The dangers of the country were at that time such as might well have disturbed even a constant mind.Army after army had been sent in vain against the rebellious colonists of North America.
On pitched fields of battle the advantage had been with the disciplined troops of the mother country.But it was not on pitched fields of battle that the event of such a contest could be decided.An armed nation, with hunger and the Atlantic for auxiliaries, was not to be subjugated.Meanwhile the House of Bourbon, humbled to the dust a few years before by the genius and vigour of Chatham, had seized the opportunity of revenge.France and Spain were united against us, and had recently been joined by Holland.The command of the Mediterranean had been for a time lost.The British flag had been scarcely able to maintain itself in the British Channel.The northern powers professed neutrality; but their neutrality had a menacing aspect.In the East, Hyder had descended on the Carnatic, had destroyed the little army of Baillie, and had spread terror even to the ramparts of Fort Saint George.The discontents of Ireland threatened nothing less than civil war.In England the authority of the government had sunk to the lowest point.The King and the House of Commons were alike unpopular.The cry for parliamentary reform was scarcely less loud and vehement than in the autumn of 1830.Formidable associations, headed, not by ordinary demagogues, but by men of high rank, stainless character, and distinguished ability, demanded a revision of the representative system.The populace, emboldened by the impotence and irresolution of the government, had recently broken loose from all restraint, besieged the chambers of the legislature, hustled peers, hunted bishops, attacked the residences of ambassadors, opened prisons, burned and pulled down houses.London had presented during some days the aspect of a city taken by storm;and it had been necessary to form a camp among the trees of Saint James's Park.
In spite of dangers and difficulties abroad and at home, George the Third, with a firmness which had little affinity with virtue or with wisdom, persisted in his determination to put down the American rebels by force of arms; and his ministers submitted their judgment to his.Some of them were probably actuated merely by selfish cupidity; but their chief, Lord North, a man of high honour, amiable temper, winning manners, lively wit, and excellent talents both for business and for debate, must be acquitted of all sordid motives.He remained at a post from which he had long wished and had repeatedly tried to escape, only because he had not sufficient fortitude to resist the entreaties and reproaches of the King, who silenced all arguments by passionately asking whether any gentleman, any man of spirit, could have the heart to desert a kind master in the hour of extremity.
The opposition consisted of two parties which had once been hostile to each other, and which had been very slowly, and, as it soon appeared, very imperfectly reconciled, but which at this conjuncture seemed to act together with cordiality.The larger of these parties consisted of the great body of the Whig aristocracy.Its head was Charles, Marquess of Rockingham, a man of sense and virtue, and in wealth and parliamentary interest equalled by very few of the English nobles, but afflicted with a nervous timidity which prevented him from taking a prominent part in debate.In the House of Commons, the adherents of Rockingham were led by Fox, whose dissipated habits and ruined fortunes were the talk of the whole town, but whose commanding genius, and whose sweet, generous, and affectionate disposition, extorted the admiration and love of those who most lamented the errors of his private life.Burke, superior to Fox in largeness of comprehension, in extent of knowledge, and in splendour of imagination, but less skilled in that kind of logic and in that kind of rhetoric which convince and persuade great assemblies, was willing to be the lieutenant of a young chief who might have been his son.
A smaller section of the opposition was composed of the old followers of Chatham.At their head was William, Earl of Shelburne, distinguished both as a statesman and as a lover of science and letters.With him were leagued Lord Camden, who had formerly held the Great Seal, and whose integrity, ability, and constitutional knowledge commanded the public respect; Barre, an eloquent and acrimonious declaimer; and Dunning, who had long held the first place at the English bar.It was to this party that Pitt was naturally attracted.
On the 26th of February 1781, he made his first speech, in favour of Burke's plan of economical reform.Fox stood up at the same moment, but instantly gave way.The lofty yet animated deportment of the young member, his perfect self-possession, the readiness with which he replied to the orators who had preceded him, the silver tones of his voice, the perfect structure of his unpremeditated sentences, astonished and delighted his hearers.
Burke, moved even to tears, exclaimed, "It is not a chip of the old block; it is the old block itself." "Pitt will be one of the first men in Parliament," said a member of the opposition to Fox.
"He is so already," answered Fox, in whose nature envy had no place.It is a curious fact, well remembered by some who were very recently living, that soon after this debate Pitt's name was put up by Fox at Brookes's.
On two subsequent occasions during that session Pitt addressed the House, and on both fully sustained the reputation which he had acquired on his first appearance.In the summer, after the prorogation, he again went the western circuit, held several briefs, and acquitted himself in such a manner that he was highly complimented by Buller from the bench, and by Dunning at the bar.