Sidor som bilder
PDF
ePub

PITT'S FINANCIAL POLICY.

Posterity has revoked many opinions adverse to the soundness of Pitt's political career. His conduct while peace lasted is now universally approved. It is approved even by the successors of those who, in his lifetime, were his most vehement opponents. His financial policy has of late been especially praised. In the commercial treaty with France, Mr. Gladstone had before him for a pattern Pitt's French Treaty of 1786; and in the Succession Duty, which a few years ago he succeeded in imposing upon real property, he but carried into effect a scheme which Pitt had set on foot, though he was unable to pass it into law.

Again, there is one part of Pitt's financial policy which is now placed beyond dispute. It has been usual to say that his system of raising loans was improvident. War was declared in the beginning of 1793, and peace came in the beginning of 1802. Now, in the beginning of 1793, the funded capital of the national debt was £238,000,000, while in the beginning of 1802 it was £574,000,000. The difference between these two sums-that is to say, £336,000,000-represents the amount added to the funded debt of the country during the first French war. But while the debt was increased by this amount, the sum of money actually received at the Treasury was only about two-thirds of it£223,000,000. The nation accepted liabilities to an enormous extent, for every £100 of which it received only £66. This is a bad bargain, say the critics of Pitt. He should have borrowed money at par, paying upon it a high interest, which in better times might be reduced, instead of borrowing at a lower rate of interest (generally 3 per cent.), and to make up for that low rate giving up 33 per cent. of the principal to be received. Now, apart from the difficulty, every time that a loan is required, of creating a stock which should be of the precise rate of interset then ruling in the market, it is quite clear to one who will glance at the relative prices of stock which then prevailed, that Pitt in every case borrowed his money at the very cheapest rate. One of the most distinguished of our actuaries, Mr. Newmarch, has gone into the calculation of each separate loan most minutely, and has shown that if Pitt had borrowed, not in the 3 or the 3 per cents., but in the 4 or the 5 per cents., he would have made a very much worse bargain. Compared with the 3 per cents., the 5 did not fetch in the market anything like the price which the difference of denomination would appear to warrant. In this view Pitt's financial policy stands the light and defies the critic; but another part of that policy is considerably less entitled to praise. Both may have established

strict economy in the details of the revenue-have put an end to army jobbing, and effected great savings in the Admiralty by the custom of ninety days' "bills "--but Lord Henry Petty, who succeeded Pitt as Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his memorable speech, exposed the state of public accounts as managed from about the time when Pitt first entered upon office. Speaking in May, 1806, he showed that the last pay-office audit was for the year 1782; that the navy and other offices were equally in arrear; that there were accounts not passed to the extent of £167,000,000; that there were accounts not proceeded with to the amount of £58,000,000; that there were twenty-one years' pay-office accounts, amounting to £150,000,000, not even delivered in; that there were naval accounts in the same situation amounting to £80,000,000; and that all these arrears made up the enormous sum of £455,000,000 of public money unaccounted for.-Times Review.

WILLIAM PITT'S ESTIMATE OF LORD CHATHAM'S

ELOQUENCE.

On May 30, 1777, the Earl of Chatham, though in a state of great weakness, went down to the House of Lords, and made a motion for the cessation of hostilities with America. It was rejected after a long debate by 99 against 28. His illustrious son, the future prime minister of the country, was present, and wrote on the following day to his mother:-"I cannot help expressing to you how happy beyond description I feel, in reflecting that my father was able to exert, in their full vigour, the sentiments and eloquence which have always distinguished him. His first speech took up half an hour, and was full of his usual force and vivacity. He spoke a second time, in answer to Lord Weymouth, to explain the object of his motion, and his intention to follow it by one for the repeal of all the Acts of Parliament which form the system of chastisement. This he did in a glow of eloquence, and with a beauty of expression, animated and striking beyond description."

CHARACTER OF GEORGE I.

This king's character may be comprised in very few words. In private life he would have been called an honest blockhead; and fortune, that made him a king, added nothing to his happiness, only prejudiced his honesty, and shortened his days. No man was ever more free from ambition: he loved money, but loved to keep his own, without being covetous of other men's. He

[ocr errors][ocr errors]

would have grown rich in saving, but was incapable of laying schemes for getting; he was more properly dull than lazy, and would have been so well contented to have remained in his little town of Hanover that, if the ambition of those about him had not been greater than his own, we should never have seen him in England; and the natural honesty of his temper, joined with the narrow notions of a low education, made him look upon his acceptance of the crown as an act of usurpation which was always uneasy to him. But he was carried by the stream of the people about him, in that as in every action of his life. He could speak no English, and was past the age of learning it. Our customs and laws were all mysteries to him, which he neither tried to understand, nor was capable of understanding if he had endeavoured it. He was passively good-natured, and wished all mankind enjoyed quiet, if they would let him do so.— Quarterly Review.

GEORGE II. AT DETTINGEN.

Frederick the Great, in his Histoire de mon Temps, gives the following account of George II. at Dettingen :-"The King was on horseback, and rode forward to reconnoitre the enemy; his horse, frightened at the cannonading, ran away with his Majesty, and nearly carried him into the midst of the French lines: fortunately, one of his attendants succeeded in stopping him. General Cyrus Trapaud, then an ensign, by seizing the horse's bridle, enabled his Majesty to dismount in safety. 'Now that I am once on my legs,' said he, 'I am sure I shall not run away.' The King then abandoned his horse, and fought on foot at the head of his Hanoverian battalions. With his sword drawn, and his body placed in the attitude of a fencing-master, who is about to make a lunge in carte, he continued to expose himself, without flinching, to the enemy's fire."

CHARACTER OF GEORGE III.

Had George III. been born heir to absolute sovereignty, his reign would have been one of the luckiest accidents possible for his subjects. He had certain qualities which win for absolute monarchs the loyalty of their people and the devotion of their personal adherents. His theory of government somewhat resembled that of the governor of a crown colony, assisted, but not controlled, by his council. As it was, George III. was, after 1790, extremely popular with the bulk of the English people, who knew nothing of his relations towards the leaders

of political parties, and cared little for the punctilios of constitutional government. To the traders and bankers outside the circle of metropolitan agitation-to the squirearchy in the country, to the middle-class inhabitants of provincial townsabove all to the clergy and the yeomanry, it was a matter of supreme indifference that their King was suspected of intriguing to oust George Grenville, or of circumventing Lord Rockingham, or of conspiring to make the great Commoner unpopular, or holding in reserve a corps of devoted official Janizaries prepared to upset his recognized Ministers. To some of them the worst of these suspicions appeared-and we think justly appeared to be destitute of foundation. To the majority they appeared utterly unimportant. They saw in the King a man who practised the virtues which they themselves most admired, and reflected the prejudices by which they themselves were mainly actuated. He was temperate, he was frugal, he was industrious, he was devout, he was courageous, he was affectionate. Did not the King work harder at public business than the generality of merchants worked at their own? Was not his dinner the model of a gentleman-farmer's family dinner? Did not the King ride about the country without pomp, and talk to yeomen and farmers like the good "Farmer George" that he was? Did he not keep his accounts with marvellous minuteness? Did he not date each of his letters with a methodical precision and particularity unrivalled by scriveners, bankers, and lawyers? Again, had not they seen him on the day of his coronation, unadvised by precedent or counsel, himself doff the Royal Crown that he might with_becoming humility partake of the holy communion? They knew, too, how, on ascending the throne, he had rebuked a courtly preacher for a too adulatory sermon, and how he had written to most reverend prelates to express his disapprobation of the secular festivities which had violated the traditional sanctity of episcopal palaces. At a later period than that of Lord North's Ministry good and thoughtful persons were melted into tears at the spectacle of the aged monarch going to the great metropolitan cathedral to return humble thanks to the Almighty for His goodness in restoring him from the dread darkness of a malady worse than death, to life, reason, and health. They knew, too, that on occasions which made Ministers and Privy Councillors mute through fear, the King alone had breathed courage into the cowed and hesitating circle. It was to his promptitude and spirit that London owed its rescue from the anarchy, at once shameful and terrible, with which the grotesque fanaticism of Lord G. Gordon had afflicted it. It was the King

who took down on the spot Wedderburn's opinion that the troops might be legally employed; it was the King who ordered them to be called out; it was the King who declared his readiness to lead them. When an angry mob pelted the royal carriage on its way to Westminster, and his courtiers turned pale at the rude assault, the King alone was calm and undismayed; when fired at in the theatre, he alone of the royal party retained his composure. It was in no vaunting spirit of fictitious bravery, then, that the King had written in 1755, when incendiary handbills were circulated about the streets of London to prevent the meeting of Parliament: "These handbills are certainly spread to cause terror: that they may in the timid duke (sc. of Grafton) I saw yesterday, but I thank God I am not of that make. I know what my duty to my country makes me undertake, and threats cannot prevent me from doing that to the fullest extent." Indeed, next to gambling and debauchery he seems to have had the most utter aversion to cowardice. He is never tired of sneering at the pusillanimity which made the Duke of Grafton desert him, and contrasting it with the courage shown by Lord North in confronting the dangers and responsibilities of office. If his courage and firmness degenerated into an obstinacy which resisted the eloquence of reasoning and the logic of facts, a few brilliant statesmen or profound philosophers might deride a stubborn temper which the King shared with half the ploughboys and carters in his kingdom; but the great majority of the nation was proud to think that the King had the fortitude to maintain opinions which were common to themselves and their sovereign.—Edinburgh Review.

GEORGE IV.

With a slate and a piece of chalk, said Thackeray, I could at this very desk perform a recognizable likeness of George IV. And yet, after reading of him in scores of volumes, hunting him through old magazines and newspapers, you will find nothing but a coat and wig, and the mask smiling below it-nothing but a great simulacrum. His sires and grandsires were men with individualities; they had steady loves and hatreds; one knew what they would do under given circumstances. The sailor-king who succeeded him was a man; and the Duke of York, his brother, was a man-a big, burly, jolly, cursing, courageous man. But this George was but a bow and a grin; he was all outside a tailor's work-fine cocked-hat, nutty-brown wig, coat, huge black stock, under-waistcoats, more underwaistcoats, and then nothing-a royal mummy. The lecturer

F

« FöregåendeFortsätt »