when Shelburne March, Pitt become premier ; Portland became such in name; Fox, the so bitterly hostile to each other, had coalesced in order to overthrow the king's party headed by Shelburne and Pitt. When the test came, the rumor was confirmed by the rejection of the address presented by the supporters of the government by a majority of sixteen.1 Thus left in the minority, Shelburne resigned in resigned on the 31st of March; and then followed a bitter declined to struggle, during which the king, in the hope of breaking up the coalition, appealed in vain to Pitt to become his first minister. Counselled by the intuition of genius, he firmly declined, and thus forced the crown to accept a ministry presided over by the duke of Portland as the nominal head, but with all real power divided between Fox and North as secretaries of state. When parliament met in November, this unnatural and scandalous alliance, which drove at once the ultra-Tories from North and the ultra-Whigs from Fox, was soon hurried to its doom through the adoption by the latter, who was the real chief, real prime minister, of a bill drawn up by Burke embodying a bold and startling project that proposed to take away from the East India Company the authority it had previously exercised, and to vest it in seven commissioners, to be appointed by parliament and to be irremovable by the crown. Revolutionary as the proposition was, the coalition, eager to possess the power and patronage that would pass to its nominees, hurried it through with great majorities, and sent it up to the house of lords. Then it was that the king undertook to oppose his own ing the bill ministers by authorizing Temple, Pitt's cousin, "to say that of his own whoever voted for the India Bill was not only not his friend, the lords, but would be considered by him an enemy.' "3 Under that pressure the bill was first postponed and then finally rejected dismissed by the upper house. To the humiliation thus put upon Fox and North, their implacable sovereign added by sending them an order to return their seals by their under-secretaries, as a personal audience with them would be disagreeable to him." attacked the East India Company by adopting a bill drawn by Burke; the king, after defeat ministers in them from office; refused to commons; divisions him; that the The time had now come for the king to commit the power thus wrested from his adversaries to the keeping of some one who could unite fidelity to the crown with the trust of the nation. Under such circumstances it was that Pitt became Pitt became the king's in December first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the minister in exchequer. In outward seeming he was only the king's min- December, 1783; ister, as Bute had been; and his position as such he at once as such he emphasized by refusing to bow to the will of the house of com- bow to the mons during a contest that lasted from the 17th of December, 1783, to the 8th of March, 1784. During that time the opposition, led by Fox, North, and Sheridan, carried sixteen divi- sixteen sions against him, but with dwindling majorities. In thus carried apparently defying the fundamental principle of parliamentary against government, Pitt was sustained by the consciousness that he conscious had not only the king, but the nation behind him; and as a nation was proof of his faith in that fact, he did what no other minister of behind him; a Hanoverian king had ever dared to do, after the supplies and the Mutiny Bill were voted, he appealed from the representatives in parliament to their constituents. In thus appeal- his appeal ing to the people, Pitt relied, as his father had before him, upon stituencies; that great and growing middle class, composed of merchants the growing and manufacturers, whose mighty force was working a revolu- class; tion in English society and in English politics, and yet without any adequate representation in the legislature. Since the middle of the century a large part of the population had applied its thought to the practical problems affecting industry, effects of and thus was set in motion the revolution that was fast bring- trial revoluing about the transfer of wealth and population from southern tion; to northern England, and from the country to the town, while the kingdom as a whole was becoming the great workshop of the world. As a result of the progress thus set in motion, growth in population more than doubled during the eighteenth century, population; and the increase in wealth was even greater than in population.2 In 1776, at the moment when such a work was sorely needed, appeared Adam Smith's epoch-making book upon the 1 Macaulay's "William Pitt," Essays, vol. iii. p. 333. 2 "Under these conditions the growth of English commerce was very rapid. . . . The expansion had been so rapid that merchants strained their credit to engage in vast speculations, to the con middle the indus wealth and Pitt, the leader of classes, and also of the court party; "Wealth of Nations," and Pitt, then an undergraduate at Cambridge, whose mental temper was mathematical and financial, became at once a disciple of the new master, whose principles soon became the groundwork of his policy.1 Nothing could have been more natural than the instinct that led the became the manufacturing and trading classes, in the midst of the politithe trading cal confusion by which every interest was clouded, to turn to Pitt as a deliverer. To the support that thus came to him from the most aggressive element in the nation was added the influence of the potential body surrounding the throne, who saw in him the only man who could rescue the king from his peril. By the combined force of these two great currents, the will of the nation was able to break through the corrupt influences that ordinarily dominated the representative system, and the result was that the new government was so enthusisustained astically sustained by the constituent bodies that upwards of a stituencies; hundred and sixty of the coalition that had opposed Pitt lost their seats,2 he coming in at the head of the list from the University of Cambridge,3 where a few years before he was at the although he bottom of the poll. Thus the prime minister of twenty-five, political life who had entered public life as a Whig, was lifted through the as a Whig, wreck of that party to a height of political authority which no the founder other statesman had been able to reach since the Revolution. of the long tory ascend. As the favorite of the king, the parliament, and the nation, Pitt was able to consolidate the power he had gained, and to retain it unbroken down to 1801, while the Tory ascendency thus established continued in name, at least, almost without interruption, down to the era of the Reform Bill of 1832. by the con entered Pitt was ency. Revival of the ministerial system under the influence of Pitt; The importance of Pitt's ascendency to the history of the constitution is embodied in the fact that through the combined strength of his personal character and political position he was able to neutralize to a great extent the efforts that George III. had made to destroy the new ministerial system, whose reconstitution was absolutely necessary for the execution of Pitt's political ideas. In a conversation with Lord Melville in 1803 1 "He had learned from Adam Smith the first principles of political economy, and the commercial treaty with France was the first visible result of the new science." - Gardiner and Mullinger, Introd. to Eng. Hist., p. -- 2 Tomline's Life of Pitt, vol. i. p. 469; Stanhope's Life of Pitt, vol. i. p. 204, et seq. 8 Macaulay's "William Pitt,” Essays, vol. iii. p. 334. that a real his will able to he, when out of office, gave expression to those ideas "pointedly and decidedly," in explaining "the absolute necessity there is in the conduct of the affairs of this country that there should be an avowed and real minister, possessing the chief he avowed weight in the council, and the principal place in the confidence first minisof the king. In that respect (he contended) there can be no necessity; ter was a rivalry or division of power. That power must rest in the person generally called the first minister, and that minister ought (he thought) to be the person at the head of the finances. If it should unfortunately come to such a radical difference of opinion that no spirit of conciliation or concession can reconcile, the sentiments of the minister must be allowed and under- and that stood to prevail, leaving the other members of administration should to act as they may conceive themselves conscientiously called always prevail; upon to act under such circumstances."1 While such ideas were directly in conflict with the aggressive position the king how the had assumed from his accession, his perfect confidence in the king was integrity and ability of Pitt, coupled with the fact that his reconcile principles were entirely in accordance with his own, made it with his possible for him so far to yield to the superior intelligence of his first minister as to approximately establish the constitutional relations between the sovereign and his advisers that had existed in the two preceding reigns. And yet it would be a grave error to suppose that the surrender upon the part of the king was either sudden or absolute. George III. persevered to the end in having all matters of government, both great and small, submitted to his judgment and approval, while he jealously held on to the distribution of patronage in church and state.2 But if Pitt was thus forced to veil his absolutism as while Pitt prime minister by an outward show of submission to the royal outward will, within the cabinet itself he so asserted his authority as to show of put beyond all question the fact that he was the real chief of to the state. sovereign, It is said to have been his custom to briefly discuss at he was cabinet meetings with Dundas such matters as they had not autocratic with his previously arranged, and then after communicating his decision colleagues; to his colleagues they were told that they might go.3 By thus firmly establishing the paramount influence of the prime min Pitt's ideas own; his submis sion only partial; made an submission the system ments; with the rise of Pitt influence of the broke down ister over his associates, Pitt was able to break down at last the of independ- bad system of government by means of separate and independent departments of state that had existed since the Revolution simply because the ministers had never been forced to accept the supremacy of a common chief.1 The foundations of such a supremacy laid down by Walpole ripened under Pitt into a rule of government which, with perhaps two exceptions, has never been disputed since that time. The statement may the personal therefore be made that, from the moment that Pitt entered into office as first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the Sovereign exchequer, the right of the sovereign not only to reign but to began to wane; rule began again to sink into the background, in order to make place for the supremacy of the prime minister as now understood. Before the reign of George III. drew to a close the principles were firmly settled, (1) that the prime minister was the personal choice of the king, and as such the depository of his constitutional confidence; (2) that the trust thus assumed was to be discharged with the aid of colleagues selected by the first minister 2 himself, subject of course to the sovereign's approval. two great principles settled before the end of the reign of George III. Pitt as legislator and financier; 7. Apart from the inestimable service rendered by Pitt in removing the obstruction that forced for a time the new system of government by cabinets into eclipse, he was the author of two far-reaching schemes of legislation which have become permanent parts of the constitution. As the responsible head of the national finances he was immediately called upon to provide for increased taxation, made necessary by the expenses of made neces- the War of American Independence, that added a hundred and twenty-one millions to the permanent debt. The rapid increase of wealth and prosperity during the eight years of peace with which his administration opened made that task a compar atively easy one; and the result was that, at the end of the increased taxation sary by American war; 1 "It was not until the accession to office of the younger Pitt, in 1783, that the paramount authority of a prime minister over his associates in the government was unreservedly confessed, and that as a natural consequence government by departments came to an end."-Todd, Parl. Government, vol. i. pp. 264, 265. See also pp. 277, 278. 2 "As the cabinet stands between the sovereign and the parliament, and is bound to be loyal to both, so he stands between his colleagues and the sovereign, and is bound to be loyal to both.”. Gladstone, Gleanings, vol. i p. 242. 8 "At the time of the revolt of the American colonies, it was under one hundred and thirty millions, an amount which frightened all the political econ omists of that day.". Whitaker's Ab manack, 1896, p. 183. |