempt we must recall for a moment the issue of the Revolution on which he claimed to take his stand. It had no doubt given personal and religious liberty to England at large. But its political benefits seemed as yet to be less equally shared. The Parliament indeed had become supreme, and in theory the Parliament was a representative of the whole English people. But in actual fact the bulk of the English people found itself powerless to control the course of English government. We have seen how at the very moment of its triumph opinion had been paralyzed by the results of the Revolution. The sentiment of the bulk of Englishmen remained Tory, but the existence of a Stuart Pretender forced on them a system of government which was practically Whig. Under William and Anne they had tried to reconcile Toryism with the Revolution; but this effort ended with the accession of the House of Hanover, and the bulk of the landed cla.s.ses and the clergy withdrew in a sulky despair from all permanent contact with politics. Their hatred of the system to which they bowed showed itself in the violence of their occasional outbreaks, in riots over the Excise Bill, in cries for a Spanish war, in the frenzy against Walpole. Whenever it roused itself, the national will showed its old power to destroy; but it remained impotent to create any new system of administrative action. It could aid one clique of Whigs to destroy another clique of Whigs, but it could do nothing to interrupt the general course of Whig administration. Walpole and Pelham were alike the representatives of a minority of the nation; but the minority which they represented knew its mind and how to carry out its mind, while the majority of the people remained helpless and distracted between their hatred of the House of Hanover and their dread of the consequences which would follow on a return of the Stuarts.
[Sidenote: Parliament and the nation.]
The results of such a divorce between the government and that general ma.s.s of national sentiment on which a government can alone safely ground itself at once made themselves felt. Robbed as it was of all practical power, and thus stripped of the feeling of responsibility which the consciousness of power carries with it, among the ma.s.s of Englishmen public opinion became ignorant and indifferent to the general progress of the age, but at the same time violent and mutinous, hostile to Government because it was Government, disloyal to the Crown, averse from Parliament. For the first and last time in our history Parliament was unpopular, and its opponents secure of popularity. But the results on the governing cla.s.s were even more fatal to any right conduct of public affairs. Not only had the ma.s.s of national sentiment been so utterly estranged from Parliament by the withdrawal of the Tories that the people had lost all trust in it as an expression of their will, but the Parliament did not pretend to express it. It was conscious that for half-a-century it had not been really a representative of the nation, that it had represented a minority, wiser no doubt than their fellow-countrymen, but still a minority of Englishmen. At the same time it saw, and saw with a just pride, that its policy had as a whole been for the nation's good, that it had given political and religious freedom to the people in the very teeth of their political and religious bigotry, that in spite of their narrow insularism it had made Britain the greatest of European powers. The sense of both these aspects of Parliament had sunk in fact so deeply into the mind of the Whigs as to become a theory of Parliamentary government. They were never weary of expressing their contempt for public opinion. They shrank with instinctive dislike from Pitt's appeals to national feeling, and from the popularity which rewarded them. They denied that members of the Commons sate as representatives of the people, and they shrank with actual panic from the thought of any change which could render them representatives. To a Whig such a change meant the overthrow of the work done in 1688, the coercion of the minority of sound political thinkers by the ma.s.s of opinion, so brutal and unintelligent, so bigoted in its views both of Church and State, which had been content to reap the benefits of the Revolution while vilifying and opposing its principles.
[Sidenote: Need of Parliamentary reform.]
And yet, if representation was to be more than a name, the very relation of Parliament to the const.i.tuencies made some change in its composition a necessity. That changes in the distribution of seats in the House of Commons were called for by the natural s.h.i.+ftings of population and wealth which had gone on since the days of Edward the First had been recognized as early as the Civil Wars. But the reforms of the Long Parliament were cancelled at the Restoration; and from the time of Charles the Second to that of George the Third not a single effort had been made to meet the growing abuses of our parliamentary system. Great towns like Manchester or Birmingham remained without a member, while members still sat for boroughs which, like Old Sarum, had actually vanished from the face of the earth. The effort of the Tudor sovereigns to establish a Court party in the House by a profuse creation of boroughs, most of which were mere villages then in the hands of the Crown, had ended in the appropriation of these seats by the neighbouring landowners, who bought and sold them as they bought and sold their own estates. Even in towns which had a real claim to representation the narrowing of munic.i.p.al privileges ever since the fourteenth century to a small part of the inhabitants, and in many cases the restriction of electoral rights to the members of the governing corporation, rendered their representation a mere name. The choice of such places hung simply on the purse or influence of politicians. Some were ”the King's boroughs,” others obediently returned nominees of the Ministry of the day, others were ”close boroughs” in the hands of jobbers like the Duke of Newcastle, who at one time returned a third of all the borough members in the House. The counties and the great commercial towns could alone be said to exercise any real right of suffrage, though the enormous expense of contesting such const.i.tuencies practically left their representation in the hands of the great local families. But even in the counties the suffrage was ridiculously limited and unequal. Out of a population of eight millions of English people, only a hundred and sixty thousand were electors at all.
[Sidenote: Pressure of opinion.]
”The value, spirit, and essence of a House of Commons,” said Burke, in n.o.ble words, ”consists in its being the express image of the feelings of the nation.” But how far such a House as that which now existed was from really representing English opinion we see from the fact that in the height of his popularity Pitt himself could hardly find a seat in it.
Purchase was becoming more and more the means of entering Parliament; and seats were bought and sold in the open market at a price which rose to four thousand pounds. We can hardly wonder that a reformer could allege without a chance of denial, ”This House is not a representative of the people of Great Britain. It is the representative of nominal boroughs, of ruined and exterminated towns, of n.o.ble families, of wealthy individuals, of foreign potentates.” The meanest motives naturally told on a body returned by such const.i.tuencies, cut off from the influence of public opinion by the secrecy of Parliamentary proceedings, and yet invested with almost boundless authority. Walpole and Newcastle had in fact made bribery and borough-jobbing the base of their power. But bribery and borough-jobbing were every day becoming more offensive to the nation at large. A new moral consciousness, as we have seen in the movement of the Wesleys, was diffusing itself through England; and behind this moral consciousness came a general advance in the national intelligence, which could not fail to tell vigorously on politics.
[Sidenote: The intellectual advance.]