which her greatest statesmen have sought to attain; she became once more the chief power in the West, and France and Spain quailed before her determined attitude as regards Spanish pretensions on the American coast. The Triple Alliance, moreover, saved Gustavus III. from the hands of Catherine, and though it did not prevent the unnatural league between Catherine and Joseph II. for the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire-a league condemned by every impartial statesman-it contributed to its final discomfiture. The ability of Pitt in these years, however, was most conspicuous in his successful efforts to counteract the ambition of Prussia, and to re-establish peace in Eastern Europe. Prussia, true to her traditional policy, and ever jealous of the power of Austria, was eager at this time to get a slice of Poland, to deprive Austria of her Galician provinces, and to detach the Netherlands from the Empire, and, largely relying on the support of England, she was ready to attack Catherine and Joseph II., and she actually signed a treaty with the Turks in order to attain her coveted objects. Pitt, however, determined to avert a conflict in which all Europe would have been perhaps involved, addressed himself to thwart these greedy designs, and, taking his stand on international right and on the principle of the renunciation of conquests, succeeded, by the exercise of infinite tact and of extraordinary diplomatic skill, in defeating Prussia's rapacious policy, and even in bringing the war in the East to a close. Mr. Lecky has quoted at much length from his correspondence and that of our ministers at Vienna and Berlin on this subject; it is a model of discretion, good taste, and judgement; and the peace of Sistova, and even that of Jassy, which possibly saved the Turkish Empire, must in a great measure be ascribed to Pitt.

The foreign policy, however, of Pitt failed in an important point at this juncture. He was the first English statesman who perceived the danger of the growth of Russia to our Indian Empire, and who understood the value of Turkey to us; he appreciated, too, the importance of Poland as a barrier against the Muscovite power; and he would have gone to war with Catherine in 1791 had he found the support he wished in Parliament. The House of Commons, however, was not inclined to depart from the traditional policy which had hitherto favoured a Russian alliance, and, in the affair of Oczakow, Pitt was only saved from defeat by giving up a project which marks the beginning of a great

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change in the system of our continental politics. Mr. Lecky has given us ample evidence that England and Russia were on the verge of a contest, and that Catherine even then had an eye on India.

The following is interesting as affording proof that Irish disaffection at the present day, fawned on without shame by political renegades, was as ready in 1791 as it is in 1887 to perpetrate the basest and most atrocious crimes:

In July Whitworth sent home a circumstantial account of a plot to burn the English fleet at Portsmouth by means of several incendiaries of different nationalities who were in Russian pay. Two Irish Roman Catholics, named Keating and Swanton, who had been in the French service, and who were acquainted with England and with the town of Portsmouth, were to conduct the enterprise, and were at this time actually in London.'

The policy of this great statesman contained the germs of prolific fruits, and anticipated, in many respects, the future; he was the author of our present system of finance; he heralded the advent of the reign of free trade; in the constitution he framed for Canada he laid down the principles of our colonial rule; and he influenced for long years the attitude of England as to the Eastern Question. Mr. Lecky is far from just when he contrasts the wisdom of Pitt's views and of his domestic measures with the extreme paucity of his actual achievements.' As a parliamentary reformer Pitt, no doubt, was less earnest and bold in office than he had been as an independent member, and he ultimately refused to deal with the problem; though opposed throughout his career to the slave trade, he did not see abolition triumph, and never risked defeat for the cause; he more than once rejected the claims of the Dissenters to a measure of relief, the opportunity not having arisen; and he ought certainly to have insisted that the recognition of the just rights of the Catholic priesthood, and Catholic emancipation in the widest sense, should have been a sine quá non of the Union. But though Pitt, we have said, may have departed from principle in more than one instance, he was in all these questions on the side of right, and held large and enlightened views upon them; and in estimating his conduct it is not fair to keep out of sight how the ultimate results must, in some measure, be ascribed to him. Pitt, moreover, it ought to be borne in mind, was a constitutional and parliamentary minister; he was compelled to temporise and to adjust his policy with a continual reference to the opinion of the day, and to passion and prejudice in high places; and

certainly, could he have obtained the support of the House of Commons and of George III., he would have reformed Parliament, have put an end to a traffic persistently and most eloquently denounced by him, have repealed the Test and Corporation Acts, and have established the Irish Union on the firm basis of equity and of religious freedom.

Another consideration of extreme importance, not, indeed, omitted by Mr. Lecky, but not fully taken into account, deserves to be weighed and specially noticed. The French Revolution not only compelled Pitt to forego a policy of wise improvement, and drove him upon a reactionary course; it had so tremendous an effect on the mind of England, that reforms became for many years impossible; and it alike prevented the accomplishment of the judicious measures to which the minister was really inclined, and in the general revulsion of public opinion to the side of force, privilege, and a narrow Toryism, checked the growth of liberal ideas in him, and turned him aside from the ways of progress. But for that calamitous event, it may not be too much to assert that, had Pitt lived to the full age of man, most of the great legislative, economic, and social changes, which have been witnessed in this generation, would have been carried out happily under his auspices.

We turn from this country to the ill-fated island which, at this as at all times, has been a thorn in our side. In 1782 Ireland had become a separate state; the Irish Parliament was, in theory, a co-ordinate power with that of England, supreme in all merely local affairs, and with a concurrent authority on imperial questions; and, from a constitutional point of view, the only link between the two countries was the Irish Executive appointed and controlled by the British Minister. Such an arrangement obviously was perilously insecure, and certain to lead to discord and trouble; and the vices of a bad political system were greatly aggravated by the inveterate ills that affected the structure of Irish society. Three nations at this time were to be found in Ireland: the aristocracy of the dominant Church, supreme in the legislature, the owners of the land, enjoying a monopoly of privilege and power; the great Presbyterian middle class of Ulster, associated with their superiors, in some measure, by the ties of race and of a common Protestantism but kept in a position of unjust dependence; and the descendants of the conquered septs and clans, the long oppressed and subjugated Catholic people, only just emerging from abject thraldom, and still excluded from most of the

rights of citizens. In a community thus laid out and divided, elements of misgovernment, of discontent, of violence, were, from the nature of the case, abundant; and while the ruling and favoured class was, in the main, loyal and true to England, the sentiments of the Presbyterian and Catholic Irish were, in different ways, of an opposite kind, and of evil omen to careful observers. Though some of the ills, however, of the new Irish polity became evident from the first moment, and Mr. Lecky has set them clearly forth, its worst mischiefs were not at once disclosed; the Parliament in College Green, independent in name, was practically controlled by the Imperial Government, through the influence of an executive external to it, of patronage and corruption without stint, and of the interest of the dominant order; and if sounds of widespread discontent were heard, they were easily suppressed, and were scarcely formidable. The first subject that seriously engaged attention was the state and the constitution of the Irish Parliament, which had recently acquired a great increase of power, and yet in no sense represented the nation. Mr. Lecky has fully and fairly described the nature and composition of this strange legislature, though his description scarcely falls in with his theory that it really accomplished great things for Ireland; suffice it here to say that if splendid genius and eloquence, exaggerated in tone, but brilliant, have thrown over it a deceptive lustre, it was essentially the organ of a mere class, and an instrument of power directed by illegitimate means. In a nation of which three-fourths were Catholics, both Houses were wholly made up of Protestants; and the House of Commons was an assembly composed of the nominees of a handful of peers, of officials and pensioned servants of the Crown, and of representatives of the landed interest, mostly held together by corrupt influence, with the exception of a few independent men. Two projects of reform were, at this period or some time afterwards, proposed and agitated, and Mr. Lecky has described them at length. Flood sought to diminish the power of the Crown and of the great borough-mongering nobles, by excluding holders of pensions from the House of Commons, and by enlarging the areas of certain boroughs; he wished also widely to extend the franchise; and he would have limited the duration of Parliament to three years. But Catholic Ireland had no place in his scheme; he refused to admit a race he despised to any share of political rights; and whatever it might have done for the Irish Protestants, his reform would have left the mass of the nation serfs.

The project of Grattan, later in date, was of a nobler and more comprehensive kind; but it aimed at an ideal we believe impossible. Like Flood, Grattan desired to enlarge the basis and to purify the constitution of the Irish Parliament; but he insisted that it should embrace all parts of the nation, and that Catholic and Protestant should have equal rights; and, forgetting the divisions and the misdeeds of centuries, he hoped that in this way it would become the beneficent organ of a united people.

The Irish Parliament and the condition of Ireland attracted from the first the attention of Pitt. We agree, however, with Mr. Lecky that his knowledge of Ireland was very imperfect; he never gave proof in his Irish policy of the grasp of facts and of the clear insight which marked his conduct on many English questions. Except in one point, on which Fox and North had already expressed decided views, he did not for years perceive the evils of the settlement of 1782; he* perhaps thought that the rival legislatures, the conditions of the

* In 1886 Mr. Gladstone condemned Pitt's conduct to Ireland in language of quite unexampled violence. His fugitive studies of Irish history have since caused him to claim Pitt as a witness in favour of the Home Rule policy happily defeated at the last election. His reasoning, set forth in an article in the Nineteenth Century,' is, no doubt, characteristic, but will scarcely satisfy people of plain understandings. Because Pitt, bound by the recent Constitution of 1782, wrote to the Duke of Portland that he was satisfied that the two countries should for local concerns be under distinct legislatures,' taking care, however, to add that they should be 'one in effect,' the author of the Union is to be cited as approving in principle, by anticipation, of a measure which would break up the Imperial Parliament, and in the opinion of most thinking men would separate Ireland from Great Britain ! Because Pitt was silent as to the concession of the franchise to the Irish Catholics-but in the very same letter he insisted that they were to have no share in the representation or government' -he would not, were he now alive, condemn a revolutionary policy which would secure to Catholic Ireland an ascendency more grievous and tyrannical than Protestant ascendency ever was, and would certainly destroy that Protestant interest, the preservation of which he declared to be a paramount object! A very simple test may be applied to this matter. Pitt dealt pretty summarily with the leaders of the United Irishmen, and treated Jacobin slanders of English rule in Ireland with merited contempt; would this precursor of Mr. Gladstone, were he at the heim in our day, be the submissive ally of the National League, and discern the voice of the civilised world' in the interested attacks of Yankee politicians and of the Chicago Convention on the Irish policy of Russell, of Peel, and of Palmerston?