John Richard Green

“ He had done more than any man to create a literary class. It was his resolve to live by his pen that first raised literature into a profession. In the stead of gentlemen amusing a curious leisure with works of fancy, or Dependants wringing bread by their genius from a patron's caprice, Dryden saw that the time had come for the author, trusting for support to the world of readers, and wielding a power over opinion which compensates for the smallness of his gains. But he was not only the first to create a literary class; he was the first to impress the idea of literature on the English mind. ”

“ Revolution lost year by year somewhat of their energy. The fervour which breeds revolt died down among the Jacobites as their swords rusted idly in their scabbards. The Tories sulked in their country houses; but their wrath against the House of Hanover ebbed away for want of opportunities of exerting itself. And meanwhile on opponents as on friends the freedom which the Revolution had brought with it was doing its work. It was to the patient influence of this freedom that Walpole trusted; and it was the special mark of his administration that in spite of every temptation he gave it full play. ”

“ Violent and reckless as it was, the storm only marked a fresh advance in the reawakening of public opinion. The bulk of the higher classes who had till now stood apart from government were coming gradually in to the side of the Crown. But the mass of the people was only puzzled and galled by the turn of events. It felt itself called again to political activity, but it saw nothing to change its hatred and distrust of Parliament and the Crown. On the contrary it saw them in greater union than of old. The House of Commons was more corrupt than ever, and it was the slave of the king. ”

“ It is strange to contrast this urbanity of literature with the savage ferocity which characterized political controversy in the England of the Revolution and the Georges. Never has the strife of warring parties been carried on with so utter an absence of truth or fairness; never has the language of political opponents stooped to such depths of coarseness and scurrility. From the age of Bolingbroke to the age of Burke the gravest statesmen were not ashamed to revile one another with invective only worthy of the fish-market. And outside the legislature the tone of attack was even more brutal. ”

“ The Colonists still looked to England as their home. They prided themselves on their loyalty; and they regarded the difficulties which hindered complete sympathy between the settlements and the mother country as obstacles which time and good sense could remove. England on the other hand looked on America as her noblest possession. It was the wealth, the growth of this dependency which more than all the victories of her arms was lifting her to a new greatness among the nations. It was the trade with it which had doubled English commerce in half-a-century. ”

“ It had marked the failure of those dreams of European supremacy which the House of Bourbon had nursed ever since the close of the sixteenth century, and which Lewis the Fourteenth had all but turned from dreams into realities. Beaten and impoverished, France had bowed to the need of peace; but her strange powers of recovery had shown themselves in the years of tranquillity that peace secured; and with reviving wealth and the upgrowth of a new generation which had known nothing of the woes that followed Blenheim and Ramillies the old ambition started again into life. ”

“ The touchy pride of the king of Prussia in his new royal dignity, when he rose from being a simple Elector of Brandenburg to a throne, made him one of the most vexatious among the allies; but all difficulty with him ceased when Marlborough rose at a state banquet and glutted his vanity by handing him a napkin. Churchill's composure rested partly on a pride which could not stoop to bare the real self within to the eyes of meaner men. In the bitter moments before his fall he bade Godolphin burn some querulous letters which the persecution of his opponents had wrung from him ”

“ There is nothing to charm in the outer aspect of the man; nor is there anything picturesque in the work which he set himself to do, or in the means by which he succeeded in doing it. But picturesque or no, the work of keeping England quiet, and of giving quiet to Europe, was in itself a noble one; and it is the temper with which he carried on this work, the sagacity with which he discerned the means by which alone it could be done, and the stubborn, indomitable will with which he faced every difficulty in the doing it, which gives Walpole his place among English statesmen. ”

“ Not less keen and steady was his sense of the necessity of external peace. To provoke or to suffer new struggles on the Continent was not only to rouse fresh resentment in a people who still longed to withdraw from all part in foreign wars; it was to give fresh force to the Pretender by forcing France to use him as a tool against England, and to give fresh life to Jacobitism by stirring fresh hopes of the Pretender's return. It was for this reason that Walpole clung steadily to a policy of peace. But it was not at once that he could force such a policy either on the Whig party or on the king. ”

“ The revival of English religion he looked on with an indifference lightly dashed with dread as a reawakening of fanaticism which might throw new obstacles in the way of religious liberty. In the face of the growing excitement therefore he clung as doggedly as ever to his policy of quiet at home and peace abroad. But peace was now threatened by a foe far more formidable than Spain. What had hitherto enabled England to uphold the settlement of Europe as established at the Peace of Utrecht was above all the alliance and backing of France. ”

“ He gloried in a resistance, which was denounced in Parliament as rebellion. "In my opinion," he said, "this kingdom has no right to lay a tax on the Colonies.... America is obstinate! America is almost in open rebellion! Sir, I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest." "He spoke," said a looker-on, "like a man inspired," and he ended by a demand for the absolute, total, and immediate repeal of the Acts. ”

“ The long agony of Londonderry was invaluable to England: it foiled the king's hopes of an invasion which would have roused a fresh civil war, and gave the new Government time to breathe. Time was indeed sorely needed. Through the proscription and bloodshed of the new Irish rule William was forced to look helplessly on. The best troops in the army which had been mustered at Hounslow had been sent with Marlborough to the Sambre, and the political embarrassments which grew up around the new Government made it impossible to spare a man of those who remained at home. ”

“ By removing an enemy whose dread had knit the colonists to the mother country, and by breaking through the line with which France had barred them from the basin of the Mississippi, Pitt laid the foundation of the great republic of the west.
England a World-Power.
Nor were these triumphs less momentous to Britain. The Seven Years' War is in fact a turning-point in our national history, as it is a turning-point in the history of the world. Till now the relative weight of the European states had been drawn from their possessions within Europe itself. ”

“ Day by day indeed the American colonies found it harder to submit to the meddling of the mother country with their self-government and their trade. A consciousness of their destinies was stealing in upon thoughtful men, and spread from them to the masses around them. At this very moment the quick growth of population in America moved John Adams, then a village schoolmaster of Massachusetts, to lofty forebodings of the future of the great people over whom he was to be called to rule. "Our people in another century," he wrote, "will be more numerous than England itself. ”

“ They were Englishmen, but they were Englishmen parted from England by three thousand miles of sea. They could not, if they would, share the common political life of men at home; nature had imposed on them their own political life; what charters had done was not to create but to recognize a state of things which sprang from the very circumstances under which the Colonies had originated and grown into being. Nor could any cancelling of charters cancel those circumstances. No Act of Parliament could annihilate the Atlantic. ”

“ The groundwork of Pitt's character was an intense and passionate pride; but it was a pride which kept him from stooping to the level of the men who had so long held England in their hands. He was the first statesman since the Restoration who set the example of a purely public spirit. Keen as was his love of power, no man ever refused office so often, or accepted it with so strict a regard to the principles he professed. "I will not go to Court," he replied to an offer which was made him, "if I may not bring the Constitution with me." For the corruption about him he had nothing but disdain. ”

“ He looked on the Revolution of 1688 as the final establishment of English institutions. His aim was to keep England as the Revolution had left it, and under the rule of the great nobles who were faithful to the Revolution. Such a conviction left him hostile to all movement whatever. He gave his passionate adhesion to the inaction of the Whigs. He made an idol of Lord Rockingham, an honest man, but the weakest of party leaders. He strove to check the corruption of Parliament by a bill for civil retrenchment, but he took the lead in defeating all plans for its reform. ”

“ A nation is an aggregate of individual citizens, bound together in a common and equal relation to the state which they form. An empire is an aggregate of political bodies, bound together by a common relation to a central state, but whose relations to it may vary from the closest dependency to the loosest adhesion. To Grenville and the bulk of his fellow-countrymen the Colonies were as completely English soil as England itself, nor did they see any difference in political rights or in their relation to the Imperial legislature between an Englishman of Massachusetts and a man of Kent. ”

“ The stubborn purpose of William wrestled in vain with its turns of sentiment; even the genius of Marlborough proved helpless in a contest with it. It was indeed irresistible whenever it acted. But as yet it acted only by spurts. It had no wish to interfere with the general course of administration or policy; in the bulk of the nation indeed there was neither the political knowledge nor the sustained interest in politics which could have prompted such an interference. ”

“ The constant dream of every Spaniard was to recover all that Spain had given up, to win back her Italian dependencies, to win back Gibraltar where the English flag waved upon Spanish soil, to win back, above all, that monopoly of commerce with her dominions in America which England was now entitled to break in upon by the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht. ”

“ For all that Pitt coveted, for the general direction of public affairs, the control of foreign policy, the administration of the war, Newcastle had neither capacity nor inclination. On the other hand his skill in parliamentary management was unrivalled. If he knew little else, he knew better than any living man the price of every member and the intrigues of every borough. What he cared for was not the control of affairs, but the distribution of patronage and the work of corruption, and from this Pitt turned disdainfully away. ”

“ As cities ceased to be regarded simply as centres of trade and money-getting, and became habitual homes for the richer and more cultured; as men woke to the pleasure and freedom of the new life which developed itself in the street and the mall, of its quicker movement, its greater ease, its abundance of social intercourse, its keener taste, its subtler and more delicate courtesy, its flow of conversation, the stately and somewhat tedious prose-writer of days gone by passed into the briefer and nimbler essayist. ”

“ During the first ten years of his reign he managed to reduce government to a shadow, and to turn the loyalty of his subjects at home into disaffection. Before twenty years were over he had forced the American colonies into revolt and independence, and brought England to what then seemed the brink of ruin. Work such as this has sometimes been done by very great men, and often by very wicked and profligate men; but George was neither profligate nor great. He had a smaller mind than any English king before him save James the Second. ”

“ How strangely Spain had fallen from its high estate in Europe the wars of Lewis had abundantly shown, but so vast was the extent of its empire, so enormous the resources which still remained to it, that under a vigorous ruler men believed its old power would at once return. Its sovereign was still master of some of the noblest provinces of the Old World and the New, of Spain itself, of the Milanese, of Naples and Sicily, of the Netherlands, of Southern America, of the noble islands of the Spanish Main. ”

“ They did better in fighting without a king. The French indeed withdrew scornfully from the routed army as it turned at bay beneath the walls of Limerick. "Do you call these ramparts?" sneered Lauzun: "the English will need no cannon; they may batter them down with roasted apples." But twenty thousand Irish soldiers remained with Sarsfield, a brave and skilful officer who had seen service in England and abroad; and his daring surprise of the English ammunition train, his repulse of a desperate attempt to storm the town, and the approach of winter forced William to raise the siege. ”

“ From the moment when its sole right to tax the nation was established by the Bill of Rights, and when its own resolve settled the practice of granting none but annual supplies to the Crown, the House of Commons became the supreme power in the State. ”