 Section 11 of Charles James Fox by Henry Offly Wakeman, this LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 6, The India Bill, Part 1 The summer of 1783 was spent by Fox with the assistance of Burke in preparing the bill for the better government of the Indian possessions of Great Britain, upon which the coalition ministry had chosen to stand or fall. Fox was fully aware of the difficulty of the task which he had undertaken, and indeed it is not untrue to say that he had undertaken it because of its difficulty. In a letter to Lord Northington, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, written in November 1783 he says, Our Indian measure will come on soon after the meeting. It will be a vigorous and hazardous one, and if we get that well over I have very little apprehension about anything else here. And a few days later he says again, Our Indian business upon which all depends comes on Tuesday. The great contest about it on the second reading will, in my opinion, be the most important question to us that is ever likely to come on. He did not therefore conceal from himself the risk which he was running. Political cowardice was never among his faults, though perhaps his friends might sometimes almost wish that it was. In an attack upon an old, established, and wealthy corporation like the East India Company, he was certain to alienate many powerful interests, to enable the different sections of his enemies to find a common ground of opposition, and to give the King an opportunity for the exercise of personal influence if he was disposed to make use of it. Fox was well aware of all this, but he was not the man to hesitate to put his fate to the touch and win or lose it all. His whole heart was stirred by the reports which had been laid before Parliament of the rapacity of English officials, and the wrong done to unoffending natives. The pure love of humanity, always among the noblest of his qualities, burned with this intense of flame for the riot of Bengal or of O'wed as for the Negro of Africa or for the surf of France. He could not endure the thought that the rule of England should seem to the educated Hindu a return to barbarism and brutality, the victory of might over right. But it was not only philanthropy which urged Fox to stake the fortunes of the ministry upon the Indian question. Statesmanship undertook what humanity prompted. A great success was necessary to quiet the cavalings of opponents, to obliterate the remembrance of the past, and to give to England that steady and firm government which was the best and to many minds the only justification of the coalition. The ministry were secure of their majority in the House of Commons. They were by no means sure of a majority in the constituencies if the weight of the court influence was to be thrown into the opposite scale. The Indian question had been before Parliament again and again. The proceedings of Warren Hastings, his dissensions with the council at Calcutta, the repudiation of his policy by the directors at home, its support by the proprietors, had been for years the common talk of political society and a fruitful topic of parliamentary criticism. In 1781, an inquiry into the government of India had been authorized by Parliament and the report of the committee had been strongly condemnatory of the Governor General. Before the recess of 1783, just after the coalition ministry had assumed the responsibilities of office, Dundas had actually brought into the House of Commons a bill for the appointment of Lord Cornwallis as Governor General with the unlimited powers of a dictator. After this, it would be a distinct confession of weakness on the part of the ministry if they avoided the question. While if they succeeded in solving it to the satisfaction of the country and of their supporters, a long period of office seemed assured to them. The prospect was an enticing one. Fox had never yet been appalled by the bigness of a stake, nor was he the man to be turned from the path of glory because it was also the path of danger. From a dramatic point of view, the India bill and the events which succeeded it formed the crisis in Fox's life and political career. It is his one great effort at constructive statesmanship, his one great opportunity not merely of destroying a vicious system, but of constructing a method of government for 30 millions of people which should be just, humane and workable. It was a problem which demanded the highest gifts of statesmanship, the insight which could look fearlessly and safely into the future, the sympathy which could understand the thoughts and feelings of people different in race, in religion, and in temperament from Englishmen, and the wisdom which could combine what was rightly due to them with the just claims of a conquering and dominant nation on the other side of the world. Fox threw himself into his task with characteristic self-surrender. He discarded the notions of political prudence as unworthy of the cause. He refused to compromise and impair the perfection of his scheme by concession to ignorance or prejudice at home. He could not bear to think that the welfare of India should be affected by the danger of losing a few corrupt votes in a parliamentary division, and he produced eventually a scheme which posterity has agreed to admire and which contemporaries united to denounce. The principles of Fox's bill are principles which, when carried out in later time, have given to the people of India the only just government which they have ever known. They are principles which, when enunciated by Fox, seemed to educated England to be the corrupt offspring of the meanest party spirit. To us, the constant supervision of Parliament, however liable and detailed to abuse, seems the best conceivable check upon ministerial mal-administration. To the nation in the days of Fox, Parliament meant the chosen field of ministerial influence, its supervision was of Fox, its patronage corruption. To increase the powers of the representatives of the people was but a well-sounding phrase for throwing power into the hands of the minister. It was the unrepresentative character of Parliament which was the real cause of the mischief. People must first learn to trust Parliament itself before they will trust its nominees. They were far more willing to hand over all power to a dictator like Cornwallis, whose character was their guarantee, then entrust a share of it to a House of Commons which too often meant a majority, nominated by peers and Nabobs, returned by secret service money, and kept together by sinecures and pensions. Fox, in so many things below the moral standard of his age, was in his belief in Parliament above it. He looked forward to the time when by the passing of the imminent measure of Parliamentary reform the House of Commons should be emancipated. His countrymen looked back to the last election when even George III was aghast at the money which had been spent. The mistake was a fatal one. He was sure of the House of Commons for the coalition majority was unimpaired. The House of Lords might be with him, for party ties were still strong. But if any untoward accident happened, and he was forced to the arbitrement of the constituencies, his success would mainly depend upon the way in which the question came before the electors, and management was Fox's weak point. On the 18th of November, Fox introduced his scheme. It was divided into two parts. By the first bill, the existing authority of the East India Company was superseded by a board of seven commissioners in whom absolute control over the patronage and government of India was vested. Under them, another board of eight assistant councillors was formed to administer and regulate the commercial affairs of the company. The seven commissioners were at first to hold office only for four years and to be appointed by Parliament. If the Act proved a success in practice, after the expiration of the four years, they were to be appointed by the Crown. The assistant councillors were also in the first instance to be appointed by Parliament. But future vacancies were to be filled up by the Court of Proprietors. The commissioners were to sit in England under the eye of Parliament. All business transacted by them was to be entered in books open to the inspection of Parliament. And all differences of opinion which might arise between them and the Governor General or other authorities in India, and especially any act of disobedience to orders from home committed by the Indian officials, was to be made the subject of careful minutes on both sides. So that Parliament might have before it held the materials necessary for an independent judgment. By the second bill, which hardly survived its birth, minute and harassing restrictions were imposed upon the free action of the Governor General, both in commerce and in politics, which were intended to guard against abuse of power and overambitious schemes by bringing them rigidly under the control of the home authorities. The plan of Fox and Burke therefore depended upon two great principles. One, that India was to be governed from England. Two, that the guarantee for its good government was to be found in Parliamentary control. India was to be brought within the pale of the English Constitution. Responsibility for the well-being of 30 millions of people was too great to be lodged anywhere but in the Crown and its responsible advisors. The same power that checked the insidious influence of a George III in England and punished the oppression of a strafford in Ireland, or the corruption of a Trevor, even in the Speaker's Chair, was to extend a watchful eye as far as the distant plains of Bengal. Parliament in the eyes of Fox, like Magna Carta in the eyes of Cook, was such a fellow that he will have no sovereign. True, India was not to follow humbly in the wake of English party politics, continuity in administration so desirable for a distant dependency, so essential for an eastern community was carefully preserved. The commissioners were not to be the sport of party majorities in England and change with every ministry as the Secretary for India does now, but when Parliamentary control was fully established, when each vacancy on the board as it occurred was filled up by the Crown on the advice of the Prime Minister of the day. English party politics could not fail to make themselves clearly, though indirectly felt in the Government of India, and India could not afford to disregard her common interests in the political problems of England. A scheme so broad and so far-seeing almost disarms criticism by its attractiveness, yet it was clearly a scheme for the future rather than for the present, for the nineteenth century rather than for the eighteenth. It would almost seem as if the vivid and prophetic imagination of Burke already saw the thin dark line of the electric telegraph binding together England and India in quick and close embrace, as if his ears already caught the thud of the steam engine amid the deserts of Suez. Not many years before he had denounced the folly of attempting to coerce a nation three thousand miles away. He was now attempting to bind down by Parliamentary inquiry and legislative restriction the ruler of an empire on the other side of the world. Restrictive checks such as Parliament can impose or exercise are only useful when they can be promptly enforced. They are valuable to prevent, they are useless to cure, they are often dangerous to punish. They must be both useless and dangerous when they can only act a year after the occasion for action has arisen. Men who have the stuff in them to build up an empire are not the men to be bound down by legislative restrictions or deterred by the fear of Parliamentary inquiry. In modern days the conditions are precisely reversed to what they were in 1783. The business of Indian administrators is to defend an empire not to create it and the will of Parliament is known at Calcutta almost before it has been declared in London. Yet even in modern days the wisest statesmen of England have been willing to give a generous confidence to the viceroy whom they have carefully chosen. In 1783 Indian affairs were in a state of transition. Our power in India was but half developed, our administration most imperfect, our knowledge of the country very limited. We had but just escaped by the talents and partly it must be admitted by the unscrupulousness of war and hastings from total ruin. Grave dangers from Mysore, from the Marathas and from the French still threatened our ascendancy. How could these dangers possibly be adequately met by a board of English politicians in London? Mr. Pitt's India bill was not so comprehensive, not so far cited a scheme as that of Fox and Burke, but it possessed the great merits of being suited to the circumstance of the time. It was transitional in its nature and it dealt with a power in a state of transition. Corruption and oppression in India were to be suppressed not by the vigilance of an English Parliament possibly equally corrupt and unjust but by the high character and unremitting efforts that great officials sent out to assume the reins of government. Pitt's India bill was twice modified in the ten years which elapsed from its passing and each time in the direction of placing greater confidence in the Governor General and it was in consequence of such a policy that England obtained the services of Lord Cornwallis and the Marquis Wellesley. Had Fox's bill passed into law and by great good fortune Cornwallis and Wellesley accepted office in spite of it can it be imagined that the restrictions which it contained would have lasted one moment beyond the time when they began to be felt? Would Cornwallis have drawn back from the conquest of Mysore or Wellesley from the Treaty of Bassane for fear of parliamentary censure or indefference to parliamentary restriction? When the crisis came all considerations except those of the safety of the Empire would have been scattered to the wind and legislative restrictions like Samson's Bonds proved efficacious only while the strongman slept. But this was not the reasoning which proved fatal to the bill. It was attacked not from the high ground of the true relations between India and England but from the lower ground of pure party policy. In order to put the Government of India on right lines for all time Fox had deliberately run the risk of wrecking his whole scheme by his two ostentatious disregard of the prejudices of the day. Never was any great scheme constructed since the days of parliamentary government with so little consideration for the necessities of parliamentary warfare. The strange inability to grasp the political responsibilities of the moment and to combine them with statesmen-like schemes for the future which is so astonishing in a practical and powerful debater like Fox was never more apparent than in his India bill. The coalition on which he relied was partly made up of men returned to parliament by royal influence to support a royal minister. The opposition which he had to dread was inspired by the King himself and headed by men who had taken as their leading political principle the vindication of royal authority and administration. Yet Fox proposed to transfer the whole patronage of India for four years from the company not to the crown as head of the state but to commissioners appointed by parliament that is by himself and his majority. Such a provision could not fail to unite the whole Tory party the whole of the court party and the whole of those interested not merely in the East India Company but in any chartered company whatsoever in the bitterest hostility to the measures. It raised grave doubts among those of his own supporters who disliked wholesale interference with old established institutions. Again the chief difficulty with which Fox had to contend next to the personal hostility of the King was the suspicion in the minds of the nation that his coalition with North rested on no principle and was dictated merely by greed of office. The King had diligently let it be known what he thought about the matter. The opposition had not lost an opportunity of pressing their view upon the country during the recess. It is noticeable that the attack on the coalition as unprincipled and unnatural became much more virulent after the recess than it was before it. One member with more passion than humor fell into the delightful bathos of winding up a furious attack on the ministry by demanding that a starling should be placed in the house to remind members of the state of affairs by constantly repeating coalition, coalition, cursed coalition. As a matter of parliamentary tactics it was above all things important to the ministry that their great measures should not be open to the charge of being corruptly designed to throw power and influence into their own hands under cover of an hypocritical profession of concern for the sufferings of India. Yet Fox, either carelessly or presumptuously ran his head straight into the trap which lay open before him. To those who were already somewhat doubtful of the honesty of the coalition the proposal to vest the cold lucrative patronage of India in the hands of the ministry for four years seemed an absolute confirmation of their worst fears. The revolutionary character of the India bill illustrated the unprincipled character of the coalition. Men like Fox and Burke in the cold shade of opposition had declaimed against corruption with an intensity of moral earnestness which had convinced all men of their sincerity. Yet when other chances of obtaining office seemed to fail they had not scrupled to make terms of alliance with the man who above all others was blackened with the stain of long years of parliamentary corruption and now when they had gained power by these doubtful means they proposed to assume to themselves the whole patronage of India for four years. For what purpose had they thus deprived the East India Company of its chartered rights? For what purpose did they propose to deprive the crown of its natural inheritance? What sort of use would Fox and North make of the influence thus greedily claimed? Was it to send out to India men of approved honesty and of high character regardless of political connection and party advantages? Or was it to use the patronage of India for binding together the party at home for the reward of political service for the satisfying of personal claims for consolidating the power of the ministry? Such were the thoughts which were stirring in the minds of men when Fox made public the names of the first seven commissioners. End of Section 11. Section 12 of Charles James Fox by Henry Offley Wakeman. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 6 The India Bill, Part 2 At their head stood the respectable name of Lord Fitzwilliam. Among them was the able and subtle brain of Sir Gilbert Elliott, but one and all they were essentially party men. They were the personal friends and the devoted adherents of the leaders of the coalition. Allured light was at once thrown upon the real designs of the ministers. Here was the first act of this unlimited patronage. Who were the men chosen out of all England as most fit to become dictators of India? Men who had served the country well? Who had proved themselves capable just and impartial administrators? Men who had made the great problems of India their special study? On the contrary, men of whom nothing more was known than that they were personal friends of the ministers, steady political adherents, and the owners of valuable votes, like master, like man. If Fox and North used their patronage purely for the furtherance of party interests, it was perfectly certain that the commissioners would follow in the same footsteps. Men saw rising before them the horrible specter of a vast colossus of corruption, clasping both England and India in its foul embrace, under the shadow of which royal authority and popular independence and imperial development alike must wither and decay in order that on its shoulders, sharing its crown of power, it might support insecure but despicable dignity its twin children of the coalition. Burke was seen to have turned his back upon a lifetime devoted to economical reform. Fox was proved, after all, to be but a chip of the old block, and men believed in the absolute truth of the current sarcasm, that the bill was one to take away the crown from the head of George III and put it upon that of Fox. Nevertheless this wide extended distrust was more apparent without than within the walls of Parliament, and the bill would almost certainly have passed with substantial majorities in both houses had it not been for the extraordinary and unconstitutional action of the King. George III, following out his principle that he was not bound to give his confidence to ministers who had been forced upon him against his will, had from the first openly ordered that he would get rid of the coalition directly an opportunity offered, and had called upon the Grenvils to come to his aid. The India Bill gave him the desired opportunity, and Lord Temple, the head of the Grenville family came forward as his agent. On the 1st of December the critical division in the House of Commons gave the ministers a majority of 114. On the same day Lord Temple gave the paper to the King in which they advised that every possible exertion should be made to throw out the bill in the House of Lords. On the 9th the bill was brought up to the Lords and the 2nd reading was fixed for the 18th. In the meantime Lord Temple had an interview with the King who authorized him in writing to say on his behalf to the peers that he should consider every man who voted for the bill as his enemy. Called upon in this way by George III to decide between himself and his ministers the majority of the Lords not unnaturally adhered to the King and the bill was thrown out by a majority of 19. On the same evening the ministers received an order from the King to deliver up their seals of office and the coalition ministry came to an end. No means the end of the conflict. It was merely the first blow struck by the King in a long war. The real struggle was to come. Fox himself had fully expected some such sudden backfall and looked on the prospect of fighting his way back into office again with zest as a soldier and little misgiving as a general. Nor was he necessarily wrong. Bad generalship on his part and unexpected treachery on the part of the King had defeated him. But it was quite possible that good generalship might not only retrieve the past but establish him more firmly than ever for the future. So with the good humor which distinguished him he took a seat on the front opposition bench and waited events little dreaming that he would be there for nearly the rest of his life. On the 19th of December Pitt was appointed Prime Minister and on the 22nd the House met again for business. Unfortunately it at once became apparent that good generalship was a gift which the opposition could not hope to enjoy as long as it remained under the leadership of Fox. It is almost incredible how deficient in insight into the state of affairs he showed himself to be. He was now in the zenith of his power as an orator. His special strength and debate lay in his quickness in seizing and dealing with the real pointed issue. In the management of a debate he rarely made a mistake. In the management of a political question he rarely avoided fatal blunders. He had had quite sufficient experience of office to learn that in a system of parliamentary government a politician must consider not only what is desirable but what is possible and must make his policy coincide with the general good sense of the country. Yet through his love for abstract statesmanship or his personal predilections he continually allowed himself to get into wholly false relations with the country. No great leader of modern times has been served so devotedly and has been loved so passionately as was Fox. Yet none has ever led his followers so often into positions where victory was only possible by a miracle. A general who fought all his battles on the model of dead-ingen would soon cease to rank high among tacticians. A glance at the state of political thought in parliament and in the country at the time of the dismissal of the coalition will soon show how greatly Fox misconceived the position of affairs. In the course of Laura's as experience had just shown distrust of the principles of the coalition and deference to the wishes of the Crown had become too strong for the ties of party which are always weaker in and hereditary than in a representative chamber. The peers as a body were not likely to reverse their recent decision except under strong pressure from the House of Commons fortified by a fuller appreciation of the danger attaching to unconstitutional conduct such as that of George III and Lord Temple. The House of Commons was the stronghold of the opposition. Their Fox reigned supreme. A substantial majority followed his lead and was not likely to be wanting infidelity to any policy which seemed to promise a speedy return to office. Yet any thinking man could easily see that not wise to stake too much upon the power and authority of the majority of the House of Commons. The House was nearly four years old. It had been elected toward the end of the American war. Royal influence and corrupt practices had been freely resorted to to procure a majority for the King and Lord North. That majority was obtained at a time when the general opinion of Englishman was notoriously against the crown. No one knew better than Fox how opposed to the national sentiments was the House of Commons in 1780. Why should it so greatly have changed its character in 1784? Of the majority which Fox and Lord North directed against Pitt the larger part no doubt were staunch and true wigs who had always followed the banners of Fox whose fidelity was a suspicion. But the rest whose presence was absolutely necessary on a division were the followers of Lord North returned by corrupt influence to support the King's minister in 1780 who partly from allegiance and partly from desire of office had joined the coalition in 1783 but who found themselves in a false and uncongenial position where they were called upon to fight their way back to power over the prostrate bodies of the King and Pitt. Their natural sympathies were with authority and they were not prepared to take part in a parliamentary revolution. In the nation itself much prejudice had been excited by the India Bill. Much sympathy was felt with the King upon whose councils and ministry of so questionable a nature as the coalition had forced itself. Shocked by the coalition startled by the sweeping changes of the India Bill men were not prepared at once to denounce the King and his boy minister and shout for the buff and blue. They held their judgment in suspense distrustful of both parties persuadable by either but vaguely sensible that after all the King was the most honest man in the whole range of English political life. If this was the state of public opinion Fox's true policy was clear and distinct. He ought to have applied himself heart and soul to persuade the nation that he was in the right. Neither side could win without the active support of the people. The influence of the crown and the deference of the peers would not by themselves prevail over the will of the House of Commons. The House of Commons by itself had not moral strength enough to stand against the power of the crown and of the peers. The mutual war could at best only produce a deadlock. The nation alone held the key to the puzzle. If Fox had boldly claimed the nation on his side welcomed an immediate appeal to the people explained to them the true greatness of his India scheme modified if necessary those parts most open to destruction. Proceeded at once against Lord Temple in Parliament for his unconstitutional conduct and announced to the nation the sinister revival of the personal interference of the crown as subversive of true parliamentary liberty he would probably have won the day. At any rate he would have had his cause argued fairly on its merits before a tribunal of which on his own principles were bound to approve. The policy which he actually adopted was the exact opposite. He determined to rely solely upon his majority in the House of Commons and to force the will of the Commons upon the King. He showed the greatest dread of an appeal to the people procured and addressed to the King against the dissolution on the very first day on which the House met after the change of ministry to extort a promise from Pitt that he would not advise a dissolution. He suffered the extraordinary action of Lord Temple to go perfectly unchallenged in the teeth of a resolution of the House passed while the India bill was before the Lords that to report any opinion of his Majesty upon any bill in either House of Parliament with a view to influence the votes of members is a high crime in misdemeanor and subversive of the Constitution of this country. Having thus let the agent whom he could punish ghost god free he proceeded to attack the principal who was above his reach. There was hardly a speech of his in the spring of 1784 which was not directed against the secret influence of the Crown and the unconstitutional appointment of the ministers. Thus he narrowed the issue as much as possible to a duel between himself and George III in which Pitt stood forth as the defender of the Crown. He threw away the opportunity which the unconstitutional conduct of the King had given him by himself taking the equally unconstitutional line of attempting to interfere with the undoubted prerogative of the Crown to dissolve Parliament. He threw away all the advantages which his position as leader of the popular party had given him by insisting on defending the narrow rights of a majority in one house and enabled his adversary to pose as the champion at once of King, Lords and people. Naturally therefore as the struggle increased in violence the nation began to declare itself more and more decidedly on the side of Pitt and the King. When the King took no notice of a vote of want of confidence Pitt did not resign and George did not dismiss him all that was left to Fox was to refuse supplies and make government impossible. But that could only render certain the dreaded dissolution and make the elections still more unfavorable. So as time went on Fox found himself in a more and more hopeless position. The memory of the King's unconstitutional act faded away in the light of his own unconstitutional conduct. The King, adopting his own view of the situation entered the lists with him as a combatant and refused to take any notice of his addresses and resolutions. The people trusted by Pitt distrusted by Fox naturally turned to their friends. All that was left to Fox in the political sphere was to stop the supplies in that he dared not do. A policy of protest and protest alone was doomed to failure. Even the mechanical majority on which he had relied and for which he had sacrificed so much came to desert him and melt away. At last the crash came. On the 8th of March Fox carried a representation to the Crown by a majority of one only. This was the end of the opposition. Dr. Johnson truly said that the question before the country was whether it would be ruled by the scepter of George III or by the tongue of Fox. On the 24th of March the Parliament was dissolved and Fox had the mortification of seeing one of the most powerful parties ever gathered together under a minister hopelessly shattered to pieces by his own extraordinary blunders. A shower of squibs and broadsides followed him in his discomforture. For political wit never spares the unfortunate. Dear Carr, is it true what I've long heard of you? The man of the people they call you, they call you? How comes it to pass? They are now grown so rash at the critical moment to leave you, to leave you. Oh, that cursed India bill. Enjoy a tight place and be civil, be civil. Had you carried it through? Oh, that would just do. Then their charters we'd pitched to the devil, the devil. Others not quite so good tempered pointed to the political catastrophe as the natural and appropriate reward of a career conspicuous for want of moral principle. When first young Reynard came from France he tried to bow to dress to dance, but to succeed had little chance the courtly dames among. It is true indeed his wit hath charms, but his grim fizz the pointless arms and all were filled with dire alarms at such a bogar song. He left the fair and took to dice. At Brooks they were not so nice, but cleared his pockets in a trice, nor left a wreck behind. Nay some pretend he even lost that little grace he had to boast and then resolve to seize some post where he might raise the wind. In politics he could not fail, so set about it tooth and nail, but here again his stars prevail, nor long the media are shown. His friends, if such deserve the name, still keep him at a losing game, bankrupt in fortune and in fame his day is almost done. End of Section 12 Section 13 of Charles James Fox by Henry Offly Wakeman this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Pamela Nagami Chapter 7 The Years of Opposition 1783-1793 Part 1 The Pitched Battle The Pitched Battle of 1784 ended as most battles do in the complete victory of the greatest tactician. When the new parliament met on the 18th of May, Fox found himself at the head of a broken and dispirited party which numbered little over a hundred members face to face with a solid and triumphant body of some 250 ministerialists enthusiastic in their loyalty and completely devoted to their young and skillful leader. Fox himself had only succeeded in obtaining the second place on the pole for Westminster after the most unremitting efforts on his part backed by the charms of the Duchess of Devonshire and the open advocacy of the Prince of Wales. As it was, his enemies succeeded in preventing him taking his seat for Westminster for more than three years. The Pitches were then disinferred by a group of people who had been sitting in the house of Commons at the time of the election. The Pitches were then disinferred by the members of the House of Commons and the Pitches were disinferred by the members of the House of Commons and the Pitches were disinferred by the members of the House of Commons or rather Fox's friends found themselves involved in a long, weariesome and expensive inquiry which could have no other result than to waste money and embitter party feeling. At last, after nine months had elapsed, the House of Commons ordered progress to be reported and it was found that the scrutiny was complete only in one parish and that On this, the majority became rather ashamed of their factiousness, and although Pitt continued his opposition, the House, on the 5th of March, 1785, declared Fox duly returned for Westminster. Such a beginning did not seem to promise any decline in party virulence, yet it was really but the last muttering of the thunderstorm as it passed away over the hills of time. The majority which supported Pitt was so ample and so homogeneous, and the verdict of the country not merely upon the policy of Fox, but on the whole coalition so unmistakable, that all thought of changing the position of affairs speedily dropped out of the thoughts of politicians on both sides. Parliament settled down naturally and quietly to the transaction of business under the guidance of Pitt, without fear of any renewal of political convulsion. Fox himself, tired out in body and mind, was anxious to leave Parliament and let the country take its chance without the help of an organised and active opposition, while he pursued at St. Anne's what was to him the far more enjoyable and profitable employment of the critical study of the best classical and modern poetry. It was only the stern call of duty and the urgent representations of his followers which prevented him from anticipating in 1784 the secession of 1797. The reasons for this attitude of mind are not far to seek. It is always difficult for men, almost impossible for politicians, to look with impartiality upon the withdrawal of distinguished men from posts of great responsibility. It seems to argue on the face of it a want of sense of duty and of patriotism, if not serious defects of temper and perseverance. The abdications of history are not reassuring. Diocletian, Charles V, and Christina are not the greater for their efforts at self-abnegation. Achilles sulking in his tents when the Trojans were at the ships is a picture on which every English schoolboy instinctively looks with contempt. And the instinct is right, because it springs from the conviction that the man cannot withdraw from the work of his life while his powers are still unimpaired without grave loss to himself and others. But to Fox politics never appeared in this serious way as the work of his life. He was not a professional politician as Diocletian or Pitt were professional politicians. He was not even a professional parliamentary soldier as Achilles was a professional military warrior. The accident of his birth had made him a politician. His extraordinary political gifts had made him a leader. His sporting instincts made him determined to be first in any race in which he was engaged. His real and strong sympathy for the oppressed, his burning love for liberty, urged him ever against his will to throw himself into the foremost place and fight stubbornly for office because office meant the opportunity of advancing the cause of liberty. But in his heart of hearts these were after all but episodes, episodes which from time to time took up into themselves all the threads of his life story but which were still to him essentially episodes. His true life as he conceived it to himself was a life of lettered ease, of quiet domestic enjoyment. When he was young his real interests were at Newmarket and at Almax. Now in middle age they were with Homer and at St. Anne's. He had by this time formed the permanent connection with Miss Blaine usually known as Mrs. Armistead which afterwards ripened into marriage and which showed him the delights of domestic happiness. Half of his great political blunders came from either an inability or a disinclination to take the trouble to understand the game of politics, to find out what people were thinking about, to ponder carefully how prejudice might best be overcome and difficulties avoided. The work of the party manager was distasteful to him and scorned by him for the simple reason that politics in themselves had no attractions for him but only the ends which politics might serve or the passing excitement of the political battle. So it naturally happened that when all possibility of carrying out the object which he desired passed away with the election of 1784 and all the excitement of the duel with the king was over it seemed to him mere waste of time to keep up a hopeless opposition to Pitt and Dundas when he might be so much more profitably employed upon Homer and Ariosto. Had he been left to himself the world would have seen no more of Fox as a politician after 1784 but knowledge would have been enriched by healthy and eminently sensible criticisms on the great poets of Greece and Italy and possibly scholars might have been delighted by a treatise which would have set the question of the Digama forever at rest. But it was not to be. Fox above all men was the slave of his friends. He felt deeply what he owed to those who stood by him in adversity and at their call he emerged from his seclusion at St. An's to oppose Pitt's best measures and to bring renewed disgrace upon his party by his mismanagement of the question of the regency. The opportunities which attended Pitt on his entrance upon office were such as a constitutional minister rarely enjoys. For five years he was undisputed master of the country without any serious question to face except that of regency. For nine years he was unhampered by war. Royal influence which had proved so fatal to so many of his predecessors from the very nature of things became extinct. He was the king's own choice. It was he that had won for George's victory. Respected by the king though not beloved, deferential though not subservient, self-reliant, self-controlled, incorruptible, he wasn't once too powerful and too useful to be dispensed with. Though George III never gave him his full confidence as he had given to North and afterwards gave to Addington, he never caballed against him. The party of the king's friends insensibly passed into well-merited oblivion. Jenkinson their leader accepted a peerage at the hands of Pitt. The old cry of secret influence died away. Corruption which can only really thrive when opinion is much divided and votes are precious, veiled her face and fled from the presence of a high-principled minister and a united nation. The personal authority of the king in administration, so long the war cry of the Tory Party, was indeed still acknowledged in word, but it ceased to mean much when it was constitutionally exercised to the Prime Minister. So it came about that Pitt was the strongest and most independent minister whom England had had since the days of Walpole, and under him the doctrine of the Prime Minister's ship, which has done more than anything else to take political power out of the hands of the crown, became finally established. Besides these advantages of his political position, Pitt also enjoyed gifts of character and mind which peculiarly fitted him for the post he occupied. From his earliest boyhood he had made the House of Commons his special study, and at the age of twenty-five was a far greater master of the difficult art of directing that fastidious and critical assembly than many a veteran of fifty years parliamentary experience. It is said that since the House of Commons became the chief factor in the Government of England, there have been only five men who have thoroughly possessed its confidence as its leader, namely Pym, Walpole, Pitt, Peel, and Israeli, and of those Pitt stands out ahead in shoulders above the rest. In the whole of his long ministerial experience he never made a tactical mistake in parliamentary management. His oratory, too, was exactly suited to his position and to the times in which he lived. Gifted with a rich, sonorous voice and having in his command an extraordinary wealth of words which seemed to shape themselves without art or premeditation into majestic periods and found their natural completion in the appropriate Virgilian quotation, rising at times too powerful and stirring declination, never sinking into vulgarity or colloquialism, he made his oratory exactly to correspond to the demands of the purest art form of the eighteenth century. To the House of Commons of those days, when one and all of the members were trained in the school of imitative classical taste, his speeches seemed perfect and flawless, formed on the best models polished usque at Anguam. To us they appear colds-dilted and colorless, artificial in expression and unreal in feeling, the glitter of the sunlight upon the snow, as has been well said, or rather perhaps like a Greek statue, perfect in form, graceful in outline, instinct with feeling, but wanting life. These great gifts of parliamentary tact and oratory were directed to their proper channels of usefulness by a character, the distinguishing mark of which was self-control, and by a manner carefully adapted to maintain by a cold and distant address that ascendancy which talent had gained. Pitt walked among mankind, pale, passionless and lofty, with his eye in the air. Only among his most intimate friends would he unbend. It is characteristic of him that while in private life he was witty and agreeable, the wittiest man I ever knew, said his intimate friend Rose, in public he never made or attempted to make a joke. His one failing was drunkenness, and that was, to a great extent, brought on by the necessity of stimulant to a frame physically weak, and to a nature overburdened with the cares of an empire. In the eyes of the eighteenth century it was a venial sin and one which he shared with most of his contemporaries. Such a man as this lived but for one object, political ascendancy. Having by great good fortune attained it at a very early period of his life, his whole energies were devoted to its maintenance. Regardless of office he was greedy of power. He became morbidly timorous in any action which might tend to endanger his ascendancy. He was careful not to embark, if he could help it, on any policy which threatened to be unsafe, and drew back at once directly he encountered serious opposition. Thus he soon came always to take the line of the least pressure. In his legislation he was said to think much more of the parliament, which was to pass the law, than of the country which was to be affected by it. His greatest failures came from a want of courage in risking his ascendancy for what he believed to be a great national good. The very antithesis of Fox. He counted over and over again the cost of everything he said and everything he proposed to do, and frequently allowed the golden moment for action to pass away while he was counting. If he had set himself in 1784 to deal boldly and comprehensively with the great questions which were clamoring for settlement, monetary reform, the removal of religious disabilities, the abolition of the slave trade, the union with Ireland, he would have saved England from the effects of a political convulsion which was dangerous only because it was delayed so long. He would have rescued her from the grave dangers which now threaten her political and social welfare through the domination of a democracy mentally and politically uneducated, and he would have handed his name down to posterity as the greatest statesman as well as the greatest economist among the ministers of the century. But questions such as these involved risk. They ran counter to powerful interests. They were certain to excite formidable opposition. So Pitt deliberately let slip his unique opportunity and the most loyal majority minister ever had was used to reform the customs duties and establish a sinking fund while the real wounds of the nation were festering undressed and unhealed. One result of Pitt's careful and safe policy was a great diminution in the vigor of the opposition. The economical measures passed by Pitt in 1784 and 1785 were thoroughly non-contentious in character and though open to criticism and details were calculated greatly to benefit the finances of the country. Fox accordingly gave them his hearty support. He did not understand finance. He would not read Adam Smith. It was not therefore likely that he would vie with Pitt on financial or economical questions or would be able to detect any fallacy in his reasoning about the sinking fund. The commercial treaty with France by which a limited system of free trade was introduced was the only question which brought the whole force of the opposition to bear upon the ministry. The scheme is Pitt's best title to fame as a financial statesman. The idea was originally that of Shelburne and was directly inspired by the writings of Adam Smith, but to Pitt belongs the credit of having adopted it, made it his own and with the able assistance of Eden as negotiator carried it through. The speech of Pitt in introducing it was one of his greatest oratorical efforts and was mainly directed to show the mutual benefit in commerce which both countries must infallibly receive. Fox on the other hand attacked it violently on political grounds. He declared that France was England's natural enemy and it was only at England's expense that she could grow. Her object in the present treaty was merely to entangle England in her own system of politics in order to neutralize opposition to her further political aggressions. Burke, Sheridan, Wyndham and Gray, who made his maiden speech on this occasion, all reiterated the same complaints and avowed their distrust of France. But in spite of this appeal to national prejudice the measure was passed by a majority of two to one and the consumption of French wine in the country was at once nearly doubled without any corresponding loss in the Portuguese trade. The detestation of France, which showed itself so strongly in the speeches of all the Whig leaders at this time and especially in those of Burke and Fox, sounds somewhat strange in the mouth of a party which a few years later was specially to identify itself with the French nation and to sacrifice much for the sake of France. The fact was that in this, as in so many other questions, there was a great difference of view in the ranks of the opposition, there was yet no difference of action. To the mind of Burke and the older school of Whigs, France itself appeared as the traditional enemy, resistance against whom had been the cardinal principle of Whig foreign policy ever since the days of William III. Opposition to France was as sacred a duty as the support of the glorious revolution. To Fox, on the other hand, younger in years and more practical and more sympathetic in mind, France was represented by her government and was hateful not because she was France, but because she was the greatest photo liberty in Europe. Still whatever the motive may have been, the union of the whole Whig party against the French treaty in 1785 shows how far behind their opponents they were at that time in appreciation of the directions in which the true liberty of a commercial nation can best influence the world. During the two years which followed the passing of the French treaty, the public question in which Fox chiefly interested himself was the impeachment of Warren Hastings. For some time Burke had been deeply engaged in investigating the conduct of this remarkable man. Starting with a preconceived conviction of his guilt, he soon found enough to persuade himself that Hastings had not merely dishonored the British name by his tyranny and extortion, but that he was himself the source and center of all the misgovernment of India. The subject preoccupied Burke. It became almost a mania with him. He could think and speak of nothing else, and the more he talked, the more Hastings dilated before his eyes as a monster of iniquity in himself the incarnation of governmental wickedness. Marx and Sheridan approached the matter from rather a different standpoint. The sufferings of the people of India had ever been a subject which easily touched Fox's tender heart. All his strong humanitarian instincts were with them against their oppressors. He had lodged the power of control in the Parliament of England in his India bill, because he hoped thereby best to watch over the interests of the riots. He did not, like Burke, permit himself to be so carried away with passion as to be insensible to Hastings' real services to India and the country. He fully recognized that without him the British power in India must have sunk, but he thought that no amount of difficulties overcome, no amount of services rendered, could justify conduct in itself rapacious and unjust. Such arguments were merely a plea on a gigantic scale for doing evil that good might come. And he thought that it would be a very useful lesson to teach both to the servants of the company and to the natives that no services, however great, no station, however high, could to the minds of Englishmen be considered as excuse for tyranny, or ward off the avenging stroke of offended justice. But besides these considerations, founded on general principles of morality, it was not very difficult to see that an impeachment of war in Hastings, if successfully carried out, would be of immense political advantage to the opposition. It was an open secret that the king warmly espoused the cause of Hastings. It was whispered that he even wished to place him at the head of the Board of Control. An impeachment justly founded on strong evidence would therefore place pit on the horns of a dilemma. He must either surrender Hastings and forfeit the king's favor, or support Hastings and put himself in marked opposition to the moral sense of the country. Accordingly the opposition mustered all their strength and carefully prepared their scheme. On the 17th of February, 1786, Burke moved for papers. On the 4th of April, he produced articles of impeachment of Hastings for his conduct with regard to the Rohillus, the Raja of Bonaris, and the Begums of Oed. Burke, Fox, and Sheridan respectively undertook the task of explaining these charges to the House. CHAPTER VII Unfortunately a dilemma in politics is rarely more successful than a dilemma in argument, and Pitt found little difficulty in picking his way through the toils which his enemies had spun for him. When the Rohilla charge was brought before the House by Burke on the 1st of June, Dundas, Pitt's closest friend and the President of the Board of Control, took the lead in opposing the motion on the ground that however blameworthy Hastings' conduct might have been, there was nothing on which to found a criminal charge. Fox strongly supported Burke and described the whole transaction as the basest of bargains, to exterminate an inoffensive people for forty lax of rupees, for that sum he cried, the character, the dignity, the honor of the English nation were basely and treacherously exposed to sale. The House however took the other view, and threw out the motion by a majority of fifty-two. On the 13th of June, Fox brought forward the Bonaris charge, and at the beginning of the following year, Sheridan introduced that relating to O'Wedd in his celebrated Begum speech, which has been pronounced by so many competent judges to be the finest display of eloquence ever listened to by the House of Commons. In both these matters, Pitt, though not fully accepting the accounts of the opposition, thought that there was enough disclose on which to found an impeachment. He took a leading part in settling the articles which were to be laid before the lords, and having thus carefully avoided identifying himself with the doubtful acts of Hastings, was content to let the impeachment drag its weary length along, and absorb the energy of the opposition, which otherwise would be devoted to his own policy. On the other hand, the King was wise enough to see that after all a long and weary some investigation was the best way of avoiding any direct censure on Hastings, and never withdrew from Pitt any of his confidence for the part which he had played. But by far, the gravest of the difficulties with which Fox had to contend during this part of his political life was his close connection with the Prince of Wales. A character so low, mean, and degraded has rarely tarnished the reputation of an English family. To find a parallel, we must go to the brutalized courts of Germany, to the abandoned court of Louis XV, or to the barbarous court of Russia in the eighteenth century. Immorality, wastefulness, and folly were at that time the recognized privileges of princes of the blood. The Prince of Wales added to them the mean and unkingly vices of shamelessness and mendacity, while generous instincts and noble thoughts seemed as far from his character as the more vulgar feelings of filial or domestic affection. It had become a sinister tradition in the House of Hanover for the heir to the throne to be in violent antagonism to his father. In the case of George III and his son, antagonism ripened into a hatred which neither side cared to attempt to conceal. The King, harsh and unsympathetic, looked upon every act of boyish independence as little better than rebellion. The Prince, dissolute and undutiful, took him a lignant pleasure in outraging his father's prim respectability. Partly to annoy the King, partly because he had imbibed as real and affection for Fox as his shallow nature was capable of, he had from the first violently attached himself to the wigs, became a member of Brooks, wore their colors, voted for their measures, and celebrated the return of Fox for Westminster with rejoicings which were as indecent in a person of his position as they were uproarious. There was not a more violent fox sight in the Kingdom, wrote Lord Cornwallis in 1783. Such conduct as this naturally did no small disservice to his friends. It is characteristic of Fox that he never seems to have pressed upon the Prince, perhaps he never fully realized, the harm which was being done to his party and to its leader. The secret of the King's rooted antipathy to the wigs, of his personal enmity to Fox, is to be found mainly in the conduct of the Prince of Wales. Of course George III was strongly opposed to the wigs on political grounds. He would never and he had never accepted wigs as his ministers when he could help himself. But there is a distinct difference to be noted in his dealings with men like Chatham and Rockingham and his conduct to Fox. Partly no doubt it is to be accounted for by the change in his own position. He was not so strong and not so experienced in the days of Chatham and Rockingham, as he was in the days of Fox and the Duke of Portland. Partly it is to be explained by the greater boldness of Fox's views. But after making all allowances for considerations such as these, there remains behind a fast fund of suspicion and prejudice which is only explicable on the grounds of a deep moral hatred. George III looked on Fox not merely as a wrong-headed and unprincipled politician, but as the preacher and the teacher of evil, a methistopheles who had set himself to corrupt the morals and ruin the character of his son, who having succeeded only too well had carried him off in triumph to head the party of revolution against the church and the throne. Nor was this view distorted and one-sided as it was, wholly without foundation. The Prince's character was not one which required a methistopheles to ruin it. There was not much of it left by the time he was out of the nursery. But Fox, if not his leader, had certainly been his companion in many a scene of dissipation while the Prince was yet a boy. The coterie of young wigg lords by whom the Prince was surrounded, and whose ill-timed jests and bets upon the succession wrangled so deeply in the heart of the King, were the devoted adherents of Fox. His was the one influence which the Prince on emerging into manhood willingly owned. He was the only man in England who could have checked the headlong torrent of extravagance and vice. Yet his influence, though sometimes exerted for the public good, seems never to have been used in purely private matters. Fox was content to allow the Prince the same liberty which he himself had enjoyed, and so it happened that the want of moral sense so conspicuous throughout his whole career forced him to throw away the opportunity which he and he alone could utilize. How could he, with his past history of dead and of gambling, with his present history of carelessness and immorality, play the part of mentor? His own vices rose up in judgment against him and prevented him from using the only means which could have reconciled the King to the wigs and paved the way for his own return to office. Ah, que l'immoralité d'imaginesse affédétore à la chose publique was the exclamation of the despairing mirabeau in similar circumstances. And Fox, if he ever permitted himself to reflect upon the connection between morals and politics, must often have been tempted to re-echo the cry. Ever since he was eighteen, the Prince had always been under the influence of women. Usually each connection that he formed proved as evanescent as it was discreditable. But in 1784 he fell seriously, and his he thought permanently, in love with Mrs. Fitzherbert, a young widow of twenty-eight, with considerable personal attractions, but a Roman Catholic by religion. Mrs. Fitzherbert at first was naturally rather alarmed than flattered by her conquest. Nothing daunted, however, by her coyness, the Prince proceeded to lay siege to the fortress by every contrivance known to the hero of a melodrama. He made vows and protestations. He cried by the hour. He rolled on the floor. He tore his hair. He wrote appalling love letters thirty-seven pages long. He went into hysterics. He swore to give up his crown in his country, and even descended to the mean trick of an affected suicide. It is now often that a Prince has to push his suit to such lengths. When a year had elapsed and his passions still seemed to remain as constant as ever, Mrs. Fitzherbert could hold out no longer. In December 1785 she returned to England from her sanctuary abroad, and on the twenty-first of the same month the two were married by an English clergyman in the presence of at least six witnesses. The step was one of serious political importance. By the Royal Marriage Act the marriage was invalid as the previous consent of the crown had not been obtained and the Prince was under twenty-five years of age. But it was exceedingly doubtful whether this disability would be held to exempt him from the penalties of the act of settlement, by which marriage with a Roman Catholic forfeited the succession to the crown. The doubt was so grave that Fox thought it his duty to interfere. In a long and carefully worded letter, written ten days before the marriage, he pointed out in terms of respectful affection the seriousness of the issues at stake both to the Prince and to the nation. He was answered in a few jaunty lines absolutely denying the truth of the rumours, so malevolently circulated. Ten days after this distinct denial the marriage was celebrated but kept secret from Fox. It was impossible, however, to keep it secret very long from the world. Early in 1786 the bailiffs were in possession of Carlton House. The King refused to authorize his ministers to make any application to Parliament for his son's assistance. The opposition took the matter up, and in April 1787 Alderman Noonan gave notice of a motion for the payment of the Prince's debts. During the year the rumours of his marriage had been growing more and more persistent. Many of the opposition leaders partly on that account were opposed to any application to Parliament at all. The Duke of Portland had such a stormy interview with the Prince that Burke thought that the party would break up. Rol, the hero of the Roliad, took up the cudgels for the Tories, and openly intimated that the proposal, if pressed, would involve questions by which the Constitution, both in church and state, would be affected. On this Fox saw that some explanation was absolutely necessary. He had an interview with the Prince, and on the next day speaking on his behalf and having, as he avowed, direct authority for what he said, told the House of Commons that the Prince was willing to give his Majesty and his Majesty's ministers the fullest assurances of the utter falsehood of the fact in question, which never had, in which common sense, must see, never could have happened. In consequence of this explicit statement the House voted 161,000 pounds for the payment of existing debts, and an addition was made by the King to the Prince's allowance. On the morning following Fox's statement the Prince went up to Mrs. Fitzherbert and, taking her hands in his said, only conceive, Maria, what Fox did yesterday. He went down to the House and denied that you and I were man and wife. On the same evening a gentleman said to Fox at Brooks's, I see, Mr. Fox, by the papers, you have denied the fact of the marriage of the Prince with Mrs. Fitzherbert. You have been misinformed. I was present at that marriage. A story more incredibly base could not be found in the whole range of fiction. It was bad enough that a man of position and education should solemnly deny his approaching marriage ten days before the ceremony took place. That after he had been married, more than a year, he should instruct his friend publicly to brand his wife's honor in the House of Commons, in order that, as the price of her assumed shame, he might procure the payment of his own debts, shows an extent of moral obliquity but little better than that of a father who lives on the proceeds of his daughter's prostitution. After an act of such vileness as this, his attempt to throw over Fox when he had made all the use of him that he could seems comparatively trifling. Yet that violated the rules of social honor no less than the other did those of domestic faith. Fox himself had the rare courage to hold his tongue, and not to make matters worse by publishing the gross deception of which he had been made the victim. But the relations between the two could, of course, never again be the same. For a year he absolutely refused to have any dealings at all with the Prince. But after that time the necessities of party warfare, and his own easy standard of morality, paved the way for a reconciliation. They became once more political allies, but never again intimate friends. In the spring of 1788 Fox found himself able to carry out a long meditated tour in Switzerland and Italy. As was usual with him he abandoned himself wholly to the delights of travel, banished all thoughts of politics, never looked at an English paper except to see the result of a race at Newmarket, and promised himself a long spell of unalloyed happiness in the art galleries of Italy. The dream, however, was quickly dispelled. He had only got as far as Bologna on his way south when he was summoned home as quickly as he could travel by the news of the alarming illness of the King. And he had to tear himself away from the Society of Guido Reni and the Caracci, whom strange to say he greatly admired. In order to plunge headlong into the keenest party fight which had occurred since 1784. For some months it had been evident to those about the court that the King's mind was slightly impaired. But it was hoped that quiet and rest would enable him to recover without drawing public attention to the matter. At the beginning of November, however, his affection took a serious turn for the worse. He completely lost his reason, became violent and depressed by turns, and was seized by a sharp attack of fever which placed his life for some days in danger. Parliament was summoned to meet on the 20th, and it was clear that on its assembling immediate measures would have to be taken for conducting the affairs of the country during the incapacity of the Crown. To an ordinary observer the difficulty did not seem to be a serious one. The Queen was the natural person to take charge of the King, and the Prince, now of full age, to succeed to the Regency. All politicians, however, knew that the matter was not so simple as it looked. It was thought at the time that the King's incapacity was certain to last for months and probably for years. It was certain that the first act of the Regent would be to dismiss Pitt from office and recall the leaders of the hated coalition. Men saw with horror the prospect open out before them of a renewal of the party fight of 1784 with the conditions reversed. They found themselves suddenly face to face with a minority ministry resting wholly on royal support, bidding frantically for the votes of the constituencies as their only safeguard against the vengeance of the King should his reason return. So over the stricken mind of George III, as of old over the dead body of Patroclus, swayed the faction fight. It is a melancholy chapter of English history. Not one of those who took a leading part in the question came out of it with increased reputation. The Prince and the Duke of York showed an indecent haste to seize upon the King's papers and a desire to oust the Queen from the guardianship of his person. They were believed openly to exalt in the prospect of reversing his most cherished policy and ejecting his chosen minister. When the King lay, as it was thought dying, they were dancing, gambling, and drinking. The Queen, zealous in the extreme of her rights over the King's person, resented any interference on the part of the princes with an acrimony which bordered on insult, deliberately denied them information, and on the King's recovery poisoned his mind against them. Pit, ever stately and dignified, wasted time deliberately, in the hope of the King's recovery, an embittered opposition by the needless and ungenerous restrictions which he sought to place upon the regent. The opposition completely lost their heads on the sudden prospect of a return to power. They threw to the winds all respect and thought for the terrible blow which had fallen upon the head of the state. They took a pleasure in magnifying his infirmities. They prophesied the impossibility of his recovery. Burke especially was so carried away that he almost gloated over his sufferings. Fox and the Duke of Portland settled their cabinet, and it was said allotted their patronage before the regency was an accomplished fact. On all sides mismanagement was rife, but Fox was chiefly responsible for the blows sustained by his own party. His want of parliamentary tact again put the game into his adversaries' hands. Parliament met on the 20th of November, and on December 8th the commons examined the King's physicians as to the state of his health and drew up a report. On the 10th, Pitt in consequence of the report moved that a committee should be appointed to search for precedents with a view of laying a foundation for a regency bill which he proposed to introduce. Fox who had been in England more than a fortnight and had ample opportunity of consulting his friends strongly protested against the adoption of this course. It is a sheer loss of time to search for precedents, he said. The circumstances to be provided for does not depend upon our deliberations as a House of Parliament. It rests elsewhere. There is now a person in the kingdom different from any other person that existing precedents can refer to, an heir apparent of full age and capacity to exercise the royal power. In my firm opinion the Prince of Wales has as clear as express a right to assume the reigns of government and exercise the powers of sovereignty during the continuance of the illness and incapacity with which it is pleased God to afflict his Majesty, as in the case of his Majesties having undergone a natural and perfect demise. As to this right which I conceive the Prince of Wales to have, he himself is not to judge when he is entitled to exercise it, but the two Houses of Parliament, as the organs of the nation, are alone qualified to pronounce when the Prince ought to take possession of and exercise this right. The joy of the ministerial power when they heard this clear enunciation of the doctrine of hereditary as against parliamentary right from the lips of the Whig leader can easily be imagined. I'll unwig the gentleman-cried pit as Fox was speaking, for the rest of his life. Of the momentous business opened last night, wrote Sir William Young to the Marquis of Buckingham, I can only say that our astonishment is only equaled by the spirits we are in on viewing the grounds Mr. Fox has abandoned to us and left our own. Talbot, who made one of my morning's levy, told me that at Whites last night all was hurrah and triumph. Pit seized the opportunity with masterly skill. Once more the blunders of his rival had enabled him to stand forth in the eyes of the world as the champion of the King and the Constitution. Turning upon Fox he denounced the doctrine he had just heard as treason to the Constitution, a reassertion of the exploded doctrine of indefensible right. In vain Fox tried to explain away his words to induce the House to leave abstract questions alone and proceed to practical matters. Pit fully understood his advantage and meant to press it. Fox he said had deliberately raised the question of abstract right. He had claimed for the Prince a vested right to the Regency. It was impossible to stir a step until the question of right was determined, for it touched the very vitals of the Constitution. A few days afterwards Sheridan added fuel to the flame by reminding the House of the danger of provoking the Prince to assert his right. The effect was instantaneous. During the whole time that I have sat in Parliament writes W. Grenville to his brother, I never remember such an uproar as was raised by his threatening. Because of the days of Charles I floated before the members' eyes, Parliament was being openly defied and threatened. The principles of divine right and of the indefensible authority of princes seemed again to rear themselves from their slumber and place the liberties of Englishmen once more in jeopardy. Well, might Grenville say in another letter, only think of Fox's want of judgment, to bring himself and his friends into such a scrape as he has done by maintaining a doctrine of higher Tory principle than could have been found anywhere since Sir Robert Sawyer's speeches. Never was Pitt's singular Parliamentary ability so evident as in his management of the Regency question. His was the worst case to argue, from the point of view of constitutional law, but Fox, with his usual carelessness, had used words which were easily capable of being interpreted in an unconstitutional sense. Pitt immediately fastened this meaning upon them, and from that moment all attempts to explain appeared as attempts to explain away. To us there cannot help being something ludicrous in the picture of Fox and Sheridan standing in the pillory of public opinion with Atterbury and Cecheverelle as the apostles of divine right. We wonder that Parliament did not at once see the joke and sweep the cobweb away with a hearty peel of laughter. But to men of that day the danger to the Constitution seemed serious enough. The tarnished character of the Prince of Wales and the distrust so generally felt in Fox since the coalition made men unwilling to entrust to their keeping the full powers of sovereignty and afraid of acknowledging a principle which seemed to put them outside the sphere of parliamentary control. As a matter of policy, Pitt was undoubtedly right. It was better under the circumstances to disregard constitutional logic. It was wiser to confer the Regency on the Prince and to restrict his powers by act of Parliament, although such a course necessitated the creation of a phantom king than it was to place the whole household as well as the whole administration unreservedly in the hands of a Prince who could not understand that a constitutional king must not be a party leader. But as a matter of constitutional law, Fox's view was by far the most logical and comprehensive. The Crown of England is hereditary, not elective. Incapacity in the king must be considered in the light of a temporary demise, on the occurrence of which the temporary succession passes at once to the heir of of age and preserves the continuity of the constitution. Parliament, apart from the king as the great council of the nation, may well recognize this state of affairs and call upon the Prince to enter upon his new duties. But Parliament, as part of the legislature, apart from the king, has no power at all. It cannot, by itself, pass the smallest measure, much less impose restrictions on the executive. To get over the difficulty by making the affixing of the great seal by a parliamentary commission, tantamount to the royal assent, was to introduce a totally new principle into the constitution, and one far more dangerous than that of the inherent right of the Prince of Wales, for it came very near to dispensing with the royal assent altogether. It was intended, said Burke, to set up a man with black eyebrows and a large wig, a kind of scarecrow to the two houses, who was to give a fictitious assent in the royal name. The farce reminds me of a priest among savages who raised an idol and directed its worship merely that he might secure to himself the meat that was offered as a sacrifice. Fortunately for both parties, the necessity for a decision never arose. Ireland, following the arguments of Fox, recognized the prince as regent in his own right. In England, Pittsbill vesting the regency in the prince, but placing the whole management of the king's person and household in the hands of the queen, and restricting very considerably the patronage exercised by the regent, passed the commons, and was before the lords, when the king recovered. Had it passed, and had the prince in accordance with his expressed intention dismissed Pitt, summoned to his councils Fox and the Duke of Portland, and dissolved Parliament, the result would not improbably have somewhat disillusioned the wig-leaders. There is good reason to believe that the country in the full flow of its sympathy for the king, and its indignant contempt for the prince, with its deep-rooted suspicion of Fox, unappeased and unappeasable, would have inflicted upon the wigs a chastisement so severe as almost to wipe them out of existence as a political party. Among those who played the sorriest of the parts in the regency question was Thurlow, the Lord Chancellor. He had ever been among the stoutest of the henchmen of the king, and had acted as detective on behalf of the king in the ministry of Rockingham. But there was one thing he valued more than the king, and that was the woolsack. He had got accustomed to it, had grown to it in the course of so many years, and could not bear the thought of having to surrender it to Loughborough if the wigs came in. Fortunately for him what Sir G. Eliot finally calls his table qualities had endeared him to the Prince of Wales, and this gave him an opportunity of standing well with both sides. When the king was first taken ill, Thurlow made up his mind that recovery was hopeless, and at once put himself into communication with the Prince and the Duke of Portland. Secret interviews were held, and pledges given, and it soon began to be whispered on the ministerial side that the Chancellor was playing false. Much amusement was caused one day after a cabinet council by the conduct of a page, who having been sent in search of Thurlow's hat, which was not to be found, at last brought the missing article into the room where the ministers were assembled with the naive but compromising remark. My lords, I found it in the closet of the Prince of Wales. When Fox returned from Italy, he found it practically settled that Thurlow was to retain the woolsack, and there was nothing left for him but to acquiesce. I have swallowed the pill he wrote to Sheridan, and the most bitter one it was. I do not remember ever feeling so uneasy about any political thing I ever did in my life. As the King's health improved, however, so did Thurlow's loyalty. He ceased his visits to the Prince. He became an ardent admirer of the Regency Bill. When it was certain that the King would recover, his zeal knew no bounds. Going down to the House of Lords, he drew a picture of the King in his affliction which touched all hearts. Then bursting into a flood of tears, he allowed himself to be carried away in a paroxysm of exuberant loyalty, and finished an impassioned proration with the exclamation, When I forget my King, may my God forget me. Forget you, Mothered Burke, who stood near, the best thing that could happen to you. Forget you, repeated Wilkes, with more wit than reverence. He will see you damned first. Pitt never forgot the hypocrisy of this scene, and took the earliest opportunity of placing the Great Seal in safer hands. The following epitaph, one of the most pungent lampoons which ever destroyed a reputation, shows the estimation in which the Chancellor's character was generally held at the time. To the memory of Thurlow. Here lies beneath the prostituted mace a patriot with but one base wish place. Here lies beneath the prostituted purse a peer with but one talent how to curse. Here lies beneath the prostituted gown, the guardian of all honor but his own. Statesman with but one rule his steps to guide, to shun the sinking take the rising side. Judge with but one base law to serve the time, and see in wealth no weakness power no crime. With but one value for the name the scoffers prouder privilege to blaspheme. Britain with but one hope to live a slave, and dig in deathless infamy his grave. If the Regency question was the most interesting it was certainly not the most useful of the subjects which claimed the attention of Fox and Parliament during the ten years which elapsed between the overthrow of the coalition and the outbreak of the great war. During his whole political career Fox had never wavered in his unqualified support of the removal of religious disability, the reform of the House of Commons, and the abolition of the slave trade. But it is clear from his published utterances that the three subjects appealed in a very different way to his mind and heart. Parliamentary reform he had inherited as an acknowledged part of the Whig policy ever since George III had shown that the conditions of an unreformed House of Commons were as favorable for the maintenance of Tory as they had been of Whig ascendancy. It was a subject which the opposition naturally took up when kept out of office by aristocratic or kingly influence. It was a subject that they as naturally dropped when that influence was on their side. Fox never seems to have thoroughly understood the importance of the subject or appreciated its bearing upon national liberty and progress. Even the disasters of the Wilkes case and of the American War only taught him the evils of corruption, not of faulty representation, and he had no scruples in 1783 impressing the wishes of an unrepresentative House of Commons against the obvious wishes of the people. Pitt was the only statesman of that generation who really saw something of the deeper issues of the question. But after 1785, when the existing system seemed to be producing such excellent results, and any attempt to alter it boated such indefinite dangers, he was quite content to soothe his conscience to sleep by the time honored opiate of Walpole's maxim, Quieta non mole. The truth is, reform is essentially an opposition question. No government as long as it is strong in Parliament and popular in the constituencies is likely to be very anxious to try experiments. An opposition, on the contrary, in the position of the opposition of 1784, had every motive for energy. They had a great stain to wipe off their political escutcheon. They had a great defeat to avenge. They had every reason to welcome political experiments, for they could not be worse off than they were. It is true that some members of the party like Burke were opposed to any measure of reform, but they were very few in number. If Fox had had his heart in the question, he would never have arrested until he had forced his rival from his retreat, or have torn his weapons out of his feeble and unwilling hands, and used them against him with deadly effect. But Fox did neither of these things. He took no action whatever between the abandonment of the cause by Pitt in 1785, and its revival under the influence of the French Revolution by Flood in 1790. In that year he supported Flood by a short end-language speech. In 1791 he again allowed the question to drop, and in 1792 resigned it permanently to Gray and the society of the friends of the people, although he disapproved of the society himself, refused to become a member of it, and must have known perfectly well that in the exasperated state of public opinion the only result of permitting the society to monopolize reform would be to unite the whole Tory party and blind opposition to the question and postpone indefinitely all possibility of settling it on a fair and reasonable basis. There was at that time no subject of more vital importance to the well-being of England than that of parliamentary reform, that its solution was postponed to a date at which it could not fail to bring with it some of the evils of a revolution was due almost as much to the indolence of Fox as to the selfishness of Pitt. In the various attempts made between 1783 and 1793 to remove religious disabilities, Fox played a more generous part. The idea of freedom from personal restriction formed a large part of his conception of liberty. His thoughts on the due relations of church and state had never been profound or comprehensive. He moved with but slightly greater ease in the atmosphere of religion than he did in that of finance. A comparison of his speeches on these subjects with those of Burke discloses at a glance the whole difference between the views of a man who has studied a problem with an intense desire to arrive at the true solution and has an intimate and heartfelt sympathy with the subject matter of his thought and the judgment of a clear, forcible and powerful mind brought to bear upon an unaccustomed subject, the full bearings of which it does not and perhaps does not care to wholly understand. Fox fully grasped the principle of religious toleration that anyone should be prevented by law from worshiping God in his own way, provided of course there was no outrage of public order or decency was hateful to his mind. He laid down the broad principle that the state has nothing to do with the opinions but only with the actions of men. He supported with all his energy the Catholic Relief Acts of 1778 and 1791 and himself brought the religious grievances of the Unitarians before Parliament in 1792. But the doctrine of religious toleration was not seriously disputed. Pitt himself was responsible for the Relief Act in 1791 and the bishops supported it as eagerly as Fox. Even Lord North, now in firm and blind, had himself carried down to the house to speak in favour of the Unitarians and the bill was only lost because the commons agreed with Burke that they were really quite as much a revolutionary political faction as they were a religious body. On the much more serious question of the admission to offices in the state of persons opposed to the religion of the state, Fox never really faced the difficulties of his own position. He had an amiable desire that everybody should have what they wanted. He thought it absurd and unreasonable to deprive the king of the services of able and loyal men because of their religious opinions. He had a very natural and just abhorrence of the particular test imposed upon non-conformists by the legislation of Charles II, which excluded the conscientious, put no hindrance in the way of the sac religious, and placed a very unfair burden upon the consciences of the clergy. His own view of the church was that put forward by Holdley at the beginning of the century and adopted by Walpole and the Wigs. In the language of the 18th century it was the low church view, and in modern days would be termed Arastian. According to this view the church was merely a state organization for the teaching of morality upon a religious basis. Its functions were to inculcate good and reprove evil, and the more reasonably and moderately it discharged these functions the more splendid appeared its reputation to the eyes of Fox. It was the sanction of the state which gave its authority to the church and even apparently secured the truth of its teaching. I will ever commend, he once cried with a momentary aberration into nonsense, the enlightened policy of the time of the Union which allowed both the Kirk in Scotland and the hierarchy in England to be religions equally true. Equally true certainly no act of parliament could make them, but what he meant no doubt was equally the religion of the state, for his argument was that if the state thus recognized authoritatively two religions within its borders it could not logically object to be served by those who differed in religion. The test incorporation acts accordingly seemed to him as simply acts of persecution imposed by a dominant party in the interests of monarchy. With the more enlightened views of the 18th century all excuse for such persecution had passed away, and Fox looked forward with hope to the time when the state would have nothing to say to opinion whatever, religious or irreligious, and offices from the highest to the lowest should be thrown open to all irrespective of creed. The ideal was a noble one. It was one of Fox's chief claims to be considered the founder of the New Wig Party, that he formulated so distinctly the exact meaning of the policy of religious liberty which has since been carried into effect by them. Yet it was a policy essentially incomplete, too narrow in its basis, too sectarian in its objects to be wholly successful. It was the policy of an opportunist, not of a statesman. An opportunist imperfectly acquainted with the gravity of the problem with which he was dealing, and only able to see one small part of it at a time. The adjustment of the relations between church and state to the problems caused by the existence of religious division has been the most crucial question with which England has had to deal since the Reformation. Henry VIII and Elizabeth had no doubt at all about the principle which ought to be followed. It was that of the absolute oneness of church and state under the crown, a principle which found its necessary and logical expression in the attempt to insist that every officer and member of the one state should also be a member of the one church. The whole theory of the royal supremacy and the whole policy of religious uniformity with its long series of penal acts rest alike upon this basis. The great and typical work of Hooker takes it as its central thought. Opposed to the popular religion of the day, the principle failed and was overthrown at the great rebellion. It revived at the Restoration, but the number of religious dissidents was then so great that its maintenance became intensely difficult and the Test and Corporation Act were passed with the express object of defending it, fiction though it had grown to be. At the Revolution it underwent a modification. The principle which had succeeded so well under Richelieu in France was adopted in England which may be shortly expressed in the formula, religious toleration, state uniformity. The oneness of the church and state was still to be maintained for the security of the state, for the preservation of continuity in the Constitution, for the dignity of the church, but liberty of conscience was to be respected in religious matters. But the proposals of Fox went to the length of sweeping away the principle altogether and establishing in its place the totally opposite one, that the state is wholly apart from religion and has nothing to do with it. And he did not see that the carrying out of this principle simply by the removal of existing disabilities upon non-conformists was in reality only a half measure of religious liberty. It left the church still under the operation of the theory of the oneness of the church and state and, as the historical results of that theory, under the operation of the royal supremacy and of parliamentary control. That is to say, he left the largest religious body in England under the control of an assembly, the doors of which he had just opened to his enemies, and subject to no slight extent in its administration to the supremacy of a crown, which owing to the advance of Whig principles, was every day becoming more and more merged in parliament. Such disabilities with regard to legislation and management were intelligible enough and a little practical moment when the state legislature and executive were bound up with the church. They amounted to a very galling tyranny when the state legislature contained a sufficient number of the enemies of the church to prevent it from carrying out the smallest reform in its own organization or adapting itself to the new claims which the growth of population were daily making. To maintain an established church with the existing theory of the royal supremacy after it had been established as a principle of the constitution that the state as such has nothing to do with religion was a contradiction in terms and an injustice in fact. Fox himself was strongly in favor of the maintenance of an established church as long as it was the church of the majority. But when he proposed to alter the whole basis upon which an established church had been dealt with since the reformation, he ought at least to have taken care that in giving religious liberty to a minority he was not taking it away from the majority of the nation. Fox himself never saw the completion of the work which he took over from Beaufoy in 1792. During the terror of the French Revolution a Tory parliament was not likely to alter lightly an important constitutional principle. But it was Fox who planted this particular measure in the seed plot of Whig policy and when the turn of the political wheel gave a majority to the Whigs it was too late for politicians to see anything beyond the party triumph and the party obligations. They carried the bill, they did not solve the question. In his advocacy of personal liberty Fox was on safer because on more congenial grounds. Ever since the decisions of Lord Mansfield in Wilkes's case the courts had continued to hold that in a case of libel it was in the province of the judge to say whether the words or writing complained of constituted a libel while the duty of the jury was confined to saying whether the alleged libel was published. This doctrine seemed to most statesmen and to some lawyers notably Lord Camden to be seriously detrimental to the liberty of the subject and to impair the right of every Englishman to be tried by his peers. Erskine in an eloquent speech in the Dean of Asif's case drew public attention to the matter and Fox applied the proper parliamentary remedy. In 1791 he succeeded in passing through parliament with Pitt's support an act declaratory of the law of libel by which it was asserted by parliament that the jury had the power of finding a general verdict upon the whole issue as in other criminal cases. This was Fox's chief personal contribution to the statute book. It contains only four clauses but its importance in securing personal liberty is but little less than that of the habeas corpus act itself. In his effort to procure the abolition of the slave trade Fox is seen at his best. He far outstripped all his contemporaries except Wilberforce and Zeal and presented in his single hearted humanity a striking contrast at the calculating selfishness of Pitt. In his first speech on the subject he laid down the broad principle that the slave trade must not be regulated but abolished and to this he resolutely adhered until the opportunity came for him to carry his words into effect. In 1791 speaking to Mr. Wilberforce's motion for a committee he delivered what some critics have considered the finest of his speeches in parliament. There is a ring of true enthusiasm about it holy wanting in his speeches on the test act and in it he shows clearly the reasons which led him to speak so strongly as he did. No man he proudly said will suspect me of being an enemy to political freedom. Political freedom is undoubtedly as great a blessing as any people under heaven can pant after but political freedom when it comes to be compared with personal freedom sinks into nothing and becomes no blessing at all by comparison. It is personal freedom that is now the point in question. Personal freedom must be the first object of every human being. It is a right and he who deprives of fellow creature of it is absolutely criminal and he who withholds when it is in his power to restore it is no less criminal in withholding. Fox had indeed declared war with his whole heart against arbitrary power exercised against individual liberty. It was that which inspired his attacks upon George III and the American war. It was that which impelled him to place the aegis of parliament over the riyat of India. It was that which urged him in hot haste to the punishment of war and hastings. It was that which made him see nothing but hope in the rising of the French peasant and triumph in the fall of the Bastille. It was a generous sentiment and it sprang from a generous and warm heart. Never was it more generously and wisely invoked than in the assault against that castle manned by selfishness and tyranny and peopled by misery and despair known as the African slave trade. I spoke, he writes to T. Grenville after the division, I believe very well, and indeed it is the thing which has given me most pleasure since I saw you, for I do think it is a cause in which one ought to be an enthusiast and in which one cannot help being pleased with oneself for having done right. End of section 15.