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beginning of a new and beneficial system on the basis of which a new Ireland could have slowly arisen. Pitt clearly was disheartened after the unexpected rebuff of 1785; and his silence and lack of interest for the next eight years proved to be a grave mistake. The grievances remained untouched; the forces of opposition grew stronger and stronger. A study of the papers and letters gives us the data on which Pitt's mind worked, both for this and the subsequent epoch; and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Pitt, without first-hand knowledge, and absorbed in other questions, was in the hands of advisers, able, sincere, but narrow-minded and bigoted, from whom he neither heard nor could hear the whole truth. And the missing elements in the official presentation of the situation were profoundly vital. In 1795 Fitzwilliam came into direct contact with realities in Ireland. Unauthorised, he defied the Castle and the British Cabinet, and was recalled. What might have been reform before 1795 and the French Revolution was now in Pitt's judgment impossible. No less clearly, in the judgment of the Opposition leaders, there would be no reform except by a rebellion, in league with France, which would smash the British executive and sever the British connexion. In this terrible dilemma Ireland needed a Warren Hastings and an army of 40,000 regulars commanded by impartial soldiers. She got instead Camden, Clare and the Protestant militia. Had Ireland been a continental possession or had we lost the command of the sea, the rebellion from within, aided by the revolution without, must, in the opinion of competent contemporaries on the spot, have won. Ireland was saved for the Empire, not by British statesmanship from 1794 to 1798, but by the

sea.

Dr Rose's account of the policy of the legislative union need not detain us. In both its criticisms and its conclusions it concurs broadly with the views of Mr Lecky and Dr Hunt. A legislative union was an imperial necessity and the indispensable condition of justice to the Roman Catholics and the reform of crying grievances. It is absurd,' says Dr Rose, 'to deny that Pitt used corrupt means to carry the union;' and he proves once and again how Pitt, Cornwallis and Castlereagh were determined to make sweeping reforms part and consequence of the union

policy, and thereby to open a new chapter in Irish history. The statesmanlike scheme was shattered by the obstinacy of the King and the desertion of half the Cabinet. The evidence that Pitt's resignation was not a 'notorious juggle,' restated by Dr Rose, is conclusive. We should also agree in the criticism that Pitt's preparations for carrying the union were 'halting and ineffective,' and that it should have been passed in 1798. But neither Dr Rose nor anyone else has explained why Pitt, with the explicit warning of 1795 before him, did not discover until it was too late that on the vital point— Roman Catholic Emancipation-George III would rather go mad or die than yield. If he reckoned on confronting the King with a united Cabinet or the alternative of sending for Fox, it is a terrible proof of Dr Rose's repeated verdict that Pitt did not know men and therefore did not know Cabinets.' If it was due to ignorance or selfconfidence, it is the most tragic example on record of Pitt's optimism. For Pitt himself, as for England and Ireland, the result was that the legislative union remained the shell of a structure without a roof or a solid foundation.

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The diplomacy of the war exhibits Dr Rose in no less critical a spirit, though he fully recognises that the issues involve controversies in some of which at least finality of judgment and agreement, even when the facts are placed beyond dispute, are probably impossible. Unless we are prepared to argue against all the evidence, we can agree with the sane view that the war was not 'inevitable.' On the other hand, in December 1792 a deadlock had been reached, in an atmosphere of intellectual, moral and political storm; and, unless we can prove that Pitt could have 'recognised' the Republic, and that a FrancoBritish alliance would have altered the principles of Revolution policy, preserved the independence of Belgium and Holland, and saved Poland from dismemberment and the monarchies of the Coalition from extinction, no other alternative than war lay open to Pitt and the solid and organised governing class in whose eyes Pitt on this question was a moderate. For the war, as Dr Rose points out, was not in 1793 truly national, but rather one between our governing class and the Revolution.

From a broad survey of the war period from 1793 to 1806 emerge certain plain questions, the answers to which

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go to the root of the matter. Great Britain and the three Coalitions demonstrably failed to attain the objects of their policy. Are the grounds of that failure to be found in the policy or the methods or both? Would the policy have met with success had the methods been more skilfully devised and more effectively applied? or are we justified in concluding that the policy of the statesmen responsible for the Coalitions was based on fundamental misconceptions and miscalculations as well as vitiated by incapacity in execution? Dr Rose, for example, quotes (in another connexion) Pitt's argument in 1790, that it is no valid excuse for a statesman to exclaim in the midst of disaster, 'Who would have thought it?' because statesmanship consists in correct interpretation of a given situation and in foresight of the consequences of a given policy. We cannot exonerate the Second Empire because its ministers and generals, in obedience to an ignorant Paris, and with the most patriotic ambitions, plunged France into war unprepared and with a light heart matched Gramont and Bazaine against Bismarck and Moltke. 'Pitt,' pronounces Dr Rose, 'knew France no better than the great Irishman [Burke].' To Grenville and the Cabinet, M. de Bonaparte was even in 1802 a tinsel and unstable Corsican adventurer. But it is a poor defence of statesmanship to be obliged to plead at every turn ignorance, optimism and shortsightedness, or to prove up to the hilt that our allies were morally rotten, politically corrupt and militarily incompetent. Yet the commentary on the events after 1793 is an uncomfortable expansion of this theme. The old line of defence was in principle more sound and more courageous. To undo the work of revolution was a desirable and necessary object of British policy; a decadent, but absolutist Prussia, Austria and Russia combined with the Bourbons and the émigrés would have made a better Europe than a vigorous revolutionary France; the defeat of the Coalitions was a political and moral disaster; the worse cause won; and Pitt cannot be blamed, must rather be praised, because he had done all that mortal man could to avert results for which not he but the Allies, perhaps, were responsible.

Unfortunately the advocates of this line of argument are in embarrassing straits. Experts such as Mr ForVol. 216.-No. 431.

tescue, who has repeated with concise gusto in his 'Lectures on British Statesmen' the indictment set out at length in his 'History of the British Army,' hold that Pitt's military measures did everything to avert success and bring about disaster. History makes strange bedfellows; and Mr Fortescue, endorsing the verdict of the arch-Whig Macaulay, who dubbed Pitt 'a driveller' as a Minister of War, surely finds himself in questionable and demoralising company. Dr Rose, indeed, either largely admits or does not effectively disprove the formidable arguments piled up by Mr Fortescue. Even if we admit that Mr Fortescue underrates the political difficulties, is it possible to deny in the state of our present knowledge that the conduct of the war reveals almost every blunder of which an alliance making war can be guilty, or that the reasons for our military failures are not perfectly clear and can be brought home to Pitt's Cabinet? 'Where,' said Nelson, 'I should use a penknife, my lord St Vincent would use a hatchet.' Pitt's Cabinet, where a hatchet was required, invariably used a penknife, one blade in which was always missing.

It has been frequently argued, notably by Mahan and others, that the failure of Pitt's military policy in 1800 and again in 1806 is misleading; that the justification of Pitt is to be found in 1814 and in 1815; that Pitt's principles and methods triumphed in the long run; and that Revolutionary and Napoleonic France were overcome by Pitt's disciples carrying out their master's policy and methods. Obviously, the command of the sea, combined with vast operations on the Continent, ultimately destroyed the Napoleonic Empire; obviously, without the combination this result would not have been achieved. But it is demonstrable that the Wars of Liberation were in spirit, principle, methods and objects as different from the wars of the first three Coalitions as was the Peninsular War from the expeditions to Quiberon, Belgium, Toulon or Walcheren. The conduct of the war after 1809 was as fundamentally different from that hitherto pursued as was the Prussian campaign of 1813 from that of 1806. The revolution in strategy was the result of a political revolution which introduced a wholly new moral element into the cause of the Allies. If it is true that Pitt and his colleagues dimly perceived that France

must somehow be beaten on land as well as by sea, we can judge them only by what they did, not by what they wished to see done. Down to 1806 it is demonstrable that they revealed no sign that success depended on a political and moral revolution which in turn would revolutionise military and naval strategy, and bequeathed no proof of their capacity to frame political alliances on a new basis and to plan and execute a campaign of combined naval and military operations on a vast scale, strategically sound and adequately executed. Neither Pitt nor Grenville showed any desire to play the part of a Stein; still less did Dundas betray the ideas or the capacity of a Scharnhorst. Dr Rose, indeed, emphasises rightly (ii, 524) Pitt's 'reliance on the statics of statecraft rather than on the dynamics of nationality,' and his lack of the sympathetic instinct' for national and popular effort. On evidential grounds he refuses to believe that Pitt, after Ulm, prophesied the revolt of the Spanish people or contemplated anticipating Canning's or Castlereagh's policy of opening a new chapter in the history of Europe' by the Peninsular War. We are entitled, therefore, to conclude that it was Pitt's principles and methods, as we know them, which ultimately overthrew Napoleon; that continuance of these principles and methods would have met with a continuance of failure; and that, if the opportunity for a wholly new departure was not offered, the principles, methods and objects of the new system were not revealed by Pitt before he died. The proofs that Pitt had divined the secret of his failure, or had in any sense anticipated the triumph of 1814, are still to seek.

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The political object of Pitt's diplomacy throughout the war from 1793 to 1801 was 'security.' Security, in the sense of insular security or the freedom of Great Britain from invasion, was certainly achieved both in 1802 and in 1806; and Pitt and the Admiralty are entitled to full credit for the achievement. But security, as defined by Pitt in 1794-a balance of power on the Continent which would guarantee the independence and stability of the European monarchies, the sterilising of revolutionary principles, and the limitation of revolutionary France within the boundaries of 1792-was not achieved. The revolutionary France of 1802 and

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