If some great misfortune, a pitched battle lost by the allies, the annexation of a new department to the French Republic, a sanguinary insurrection in Ireland, a mutiny in the fleet, a panic in the city, a run on the bank, had spread dismay through the ranks of his majority, that dismay lasted only till he rose from the Treasury bench, drew up his haughty head, stretched his arm with commanding gesture, and poured forth, in deep and sonorous tones, the lofty language of inextinguishable hope and inflexible resolution.Thus, through a long and calamitous period, every disaster that happened without the walls of Parliament was regularly followed by a triumph within them.At length he had no longer an opposition to encounter.Of the great party which had contended against him during the first eight years of his administration more than one half now marched under his standard, with his old competitor the Duke of Portland at their head; and the rest had, after many vain struggles, quitted the field in despair.Fox had retired to the shades of St Anne's Hill, and had there found, in the society of friends whom no vicissitude could estrange from him, of a woman whom he tenderly loved, and of the illustrious dead of Athens, of Rome, and of Florence, ample compensation for all the misfortunes of his public life.Session followed session with scarcely a single division.In the eventful year 1799, the largest minority that could be mustered against the government was twenty-five.
In Pitt's domestic policy there was at this time assuredly no want of vigour.While he offered to French Jacobinism a resistance so feeble that it only encouraged the evil which he wished to suppress, he put down English Jacobinism with a strong hand.The Habeas Corpus Act was repeatedly suspended.Public meetings were placed under severe restraints.The government obtained from parliament power to send out of the country aliens who were suspected of evil designs; and that power was not suffered to be idle.Writers who propounded doctrines adverse to monarchy and aristocracy were proscribed and punished without mercy.It was hardly safe for a republican to avow his political creed over his beefsteak and his bottle of port at a chop-house.
The old laws of Scotland against sedition, laws which were considered by Englishmen as barbarous, and which a succession of governments had suffered to rust, were now furbished up and sharpened anew.Men of cultivated minds and polished manners were, for offences which at Westminster would have been treated as mere misdemeanours, sent to herd with felons at Botany Bay.
Some reformers, whose opinions were extravagant, and whose language was intemperate, but who had never dreamed of subverting the government by physical force, were indicted for high treason, and were saved from the gallows only by the righteous verdicts of juries.This severity was at the time loudly applauded by alarmists whom fear had made cruel, but will be seen in a very different light by posterity.The truth is, that the Englishmen who wished for a revolution were, even in number, not formidable, and in everything but number, a faction utterly contemptible, without arms, or funds, or plans, or organisation, or leader.
There can be no doubt that Pitt, strong as he was in the support of the great body of the nation, might easily have repressed the turbulence of the discontented minority by firmly yet temperately enforcing the ordinary law.Whatever vigour he showed during this unfortunate part of his life was vigour out of place and season.He was all feebleness and langour in his conflict with the foreign enemy who was really to be dreaded, and reserved all his energy and resolution for the domestic enemy who might safely have been despised.