commission named by Parliament. It was attacked as assailing the chartered rights of the Company, and the prerogative of the king to appoint ministers. "If this bill passes," said Thurlow, "the king will take the diadem from his own head and put it on the head of Mr. Fox." But George resolved it should not pass. It went through the Commons easily, but Lord Temple (nephew of Lady Chatham, and son of George Grenville) handed round in the Lords a paper written by the king, saying that "whoever voted for the India Bill was not only not the king's friend, but would be considered as his enemy." The old Whig majority had long been broken up by secessions and new creations and by making "king's friends" bishops. "We were beaten," said Fox, "in the Lords by such treachery of the king, and such meanness of his friends, as one could never have expected." George now turned the ministers out, but they passed a resolution through the Commons condemning Temple's action “as a high crime and misdemeanour," and Fox boasted that "nobody could undertake to form a ministry without madness." William Pitt, however, did undertake the task, though he could not get a single minister of cabinet rank from the Commons. The news of his appointment was received with shouts of laughter. "It will only be a mince-pie administration, and will not outlast the Christmas holidays." "They are a set of children playing at ministers," said a Whig leader, "and must be sent back to school."

An extraordinary struggle occupied the spring session of 1784. Pitt was beaten again and again, and the fiercer Whigs threatened to stop supplies; but the young minister haughtily declared that so long as he kept the king's confidence he would neither resign nor dissolve Parliament. Soon popular enthusiasm for the son of Chatham began to flow, and, combined with the influence of the Crown, was strong enough to win the battle. The Tories now began to desert North for George, and Wilkes himself was hot against the Coalition. On 25th March Parliament was dissolved, and the new elections gave king and minister a solid and triumphant majority. It was the greatest victory George had ever won. It was also the greatest victory of the people. George had learnt from the son what he would never learn from the father. Pitt had united king and people in opposition to greedy and selfish factions. The principles of Chatham and Bolingbroke were at last realised together. 11. Pitt was now just twenty-five years old. He was tall, thin, stiff in his manner, dignified, sickly in health, shy,

1783-89.

and proud, though among his few intimates he was gay, easy-tempered, witty, and affectionate. He had been taught oratory by his father, and had studied hard at Pitt's character Cambridge. Without Chatham's fire and pas- and early sion, he yet had a "premature and unnatural government, dexterity in the combination of words," was a ready debater, and a fluent and impressive rhetorician. With but little of his father's genius, he had the tact and business knowledge which Chatham had lacked. Burke called him "the sublime of mediocrity," and the phrase expresses a truth, though not the whole truth. As a statesman, he was hopeful, stimulating, and steadfast. Though so closely bound up with the king, he was too powerful and too hardworking to become his dependant like North. He still looked to the people for support, and though he led the Tory party, still called himself a Whig among his friends. He believed in parliamentary reform and the relief of the Catholics, and he was in favour of a generous attitude to Ireland. He found, however, that the king and his party were against him, and he was rather too ready to rest contented with making his views known, without taking vigorous steps to carry them into effect. Under him bribery ceased, though he was a lavish creator of peers, and thought that all very rich men ought to sit in the House of Lords. He was a great financier. He had read and digested Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and believed in his doctrines of free trade and colonial policy. His budget speeches were much admired. In 1786 he carried a plan for a Sinking Fund, by which he proposed to set aside a part of the national revenue every year to be invested and applied with its interest towards the reduction of the national debt. In the same year he made a famous Commercial Treaty with France, which went a long way towards free trade between the old enemies. He carried an India Bill (1784), which, though not so broad as Fox's, brought about nearly the same end by establishing a new government department called the Board of Control, under a President who was a member of the ministry, to supervise the political policy of the Company. When, in 1787, the opposition impeached the great and successful governor-general, Warren Hastings, for corruption, misgovernment, and oppression, Pitt, urged by Wilberforce, who was horrified at the piteous tales told about the wrongs of the Indians, supported the impeachment, though George stoutly and manfully backed up Hastings.

The great trial began in 1788, but was more famous for oratory than for its results, and, after languishing many years, ended in the much-wronged Hastings' acquittal.

Pitt was very careful in his foreign policy, and strove successfully to win back the friends England had lost during the American war. He formed a close alliance with Prussia, Holland, and other northern powers, and was the first English statesman to look with jealousy on the rise of Russia, where the great Empress Catharine II. had made a firm friendship with the philosophic reformer Joseph II. of Austria, the son and successor of Maria Theresa, and had arranged with him to partition Turkey.

In 1788 George went quite mad for a time, and Fox and the Whigs argued that their friend the Prince of Wales had a right to act as Regent. Pitt rightly maintained that in Parliament alone lay the appointment of a Regent and the definition of his powers. He was ready to make the prince regent with certain limitations to his power by Act of Parliament. But under the mild and gentle treatment of Dr. Willis, the king soon got well again, and, approving Pitt's behaviour, he said that "they were united for the rest of his life, and that nothing but death should separate them."

CHAPTER III.

Great Britain during the Eighteenth Century. The Industrial Revolution.

1. Up to about 1760 England remained mainly a nation of farmers and merchants. Save that of wool, its manufactures were of no great importance. Rough goods English trade for home use were largely made, but most fine before 1760. and finished articles were imported from France or Holland. During the first half of the 18th century England won the trading supremacy over the world. The carrying trade, which, before the Revolution, had been in the hands of the Dutch, had now passed to the English. Every war was waged for commercial advantages. Every peace brought fresh gains to trade. The Methuen Treaty with Portugal (1703) had opened the Portuguese markets to our

woollen goods on condition of our taking Portuguese wines at a third less duty than French. This was looked upon as that "glorious treaty by which England gains a million a year," because the Portuguese had nothing to pay for our English goods except gold and silver, and in those days the trade which brought most gold and silver into a country was looked upon as by far the most beneficial. The Asiento (which gave England the sole right of supplying the Spanish colonies with negro slaves), and the commercial clauses of the Treaty of Utrecht gave a fresh start to English trade. Bristol merchants grew rich on the slave-trade, which was so profitable that no one thought of its wickedness. The growth of the East India Company's territories, the conquest of the French colonies and the spread of our own, all gave fresh openings to the British merchant. Traders got richer, had more influence in Parliament, and founded county families. London grew fast, Liverpool, and (after the Union) Glasgow began to rival Bristol in the American trade. But it was not by peace and free trade, but by successful war and monopoly that England won its great foreign trade. Yet having once got it, she managed to beat all possible competitors; and, even after losing the American colonies, the volume of her trade with them increased, in accordance with Adam Smith's principle, but to everybody else's surprise.

Manufacturing industry also grew steadily during the first half of the eighteenth century; but it was on the old lines and with the old tools. There was little elaborate machinery, little concentration of labour into factories, limited division of labour, and miserable means of communication. Yet between 1700 and 1750 the population of Lancashire, where the cotton trade was beginning to be important, grew from about 160,000 to nearly 300,000, and that of the West Riding of Yorkshire from 230,000 to 360,000, while the whole population of England was only five millions in 1700 and six millions in 1750.

2. About 1760 a series of discoveries multiplied the power of production. Four great inventions made the cotton trade, The Industrial hitherto one of the smallest of our industries, a Revolution. rival with the woollen trade itself. Up to 1760 the machines used were as simple as those of India, and no whole cotton goods were made; all had a linen warp as well as a cotton weft. In 1769 the shrewd and sanguine Richard Arkwright, a Bolton barber, invented the system of spinning by rollers, which led to his water-frame.

In 1770