May 5, 1789 April 20, 1792 Aug. 10, 1792 Sept. 22, 1792 Jan. 21, 1793 Feb. 1. 1793 June 1, 1794 July 28, 1794 April 5, 1795 Oct. 27, 1795 1. Prospects of Pitt's Ministry. 1789. The spread of manufacturing industry did much to strengthen Pitt's government, because the wealthy manufacturers were jealous of the landed aristocracy, and, therefore, supported him against the great Whig families. In the beginning of 1789 there seemed to be every prospect that Pitt's tenure of office would continue to be distinguished by a long series of gradual reforms, carried out just so far as Pitt could induce the nation to follow him. Before long, however, events took place in France which shocked the English nation, and produced a temper hostile to reform. 2. Material Antecedents of the French Revolution. The form of government in France had long been an absolute monarchy; but, though the kings had deprived the nobles and the clergy of all political power, they had allowed them to retain privileges injurious to the rest of the community. The nobles and the clergy, for instance, who formed the first two estates, paid much lower taxes than the rest of the people, and the Third Estate, which comprised all who were not noblemen or clergymen, bore, in consequence, heavier burdens than ought to have been placed on them. Many noblemen and clergymen, again, were seigneurs, or, as would have been said in England, Lords of Manors, and though the peasants who lived on their estates were often actually proprietors of their own pieces of land, they had nevertheless to pay dues to their seigneurs on all sorts of occasions, as for instance when they sold land or brought their produce to market. The seigneurs, too, often treated the peasants harshly by riding over their crops in pursuit of game, or by keeping flocks of pigeons which devoured their corn. People will sometimes bear injuries from those who render some public service, but in France in the eighteenth century the seigneurs did no public service, as the kings had jealously deprived them of the right of taking part-as English country gentlemen took part-in administering justice or in looking after the business of the district in which they lived. The seigneurs and the nobility in general were accordingly hated, in the first place as obnoxious to their neighbours, and in the second place as useless idlers. 3. Intellectual Antecedents of the French Revolution.-Discontent only results in revolution when there are found thinking men to lead the oppressed masses, and in France there were thinkers and writers who prepared the way for great changes. Voltaire and several other writers proclaimed the supremacy of human reason. They called upon kings and rulers to govern reasonably, attacking not only unreasonable and cruel laws, bearing hardly on individuals or injurious to the state and the institutions of civil life, but the practices and doctrines of Christianity itself. The professors of Christianity in France were certainly open to attack. Not only were the bishops and higher clergy rolling in wealth and living worldly and sometimes vicious lives, whilst the poor parish priests (curés) who did the work were in great poverty, but the bishops cried out for the persecution of Protestants and sceptics, although some of them were themselves sceptics. On one occasion Louis XVI., who had reigned since 1774, being asked to name a certain man, who was known to be a sceptic, 1772-1789 LOUIS XVI. AND THE REVOLUTION 821 as archbishop, replied that an archbishop ought at least to believe in God. Whilst Voltaire and his allies asked that all things should be done by the king and his ministers according to reason, another writer, Rousseau, taught that all had equal rights, and that the people ought to govern themselves, holding that they knew by experience their own needs far better than those who undertook to govern them, and that as the people were always good and just, they would never act tyrannically as kings and priests had too often done. 4. Louis XVI. 1774-1789.—The feeling of the French people, in general when Louis XVI. came to the throne was hostile not to monarchy but to the privileged orders, namely, the nobility and the clergy. If, therefore, Louis XVI. had put himself at the head of this movement, he would have become a more powerful king than even Louis XIV. Unfortunately, though he was unselfish and well intentioned, he had neither strength of will nor clearness of head, and he allowed the Government to drift into helplessness. Before long he was rushing into bankruptcy, which could only be averted if the nobles and clergy were compelled to pay taxes like the Third Estate. Louis XVI. had not the nerve to compel them to do it, and in 1789 he summoned the States-General, a body answering in some respects to our Parliament, but which had not met for a hundred and seventy-five years. He did this not because he wished to lead his people, but because he did not know any other way of procuring the money that he needed. 5. The National Assembly. 1789.—When the States-General met, the work of doing justice upon the privileged orders passed out of the king's hands. Each of the Three Estates had elected its own representatives to the States-General, and those of the Third Estate successfully insisted on all the representatives sitting in one chamber and calling themselves the National Assembly. The National Assembly assumed the right of making a constitution, and when the king feebly attempted to take that work into his own hands, and gave signs of an intention to employ force to make good his claim, the mob rose on July 14 and took the Bastille, a great fortress which commanded the poorer quarters of Paris. Then the peasants rose in many parts of France, burning and sacking the country houses of the seigneurs, and, on August 4, the National Assembly swept away all the special privileges of the two privileged orders. From henceforth there was to be in France what there had for centuries been in England-equality before the law. 6. England and France. 1789-1790.—At first the Revolution in France was generally welcomed in England. Englishmen thought that they had before them a mere repetition of the English Revolution of 1688, and that a Parliamentary Government was about to be set up in France, similar to that which existed in England. It was a complete mistake. The English Revolution had been directed to limit the power of the king. The French Revolution was directed to overthrow the privileges of an aristocracy. The French king became involved in the quarrel by attempting to check the National Assembly, which he distrusted. On October 5 the mob marched upon Versailles, broke into the palace, slaughtered some of the guards, and on the next morning led the king captive to Paris. On the one hand the Assembly made enemies by meddling with the constitution of the Church; and on the other hand many who had profited by the overthrow of the privileged orders suspected the nobles and the clergy to be intriguing to regain what they had lost, and treated them with harshness and cruelty. The National Assembly busied itself with drawing up a constitution based on abstract principles, whilst it took no account of the necessity of establishing a firm and strong government. It kept the king on the throne, but distrusted him too much to give him real power, and the natural result of such a state of things was the growth of turbulence and anarchy. 7. Fox, Burke, and Pitt. 1789-1790.-In England, each of the great statesmen then living had his own way of regarding the events passing in France. Fox, enthusiastic and impulsive, gave to the Revolution unstinted praise. "How much," he wrote, on hearing of the capture of the Bastille," the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world; and how much the best!" Burke, on the other hand, regarded with disfavour, soon passing into hatred, the destruction of old institutions and the foundation of new ones on general principles. Being unable to perceive how impossible it was, in the existing circumstances of France, to found a government on those old institutions which had so completely broken down, he reviled the National Assembly, with all the wealth of argument and rhetoric at his command. Towards the end of 1790, he published his Reflections on the French Revolution, in which he pointed out, with great sagacity, the danger of all attempts to alter suddenly the habits and institutions of nations, though he failed entirely to suggest any practicable remedy for the evils which existed in France. On May 6, 1791, there was a complete breach between him and Fox. His dying words, he said, 1783-1792 THE SLAVE TRADE 823 would be, "Fly from the French Revolution!" Pitt agreed with Burke rather than with Fox; but he held that his business was to govern England rather than to denounce France, and he contented himself with hoping that the disorders in France, by weakening that country for a long time, would make the preservation of peace easier. 8. Clarkson and the Slave Trade. 1783-1788.-Cautious as Pitt was, he shared in some of the generous hopes which filled the mind of Fox. In 1772 Lord Mansfield laid down the law that a slave imported into England becomes free; but the merchants of Bristol and Liverpool were at this time carrying some fifty thousand negroes a year to slavery in the West Indies. On their way across the Atlantic the poor wretches suffered horrible torments, being packed almost as closely as the sufferers in the Black Hole of Calcutta, in nearly as stifling an atmosphere, so that large numbers died on the way. In 1783 a young man named Clarkson gained a prize at Cambridge for an essay on the question whether it was right to make slaves of others, and on his journey home sat down by the wayside to meditate whether the arguments which he used were to be more to him than mere words. He resolved to devote his life to the abolition of the slave trade, and for some years went about the quays at Liverpool, picking up facts from sailors. In 1788 he won to his side some members of the Society of Friends, and published the evidence which he had gathered. Wilberforce, the member for Yorkshire, one of the most pious and disinterested of men, tɔok up the cause, and Wilberforce influenced Pitt. 9. Pitt and the Slave Trade. 1788-1792. In 1788 a Bill was brought in by Sir William Dolben, by which means were to be taken for improving the sanitary condition of the vessels carrying slaves. The slave-traders resisted it and argued that the negroes liked being taken from their own barbarous country, and danced and made merry on deck. On enquiry, it turned out that they were from time to time flogged on deck, in order to keep up the circulation of the blood in their numbed limbs, and that what their tyrants called dancing was merely their shrinking from the lash. The Bill passed the Commons, but the Lords so changed it as to make it useless. In 1789 and 1790 Wilberforce urged the Commons to abolish the wicked slave trade entirely, and in 1792 Pitt spoke vehemently in support of the proposal, but the House of Commons refused to accept it. The men of property of whom it was composed thought that the first duty of legislators was to protect |