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CHAPTER III. TWO ENGLISH CHAMPIONS OF THE DAWNING REPUBLIC

AT the time of the Boston Port Bill and the disturbances it entailed, just as at the time of Sir Harry Vane and his troubles, one must look at the march of events in old England, no less than in New England, in order to understand the whole situation.

The resistance of the Massachusetts men to the tyranny of the king was as much applauded by certain great souls in England as by the patriots in the other colonies. The quarrel, in a word, was not between England and America, but between George III and the principles for which America stood.

Of those principles two Englishmen of great distinction — William Pitt and Charles Fox — were champions. And because every American who cares for the cause of Liberty must be interested in these men, who braved unpopularity for Liberty's sake, I want here to retrace their glorious careers, even if in so doing I run somewhat ahead of my narrative.

The William Pitt referred to is he whom Heber described as "Young without follies, without rashness bold, And greatly poor amidst a nation's gold," not, of course, the great Earl of Chatham, whose speech on the Repeal of the Stamp Act is the glorious heritage of all English-speaking people.

"Untarnished Chatham's genuine child," the second Pitt has been called, a son, that is, whose eloquence, probity and high-minded statesmanship serve to render him the peer in history's pages of even his distinguished father.

"I am glad that I am not the eldest son. I want to speak in the House of Commons, like papa," is the exclamation attributed to young Pitt, then a youth of seventeen, when he learned (in August, 1776) that his father had become Earl of Chatham. It was indeed towards speaking in the House of Commons that all the lad's thoughts and hopes were directed. At Eton and Cambridge he made the orations of history and literature an intimate part of his mental equipment. In these debates, it is interesting to observe, he always studied both sides. His favorite employment, Macaulay tells us, was to prepare harangues on opposite sides of the same question, to analyze them and to observe which of the arguments of the first speaker were refuted by the second, which were evaded, and which were left untouched. This practice made following actual debates in the House of Commons as fascinating an occupation to him as visiting the circus is to the country lad who has been performing acrobatic stunts with the old farm horse.

Fox, who was eleven years Pitt's senior, used to relate with relish his first meeting with the gifted lad. The scene was the steps leading up to the throne of the House of Lords, and Pitt was there, with a group of college friends, listening to the debate. Fox, who was already the greatest debater and one of the greatest orators that had ever appeared in England, was disposed to sit quietly listening. But as the discussion proceeded he was repeatedly addressed by Pitt with an eager "Surely, Mr. Fox, that might be met thus," or " Yes, but he lays himself open to this retort." Fox was naturally much struck with the precocity of this lad, who, through the whole sitting, seemed to be thinking only how the speeches on both sides could be answered.

When Pitt was nineteen he passed, at the House of Lords, a day ever sad and memorable to him, but of the greatest interest to us as Americans. For France had just recognized the independence of the United States, and a great debate was expected. For this reason the Earl of Chatham insisted upon being in his place, though his health had of late been wretched.

His son supported him to his seat. Scarcely had the aged man risen to address the house when he fell back in convulsions. A few weeks later he died, and his favorite child and namesake followed his coffin in gloomy pomp from the Painted Chamber to the transept, in Westminster Abbey, where his own was destined to lie, near that of Fox.

It was now necessary for William, as a younger son, to follow a profession. In the spring of 1780 he became of age; immediately afterward he was called to the bar, and in the fall of that same year he offered himself as a candidate and was returned to Parliament. He meant to lose no time in putting into practice his genius for debate.

George the Third was still pursuing his obstinate course towards America, and Fox and Burke were doing their united best to oppose the suicidal policy of Lord North. To the support of the colonies Pitt immediately added his voice. On the 26th of February, 1781, he made his first speech to endorse a reform measure advocated by Burke. Fox, who had already risen to address the house, instantly gave way to him, admiring as he settled back in his place, the self-possession of the young orator and the exquisite silver voice in which he delivered his perfect but unpremeditated sentences. Burke was moved to tears, exclaiming joyfully: "It is not a chip of the old block; it is the old block itself." And Fox, who had no trace of envy in his make-up, replied tersely to a member who observed that Pitt would be one of the first men in Parliament: "He is so already."

Such seemed indeed to be the case. Pitt continued to speak often and eloquently in support of America, and in spite of the necessarily unpopular stand he had taken, he was offered, when he had scarcely completed his twenty-third year, the great place of chancellor of the exchequer! Before he was twenty-five he was the most powerful subject in Europe.

Now that he occupied a position of enormous influence his training bore fruit. Through his whole boyhood the House of Commons had never been out of his thought, and whether reading Cicero or Thucydides he was training for the conflicts of debate. He could forcibly yet luminously, therefore, present to his audience the most complicated, the most difficult of subjects. "Nothing was out of place," Macaulay records; "nothing was forgotten; minute details, dates, sums of money were all faithfully preserved in his memory. Even intricate questions of finance, when explained by him, seemed clear to the plainest man among his hearers."

Yet when all is said, it was because of Pitt's lofty character that his speeches were so great a success. Save for a hint of pride, he may be said to have had no faults. He was incapable of envy or fear, above any kind of meanness, and his private life was absolutely beyond reproach. In an age of venality, too, he never accepted bounties of any kind; and while he was surrounded by friends upon whom he had bestowed titles and rich annuities, he remained plain Mr. to the end of his life, and put up with a very meagre salary.

Pitt's love for England was deep and sincere even though he had espoused the cause of America. To England he devoted all that he had of strength and of service. When the battle of Austerlitz presaged the extent to which Bonaparte was later to humble the first nation of Europe, Pitt could not rally from the blow. He died January 23, 1806, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of that day when he first took his seat in Parliament. For almost twenty of those years he had been first lord of the treasury and undisputed chief of the administration. No English statesman had ever held supreme power so long; none had ever combated the tyranny of the Crown so successfully.

Charles James Fox, Pitt's great rival, possessed every charming human quality which Pitt lacked. The speeches of Pitt persuade by the elegance of their diction, the sincerity of their appeal, the loftiness of their tone; those of Fox charm by their warm admiration of everything great and beautiful, their fierce hatred of whatever is cruel and unjust. Dr. Johnson said of this orator that he made it a question whether the nation should be ruled by the scepter of George III or the tongue of Fox. Even Pitt, renowned for his coolness and self-possession, could not remain unmoved by the magnetic quality of Fox's eloquence. On one occasion when a Frenchman had been expressing wonder at the immense influence wielded by Fox, "a mere gambler and a man of pleasure," Pitt retorted, "You have not been under the wand of the magician."

At first Fox used his gifts very much as a magician might. He enjoyed juggling with the slow wits of his fellow-members and would speak without conviction or premeditation upon whatever subject was up for discussion. To him it was only a diverting game in which, by virtue of his gift of debate, he always held the best hand. His father had been as dissolute and unprincipled as the Earl of Chatham was clean-hearted and high-minded. As the merest lad Fox was plunged into such temptations as assailed Pitt at no time in his life. Like Pitt, however, he was graduated from college at an early age, and, like him also, he entered Parliament, when little more than a boy.

But if Fox, during the first five years of his public career, was reckless, in political, as in private life, he later threw himself with real earnestness into the American question. The more he studied it the more his warm heart and clear head were touched by the principles at stake, and after the election in which his friend, the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, worked for his return to Parliament, — even bartering kisses for votes, it is said, — he was the colonies' champion in earnest.

Moreover, he had quarreled with Lord North, so that it suited his inclination as well as his convictions to oppose that personage with all possible vigor. When the Boston Port Bill was up for debate, he objected that it gave too much power into the hands of the Crown; a month later he vehemently denounced the attempt to tax the colonists without their consent; just before this he had cast his first vote with the Whig party in favor of repealing the duty on tea. Fox was at his best during the American War.

Throughout the six years of the War Parliament he never threw away an opportunity to speak for America, and the whisper that Charles Fox was on his legs would fill the House in a moment. To perfect himself in the arts of vindictive declamation, he read again the philippics of Demosthenes and, profiting by their tuition, he would pour upon Lord North such fierceness of personal attack as made the House fairly quake with apprehension. It was at this period, too, that he developed that gift of quick retort, ready wit, clear statement, and dashing attack which made him the first of parliamentary gladiators. Now that he was really in earnest, he could be much more compelling than heretofore.

It was quite in the spirit of a knight of King Arthur's court that he rode forth to redress the wrongs of America.

Yet Fox was never a professional politician in the sense that Pitt was. He too greatly loved a quiet hour with his books. As he grew older and abandoned his reckless way of living, the joys of Virgil and of gardening seemed to him vastly superior to those of debate. At the very height of his political career, he withdrew from public life to enjoy these quiet pleasures in the company of his dearly-loved wife, and only the encroaching greatness of Napoleon availed to lure him again from his idyllic retreat at St. Ann's Hill.

The opening of the year 1806, however, found him back in office, doing all that one man could to restore peace to England. In this he was not successful; seven months of negotiation served indeed to make it clear to him that war between Napoleon and England was inevitable. But he did succeed, that session, in putting through one important measure which had been dear to Pitt also. Year after year both these great men had raised their voices against the detestable trade in slaves by which England was being enriched, and now that he had power Fox determined to show that his sympathy with these poor oppressed creatures was not a mere matter of words. In June, 1806, therefore, he pledged himself to introduce a measure of total abolition.

It was his last speech in Parliament. Though he did not live to see it a law, he, and he alone, must ever be credited with the measure by which it was made a felony for British subjects to trade in negroes. For this, no less than for his service to the colonies, he should be eternally honored in America.