 CHAPTER 1 FOX AS A TORY, 1749-1774, PART I Mr. Fox never had any principle. Il n'a nous l'espèce de principe et il regarde avec pitié tous ceux qui s'en ont. Such were the criticisms passed on the public and private conduct of Charles James Fox in the height of his parliamentary fame, by no mean judges of human nature, George III and Madame de Diffon. From the damaging effect of these criticisms, Fox's reputation never yet has been, nor indeed can be, wholly freed. Despite his brilliant services to the Whig Party, despite the magic sway of his eloquence, despite the rare gifts of his singularly winning nature, there hangs over his career from first to last like a storm cloud on a sunny April sky, the dark shadow of an unprincipled life. The reason is not far to seek. He was a spoiled child from the cradle to the grave. Petted and indulged by his father in his childhood, he was petted and indulged by his party in his maturity. Even his opponents could hardly believe him to be an earnest, and after having been for an hour the object of his most trenchant fight-tuporation, Lord North would be content to reply with a good-natured joke. It was not to be wondered at that under such circumstances Fox found it difficult to take politics seriously, and to look at them in any other light than a game as interesting and less expensive than Faro or Caz. A gambler at Brooks, he was a gambler at St. Stevens. He played as recklessly in one place as in the other. In both places, much of his recklessness was due to the training he had received from his father. Never was son more obedient, never had son less cause for his obedience. Deliberately educated in vice from a schoolboy, laughed out of any scruples which might struggle to the surface, encouraged to indulge every whim and every desire, he could not but lose the niceness of moral judgment and could not but fail to appreciate the importance of moral principle. To Lord Holland belongs the infamous distinction of having been among the most corrupt of fathers as well as the most corrupt of the statesmen of his time. Born on the 24th of January, 1749, Charles Fox was sent to Eaton in the autumn of 1758, but he had not been five years at school before he was taken by his father on a tour to Spa and Paris, and at the age of 14 was introduced by him to the witty and abandoned society of gamblers and debauchees in which Lord Holland then lived. In 1764 he attained the dignity of a sixth form boy, but in the autumn of that year he left Eaton for Oxford and matriculated as a commoner of Hartford College at what would now be considered the ridiculously early age of 15. Two years more divided between hard work at Oxford and dissipation at Paris, suffice to complete his education as far as the university was concerned. Another two years of continental travel, chiefly spent in Paris and Italy, gave him a considerable knowledge of foreign languages and a thorough acquaintance with the lower aspects of Parisian life. At the age of 19, when most men nowadays are just entering on their university career and are beginning to realize the existence of logic and of ethics, Charles Fox was returned for the pocket borough of Midhurst and stepped out on the parliamentary arena in the spring of 1769 and accomplished scholar, a versatile man of the world, and a finished rake. He had many of the qualifications necessary for a successful politician. Gifted by nature with a fine presence and a figure which, if portly, was not as yet gross, he had done much to improve his natural advantages. His voice, rich, melodious and strong, had been carefully trained on the amateur stage to express the nicest gradations of thought and feeling. His reason, vigorous and clear, had acquired at Oxford enough of the discipline of mathematics to become logical and not enough to become narrow. His taste, formed by Eaton Scholarship and his own lifelong preference on the great classical writers, was enriched by an extensive and intimate acquaintance with French and Italian literature. His memory was singularly keen and retentive. Even Pitt could not more aptly point his arguments with the appropriate classical sentence so dear to the man of education of those days, or turn the laugh against his adversary by a well-capped quotation. No one could ruffle the even serenity of his temper, few could resist the attractiveness of his address. Such was Charles James Fox at his entrance into political life in 1769. With all the young man's heedlessness of consequences and love of excitement, with more than his share of generous instincts and ambitious aims natural to his time of life, he at once plunged impetuously into the fray, espoused without thought the party of his father, took the house by storm by his first important speech, and soon pushed himself into the front rank of the most uncompromising defenders of the king and the prerogative. The champion was sorely needed. For nine years George III had been working with stubborn pertinacity to effect the overthrow of the Whig oligarchy which had for so long ruled England in the name of the king. The attempt at first sight seemed hopeless enough. What could a young man of narrow intellect and limited experience do against the party bound together by every tie of political tradition and family connection and resting securely on a basis of scientific parliamentary organization? What could even a king do, whom all the world believed to be a tool in the hands of a profligate mother and an unprincipled favorite, against a statesman who had just added two continents to the dominions of the British crown and was the greatest orator England had known since the days of Pym? But George III was not the man to be dazzled by the glory of a career, even like that of Chatham. He had the perseverance and the courage of a typical John Bull. Curiously unable to understand the motives or feelings of others, he looked upon all those who disagreed with him or thwarted him as personal enemies. His mind, limited but tenacious, was singularly alive to his own interests. His pluck, largely compounded of pride and of obstinacy, forbade him to know when he was beaten. But over those lower qualities ruled with absolute sway a conscience which, if always narrow and often ignorant, was at any rate true and sincere. Honesty of purpose is the distinguishing characteristic of George III. It is easy to point out the deficiencies of a character which from a high sense of moral duty soiled itself in shameless and conspicuous corruption. It is easy to sneer at a conscience which on principle excluded from its trust a Chatham or a Rockingham, and folded to its breast Sir Francis Dashwood and Lord Sandwich. It is easy to say that consistency in politics is of virtue often closely allied with stupidity and prejudice. To such criticisms George III must fairly plead guilty. Stupid, prejudiced, and narrow, he was utterly unable to rise either in moral or intellectual conception above the opinions of his age, but he never deliberately sank below them. He did honestly and fearlessly what he conceived to be right, and never once did, in the course of one of the longest political lives known in English history, what he knew to be wrong. There are not many statesmen of the eighteenth century of whom the same can be said. To George III the Whig oligarchy was a tyrant which was slowly crushing the life out of the Constitution. Chatham was an all-powerful dictator who overshadowed the legitimate influence of the Crown. As long as the two were united the liberties of Englishmen and the rights of the Crown were alike at stake. There was something to be said for this view. With the passing away of all chance of a steward restoration had passed away the necessity for Whig ascendancy. There was no longer any reason why half the nation and possibly the larger half should be denied all opportunity of serving a dynasty to which it was thoroughly loyal. At the same time the principles which had been inscribed on the Whig banner of 1688, and which had been entrusted as a sacred deposit of political truth to the loving care of the great revolution families, had been carried into effect. Civil and religious liberty in the Whig sense of the words had under the governments of Stanhope and of Walpole ceased to form the program of a party, and had become the common heritage of all Englishmen. Not even the most ardent of Tories seriously proposed to revive the Schism Act were disputed the right of the nation to settle the succession to the Crown. The questions at issue between statesmen were of a much narrower kind. Whether the King should have the determining voice in the choice of his advisors and in the direction of affairs was the crucial question of the day, and to take the side of George III on such a subject was at least as much open to the Whig who revered the memory of William III as to the Tory who observed the death day of King Charles the Martyr. And if the divisions which had once divided parties had become obsolete, the new divisions which had taken their place had become unreal. They were personal, not political, and represented cliques, not principles. Walpole in order to assure his own power and to establish the Hanoverian dynasty upon the throne had raised corruption to the dignity of a science. The ministerial majority nominated for the most part by a few Whig borough owners was kept together by an elaborate system of places and pensions. It was idle to say that a House of Commons so returned represented the nation. It represented the Great Whig families, the Pelhams, the Cavendishes, the Bentinks and the Russells, and it represented the Great Whig families alone. When on the fall of Walpole they assumed the reins of government, they used their power to further the interests of their connection. To a prescient statesman at the death of George II, England might well have seemed already a Venice of the North, slowly sinking under the deadening rule of a selfish and suspicious oligarchy of noble families. From such a danger England was saved by George III. He saw clearly enough that the weakness of the Great Families lay in their mutual jealousies, and he set himself to sow dissension between them. The haughty independence of Chatham, the mystery in which he loved to conceal his real thoughts, and his evident determination never to bend his neck to the yoke of party, rendered it a comparatively easy task to separate his interests from those of Newcastle who was a party leader and nothing more. The weapon of corruption which had proved so effective in the hands of Walpole against the Tories was wielded with still more telling effect by the King and Butte against the Whigs. Unexpected success attended their efforts. The Russells, ever greedy of place and already at enmity with the Pelhams, drew nearer to the King. The Grenvils separated from Newcastle, though not wholly from Chatham. The unpopularity of a fresh war brought about the resignation of the great minister in 1761. Shelburne, soft, oily and unscrupulous, placed his admitted talents at the disposal of the Crown. Henry Fox, ever venal and ever shameless, undertook the congenial task of managing the bribery department, and the ratification of the Peace of Paris by Parliament in 1763 won for Lord Holland his tainted peerage, and for the King his first great triumph over the Whig families. But the emancipation of the Crown was by no means completed by the substitution of Butte and Fox for Chatham and Newcastle. Seven more weary years of plot and counter-plot were to pass away before the King could obtain a minister after his own heart. Butte soon quailed before a storm of unpopularity and columny, such as had not assailed an English minister since the time of Stratford, and George III, thrown back upon the discontented Whigs, found the Scorpions of Grenville and of Bedford worse than the whips of Chatham. Restlessly he turned from party to party from leader to leader from clique to clique in the vain hope of freedom. To save himself from the thralldom of Grenville's tedious and insolent harangues, he surrendered at discretion to Rockingham and the Whig oligarchy. To escape from them he put himself in the hands of Chatham and his personal ministry. In the chaos which resulted from the retirement of the dictator owing to his strange attacks of nervous prostration, the weary King lent his support by turns to Grafton or to Shelburne or to North, as occasion seemed to offer. Yet through all this apparently aimless shifting to and fro, he never lost sight of his main object. With dogged pertinacity he had gone on steadily building up his own party. Every change of ministry served to divide further the discordant sections of the once formidable Whig phalanx. Every session increased the numbers of the King's friends. Every act of patronage was dictated by a single eye to his political advantage. In the great questions which had arisen, especially those related to Wilkes and to the American colonies, he probably had with him the majority of the nation as well as the majority of Parliament. At last in 1770 came the opportunity he had been waiting for so long and so patiently. The reappearance of Chatham and Parliament finally broke up the administration which still nominally owned the rule of Grafton. But neither Chatham nor Bedford nor Rockingham were strong enough by themselves to claim the seals of office. Mutual jealousies were too rife to admit of a coalition and so, amid the divided ranks of his enemies, George marched safely to victory. In Lord North he found his servant able and trustworthy. In the House of Commons a majority of placement and pensioners, obsequious and contented. The threads of policy were in his own hands, patronage entirely under his own control. For the first time since his accession he felt himself to be in fact, as well as in name, a King. It was at this crisis that Charles Fox entered Parliament and it was quickly seen that he could bring to the King's side just what it most wanted. To gain his victory over the Whigs George had been obliged to oppose himself to the intellect as well as to the morality of the country. By far the ablest statesman and the most commanding figure in English political life was Chatham and Chatham was now in stern opposition. By far the most respected leader in the House of Lords was the praiseworthy and honest Rockingham, the acknowledged chief of the Whig families, and to counteract the reputation of Rockingham and withstand the thunder of Chatham's eloquence the court could only oppose the degraded character of Sandwich and the silver tongue of Mansfield. In the House of Commons things were even worse, for Lord North, clever and amiable as he was, had nothing but a shrewd mother-wit to enable him to parry the attacks of Burke's impassioned declamation. A young orator, cool, self-possessed, logical, incisive and cultured was a godsend to a party which had to rely upon the venal advocacy of Norton and Wetterburn. Nor was Fox backward in taking advantage of his opportunity. Political cowardice was never one of his failings. He threw himself manfully into the breach, boldly defended the supersession of Wilkes against Burke, supported the committal of Lord Mayor Crosby, forced Lord North to vote with him against his will for the committal of the printer Woodfall, was appointed one of the junior lords of the Admiralty and afterwards one of the commissioners of the Treasury, and was soon looked upon on both sides of the House as among the most able and most unprincipled of the bodyguard of the King. It is impossible to credit Fox at this period of his career with any settled political convictions. Though he was a man in education and knowledge of society, he was still a boy in judgment and in the enjoyment of life. He had not as yet thought or felt deeply on any question. Life was exceedingly pleasant to him, and in the gayness of his epicurean nature he threw himself with zest into every pleasure it afforded. Among these pleasures politics was by no means the least. It gave unique opportunities for cutting a figure in the world and for paying off old scores. It enabled him to indulge in the malicious pleasure, so dear to the heart of the clever young politician, of shocking dull respectability by the vigor of his denunciation and the extravagance of his views. It provided him with a pleasant relief to the more absorbing business of Newmarket or Almax. Careless of everything except the excitement of the moment, Fox plunged into politics and hit hard all around him with the same delightful sense of irresponsibility with which a modern undergraduate overthrows the church and the Constitution at a debating society and dances round a bonfire on the 5th of November. His conduct with regard to the marriage laws is the typical exception which proves the rule. Among the many subjects which came before parliament in the years 1769 to 1774 it was the only one about which he really cared and the only one about which he showed independence. Lord Holland, when approaching middle age, had convulsed society in the days of the Pelhems by his runaway match with Lady Carolyn Lennox, the daughter of the Duke of Richmond, and great-granddaughter of Charles II, and the scandal occasioned by the marriage had been among the reasons which led to the passing of Lord Hardwick's Marriage Act in 1753. Naturally enough, Lord Holland had been the bitterest opponent of the measure in the House of Commons, and its passing was always regarded in the family as a condemnation of the marriage. Thus from childhood Charles Fox had been conversant with this particular subject and had approached it from a private and family rather than from a party point of view, and when he had acquired a sufficient experience in the House he determined to press for its repeal. But in 1772 the question of the marriage laws came before parliament in an unexpected form. The marriage of the profligate Duke of Cumberland with Mrs. Horton, following as it did hard upon the secret marriage of the Duke of Gloucester with Lady Waldegrave, had filled the mind of the King with fears for the succession and irritation at the insubordination shown by the royal family. He took the matter up with more than his usual alacrity, insisted upon the immediate preparation of a bill to deal with it, rejected a moderate scheme drafted by Thurlow and Wetterburn, and finally forced on the cabinet a measure drawn by Lord Mansfield, by which all descendants of George II were rendered incapable of contracting a valid marriage except with the consent of the Crown. Rumors of the proposal soon got wind and created general dissatisfaction even among the stoutest henchmen of the court. Fox had once declared his intention of opposing it. Wetterburn swore he would not support it. Hardly a man on the ministerial side of the house could bring himself openly to defend it. Startled at this appearance of mutiny amongst his followers, and probably genuinely distrustful of the effect of opposition upon Fox, Lord North prevailed upon the King and Mansfield to modify their bill in one important particular, and as finally submitted to Parliament, the restriction of marriage only applied to members of the royal family under the age of twenty-six. The modification was useful to the wits. That a prince of the blood might take upon himself the cares of state at the age of eighteen, but those of matrimony not till he was twenty-six was too good an opportunity to be lost, and the following epigram, said to be the work of Doudswell, was soon making the circuit of the coffee-houses. Quoth dick to Tom, This act appears absurd as I'm alive. To take the crown at eighteen years, the wife at twenty-five. The mystery how shall we explain, for sure as Doudswell said, Thus early if there fit to reign they must be fit to wed. Quoth Tom to dick, Thou art a fool, and little knowest of life. Alas, tis easier far to rule a kingdom than a wife. The change might produce an epigram and keep together the ministerial majority, but it could not prevent the secession of Fox. The fact was that he had begun already to realize his own importance, and to see that if he wanted to satisfy his ambition he must make others realize it as well as himself. The opportunity now presented itself of assuming a more independent position on a subject on which he was known to have strong personal convictions, and he hastened to seize it. On the sixth of January, 1772, he gave notice of a bill to repeal Lord Hardwick's Marriage Act. On the twentieth of February, he sent in his resignation as Junior Lord of the Admiralty, and wrote an explanation to Lord Ossary, his friend in connection by marriage. I should not have resigned at this moment merely on account of my complaint against Lord North, if I had not determined to vote against this royal family bill, which in place I should be ashamed of doing. When the bill reached the House of Commons, he spoke with studious courtesy of Lord North, but turned upon the lawyers, Sir Fletcher Norton, Thurlow and Wetterburn, with great vigor, evidently relishing the task of pursuing his father's old enemies from subterfuge to subterfuge, till at last he fairly drove them into flat contradiction. Berkswick, allusions and enthusiasm, says Horace Walpole of the debate, were striking but not imposing. Wetterburn was a sharp, clever arguer, though unequal. Charles Fox, much younger than either, was universally allowed to have seized the just point of an argument throughout with most amazing rapidity and clearness, and to have excelled even Charles Townsend as a Parliament man, though inferior in wit and variety of talents. The House of Commons readily understood, and the ministerial majority readily forgave Fox's independent attitude on the Royal Marriage Act. Unfortunately, there was one who looked at the whole matter from a no less personal point of view than Fox, and who did not understand and never forgave. Writing to Lord North, on the 26th of February, just after the bill had been introduced into the Commons, George III had said, It is not a question that immediately relates to administration, but personally to myself. Therefore I have a right to expect a hearty support from everyone in my service, and shall remember defaulters. Three days before he had put on record his opinion of Fox's recklessness, I think Mr. C. Fox would have acted more becomingly toward you and myself if he had absented himself from the House, for his conduct cannot be attributed to conscience but to his aversion from all restraints. The extravagances of Fox's private life and the properties of his dress and manners were certain to be distasteful to the state and business like King, and to render him little disposed to make allowances for any political misconduct. The two had now become opposed to each other on a question in which the personal feelings of each were strongly stirred. The registered edict, as Chatham finally called the Royal Marriage Act, had it is true been passed into law, and the King had triumphed. But Fox had been nevertheless in his eyes amongst the worst of the defaulters, and George had said that he would remember defaulters. Thus began the little rift, which was soon to grow into so wide and impassable a gulf of separation between Fox and the King. On the 7th of April 1772, Fox's bill for the repeal of Lord Hardwick's Act came on for discussion. The day before, Fox had been at new market, losing heavily as usual on the turf. On his way back to town to introduce his first important measure into Parliament, a bill which was to alter the social arrangements of the country and remove his stigma from his family, he fell in with some friends at Hockerell. Characteristically enough, he spent the night drinking with them instead of preparing for the struggle of the morrow, and arrived on the next day at the house without having been to bed at all, without having prepared his speech, and without even having drafted his bill. Nothing but the most consummate talent could have saved him. Unprepared with arguments of his own, he introduced his bill modestly and gracefully, and reserved his strength for his reply, when Lord North and Burke who opposed him should have given him the necessary materials. Horace Walpole thus describes the scene. Charles Fox, who had been running about the house talking to different persons and scarcely listening to Burke, rose with amazing spirit and memory, answered both Lord North and Burke, ridiculed the arguments of the former and confuted those of the latter with eschewedness that from the multiplicity of reasons as much exceeded his father in embracing all the arguments of his antagonist as he did in his manner and delivery. This was genius, it was almost inspiration. Genius it certainly was, but genius which was solely intent upon its own amusement and glorification. The bill was read a first time by a majority of one in spite of Lord North's opposition. On the 19th of May it came on again for discussion, but its champion was not there. He hurried in from New Market in time to find his bill thrown out by a large majority without a debate. Charles Fox remained out of office for the rest of the year, but did not join the opposition, nor alter in the least his Tory views, except so far as they may have been insensibly altered by the conversation of Burke, with whom he now began that close and untiring friendship which was only shattered by the French Revolution. Lord North could not but feel the danger of leaving so brilliant a comet in the political horizon to follow his own erratic orbit, unregulated and uninfluenced by the son of ministerial system, and in the last days of the year an arrangement was made, of course at the expense of the taxpayer, by which Fox took his place at the Treasury Board. But in office or out of office, his nature remained the same. Ten months of independence had only wedded his appetite. Responsibility sat very lightly on his shoulders, and he was no more likely to lose an opportunity for delighting the house with a piece of brilliant invective out of consideration for his party or his leaders, than he was to check his horse at a fence because he did not know what was on the other side. The more assured grew his parliamentary position, the more hopeless became the state of his finances, the more determinately he rebelled against the bridal of office, the more viciously he kicked over the traces. He had been hardly two months at the Treasury Board when he acted as teller for Sir W. Meredith's motion against the imposition of a religious test on matriculation at the universities, although a strong whip had been issued by the government on the other side. In June of the same year, 1773, he suddenly delivered a most violent Philippic against Clive, although the house, at the instance of North, had only a month before come to a deliberate judgment on his conduct which amounted to a guarded acquittal, and Clive at that moment was the possessor of ten government votes. In the February of 1774 came his final and unpardonable indiscretion. An attack had appeared in a paper called the Public Advertiser upon the impartiality of the Speaker, Sir Fletcher Norton, who appealed to the house for an expression of its confidence. On this the printer would fall was ordered to appear at the bar. On the 14th of February he attended, named the well-known ex-vicar of Brentford, generally known as Parson Horne as the author, pleaded that this was his first offense and asked for lenient treatment. Molified by his submission, the house was about to commit him to the custody of the Sergeant at Arms when Charles Fox jumped up and moved that he be committed to Newgate. Lord North, anxious to avoid another Wilkes case, netted the assumption of leadership by Fox, and not knowing of any precedent for committal to the Sergeant at Arms moved to commit to the Gate House instead of Newgate, as that was out of the jurisdiction of the city. At this moment, Doudswell produced the very precedent for committal to the Sergeant at Arms, which Lord North had desired, who then entreated Fox to release him from his pledge of supporting a committal to prison since it was given under a misapprehension. Fox, self-willed and obstinate, refused and forced his leader to the ignominious course of himself voting for a motion of which he disapproved, while he begged all his supporters to vote against him. Conducts such as this from a subordinate official to the First Minister of the Crown was an insult which no party discipline however lacks could endure. Yet for some days Lord North took no step, waiting perhaps for some expression of regret on the part of Fox. He little knew the man with whom he had to deal. So far from expressing regret or caring at all with the king or his colleagues, or indeed the world in general might think of him, Fox was contemptuously accusing Lord North of pusillanimity at the clubs. In the following week he returned to the charge and openly attacked him in the house for what he considered his culpable lenity toward the printers. This was too much, even for the patience of Lord North, and on the 24th of February his dismissal was notified to Fox in the following laconic terms, his majesty has thought proper to order a new commission of the treasury to be made out, in which I do not see your name. In four years and a quarter of parliamentary life Fox had been twice in and twice out of office. When he so wantonly left the administration in 1774, he little thought that he had already seen more of official life than he was ever to see again, but so it was. Never again did he hold office for more than eight months at a time, and the total number of months which he spent in the service of the crown during the thirty-two years which remained to him of life when put together are only a little more than half of those which he spent in the ministry of Lord North. It has been sometimes said that Fox's behavior to Lord North and his dismissal from office which followed were due not to petulance of temper or to vanity and self-assertion, but to a sense of moral superiority which would not permit him any longer to condone the evil with which he found himself involved, that it was a true moral instinct which working faithfully if blindly led him to dissociate himself from a hireling crew of sycophants and cast in his lot with Chatham and with Burke rather than with Sandwich or with Wetterburn. The facts will hardly warrant such a view. Fox quarreled with Lord North not because he was too much of a Tory, but because he was not Tory enough. He led against the minister what in the parliamentary language of modern France would be called the extreme right. It was to the hireling crew, the placement and the pensioners that he appealed, to force his timid trimmer of a leader to support the dignity of the crown and the privilege of parliament against those who dared to print criticisms on their conduct. An honest indignation against parliamentary corruption, if felt, was certainly singularly well concealed by one who consistently opposed the only act which was efficacious in promoting an impartial trial of election petitions. The fact is that it is impossible to dissociate the public life of Fox from his private life at this period of his career. The one was a mirror of the other. Both were dominated by the same love of notoriety, were actuated by the same impulsive temperament, were clouded by the same reckless and cynical contempt for principle. It is true that at a later period of his career he acquired strong convictions. The great questions brought to the front by the American War deepened and steadied his whole character. Intervals of office taught him something of responsibility. But conviction was with him a plant of slow growth. To act upon impulse instead of on principle was for him, even to the end of his days, the most congenial course, to mistake sentiment for principle the most unfailing snare. The king appreciated him at the time of his secession far more justly if more severely than a house which is ever indulgent to those who amuse it. I am greatly incensed, he wrote to Lord North after the division on Woodfall's case at the presumption of Charles Fox in obliging you to vote with him that night. Indeed that young man has so thoroughly cast off every principle of common honor and honesty that he must become as contemptible as he is odious. Walpole with more delicacy but no less severity put the same truth in a letter to Sir Horace Mann. The famous Charles Fox was this morning turned out of his place of Lord of the Treasury for great flippancies in the house toward North. His parts will now have a full opportunity of showing whether they can balance his character or whether patriotism can whitewash it. His first essay in political life, tried by any standard except that of mere oratorical success must be pronounced a failure. Coming into Parliament gifted with transcendent talents and enjoying unique opportunities he had in five years become unpopular with the people, hated by the king, and distrusted by the house which petted and applauded him. And his failure was distinctly a moral failure, a failure of character and of character alone. In that age of meanness and moral degeneration there were plenty of statesmen who attained to honorable posts in the State whose private life would not bear examination. The Duke of Grafton could become Prime Minister, the High Priests of the Mysteries of Medinum could preside over the finances and over the Navy of England. Yet no one thought that Grafton or Dashwood or Sandwich should be debarred from the councils of an English king because they were debauchees. Charles Fox was not so degraded a Libertine as Sandwich. He was not so confirmed a drunkard as Carterette or as Dundas. Even as a Game-ster he was no worse than his friend Carlisle though he might be more unlucky. What then was it that singled out Fox as the one statesman of the eighteenth century who must retrieve his character before he could be trusted, in whose case alone moral failure was to be a bar to political advancement? The answer to the question is to be found in the fact that Charles Fox's faults were faults of character not of passion, faults which vitiated his whole life and not merely one department of it. A man might be a Libertine or a drunkard, but one free from his particular temptation might have as cool a judgment and as far-seeing an eye as the most blameless of politicians. But no one can play fast and loose with men in parties, can treat measures as dice to be shuffled about for his own advantage and refuse to be bound by the ties of party discipline without showing that he is bringing the spirit of a gambler into the councils of the nation and playing with the honor and welfare of the country as stakes in the game of his own ambition. And those who attentively studied Charles Fox and his youth saw how impossible it was to trust him in any matter of importance. His leading characteristic was exaggeration, which sprung partly from inordinate animal spirits and partly from overweening vanity. He was always in extremes. All that he did was overdone. As a macaroni, he was overdressed. On the turf he had more bad horses in training and backed them for higher sums than anyone else. As a man of fashion he would sit up all night over the bottle and hold his own in the morning against anyone in the house or on the race course. When at Oxford he walked fifty-six miles in a day, during a tour in Ireland he swam twice round the Devil's Punch Bowl at Calarney. In the house his invective was so unmeasured as to defeat its own object. Men were amused at his insolence charmed with his dash but not convinced by his argument. His idleness was fully equal to his recklessness. Many of his speeches even on the most important subjects were delivered without previous thought and his opinions decided by his personal dislikes. At Brooks no name appeared so frequently in the betting book no one played so high or lost so carelessly at the gaming table. It was the excitement of the game that captivated him not the desire to win. The largeness of the stake merely added to the excitement and with a true gambler's instinct he cared not a button whether he lost or won provided he had enough to stake on the next round. The characteristic way in which he prepared himself for making his first appearance in Parliament as the champion of religious liberty is thus described by Horace Walpole. He did not shine in the debate nor could it be wondered at. He had set up playing Hazard at Almax from Tuesday evening forth till five in the afternoon of Wednesday fifth. An hour before he had recovered twelve thousand pounds that he had lost and by dinner which was at five o'clock he had ended losing eleven thousand pounds. On the Thursday he spoke in this debate went to dinner at past eleven at night from dense to whites where he drank till seven the next morning dense to Almax where he won six thousand pounds and between three and four in the afternoon he set out for Newmarket. His brother Stephen lost eleven thousand pounds two nights after and Charles ten thousand more on the thirteenth so that in three nights the two brothers the eldest not yet twenty-five lost thirty-two thousand pounds. Charles Fox complained of the quiet of the session and said the House of Commons was always up before he was. Well might Selwyn congratulate the landlord of the lodgings where the two foxes lived on keeping in his house the finest pickles in London. He was a willing victim to the aristocratic sharpers who filled the saloons of Paris and of London in the early days of George the Third. The harpy crew of ladies in whose degraded minds avarice took the form of gambling found in him a perfect El Dorado, a gold mine always ready to yield its treasures without ever demanding them back. He knew that he was cheated but he rather loses money than his game. At all max of pigeons I am told there are flocks but it is thought the completest is one Mr. Fox. If he touches a card if he rattles a box away fly the guineas of this Mr. Fox. In gaming Tiz said he's the stoutest of cocks no man can play deeper than this Mr. Fox. During the three years which elapsed before the outbreak of the American war the passion for gaming was at its height. Fox himself said he had known as much as 70,000 pounds lost in one night. There was hardly an elder son among the men of fashion who had not parted with his reversion to the Jews to obtain money with which to gamble. Friends like Lord March and George Selwyn put all they had into a common bank and each stood surety for the losses of the other. Lord Carlisle alone had at one time lent Charles Fox as much as 17,000 pounds and each morning while the profligate was in bed his Jerusalem chamber as he wittily called his waiting room was thronged by the moneylenders anxious to suck yet deeper into the fruits of Lord Holland's corruption. Society determined not to treat him seriously either as a politician or a man of pleasure looked on with a smile half of pity half of contempt as the debts rolled up and speculated when the crisis would come. It came in 1774 soon after his quarrel with Lord North. The birth of a son to his elder brother added a good life to the one bad one which stood between him and Lord Holland's fortune. The boy was born, said Charles Fox profanely, like a second messiah for the destruction of the Jews. He was mistaken. At once those worthy hitherto so long suffering began to show their teeth. His father came nobly to the rescue and of the untold wealth which in the days of his political power Lord Holland had filched from his country no less than 140,000 pounds went at one blow to preserve his son from bankruptcy and ruin. How was it possible for the little aristocratic world which held the reins of power in the time of George the Third to distinguish between the gangster of St. Stephen's and the gangster at Brooks? In every department of life they saw in Charles Fox the same qualities, proflicacy, vanity, and extravagance inspired his speeches and marked his actions both private and public. His friends knew that behind the love of notoriety which prompted his worst excesses was to be found a clear head and a warm unselfish heart, untiring patience and a sunny temper, and could look forward to the time when the energy and self-assertion which now spent itself on political and social extravagance would be concentrated and disciplined by a cause worthy to enlist alike his heart and his judgment in its service. But the world which knew him partly and the world which knew him not at all could not be expected to look below the surface for qualities which he had hitherto carefully concealed. To most men he was still the chip of the old block, the unscrupulous son of an unscrupulous father, the political as well as the social libertine. There was no mistaking the venomous hatred which assailed him on all sides and found expression in verses such as these. Welcome hereditary worth, no doubt no blush belies thy birth, prone as the infernal fiends to evil. If that black face and that black heart be not old Holland's counterpart, Holland himself's unlike the devil. CHAPTER II THE AMERICAN WAR 1774-1777 It was fortunate for Charles Fox that his quarrel with the court-party, the crisis in his own financial position, and the climax of the American difficulties all came in the same year. Forced by insolvency into some measure of respectability, completely independent of all past political ties, he found ready made to his hand a cause important enough to demand the full exercise of all his talents and honest enough to give him an opportunity of retrieving his character. It is not often that a young politician who leaves his party from petulance and wrong-headedness can so soon hide his faults under the aegis of liberty and justice. When Fox quarreled with Lord North it was certain that the chief motive of his conduct in the immediate future would be hatred of the man whom he had wronged. His early speeches on the American question show that he took it up as he had before taken up the case of Wilkes because it was obviously the next move in the political game. He espoused the cause of the colonies because Lord North led the battle against them. But fortunately for him and his country, in the new policy which he adopted, Burke was at his side to prompt and chat him before him to lead. The more he studied the question and the more he fought the question, the more his warm heart and clear mind were touched by the principles at stake. He saw that below the legal questions of the nature and the extent of the power to tax the colonies lay far more important principles of right and wrong, and before the year of his defection was over, the Tory champion of the prerogative who had wantonly trampled upon the liberty of the press had become the wick champion of the right of resistance and the denouncer of arbitrary rule. The year 1774 was the critical year of the American struggle. On the policy adopted by the home government and especially on the means chosen by which to carry out that policy depended the action of the vast majority of American citizens. Men who were attached to the crown did not desire independence and hated fanaticism, but who would unhesitatingly prefer their liberty to their loyalty if loyalty meant submission to what they believed to be unjust. In England, the whole question was woefully misunderstood and the jealousies of English parties made it impossible to unravel the knot. Chatham and Burke agreed that England must render justice before she could demand obedience. As long ago as the debates upon the repeal of the Stamp Act, Chatham had boldly exclaimed, I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest. But neither Burke nor Chatham were quite agreed as to what justice really meant, and the latter declared in a letter to a correspondent in 1774, if I could persuade myself that the Americans entertained the most distant intentions of throwing off the legislative supremacy and great constitutional superintending power and control of the British legislature, I would be the very first person to enforce that power by every exertion the country was capable of making. The clergy and the landowners did not look deeper into the matter than to notice that the colonists were for the most part dissenters and were in declared opposition to the king. The commercial classes, following as usual their pecuniary interests, were for or against the Americans according as their particular trades were affected by the dispute. Even in the ministry itself, opinion was much divided. Mansfield and the lawyers were all for the assertion of legal right and the punishment of those who ventured to disobey the law. The Duke of Grafton and Lord Dartmouth led a smaller section who wished for conciliation. Lord North, indolent and amiable, shrank from pushing matters to an extreme, and yet shrank more from offending the king. So he allowed England to drift aimlessly into a war which begun by misunderstanding was carried on with incapacity and ended in disgrace. There were two courses and two courses only, open for the ministry to adopt and even as late as 1774 either of them, if pursued with sufficient vigor, might have been successful. The one was the policy of Burke, a full and frank repudiation of England's claim to raise a revenue from America and a generous recognition of the capacity of the colonies to a large share of self-government. The other was the policy of the king, a prompt and swift suppression of all opposition by irresistible force. Lord North adopted neither the one nor the other, but a mixture of both. By slow and hesitating threats without the power to punish, by weak efforts to punish when punishment had become not deterrent but exasperating, he made conciliation and repression alike impossible. Half-hearted coercion, ill-conceived and feebly executed cannot but stand self-condemned. During the year 1774, Fox was undergoing a course of political education. His quarrel with Lord North by no means meant that he had become a wig, but gradually the change came over him which has been common enough in later political history, and the man who separated from his party leader for personal reasons soon adopted the principles of his political opponents. With Fox, the change was probably far more sincere than it usually is. He had been a Tory in politics without ever having been a Tory by conviction. His quarrel with Lord North and the King freed him from party ties and put him in opposition to the Tory minister. The proposals of the government to close the harbor of Boston, to alter the constitution of Massachusetts by active parliament, and to try Massachusetts prisoners in other colonies or possibly even in England, were sufficiently startling to make even the most careless of politicians look well to his compass before he cast himself loose from his moorings in so stormy a sea. Against the Boston Port Bill on March 23, 1774, Fox merely objected that it gave too much power into the hands of the Crown. A month later, when the Massachusetts Charter Bill was before the House, he denounced the attempt to tax the colonists without their consent and urged the House to pause before it passed a bill of pains and penalties which began with a crime and ended with a punishment and to consider whether it was not more proper to govern by military force or by management. Just before this speech, he had given his first vote with the Whig party in favor of repealing the duty on T. Burke, whose great speech on American taxation was delivered on this occasion had during the session become his political instructor. In July, the death of Lord Holland severed the last tie which bound him to the court, and in the October of the same year in a private letter to Burke, he avows himself not merely a Whig, but a devoted follower and advisor of Lord Rockingham. Referring to some success achieved by General Gage's soldiers over the Boston mob, he says, with a dismal piece of news, I do not know that I was ever so affected with any public event either in history or in life. The introduction of great standing armies into Europe has there made all mankind irrevocably slaves, but to complain is useless, and I cannot bear to give the Tories the triumph of seeing how dejected I am at heart. I have written to Lord Rockingham to desire him to lose no time in adopting some plan of operations and consequence of this event. I am clear that a secession is now totally unadvisable, and that nothing but some very firm and vigorous step will be at all becoming. Whether that or anything else can be useful, I am sure I do not know. For the next nine years English politics were wholly dominated by the American War. Its first direct result was to divide parties at last upon an intelligible basis. The war was acknowledged to be the king's war. Lord North was well known to be half-hearted from the first but obedient. The king became a party leader. The minister was seen to be but his servant. The party became the king's party, the policy the king's policy, and its failure, the king's defeat. Parties became necessarily divided into the party for the king and the party against him. All the better part of Fox's nature impelled him to enlist himself on the side against the king. He learned from Burke to dread and to detest royal influence in politics. He believed with Chatham in the essential injustice of the English claim to tax the colonists. His logical mind grasped with ease the key of the situation. Whether the claims of England were technically legal or illegal mattered but little. An attempt to coerce the colonists could not but drive them to assert their independence. The assertion of independence could not but enlist all Europe on their side. How could England stand up single-handed against the world? What sort of relations could she establish even if she was successful with a colony which she had conquered with the sword? In his speech on the address delivered at the beginning of the session of 1776, he put this with his accustomed force. We have been told that it is not for the interest of Spain and France to have America independent. Sir, I deny it and say it is contrary to every principle of common sense. Is not the division of the enemy's power advantageous? Is not a free country engaged in trade less formidable than the ambition of an old corrupted government, their only formidable rival in Europe? The noble lord who moved the amendment said that we were in the dilemma of conquering or abandoning America. If we are reduced to that, I am for abandoning America. What have been the advantages of America to the kingdom? Extent of trade, increase of commercial advantages, and enumerous people growing up in the same ideas and sentiments as ourselves. Now, sir, would those advantages accrue to us if America was conquered? Not one of them. Such a possession of America must be secured by a standing army, and that, let me observe, must be a very considerable army. Consider, sir, that that army must be cut off from the intercourse of social liberty here, and accustomed in every instance to bow down and break the spirits of men, to trample on the rights and to live on the spoils cruelly rung from the sweat and labor of their fellow subjects. Such an army employed for such purposes and paid by such means, for supporting such principles, would be a very proper instrument to affect points of a greater or at least more favorite importance nearer home, points, perhaps, very unfavorable to the liberties of this country. As the years went on, events proved that Fox was in the right, and George III in the wrong. The half-heartedness and ignorance of the ministers, combined with the incapacity of the generals to render conspicuous the failure of the war. Nation after nation joined in the hue and cry against England in the hour for necessity, as Jays chatter and peck round a stricken eagle. The storm cloud settled lower and lower upon the head of the brave and patient king, as he fought blindly and uselessly on in sheer despair. The more hopeless became the struggle, the more men turned an anxious expectation of relief to the faithful few who had kept unstained from the first, the banner of opposition to the crown. The rights of nations and opposition to prerogative government became the watchwords of the Whigs as they reformed themselves under Fox and Burke out of the chaos of existing parties during the American War. In the annunciation of these principles, Fox found the means to obliterate from men's memories the records of his older self, and stood forward in the eyes of his countrymen, no longer the political gambler in the insolvent rhetorician, but the trusted leader of the younger Whigs, and the acknowledged champion of Whig principles. Yet the attentive observer of the public utterances of Fox during the famous parliament of 1774 will look in vain for any signs of that political insight, which is the highest, as it is the rarest gift of statesmanship. His contemporaries used to say that Fox was at his best during the American War, that he never surpassed the speeches he made on that subject, but this is really but another way of saying that Fox excelled in the power and rush of his invective. No politician whose strength lay in the destructive force of his attack could wish for a better opportunity for the exercise of his particular talent than that afforded by a hateful and disastrous civil war in which every step was a blunder weakly adopted by a reluctant minister, and carried on by a mechanical majority. During the six years of the war parliament, Fox never threw away an opportunity. Night after night he exposed with pitiless vehemence the folly of the ministers and the hopelessness of their policy. Again and again he turned upon Lord North and Lord George Germain with a fierceness of personal attack which was almost too strong for the nerves of that not over squeamish assembly. Negligence, incapacity, inconsistency, unexampled treachery and falsehood, our flowers of invective culled from a single speech directed in 1775 against the former. In December 1777 he turned upon the latter. For the two years that the noble lord has presided over American affairs, the most violent scalping tomahawk measures have been pursued, bleeding has been his only prescription. If a people deprived of their ancient rights are grown tumultuous, bleed them. If they are attacked by a spirit of insurrection, bleed them. If their fever should rise into rebellion, bleed them, Christ the state physician, more blood, more blood, still more blood. In April 1779 he moved for the removal of Lord Sandwich from the office of First Commissioner of the Admiralty. In June, stung by an accusation thrown out in the debate on the bill for doubling the militia that he had allied himself with the ministers, he burst out into a torrent of passion afterwards often remembered against him. What? Enter into an alliance with those very ministers who have betrayed their country, who have prostituted the public strength, who have prostituted the public wealth, who have prostituted what is still more valuable, the glory of the nation? The idea is too monstrous to be admitted for a moment. Gentlemen must have foregone their principles and have given up their honor before they could have approached the threshold of an alliance so abominable, so scandalous, and so disgraceful. Does the noble lord think it possible that I can ally myself with those ministers who have led us on from one degree of wretchedness to another to let length they have brought us to the extreme moment of peril? The extreme verge of destruction? Ally myself with those ministers who have lost America, ruined Ireland, thrown Scotland into tumult and put the very existence of Great Britain to the hazard? Ally myself with those ministers who have as they now confess foreseen the Spanish War? The fatal mischief which goads us to destruction and yet have from time to time told Parliament that a Spanish War is not to be feared? To ally myself with men capable of such conduct would be to ally myself to disgrace and ruin. I beg therefore for myself and my friends to disclaim any such alliance and I am the rather inclined to disavow such a connection because from the past conduct of ministers I am warranted to declare and to maintain that such an alliance would be something worse than an alliance with France and Spain. It would be an alliance with those who pretend to be the friends of Great Britain but are in fact and in truth her worst enemies. He read again the Philippics of Damasthenes to perfect himself in the arts of vindictive declamation. He was the most effective and popular of the opposition speakers. The whisper that Charles Fox was on his legs would fill the house in a moment. The rich sweep of his passion, the quick thrust of his retort, the sharp edge of his sarcasm afforded to every member of the house a keen intellectual pleasure for Fox was never dull and never involved. His arguments were intelligible to the meanest understanding. His excitement was catching to those molded in the dullest clay and the house which when his speech was over was going to outvote him by an enormous majority roared with applause as each shaft sped home to its mark. Yet in all the flood of eloquence which Fox poured forth in this parliament there is singularly little which could at all help to put an end to the evils of which he complained. His speeches must be searched through and through before anything can be found which shows a deeper appreciation of the dangers and the difficulties of the situation than that the blunders of ministers are the opportunity of the opposition. He had to deal with a parliament which was actuated mainly by a mistaken view of what the dignity of the mother country required with the nation that was exceedingly ignorant of the thoughts and policy of the colonists. As is usually the case it was ignorance not malevolence which was hurrying England along the path of destruction. It was pride which prevented her leaders from acknowledging it. The business of a great statesman in the years 1774 and 1775 and 1776 was to convince all thinking men that it is wise and courageous sometimes to eat humble pie, to show from the acts and recorded words of the colonists themselves that they were being driven to independence not rushing to seek it, to renounce wholly and frankly the old theory that colonies exist to provide markets for the trade of the mother country and to prove that the true wisdom of England would be found in promoting and not retarding the development of colonial self-government. It is possible that such a policy would have had no chance of success but with the great names of Chatham and of Camden, of Birken of Fox as its sponsors it would at any rate have guaranteed that the case of the Americans was put fairly before the people of England and that judgment was not merely going by default. Among English statesman Burke was the only one who saw that it was necessary to oppose some rival political principle to the obvious one of maintaining the legal rights of England over her colonies but unfortunately Burke had not the ear of the House of Commons or of the country. In his great speech on conciliation with America, delivered on March 22, 1775, he laid down in words which will live as long as the empire of England has any power over men's minds, the principles on which alone it can hold together. My idea is therefore, without considering whether we yield as matter of right or grant as matter of favor, to admit the people of our colonies into an interest in the Constitution. My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges and equal protection. These are the ties which though light as air are strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government. They will cling and grapple to you and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privilege is another, the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened and everything hastens to decay into solution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces toward you. Deny them this participation of freedom and you break that soul bond which originally made and still must preserve the unity of the empire. Do not entertain so weak in imagination as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, your cockets and your clearances are what form the great security of your commerce. Do not dream that your letters of office and your instruments and your spending clauses are the things that hold together this great texture of this mysterious whole. These things do not make your government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the English communion that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is the spirit of the English constitution which infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates and vivifies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member. To turn from these noble words, pregnant with deep political wisdom, to the personalities of Fox, is to come forth from a great symphony into the midst of a vulgar street brawl. Yet Fox was probably right in not attempting higher work than that of the dashing cavalry officer. The Rupert of debate, he could lead a charge and win a victory, but not as yet determine a policy or plan a campaign. To open the eyes of England to the vast issues which lay hid under the narrow legal limits of the American question, required the moral earnestness as well as the political imagination of a chatomoral Burke, and moral earnestness to be anything but hypocrisy must be based on moral conviction. The time had not yet come when Fox could lay claim to that. True, he could lament like Mirabeau of the errors of his youth, but like Mirabeau he could not put them away. Though not the gambler that he had been before the crisis of 1774, Newmarket and Almax still took up most of the time which was not devoted to Parliament. He has abandoned, says Walpole of him in 1776, neither his gaming nor his rakish life and was seldom in bed before five in the morning nor out of it before two at noon. It was in the following year that he visited Paris and made such an unfavorable impression upon Madame du Defant. It was not therefore surprising that men of fashion and politicians refused to believe in the sincerity of his new convictions, though they were quite ready to acknowledge the increased power of his oratory. Even a political opponent like Lord North so little believed him to be serious as to congratulate him after one of his most scathing denunciations of Lord George Germain in the very hearing of his victim with a joke, Charles I am glad you did not fall on me today for you is in full feather. End of Section 4 Section 5 of Charles James Fox by Henry Offly Wakeman. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 3 The Fall of Lord North, 1777 to 1782. Part 1 The surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga on the 17th of October, 1777, put an end to the possibility of the reduction of America by force of arms. The alliance with France which followed hard upon its security or independence. Englishmen under the leadership of the single-minded king and his venal followers had set about the coercion of thirteen colonies with as light a heart as they would order out the military to suppress a street riot. From the first they persisted in attributing the resistance which they met with to a few disloyal lawyers and politicians who were bent on independence. They would not believe that they had to deal with a nation determined to maintain its liberties. They did not realize how difficult it was to coerce into submission a country between whose shores and their own flowed three thousand miles of ocean. That terrible ocean they thought could be bridged if it could not be drained, and America had no fleet with which to dispute with England for the supremacy of the sea. They never stopped to think what the result of their victory was to be. They might indeed with the help of German mercenaries and Indian savages crushed the hasty levies of Washington in the field, but that was merely the beginning of difficulties. It was hard enough as every English statesman knew to hold Ireland down with all the help which a powerful English garrison of landowners, the long tradition of Protestant ascendancy, and eighty years of the grossest legal tyranny could give. Was it conceivable that a united America, the children of Smith and of Winthrop and of Penn, would ever submit to be the slaves of a penal code? Was it reasonable to expect that an army of twelve or of twenty or of fifty thousand men could thus hold down by force a growing and vigorous nationality three thousand miles away? Force, as Burke pointed out, is not the only nor the truest sanction of government. Besides the appeal to physical force there must always be the appeal to moral right. Justice must go hand in hand with power if peace is to be the result. The case for the ministry depended wholly upon two assumptions, that it was not the nation, but a factious minority which had taken up arms against its sovereign, and that the military and naval superiority of England was so great that the geographical difficulties in the way of conquest could be overcome. The events of the first two years of the war showed that both assumptions were erroneous. The assembling of the Congress and the Declaration of Independence proved the union of the colonies. The surrender of Saratoga showed that in America colonists and loyalists could fight to say the least on equal terms. The treaty with France put in daily jeopardy the command of the sea which was essential to the carrying on of hostilities by England at all. Lord North saw the abyss which was opening before him. In February 1778 he carried through Parliament proposals for conciliation which would have been welcomed in America in 1774, and which were substantially the same as those proposed by Burke in 1775. Secret communications were opened with Franklin in Paris, but Franklin replied that it was now too late. The public avowal of the treaty between France and America a few days afterwards more than justified his words. To be too late is the attribute of all incompetent ministers. In 1778 Lord North proposed two late terms which would have been accepted in 1775. In 1782 the King had to agree to the independence which he had refused to consider in 1778. From the date of the treaty with France it was clear that America would accept no terms short of independence and it was equally clear that England could not force other terms upon her as long as France supplied her with money. After the death of Chatham in May 1778 it became a settled principle with the opposition that the acknowledgement of American independence was a measure absolutely inevitable and therefore wise. Though no definite motion was made by Fox by way of pledging the House to this policy, the main gist of all his speeches on the American question delivered subsequently to 1778 was to show the impossibility of conquering America and the absolute necessity of making peace. Once in 1779 and twice in 1781 he urged this directly with all his powers upon Parliament and as it was universally admitted that peace at that time could only be obtained by the grant of independence there could be no doubt as to which way his opinion pointed. In 1781 he said as much openly, As to the mere single proposition, whether America might with propriety be declared independent, abstracted from other considerations, it is perfectly ridiculous to debate about it in the House this evening. America, as the right honorable gentleman has confessed, is already independent and as he well observed from one point of view ought to be considered as a public enemy. I most heartily agree with the right honorable gentleman that she is independent. I may possibly disagree with him when I affirm again that she will and must be independent. In this I am in my own mind authorized to say, were it not that conciliatory healing and friendly negotiation may affect much in preventing the bad consequences which a vote declaring America independent might be productive of hereafter, I should instead of making the motion I have done directly have moved that the American states be declared independent. Burke had enunciated the same truths as early as December 1778. With regard to avowing the independence of America, gentlemen looked at the position in a wrong point of view and talked of it merely as a matter of choice when in fact it was now become a matter of necessity. It is in this latter light only that I regard it, in the latter light only that I maintain that it is incumbent on Great Britain to acknowledge it directly. On the day I first heard of the American states having claimed independence, it made me sick at heart. It struck me to the soul because I saw it was a claim essentially injurious to this country and a claim which Great Britain can never get rid of, never, never, never. It is not therefore to be thought that I wish for the independence of America, far from it. I feel it as a circumstance exceedingly detrimental to the fame and exceedingly detrimental to the interest of this country. But when by a wrong management of the cards a gamester has lost much, it is right for him to make the most of the game as it then stands and to take care that he does not lose more. This is our case at present. The stake already gone is material, but the very existence of our empire is more, and we are now madly putting that to the risk. The Duke of Richmond with characteristic impetuosity had made up his mind as early as 1776 that the grant of independence was the only way of preventing serious national disaster and had said as much in the House of Lords in 1778. Rockingham, careful in taciturn, was understood to have accepted the inevitable after the campaign of Saratoga. During the latter years of the war Shelburne remained the only Whig politician of any note who true to the memory of Lord Chatham could not bear openly to look fax in the face. In the nation a similar change was slowly winning its way owing to the stern logic of events. At the outbreak of the war the bulk of the educated classes were on the side of the king. The universities, the clergy, the lawyers, the landed gentry, and a large part of the commercial classes readily supported a cause in which king and parliament were united and which seemed at first sight to be the cause both of constitutional right and of imperial unity. The greatest names in the literary world were found on the same side, Junius, Adam Smith, Johnson, and Gibbon. Most men did not trouble themselves to look to see if the colonists were anything more than naughty boys who had made a riot and must take their punishment. But when the time for a general election came round again in 1780 a considerable change was visible in public opinion. The younger generation of educated men who had been growing up while the war had been raging and who had followed anxiously the failures of our armies and had sympathized heartily in the attacks on the mismanagement of affairs were almost to a man in opposition. William Pitt, William Wilberforce, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan were all elected for the first time in the parliament of 1780 and all joined the opposition. The common people had always been on the side of the colonists. In the country during the winter of 1779 and 80 there were signs that even the landed gentry and the clergy were beginning to desert the banner of the court. Petitions for peace were largely signed in the counties. Meetings were held at which squires and clergy appeared and announced the corruption of the government and the mismanagement of the war. It is significant of the altered state of opinion among the landed interests that Fox, at a great meeting at Westminster, should have advocated the addition of a hundred county members to the House of Commons. Even the Whits, who liked the rats, ever quit a sinking ship, were coming round and their shafts became directed against the blunders of the ministry instead of against the factiousness of the opposition. The disaster of Saratoga could not dismay them. Burgoyne unconscious of impending fates could cut his way through woods but not through gates. And a report that our enemies were buying up our own horses to use against ourselves only suggested to them the following contrast. We are told that the Monsieur, our horses import, but regardless we are of what passes, but Lord what a racket twit make in our court if they kindly would purchase our asses. In Parliament alone the arguments of reason and the teaching of experience seemed to have no weight. It was the business of the placement to vote and not to think. Not even the invective of Fox could penetrate to a conscience or a mind protected by the solid armor of self-interest. The only result of the superiority and argument enjoyed by the opposition was to raise the price of votes. The elections of 1780 returned a substantial majority for the ministers, but at a cost so far exceeding that of previous elections that even the King remonstrated, while in the succeeding year the best part of a million of public money was distributed among the friends and supporters of the ministry by the infamous plan of issuing the new loan to them below the market price. It was a true instinct that made the opposition concentrate their energies in 1780 and 81 upon the reform of Parliament. Whatever Burke and the old wigs might say, the Americans were perfectly right when they complained that since the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty a revolution had taken place in the English Constitution which though silent was of infinitely greater moment than anything which was done in 1688. The old systems of checks and balances so fondly appealed to by writers on the Constitution, though nominally in full force, had practically disappeared. The old division between the legislative and the executive which Montesquieu thought the vital principle of the constitutional organism was a corpse when he discovered it. The personal responsibility of the crown for the well-being of the nation had shriveled into a rudimentary organ of constitutional life, valuable only as showing what once had been. The authority of Parliament had taken the place of the authority of the king. Parliament had become the keystone of the constitutional structure. The wisdom of Parliament made the laws. The voice of Parliament called forth the ministers. The finger of Parliament marked out their policy. The eye of Parliament searched out abuses. The hand of Parliament punished their perpetrators. The spirit of Parliament gave life and unity to the whole body of the nation. So complete was the transference of real power from the hands of the king to those of Parliament that even the ecclesiastical supremacy of the crown, an authority essentially personal and only intelligible because it is personal, had insensibly drifted into the hands of Parliament. Directly Parliament became in this way the real center of all government. It was natural that those sections of society which wished for political power should at once direct all their energies to the obtaining of control over Parliament. During the 18th century the enslaving of Parliament was an object of policy as deliberately undertaken and as unremittingly pursued as ever was the enslaving of the nation by Henry VIII. The aristocracy was first in the field. The great Wig family who had carried through the revolution of 1688 were the natural inheritors of its bounty. A combination of events put all political power into their hands at the accession of George I. They were determined to keep it. In the House of Lords their supremacy was unchallenged. They set themselves to make their supremacy in the House of Commons equally undoubted and with that object grew up the system which has made the name of Walpole infamous for all time. The real charge against Walpole is not that he was corrupt, that he gave pensions in places for votes. Statesmen before him and statesmen after him have plunged their arms up to the elbow in corruption. But after a time the muddy waters pass away and the stream runs again pure and free. But that he poisoned the river at its source. He deliberately developed the disease of the body politic and prevented the healthy flow of the national life. He was the physician who being called in to regulate a patient's health sets himself to produce in him an organic disease in order that he may retain him as a patient for the rest of his life. It was inevitable that during the progress of years the representative system of England should become antiquated and obsolete. Towns once flourishing had become hamlets. Villages once obscure had grown into important trading centers. The franchise which had once been enjoyed by the bulk of the educated citizens had become restricted to a small clique. These were the diseased parts of the representative system. They were unhealthy growths which had developed naturally in the course of years but which must be pruned and cut off before the tree would bear fruit as it ought. But these were just the parts on which the Whig families fastened in order to make their supremacy complete. So far from pruning or cutting them away, they delighted in them. They stereotyped them. They made them their own. Here was the chosen field of the local influence of the neighboring peer. Of the open bribes of the burrow monger and the nabob and of the gratifications of the dispenser of the secret service money. So successful was this policy that by the middle of the century the House of Commons represented the House of Lords far more faithfully than it did the nation. But on the accession of George III the Whig families found that the king could play their game even better than they. To all the advantages which they possessed in common George could add the peculiar and subtle influence of royalty. He could concentrate the whole forces of influence upon his object better than could administer or a clique. By the pressure of court authority and lavish additions to the peerage he soon had the House of Lords at his command. By the exercise of a patronage more on principle than that of Newcastle and a corruption more shameless than that of Walpole he gained gradually a majority in the House of Commons devoted enough to remain steady during all the blunders of his early years. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this pollution of the representative institutions of England. Nearly if not all of the national disasters of the time it may safely be predicted would not have happened had the House of Commons been in any sense representative of public opinion. Of course no one at the time of the American War except the Duke of Richmond thought that the House of Commons should be representative of those who neither by their property nor by their education had shown themselves entitled to exercise the franchise. The age of democracy had not yet come. The demand of the reformers of the time was not for a large extension of political power among the people but for its more even distribution among the educated classes. The House of Commons it was felt should be representative at any rate in a rough way of the education and good sense of the nation and a constitution stultified itself which after carefully dividing political power between the hereditary and the representative principles allowed the latter to fall entirely under the dominion of the former. A House of Commons which claimed to be the representative of the commonality and was in reality an assembly of the paid servants of the king was a contradiction in terms. The sense of this monstrous unreality runs through the whole of the eighteenth century history. Felt instinctively by the people rather than closely looked into and understood it is at the root of all the real dangers which threatened the political fabric. It was one of the chief merits of the elder pit the great commoner that he learned early to look for the expression of public opinion away from Parliament and ever did his best to get the nation as well as Parliament on his side. You have taught me said George II to him on a well-known occasion to look for the sentiments of my people elsewhere than in Parliament. Meaner men did not see the necessity. A Newcastle, a Grenville or a North was content with his parliamentary majority and as long as that would last did not look further. Wilkes became a hero and a patriot because it was felt that King, Parliament and judges were combined to crush him in their own interests and not in those of law or morality. The city rallied cheerfully to the support of Lord Mayor Crosby and Mr. Alderman Oliver because they believed that the privilege of Parliament in the mouth of the House of Commons was but another name for the slavery of the subject. Lord George Gordon and his rioters turned London into a pandemonium for two days because the more prejudiced and fanatical of Englishmen would not trust a Parliament returned by royal influence to be a safe guardian of Protestantism. End of section 5