CHAPTER XVIIIWILBERFORCE AND HIS FELLOW-WORKERSThe desire of Abou Ben Adhem that his name might be handed on as one "who loved his fellow-men" would form a fitting epitaph not only to those great-hearted workers in the cause of humanity whom the Abbey has delighted to honour—William Wilberforce, the liberator of the slave, and David Livingstone, the missionary and explorer in Darkest Africa—but also to those others who toiled with them in the same great cause of freedom, and whose claims to the grateful recollection of the nation are recorded only by monuments—Granville Sharp, Jonas Hanway, Zachary Macaulay, Fowell Buxton, and Anthony Astley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury. A few words first about one of these latter, Granville Sharp, for he it was who became the pioneer of that noble band who never ceased from their labours till they had freed the slave on British territory.He was only a linen-draper's assistant, afterwards becoming a clerk in the Ordnance Office; but the monotony of his work never allowed monotony or narrowness to enter his life. His heart was responsive to every high claim, and difficulties only meant to him obstacles to be overcome. Courage, energy, and determination were his watchwords. His brother was a doctor in Mincing Lane, who saw poor people free of charge, and among his patients was a negro called Jonathan Strong, who had been brought to London by his master, a lawyer, from Barbadoes, only to be turned out into the streets friendless and homeless when he fell ill. Dr. Sharp treated him so successfully that he became quite well, and Granville Sharp found him a situation with a chemist, which he kept for some years, until one day he was seen and recognised by his old employer, who finding him well and active had him seized, and kept in custody until he could be shipped off to the West Indies. Jonathan, in despair, thought of Granville Sharp, and appealed to him for protection. Sharp at once went to the Lord Mayor, who gave judgment that the man had been wrongfully seized and held without a warrant, and ordered him to be at once set at liberty. But then arose an unlooked-for difficulty. Jonathan's late master had sold him, and his new owner appeared with the bill of sale, claiming his property and declaring he had been robbed. Then came the question as to whether the traffic in slaves which went on openly, especially in London and Liverpool, was lawful or not. Was a slave free when he reached England, or could he be seized and compelled to go back? The lawyers declared that no English law protected the slave. Granville Sharp refused to believe it. During the next few years he spent every hour of his spare time in studying the law; in wading through masses of dry Acts; in sorting, sifting, verifying, and quoting, though more than one friendly lawyer assured him that all his work was a useless waste of time. But the result of his labours surprised them as much as it cheered the heart of Granville Sharp, for it proved that "there was nothing in any English law or statute which could justify the enslaving of others." He at once published a plain, clear pamphlet which he called "The Injustice of Tolerating Slavery in England;" and further than that, certain in the justice of his cause, he went down, armed with a writ of Habeas Corpus, to Gravesend, where he had been told of a captured negro who was being taken back by force. He found the wretched man chained to the mainmast, but after a fierce struggle he got possession of him and returned with him in triumph to London. He did much the same in the case of another negro called James Somerset, whose owner promptly brought the matter before Lord Chief-Justice Mansfield, who declared the question to be so important and doubtful a one that he must take the opinion of the judges upon it. A very lengthy trial followed. At last the court gave the opinion, that every man in England had a right to his liberty unless he had broken the law; that the power to seize or claim a slave in England had never been acknowledged by the law, and that therefore Somerset was free. It was the first great step towards a more far-reaching freedom, and it was mainly won by the careful, devoted study of Granville Sharp, whose pamphlet had made a great impression on the Lord Chief-Justice. The next step was to found a society for the Abolition of Slavery, and to this flocked a number of men, chiefly Quakers, who banded themselves together with most steadfast determination never to cease from their labours until Parliament had declared all traffic in slaves to be illegal in every part of the British Empire. This was a gigantic undertaking, for British merchants dealt largely in slaves, and they were so powerful a body that it was certain the Government would shrink from opposing them. But this little band of religious, earnest, chivalrous men had the strength which comes from the conviction that theirs was a righteous cause destined in the end to triumph over every obstacle. One of their number was William Wilberforce, a young and a delicate-looking man, who when only twenty years of age had been elected as member for Hull, with no powerful support except what he derived from his own personal influence and his independent character. In London he soon made his mark. Pitt became his greatest friend, and in society he was made much of, so full was he of wit and charm; while in addition to his many other gifts, he was an excellent singer. But fascinating and absorbing as was the life into which he was then thrown, it did not satisfy him. Even while he stood on a height, he caught the glimpse of the height that is higher, the which having once seen, no true man can rest until he has attained it. As the vision unfolded itself before his eyes Wilberforce became a changed man, so much so that for a time it was believed by his friends that he would leave public life and go quietly to the country. But his vision, instead of narrowing down his conception of duty, broadened it out. "To shut myself up," he said to his mother, "would merit no better name than desertion. It would be flying from the post in which I have been placed, and I could not look for the blessing of God upon my retirement."Just at this crisis he came under the influence of two or three people who felt intensely on the slavery question, and in him they saw the very Parliamentary champion they needed. With his great influence, his powers of speech, his many friends, his independent character, and his high enthusiasms, Wilberforce seemed destined for this work, and he eagerly grasped it. Here was a direct call from God, and to him now every gift, every power he possessed was held as a sacred trust. Besides, he was respected by all parties in the House, and the hope of the Anti-Slavery party lay in their cause being non-political. Victory could only crown their efforts when the whole moral feeling of the nation was aroused, and much, very much hung on their choice of a leader. "Mr. Wilberforce," said Granville Sharp, "with his position as member for the largest county, the great influence of his personal connections, added to his unblemished character, will secure every advantage to the cause." So from the year 1787, William Wilberforce, chivalrous as any knight of old, gave up his life to the righting of a great wrong and to the deliverance of the oppressed.For twenty years the fight went on, and though he was successfully opposed over and over again by the strong West Indian party, assisted by many of the Tories and the majority in the House of Lords, he was never baffled or disheartened."I am in no degree discouraged," he said after one defeat. "It is again my intention to move next year for the abolition, and though I dare not hope to carry the bill through both Houses, yet, if I do not deceive myself, this infamous and wicked traffic will not last out the century."Both Pitt and Fox supported Wilberforce, but the opposition was solid and wealthy, and the bill above mentioned, brought in during the session of 1796, was again defeated by 78 votes to 61. The Revolution in France was causing much excitement and apprehension among all classes of Englishmen, and the opponents of Wilberforce attempted, among other things, to prove that he was at heart a revolutionist, and that his efforts to set free a class who had always been kept in slavery showed that he believed in the revolutionary "rights of men.""There is no greater enemy to all such delusions," Pitt warmly and indignantly made reply.But by 1804 a change had come about. All fears regarding a revolution in England were allayed; every year Wilberforce and his party, by their steady persistence, their moderation, and their powerful appeals to the highest motives, had gained converts to their cause both in and out of Parliament, and the Bill of May 30, 1804, was carried in the Commons by a majority of over 70. This was by far the greatest triumph Wilberforce had yet gained, but to his regret it was not proceeded with by the House of Lords, who had thrown out the two previous bills, though, in fairness be it said, the majorities with which they had come from the Commons had been very small. However, the Abolitionists were by now accustomed to possessing their souls in patience, and they knew the tide had turned in their favour. The death of Pitt put Fox, who of the two men was the more zealous supporter of their cause, into power; he prevailed upon a majority in the Cabinet to declare that the slave trade was contrary to the principles of justice, humanity, and sound policy, and should be abolished by the House with all practicable expediency. In 1807 the bill was again brought in, this time to be carried by a majority of 283 to 16. The Solicitor-General made a powerful speech, in which he contrasted the feelings of the Emperor of the French in all his greatness with those of that "honoured man who would soon lay his head on his pillow, knowing that the slave trade was no more." At this reference to Wilberforce the House burst into delighted applause. They had seen him during his many years of brave fighting, and now that victory was at hand, they cheered him with such cheers as had seldom before been given to any man sitting in his place in either House. Further opposition was useless, and the bill became law."God will bless this country," was Wilberforce's earnest declaration, in the gladdest, proudest moment of his life. His own share in the good work he counted as nothing.Much was won, but not all. The slave trade was abolished—that is to say, slaves could not be taken to any British possession, or put on any British ships, and our warships were instructed to capture any vessels disobeying this order. Yet slaves were still held by British masters in the West Indies and on the American coast. Wilberforce, far from resting content with his victory, made ready for a second fight, having now for his lieutenant in the House of Commons, Fowell Buxton, called Elephant Buxton, on account of his great size, a man as energetic and indefatigable by nature as he was powerful in appearance. However sad the lot of the slaves, they had been bought and paid for under the old law by their masters, just as if they had been cattle or any other marketable produce, so that if they were to be set free by law, the money spent on them must in honour be returned to these masters, or otherwise they would be ruined, and a great injustice would be done. To compensate the owners, and thus honourably to free every slave, required a large sum of money, not less than £20,000,000; but so changed had become public opinion throughout England, and consequently in Parliament, that the money was voted in 1833. For the last few years Wilberforce had been in failing health, and his old place in the House of Commons knew him no more; but Buxton had valiantly carried on the work, in a spirit best illustrated by some words of his own:—"The longer I live, the more certain I am that the great difference between men, between the feeble and the powerful, the great and the insignificant, is energy,invincible determination—a purpose once fixed, and then, death or victory! That quality will do anything that can be done in the world, and no talents, no circumstances, no opportunities, will make a two-legged creature a man without it."Wilberforce just lived to hear the glorious news which crowned his life and work, and to realise that from that day forward there would not exist a slave in any British colony. It was the great triumph of righteousness, and humbly he thanked God that his had been the privilege of leading the little army which had gone on from strength to strength until its mission was accomplished. Two or three days later he passed peacefully away, and immediately after his death this letter, signed by all the leading members of both Houses of Parliament, was sent to his son:—"We being anxious upon public grounds to show our respect for the memory of the late William Wilberforce, and being also satisfied that public honours cannot be more fitly bestowed than upon such benefactors of mankind, earnestly request that he may be buried in Westminster Abbey, and that we, with others who agree with us in these sentiments, may have permission to attend the funeral."So to the Abbey he was brought. All public business was suspended, and public men of every rank followed him to the grave. Members of Parliament were there in numbers to show their reverence for one whose eloquence had ever been put to the noblest uses, and, fitly enough, his body was laid close to the tombs of Pitt and Fox."If you carry this point in your life, that life will be far better spent than in being prime minister many years," a much-loved friend had said to Wilberforce when he first resolved to devote himself to the cause of the slave, and to set aside all thought of his own career and ambition. The young enthusiast had counted the cost, but it had not changed him from his determination, and though he lived and died plain William Wilberforce, member of parliament, the Abbey roll of honour is made richer by his name, and he rests worthily in the Statesmen's Corner, great as any of those among whom he lies.Just as Wilberforce was nearing the close of his life, a young spinner in some mills near Glasgow, glowing with enthusiasm, was resolving to offer himself as a medical missionary to China or Africa. David Livingstone, for he it was, came of homely Scottish stock."The only point of family tradition I feel proud of is this," he declared. "One of my forefathers, when on his death-bed, called his children round him and said, 'I have searched diligently throughout all the traditions of our family, and I never could find there was a dishonest man among them.... So I leave this precept with you, Be honest.'"[image]DAVID LIVINGSTONE.And perfectly honest David Livingstone certainly was to the end of his days. Though he went to work in the mills when ten years old, his love of books made him learn eagerly in every spare moment and on so late into the night, that his mother, half in anger, half in pride, often went to him at midnight and carried off every available light. However David was a sturdy youth, or twelve hours' work each day in the factory added to six hours' reading would have ruined his health. He was twenty-five when he offered himself to the London Missionary Society, and he was sent for a three months' trial to a training-place in Essex. But when he had to deliver his first sermon, every idea fled from his brain. "I have forgotten all I had to say, friends," he announced frankly, and left the pulpit. But for his other sterling qualities, this would have put an end to his career. As it was, he was given another three months and came successfully out of the ordeal, after which he went for two years to a London hospital. Africa was to be his destination, "Don't go to an old station," Dr. Moffat, the veteran missionary, said to him on the eve of his ordination. "But push on to the vast unoccupied district to the north, where on a clear morning I have seen the smoke of a thousand villages no missionary has ever reached." Kuruman, an important station of the Missionary Society, more than seven hundred miles up country, was his first halting-place after leaving Cape Town, and he set himself with great energy to learn the language of the natives, acting at the same time as their doctor. In this last capacity he soon made his name famous, and patients came to him over enormous distances. Splendid patients they were too, he always declared, perfectly obedient and of extraordinary courage. When once he had mastered their language, which he did in a short while, he combined his missionary and medical work very happily.In 1843 he left Kuruman to form a new station about two hundred miles to the north-east at Mabotsa, and whilst here he married a daughter of Dr. Moffat, a girl who had lived among missionaries for many years, and so was accustomed to the rough, solitary existence which would be her lot. "My time," wrote Livingstone to a friend, "is filled up with building, gardening, cobbling, doctoring, tinkering, carpentering, gun-mending, farriering, preaching, schooling, teaching, and lecturing, while my wife, in addition to her usual work, makes clothes, soap, and candles, and teaches classes of children."Gradually it dawned upon Livingstone that a great work awaited him in the interior, but it was a work which he must face alone. "I must not be a more sorry soldier than those who serve an earthly sovereign," he wrote to the Directors of the Mission, to whose care he commended his family. "And so powerfully am I convinced it is the will of God, that I will go, no matter who opposes."Therefore in 1852, having seen his wife and children off to England, he started in his Cape waggon and again made for Kuruman, after leaving which he was constantly harassed by parties of Boers, who believed he was teaching their slaves to rise in revolt. But he reached the land of Sebituan, a friendly chief, safely, and found the warmest welcome awaiting him. As doctor and missionary his hands were full, and seeing the field of work opening all around him, he grew more and more anxious to become the pioneer missioner to the very interior. Fever, he realised, would be his worst enemy. "I would like," he wrote in his journal, "to discover some remedy for that terrible disease. I must go to parts where it prevails most and try to discover if the natives have a remedy for it.... I mean to open up a path to the interior or perish. I never have had the shadow of a doubt. Cannot the love of Christ carry the missionary where the slave trade carries the trader?"The travels of Livingstone through that unknown country which he practically discovered, would have to be closely followed on a map from point to point to be made clear. Otherwise they are a mere string of strange names. He set out in the November of 1853. "I had three muskets for my people and a double-barrelled gun for myself," he said. "My ammunition was distributed through the luggage, that we might not be left without a supply. Our chief hopes for food were in our guns. I carried twenty pounds of beads, a few pounds of tea, sugar, and coffee. One tin canister was filled with spare clothes, another was stored with medicines, a third with books, and a fourth with a magic lantern. A small tent, a sheep-skin, and a horse-rug completed my equipment, as an array of baggage would have excited the tribes." Four years later, worn out by frequent attacks of fever, but otherwise perfectly satisfied with the result of his journeyings into parts where as yet no other Englishman had penetrated, Livingstone sailed for England, having heard nothing of his family for three years. He at once became the hero of the hour; dinners were given, speeches were made in his honour, and he was asked to equip and command a government expedition for the exploration of that part of South-Eastern Africa through which the river Zambesi flows. After some consideration he decided to undertake this, though it meant that from henceforth he would cease to be a missionary pure and simple. But he looked at the question in its broadest aspect. "Wherever I go," he said, "I go as the servant of God, following the leadings of His Hand. My ideal of a missionary is not that of a dumpy man with a Bible under his arm. I feel I am not my own. I am serving Christ in labouring as well as in preaching, and having by His help got information which I hope will bring blessing to Africa, am I to hide the light under a bushel, because some will not consider it sufficiently or even at all missionary? I refrain from taking any salary from Missionary Societies, so no loss is sustained by any one."In the March of 1858 he returned to his work, and Mrs. Livingstone started with him to go at least as far as Kuruman. This second Zambesi expedition lasted nearly six years, and as Livingstone stood on the shores of Lake Nyasa, he was able to feel that he stood where no white man had ever stood before him. Three years later, Bishop Mackenzie and six missionaries followed him here, but among the many sorrows which fell upon him about this time, was the death of the "good bishop" from fever, the death of his own wife, and the growing feeling that the extreme unhealthiness of the district would make anything like colonisation impossible. His third great journey, commenced in 1866, was his last, and when more than three years passed by without any tidings of him, owing to his long stay in the country of the cannibal Manyema, the editor of theNew York Heraldequipped an expedition to go in search of him the man in charge of it being Henry Stanley, whose orders were "to find Livingstone, living or dead." It was in 1871 that the two men met face to face at Tanganyika, and the relieving party found the object of their search almost alone, worn out, fever-stricken, cut off from all news of his children, and as near to despair as was possible to one of his strong faith and brave nature. But when Stanley, after many attacks of fever, returned to Europe, he could not persuade his companion to leave the country, which held him as a magnet. He was determined to find the sources of the Nile, and the determination cost him his life. The district through which he fought his way has been described as "one vast sponge," and was poisonous to the last degree. His strength failed, and though his faithful natives bore him along on a litter with the utmost tenderness, his sufferings were terrible. He died on the first of May 1873, alone save for his natives, "the greatest and best man who ever explored Africa." Believing that to labour is to pray, if the work be done for God's glory and not for self-advancement, David Livingstone's life had been one long prayer, and throughout those lonely dangerous journeyings the sense of God's Presence had been his stay and comfort. Around the last hours of the brave man a veil is drawn. But who can doubt that the love of God overshadowed him, and made even that desolate, marsh-like place a road of light, along which the worn-out traveller passed to Him, his one true goal?His native servants behaved with beautiful devotion, and would not leave him alone in death. His heart they buried where he died, but as best they could they embalmed his body, and by slow stages made their way towards the coast with their precious burden, which they were determined somehow to get to England. At one time every one of them was stricken down by the terrible fever, but on they went for many a month, through swamp and desert and through hostile lands. Nothing could daunt them. Their master must lie in his home, far away, over the seas. When at last they reached Zanzibar and handed over the trust they had so loyally guarded, they barely received a word of thanks. But one friend of Livingstone's came forward just in time, and undertook to pay all expenses for two of their number to go to England and be present at the funeral. Susi and Chuma, two of the slaves the Doctor had freed, and his most devoted attendants, were chosen to go with their master till the end of his journey. It was almost a year after his death when the great traveller was borne into the Abbey, and those two stood there among the mourners, awe-struck but contented. Their task was accomplished; the white man who had been their deliverer lay among his own people.A very simple inscription, ending with the words, "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold. Them also must I bring," marks the place in the nave where, with a curious significance, Livingstone, an architect of the Empire, lies close to other architects, Sir Charles Barry, Sir Gilbert Scott, and John Pearson, whose works are to be seen in the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and Westminster Hall.We cannot leave these lovers of humanity without one glance at the statue of the good Earl of Shaftesbury, the friend of little children and of all those who were desolate and oppressed. Possessed of all that could make life attractive to him, he devoted himself to his dying day to the service of his fellows, and his name will go down to history as the liberator of the white slaves in England. For, as Wilberforce championed the negro, Shaftesbury fought long and steadily in the cause of the women and children employed in factories and collieries, who worked sometimes for thirty-six hours at a time under the most appalling conditions. At last he forced Parliament to take action, and to pass the Ten Hours' Bill, besides insisting that factory inspectors were appointed to see that all workers were protected as the law intended they should be. That was his greatest work, but to tell of all that he did would fill a volume with a record of golden deeds. Ever ready to lead an unpopular cause; an enthusiast without being a fanatic; strong, clear-headed, steadfast, reliable, and single-hearted, he stands out a noble figure in the social history of the nineteenth century. Just before his death, in 1885, his friend, Dean Stanley, in writing to him, spoke of Westminster Abbey as the place where he should rest. But the old man shook his head and begged to be buried in his country home.However, the Abbey could not altogether refrain from doing him honour, and through streets lined with people, many of them the poorest in the land, most of them wearing some outward sign of mourning, a bit of black ribbon or a scrap of crape, followed by deputations from almost every charitable association, the coffin was carried to Westminster. Around it stood high and low, rich and poor. The wreaths sent by royal princes lay Bide by side with the tributes from the flower-girls and the boys on the training-ships. A mighty volume of sound ascended to the vaulted roof, as the familiar hymn was sung—"Let saints on earth in concert sing,With those whose rest is won,For all the servants of our KingIn earth and heaven are one!"Then the organ ceased, the Blessing was given, and the great procession left the Abbey to the march of the coster-mongers' band, to the tramp of thousands of feet, whose way in life he had made more easy and more blessed.In the north aisle of the nave rest three great men, builders in another way, who have served the world by their thoughts—Newton, Herschel, and Darwin.Sir Isaac Newton made one of the most wonderful discoveries in the world of science and nature, the law of gravitation, and also invented a method by which the whole course of a comet could be calculated. On his monument you will see a globe, covered with constellations and the path of a comet, while below are groups of children weighing the sun and the moon. The long Latin epitaph was one which greatly offended Dr. Johnson, who said that "none but philosophers could understand it."Sir John Herschel was the son of a distinguished father, and from his boyhood he resolved to follow in his father's footsteps. "To put my shoulders to the wheel, and to leave the world a little better than I found it," was the ideal he set before himself whilst at Cambridge, and in this spirit he carried on the work of making a careful study of the stars in the southern hemisphere, which had never been done before.Besides astronomy he was devoted to books, especially to poetry, and translated many of Schiller's poems, as well as parts of the "Iliad," into English. "Give a man," he said, "once the taste for reading good books, and you place him in contact with the best society in every period of history, with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest of characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages."His eyes were fixed on the stars; his heart was ever set on those things that are above. These are the beautiful words in which he has described the object and the end of all his study:—"To spring even a little way aloft, to carol for awhile in bright and sunny regions—to open the doors of the human mind to let in light and knowledge, always sure that right will come right at last—to rise to the level of our strength, and if we must sink again, to sink not exhausted but exercised, not dulled in spirit, but cheered in heart—such may be the contented and happy lot of him who can repose with equal confidence on the bosom of the earth, or ride above the mists of earth into the empyrean day."He died loaded with honours in 1871, though no man sought fame or honour less."Enough if cleansed at last from earthly stain,My homeward step be firm, and pure my evening sky."Thus had he written, and how could longing soar higher?[image]CHARLES DARWIN.Charles Darwin was perhaps the greatest man of the three, for after long years of patient hard work, bravely carried on through bad health, he produced as the result of his experiments a wonderful book called "The Origin of Species," in which he explained how the world, instead of being created all at once as it is to-day, has grown slowly and very gradually, through many processes, just as we ourselves, our minds, and all our powers have developed from a state of savagery into our present state of civilisation. When first Darwin published his work explaining all this, some people were frightened and horrified, and declared that he wanted to upset all the old ideas about God and religion. But thus they had said whenever a new discovery had been made, and yet with each new discovery we have only learnt more and more how great God is, and how—"He moves in a mysterious wayHis wonders to perform."So all such great discoverers as Newton, Herschel, and Darwin give us in reality the same message, which is never to be afraid of truth, for truth comes from God, and the only danger is when we doubt, even for a moment, that it must come triumphant out of every honest discussion.CHAPTER XIXPITT AND THE STATESMEN'S CORNERWhen William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, was buried in the north transept at Westminster Abbey in the year 1778, Parliament having decreed that "he ought to be brought near to the dust of kings," and not lie in St. Paul's Cathedral, earnestly though the City of London begged for this favour, he drew to that part of the Abbey so many distinguished ministers of the Crown, that it soon received the name of the Statesmen's Corner, in distinction to the Poets' Corner which Chaucer had created. Pitt the elder and Pitt the younger, Fox, Canning, Palmerston, Castlereagh, Grattan, and Gladstone—these are the names which most closely belong to the Statesmen's Corner, and through their lives we can catch glimpses of English political life from the reign of George II. down to our own day.William Pitt entered Parliament in 1735, and joined the party calling themselves the Patriots, rallying round the Prince of Wales, who was always at enmity with the King and Queen. This party naturally included any one opposed to Walpole, still the all-powerful minister at Court. The Patriots were young men, talented and vigorous, and their first signal victory was obtained when they forced Walpole into declaring war against Spain, that country, they insisted, having systematically hampered, injured, and insulted British traders, in spite of treaties and negotiations. Walpole was before all else a peace minister; but the Patriots, supported by the country, declared that war was necessary if England was to uphold her position and power on the seas, and Pitt, full of energy and eloquence, was one of the most powerful, though one of the youngest, among the Patriots. This war, as Walpole had foreseen, was but the prelude to a general disturbance; England became involved in Continental quarrels, and the Stuart party seized this opportunity of making a final, though unsuccessful attempt to place Prince Charles Edward on the throne. After nine years a treaty of peace was signed at Aix-la-Chapelle, and broadly speaking, the result of the war, so far as this country was concerned, was that we had been successful on the seas, in Canada, and in India, unsuccessful on the Continent. Walpole had resigned, Newcastle was a Prime Minister "who had neither judgment nor ability," and Pitt became more and more the ruling power. The year 1757 saw him virtually Prime Minister, and with his whole might he set himself to arouse a national spirit in England, to make the people see that our real future lay not in the Continent, but in the Colonies. "I can save this country, nobody else can," he said confidently at this time, and it was no vain boast. The years which followed were glorious years. In India, France had joined with a powerful native prince to oust the British traders, and had been utterly defeated at Plassey by the genius of Clive, who had but a handful of troops as against seventy thousand. That victory made the British masters of the whole province of Bengal, and laid the foundations of our Indian Empire. From henceforward the French power in India rapidly declined. In America an equal triumph crowned Pitt's policy. In Wolfe he had found a man able to do in the West what Clive did in the East, and Canada became a British Colony. Wolfe himself fell in the great struggle for Quebec, as did Montcalm, his rival French general, and a monument stands in the north ambulatory of the Abbey to the memory of the gallant young leader, who died in the hour of his victory. "It is necessary to watch for a victory every morning for fear of missing one," was the remark of Walpole's son Horace. And the nation felt that it was Pitt whose policy and whose power had made all these things possible. Parliament was entirely in his hands, he swayed the Commons by his eloquence just as he impressed them by his strength; the King supported him, and the people adored him.But in 1760 George II. died, and his second son George, who succeeded him (Frederick Prince of Wales having died), did not care for a minister so fearless and independent. Neither was Pitt without enemies. When he saw that his opponents, supported by the King, were determined to make a peace with France of which he could not approve, he resigned, after making a powerful speech though he was very ill at the time. His words concluded thus: "It is because I see in this treaty the seeds of a future war that it meets with my most hearty disapprobation. The peace is insecure, because it restores the enemy to his former greatness; the peace is inadequate, because the places gained are no equivalent for the places surrendered." Before a year was over, all that Pitt foretold had come to pass, and England was again at war with Spain. Bute, who had been virtually Prime Minister since Pitt gave up office, now resigned, leaving in power Grenville, the leader in the House of Commons, and in a very short time Grenville brought forward a measure concerning America, which was so short-sighted and so opposed to the colonial spirit, that it could only have a disastrous ending. Practically all North America was in British hands, and it was divided into thirteen different States, besides Canada. Those States had their own Colonial Assemblies, but the supreme power rested with the British Parliament. In 1765 Grenville brought in the Stamp Act, by which American colonists had to use legal paper stamped in England for all their agreements, and this was carried without the consent of the colonists, as they had no representatives in Parliament, so that besides imposing a tax on them, Parliament had really tampered with one of their most sacred rights as British subjects. The Act was very badly received in America, and relations became so strained that Pitt, to whom any matter affecting the Colonies was very dear, came out of his retirement to protest against the Act, and brought all his splendid fearless eloquence to bear on the subject. "This kingdom has no right to tax the Colonies," he argued, and he went on to declare—"I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.... The Commons of America have ever been in possession of their constitutional right of giving and granting their own money. They would have been slaves if they had not enjoyed it.... A gentleman asks, 'When were the Colonies emancipated?' I desire to know when were they made slaves? ... I stand up for this kingdom. I maintain that our legislative power over the Colonies is sovereign and supreme in every circumstance of government and legislation. But taxation is no part of the governing or legislative power. Taxes are a voluntary gift and grant of the Commons alone. When therefore in this House we give and grant, we give and grant what is our own. But in an American tax what do we do? We, your Majesty's Commons for Great Britain, give and grant to your Majesty—what? Our own property? No; we give and grant to your Majesty the property of your Majesty's Commons of America. It is an absurdity in terms. I beg leave to move that the Stamp Act be repealed absolutely, totally, and immediately; that the reason for the repeal be assigned because it was founded on an erroneous principle. At the same time let the sovereign authority of this country over the Colonies be asserted in as strong terms as can be devised, that we exercise every power except that of taking their money out of their pockets without their consent."Pitt still held his sway over the House of Commons, and the Act was repealed. A few months later he was again Prime Minister, but now no longer as William Pitt, the great Commoner. He had accepted a title, to the disappointment of many of his followers, who had revered him in the past for his entire independence; and after he sat in the Lords as Earl of Chatham, his influence never made itself felt in the same way. Besides, his health continually broke down, bravely though he struggled against it, and he was often laid aside for many months at a time. During one of these periods, another irritating Act was passed, taxing all the tea, glass, and paper imported into America, and as this occurred just when the sore feelings over the Stamp Act had been allayed, it was particularly unfortunate. The Colonists looked on it as an act of revenge for their victory and determined to resist it, while the King was unfortunately surrounded by a party, of which Lord North was the chief, who urged him, whatever the cost might be, to force America into submission. Lord North becoming Prime Minister was the signal for an outbreak of public feeling in America; riots occurred, and some tea-laden ships in Boston harbour were boarded, the tea being all thrown into the water. Again Chatham raised his voice on the side of consideration, of common sense, and of conciliation."My Lords," he said, after he had used one telling argument after another to prove how useless and irritating had been the action of the Government, driving these loyal sons of the old country into actions which were the result of despair, and which in cooler moments they would heartily regret, "I am an old man, and I plead for a gentle mode of governing America, for the day is not far distant when America may vie with these kingdoms, not only in arms, but in arts also.... If we take a transient view of those motives which induced the ancestors of our fellow-subjects in America to leave their native country to encounter the innumerable difficulties of the unexplored regions of the western world, our astonishment at the present conduct of their descendants will naturally subside. There was no corner of the world into which men of their free and enterprising spirit would not fly with alacrity rather than submit to the slavish and tyrannical principles which prevailed at that period in their native country. And shall we wonder, my Lords, if the descendants of such illustrious characters spurn with contempt the hand of unconstitutional power, that would snatch from them the dearly-bought privilege they now contend for? My Lords, proceed like a kind and affectionate parent over a child whom he tenderly loves. Instead of these harsh and severe proceedings, pass an amnesty on their youthful errors; clasp them once more in fond, affectionate arms, and I venture to affirm you will find them children worthy of their sire."But his powerful pleading fell on deaf ears. All in vain did he urge that though the Government might be revenged on America, no Government could conquer it. In 1775 war, terrible as a civil war, broke out between the old country and the new. The Congress raised an army, and set at the head of it George Washington. "The man first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen," solemnly declared that from henceforth the United Colonies would be free and independent States, and carried on the campaign with the utmost success, assisted by France. Dismayed at last and astonished, Lord North and his ministers began to talk of conciliation. But it was too late. Two British forces, each of about four thousand men, had been forced to surrender to the American troops. No longer was it possible for England to make terms.At home there was consternation, irresolution, and a sense of deep resentment against the Government which had so blundered. Chatham was a dying man, but he yet had something to say. Weakness, irresolution, or fear were unknown words to him, even though now he admitted—"I tremble for this country; I am almost led to despair that we shall ever be able to extricate ourselves."On the 7th of April 1778 he lifted up his voice for the last time, this time against an ignominious surrender, which the discomfited Government, terrified by the action of France, were all too ready to accept. Conscious himself of his fast-ebbing strength, Chatham, the Imperialist minister of the eighteenth century, summoned all his old fire and eloquence to his aid, and spoke with intense feeling, rejoicing, he said, "that the grave had not yet closed on him, pressed down as he was by the hand of infirmity."Panic-stricken, the Government were inclined to offer absolute independence to all the Colonies. Chatham vigorously opposed the idea."His Majesty," he declared, "succeeded to an empire as great in extent as its reputation was unsullied. Shall we tarnish the lustre of this nation by an ignominious surrender of its rights and fairest possessions? Shall this great kingdom, that has survived whole and entire the Danish degradations, the Scottish invasion, the Norman Conquest, that has stood the threatened invasion of the Spanish Armada, now fall prostrate before the house of Bourbon? Shall a people that seventeen years ago was the terror of the world, now stoop so low as to tell its ancient and insatiate enemy, 'Take all we have: only give us peace.' In God's name, if it be absolutely necessary to declare for peace or war, and the former cannot be preserved with honour, why is not the latter commenced without hesitation? My Lords, any state is better than despair. Let us at least make an effort; and if we must fall, let us fall like men!"With this brave appeal Chatham sat down exhausted. A few moments later he was carried fainting out of the House, which at once adjourned. And within a month, he who has been described as "the first Englishman of his time," had passed from the troubled arena of politics.[image]WILLIAM PITT FIRST EARL OF CHATHAM.His monument in the Abbey shows him to us as he must often have looked when, wearing his Parliamentary robes, he addressed the House in that clear, sweet voice of his, which he could use with such wonderful effect, and the sculptor has well caught the expression of his fearless strength. Near him stand Prudence and Fortitude; below is Britannia, Mistress of the Seas; and the inscription tells how, under his administration, Great Britain was exalted to a height of prosperity and glory, unknown in any former age.His second son, William, was born in 1759, the year that was perhaps the most successful in his father's life, and as he was too delicate to go to school, the older man personally supervised the early education of this his favourite child. When quite small, Chatham began to give him lessons in public speaking, making him stand on a platform to recite poetry or speeches, and later on teaching him to argue their points. With such a teacher and such a ready pupil, it is not surprising to hear of excellent progress made.Little Willy Pitt, as he was called, soon showed in which direction his inclinations lay. "I am glad I am not the eldest son," he remarked, when he was seven, "as I want to speak in the House of Commons like papa."He was only nineteen when his father died, but it was he who had helped the old statesman to his place in the House of Lords on the last day of his life, he who assisted to carry him out, and he who stood as chief mourner at that impressive funeral in the Abbey, his elder brother being abroad. The thought of any life but a political and a public one, never entered his mind, and two years later he became a member of Parliament. The first step up the ladder was taken. Already a trained speaker, his gifts were at once recognised by the House. Members of both parties generously praised him, and prophesied that his would be a great career. "I doubt not," said honest William Wilberforce, "but that I shall one day see him the first man in the country." His likeness to his father was remarkable. "Language, gesture, and manner were all the same," wrote his delighted tutor. "All the old members recognised him instantly, and most of the young ones said this was the very man they had so often heard described."But it was not on his father's merits that William Pitt sprang into immediate fame; his own personality was his passport.Thirteen years before, another young man had entered Parliament, Charles James Fox, the brilliant, excitement-loving son of Lord Holland. After Eton and Oxford he had been sent abroad to complete his education, but so great were his follies and extravagances, that his father had to firmly summon him home. This mandate, we are told, "he obeyed with great reluctance," and he seems to have gone back with an extensive wardrobe of clothes in the latest and most costly fashions, leaving behind him enormous debts in every town he had visited.Lord Holland, who flattered himself that he had studied the world and human nature with great attention and success, decided that a seat in the House of Commons would best steady this irrepressible young man, and provide him with occupation and ambition, so, though he was only nineteen, and therefore legally not entitled to become a member, he was duly elected, the Speaker, by wilful or accidental oversight, offering no opposition. He too from the first delighted the House as a speaker, for he was fresh, forcible, and graceful, with a great personal charm of manner and an entire absence of conceit, and no one gave a more cordial welcome to Pitt than he did, little dreaming in how short a time this young man would be his lifelong and his successful rival. Rockingham, who had succeeded North as Prime Minister, died suddenly in 1782, and from every point of view Fox appeared to be the man who ought to have succeeded him. But the King cordially disliked Fox, and sent instead for Lord Shelburne. Fox, ever impetuous and hasty, refused to serve under him, and Shelburne turned to Pitt, who thus at the age of twenty-three became Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons. A year later Lord Shelburne resigned, and the Premiership was offered to Pitt, an honour greater perhaps than any honour ever offered to a young man of twenty-four. He declined it; the Duke of Portland accepted it; and Fox became leader in the House of Commons, with what seemed to be a strong coalition Government at the back of him. For the moment the Whigs were all-powerful, and against them stood Pitt, who refused to be a member of any coalition, with a handful of men who had belonged to the old Chatham party. No one hated the present arrangement more than the King, and before long he saw an opportunity of crushing it. Fox, chiefly by his own magnetic influence, had carried a bill concerning India through the Commons, but the Lords, influenced by the King, threw it out, whereupon he dismissed the Government, and persuaded Pitt to accept the office of Prime Minister. Never before had such a state of things prevailed. The Premier was a youth of twenty-four, with a majority of two to one against him in the House of Commons! Whatever he brought forward was defeated. Fox used all his eloquence against him, and over and over again he was put in an impossible position. Pitt, Lord Rosebery has told us, was never young. Certainly, at this crisis, his patience, his caution, his firmness, and his cool judgment would have done credit to a statesman of half a century's experience. He did not make a mistake, and gradually he won the country to his side. Before many months were over, Parliament was dissolved; an election had taken place; and Pitt came back into power with a large majority. For seventeen years he remained in office. Nothing could have been greater than the contrast between him and his strenuous opponent Fox, who was the most impulsive, genial, and lovable of men; extravagant in every direction, in his likes, his hates, and his sympathies; easily stirred and able to pour forth a torrent of passionate eloquence; living always in the excitement and impulses of the moment, with never a thought for the morrow. Pitt, on the contrary, was cool and thoughtful. He stood, as it were, aloof from all the world, though on the rare occasions when he unbent, he was full of charm. "Smiles were not natural to him," said a contemporary. "He is," said Wilberforce, who unfeignedly admired him, even though he could not always follow him, "one of the most public-spirited and upright men I ever knew." And he was called upon to guide the ship of State through troubled waters. It was his task to raise the money in payment of the American war bill, for a debt of about twenty millions stared him in the face. Then he had to face more than the usual amount of difficulty with Ireland, where the celebrated Dublin Parliament which Henry Grattan, its brilliant leader, had forced Fox to agree to, proved itself so unable to cope with the task undertaken, that riots and disturbances broke out in every quarter. Pitt believed that only one solution was possible, namely, that instead of a separate Parliament at Dublin, the Irish members with the Scotch should sit at Westminster, and in the year 1799 he brought in the Act of Union, which was carried during the next session, in spite of a strong speech against it by Grattan, who was dragged from his sick-room for the occasion. Pitt had also to contend with a restless wave which swept over England, the result of the French Revolution. But though the young minister was always ready for reform, he would have nothing to do with violent changes or with revolution, neither was he afraid to bring in such measures as seemed likely to repress the revolutionary spirits in England. The French leaders, not content with having executed their king and queen, and having waged war on Austria, when that country moved to rescue the luckless Austrian princess, now Queen Marie Antoinette, went to the further length of declaring that every country not agreeing with the doctrines of the Revolution was to be regarded as an enemy, and was to be forced into war. For some while Pitt managed to hold the English people from plunging into the conflict. He was altogether a peace minister. But public opinion was too strong for him; the old hatred of France was there, and the events of the last few years had fanned it into life. Pitt had to bow to the will of the nation, though it was the French who finally declared war in 1793 by an attack on Holland, after which England could no longer stand aloof, though Fox, in his hot-headed way, declared that in his opinion we had no right to demand the withdrawal of French troops from the Netherlands. From that time until the day of victory at Waterloo in 1815, the fight between England and France continued with more or less intensity.And the final issue was due in no small degree to Pitt, who, though he hated the war, had during his long ministry of peace freely spent millions of pounds on the British navy, recognising that so long as England was mistress of the seas she was safe. From the moment, too, that war was declared, he threw himself heart and soul into every measure for carrying it through successfully; never for a moment did he show a weak front, or fail to be the leader in every sense of the word. When Napoleon, elated by his series of triumphs on the Continent, prepared to invade England, it was Pitt who gave an impetus to the volunteer movement by himself raising a force of 3000 men, and placing himself at their head. "His spirit will lead him to be foremost in the battle, and I am uneasy at it," said Wilberforce; "yet it is his proper post, and I can say nothing against it." In an incredibly short time a volunteer force of 300,000 was enrolled, "their good sense and firmness supplying their want of experience." But though his spirit was as strong as ever, his delicate frame was giving way under the high pressure at which he had lived. True to his promise to Wilberforce, he had pushed forward the Abolition of Slavery Bill, and he did not relax an effort as regards his war policy, though on the Continent Napoleon was still all victorious. Wellesley, a young soldier, had just come back from India with a good reputation, and Pitt, then a dying man, sent for him. He knew that what England wanted now was a great soldier to lead her armies; her navy was safe under such commanders as St. Vincent, Collingwood, and Nelson. For hours he talked to Wellesley, only ceasing when he fainted from exhaustion. "The greatest minister that has ever ruled England," was the verdict of the soldier statesman. Then came the news of the victory at Trafalgar, saddened only by the death of the heroic Nelson. But Pitt was drifting far away from all these things. His mind wandered as his life flickered out; only just at the end there was a rally. "Oh my country!" he cried; "how I leave my country!" That was his last thought and his last speech.When the usual proposal was brought forward that he should be buried at Westminster at the expense of Parliament, and that a monument should be erected, Fox characteristically felt bound to oppose it. "He could not honestly," he said, "call a man an excellent statesman who had consistently supported so bad a system." But when it was further suggested that Parliament should pay the debts he had left and provide for his nearest relations, no one agreed so cordially or so readily as Fox. Wrong-headed he often was; wrong-hearted never.Into the same grave as his father William Pitt was laid in the presence of all the distinguished people of the day, his pall-bearers being six men each of whom had been, or was to be, a Prime Minister of England. "The figure of the first William Pitt," wrote Wilberforce, "seemed to be looking down with consternation into the grave of his favourite son, the last perpetuator of the name he had ennobled. It was an affecting ceremony."Pitt was still a young man, only forty-seven, yet into those years he had crowded a glorious life, and it was with truth that the herald proclaimed over his grave, "He lived not for himself, but for his country."Eight months later, Fox, who did not live to enjoy the power his rival's death had placed within his reach, was buried close to him in the Abbey. During his short spell of office, he had carried Wilberforce's Slave Bill, and had frequently said he could retire happily when once that bill was made safe. He disdainfully refused a Peerage. "I will not close my politics in that foolish way," was his remark. Near together too, though not in the Statesmen's Corner, are the monuments of these two whose lives were throughout so interwoven. Pitt towers in lonely state over the west door, standing there as if he were about to pour forth his magnificent eloquence on the statues below and charm them back into life for one brief moment. Fox lies surrounded by weeping figures, one of whom represents the negro whose cause he had so powerfully championed. And so the great Mother Church gathers them both to herself, claiming each as a noble son of England.Henry Grattan, the Irishman, is buried close to Fox, his friend and hero. He had often told his followers that he wished to lie in a quiet churchyard of his loved Ireland, but they had other ideas. "Well then," he said resignedly, "Westminster Abbey!" His funeral had a very distinctive touch, for it was attended by hundreds of Irish children from various charitable institutions, all of whom wore dresses of bright green.Next to the imposing monument of Chatham is a statue to Lord Palmerston, that most English of statesmen. He went into political life more from a sense of duty than from any particular liking for it, or from any feelings of ambition. But into every office that he held he carried with him a sturdy independence, a dogged tenacity of purpose, a fund of common sense, and a very clear idea of what he meant to attain. Add to this that he was the essence of good-nature, the most genial of friends, simple and straight, manly and cheery, and we have some idea of the man whom the nation insisted on having for Prime Minister, when he was over seventy years of age, at a critical moment when it was felt that only a strong, fearless, popular statesman could guide the ship out of the storm.And then, in contrast to the kindly, contented Palmerston, comes the tomb of Lord Castlereagh, a statesman as much out of touch with the people as "Pam" was their hero. He was Secretary of State for War in those days when the struggle with France was beginning, and because at first things went badly he was made the scapegoat. It was he who planned that combination of forces which at last broke down the French resistance, but that was not realised till long afterwards; in those early days his policy was not successful, so it was unpopular. He stood aloof from all men; he was cold, indifferent, wanting in tact, with no gifts as a speaker, and yet, looking back now on his work, it is easy to see how well he faced a period of unexampled difficulty. Nevertheless, he was invariably misunderstood, and therefore unjustly disliked, so that at last his mind gave way under the storm of hatred and abuse levelled against him, and, in a dark moment, he put an end to his life. Even at his funeral in the Abbey, the crowds could not forget their dislike of him, and shouted exultantly as the coffin was carried inside the doors. But the Abbey gave him a welcome and a resting-place.On the opposite side stand the statues of the three Cannings: George Canning, the statesman; his youngest son, Lord Canning, first Viceroy of India; and their cousin, Lord Stratford de Radcliffe, "the wise old man of the East," who was our ambassador at Constantinople during those years which led up to the Crimean War, and whose influence, supported by the Government at home and France, made it possible for Turkey to hold Russia at bay. The verse on the statue:"Thou third great Canning, stand among our bestAnd noblest, now thy long day's work hath ceased;Here silent, in our Minster of the West,Who wert the voice of England in the East,"is the work of Tennyson, who has only written one other epitaph in the Abbey. Close together are the monuments of Sir Robert Peel and Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Peel was the Minister who, in the face of violent opposition, caused the tax on imported corn to be repealed, thereby making bread cheaper; and Disraeli, who first won his reputation by the persistent manner in which he fought this policy of Peel's, doggedly forged his way to the front against much prejudice, until he, though not an Englishman by race, held the proud position of being the loved and trusted Prime Minister of Queen Victoria. The statue of Beaconsfield—for by his own desire he was buried next to his wife in the country churchyard at Hughenden—casts its shadow over the grave of William Ewart Gladstone, whose family only consented to his being laid there on the condition that Mrs. Gladstone should eventually rest beside him, even as Lady Palmerston lay by her husband's side. The coffin which contained this old statesman, who was better loved and better hated perhaps than any public man of our generation, was placed for some time in Westminster Hall, and nearly a quarter of a million people passed through to pay their last token of respect. The time has not yet come when his place in English history as a statesman can be fairly judged, but friend and foe alike can bear tribute to his brilliant intellect; his talents as a financier; his excellent learning; his wonderful personality; his rich eloquence; his generous sympathies; his stainless private life; and to those other qualities which his political opponent Lord Salisbury so finely described as making him "a great Christian." "God bless you, and this place, and the land you love," had been his last public utterance, and in the spirit of that message we leave him, who in life stirred up such sharp dissensions, sleeping peacefully in the Abbey.
CHAPTER XVIII
WILBERFORCE AND HIS FELLOW-WORKERS
The desire of Abou Ben Adhem that his name might be handed on as one "who loved his fellow-men" would form a fitting epitaph not only to those great-hearted workers in the cause of humanity whom the Abbey has delighted to honour—William Wilberforce, the liberator of the slave, and David Livingstone, the missionary and explorer in Darkest Africa—but also to those others who toiled with them in the same great cause of freedom, and whose claims to the grateful recollection of the nation are recorded only by monuments—Granville Sharp, Jonas Hanway, Zachary Macaulay, Fowell Buxton, and Anthony Astley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury. A few words first about one of these latter, Granville Sharp, for he it was who became the pioneer of that noble band who never ceased from their labours till they had freed the slave on British territory.
He was only a linen-draper's assistant, afterwards becoming a clerk in the Ordnance Office; but the monotony of his work never allowed monotony or narrowness to enter his life. His heart was responsive to every high claim, and difficulties only meant to him obstacles to be overcome. Courage, energy, and determination were his watchwords. His brother was a doctor in Mincing Lane, who saw poor people free of charge, and among his patients was a negro called Jonathan Strong, who had been brought to London by his master, a lawyer, from Barbadoes, only to be turned out into the streets friendless and homeless when he fell ill. Dr. Sharp treated him so successfully that he became quite well, and Granville Sharp found him a situation with a chemist, which he kept for some years, until one day he was seen and recognised by his old employer, who finding him well and active had him seized, and kept in custody until he could be shipped off to the West Indies. Jonathan, in despair, thought of Granville Sharp, and appealed to him for protection. Sharp at once went to the Lord Mayor, who gave judgment that the man had been wrongfully seized and held without a warrant, and ordered him to be at once set at liberty. But then arose an unlooked-for difficulty. Jonathan's late master had sold him, and his new owner appeared with the bill of sale, claiming his property and declaring he had been robbed. Then came the question as to whether the traffic in slaves which went on openly, especially in London and Liverpool, was lawful or not. Was a slave free when he reached England, or could he be seized and compelled to go back? The lawyers declared that no English law protected the slave. Granville Sharp refused to believe it. During the next few years he spent every hour of his spare time in studying the law; in wading through masses of dry Acts; in sorting, sifting, verifying, and quoting, though more than one friendly lawyer assured him that all his work was a useless waste of time. But the result of his labours surprised them as much as it cheered the heart of Granville Sharp, for it proved that "there was nothing in any English law or statute which could justify the enslaving of others." He at once published a plain, clear pamphlet which he called "The Injustice of Tolerating Slavery in England;" and further than that, certain in the justice of his cause, he went down, armed with a writ of Habeas Corpus, to Gravesend, where he had been told of a captured negro who was being taken back by force. He found the wretched man chained to the mainmast, but after a fierce struggle he got possession of him and returned with him in triumph to London. He did much the same in the case of another negro called James Somerset, whose owner promptly brought the matter before Lord Chief-Justice Mansfield, who declared the question to be so important and doubtful a one that he must take the opinion of the judges upon it. A very lengthy trial followed. At last the court gave the opinion, that every man in England had a right to his liberty unless he had broken the law; that the power to seize or claim a slave in England had never been acknowledged by the law, and that therefore Somerset was free. It was the first great step towards a more far-reaching freedom, and it was mainly won by the careful, devoted study of Granville Sharp, whose pamphlet had made a great impression on the Lord Chief-Justice. The next step was to found a society for the Abolition of Slavery, and to this flocked a number of men, chiefly Quakers, who banded themselves together with most steadfast determination never to cease from their labours until Parliament had declared all traffic in slaves to be illegal in every part of the British Empire. This was a gigantic undertaking, for British merchants dealt largely in slaves, and they were so powerful a body that it was certain the Government would shrink from opposing them. But this little band of religious, earnest, chivalrous men had the strength which comes from the conviction that theirs was a righteous cause destined in the end to triumph over every obstacle. One of their number was William Wilberforce, a young and a delicate-looking man, who when only twenty years of age had been elected as member for Hull, with no powerful support except what he derived from his own personal influence and his independent character. In London he soon made his mark. Pitt became his greatest friend, and in society he was made much of, so full was he of wit and charm; while in addition to his many other gifts, he was an excellent singer. But fascinating and absorbing as was the life into which he was then thrown, it did not satisfy him. Even while he stood on a height, he caught the glimpse of the height that is higher, the which having once seen, no true man can rest until he has attained it. As the vision unfolded itself before his eyes Wilberforce became a changed man, so much so that for a time it was believed by his friends that he would leave public life and go quietly to the country. But his vision, instead of narrowing down his conception of duty, broadened it out. "To shut myself up," he said to his mother, "would merit no better name than desertion. It would be flying from the post in which I have been placed, and I could not look for the blessing of God upon my retirement."
Just at this crisis he came under the influence of two or three people who felt intensely on the slavery question, and in him they saw the very Parliamentary champion they needed. With his great influence, his powers of speech, his many friends, his independent character, and his high enthusiasms, Wilberforce seemed destined for this work, and he eagerly grasped it. Here was a direct call from God, and to him now every gift, every power he possessed was held as a sacred trust. Besides, he was respected by all parties in the House, and the hope of the Anti-Slavery party lay in their cause being non-political. Victory could only crown their efforts when the whole moral feeling of the nation was aroused, and much, very much hung on their choice of a leader. "Mr. Wilberforce," said Granville Sharp, "with his position as member for the largest county, the great influence of his personal connections, added to his unblemished character, will secure every advantage to the cause." So from the year 1787, William Wilberforce, chivalrous as any knight of old, gave up his life to the righting of a great wrong and to the deliverance of the oppressed.
For twenty years the fight went on, and though he was successfully opposed over and over again by the strong West Indian party, assisted by many of the Tories and the majority in the House of Lords, he was never baffled or disheartened.
"I am in no degree discouraged," he said after one defeat. "It is again my intention to move next year for the abolition, and though I dare not hope to carry the bill through both Houses, yet, if I do not deceive myself, this infamous and wicked traffic will not last out the century."
Both Pitt and Fox supported Wilberforce, but the opposition was solid and wealthy, and the bill above mentioned, brought in during the session of 1796, was again defeated by 78 votes to 61. The Revolution in France was causing much excitement and apprehension among all classes of Englishmen, and the opponents of Wilberforce attempted, among other things, to prove that he was at heart a revolutionist, and that his efforts to set free a class who had always been kept in slavery showed that he believed in the revolutionary "rights of men."
"There is no greater enemy to all such delusions," Pitt warmly and indignantly made reply.
But by 1804 a change had come about. All fears regarding a revolution in England were allayed; every year Wilberforce and his party, by their steady persistence, their moderation, and their powerful appeals to the highest motives, had gained converts to their cause both in and out of Parliament, and the Bill of May 30, 1804, was carried in the Commons by a majority of over 70. This was by far the greatest triumph Wilberforce had yet gained, but to his regret it was not proceeded with by the House of Lords, who had thrown out the two previous bills, though, in fairness be it said, the majorities with which they had come from the Commons had been very small. However, the Abolitionists were by now accustomed to possessing their souls in patience, and they knew the tide had turned in their favour. The death of Pitt put Fox, who of the two men was the more zealous supporter of their cause, into power; he prevailed upon a majority in the Cabinet to declare that the slave trade was contrary to the principles of justice, humanity, and sound policy, and should be abolished by the House with all practicable expediency. In 1807 the bill was again brought in, this time to be carried by a majority of 283 to 16. The Solicitor-General made a powerful speech, in which he contrasted the feelings of the Emperor of the French in all his greatness with those of that "honoured man who would soon lay his head on his pillow, knowing that the slave trade was no more." At this reference to Wilberforce the House burst into delighted applause. They had seen him during his many years of brave fighting, and now that victory was at hand, they cheered him with such cheers as had seldom before been given to any man sitting in his place in either House. Further opposition was useless, and the bill became law.
"God will bless this country," was Wilberforce's earnest declaration, in the gladdest, proudest moment of his life. His own share in the good work he counted as nothing.
Much was won, but not all. The slave trade was abolished—that is to say, slaves could not be taken to any British possession, or put on any British ships, and our warships were instructed to capture any vessels disobeying this order. Yet slaves were still held by British masters in the West Indies and on the American coast. Wilberforce, far from resting content with his victory, made ready for a second fight, having now for his lieutenant in the House of Commons, Fowell Buxton, called Elephant Buxton, on account of his great size, a man as energetic and indefatigable by nature as he was powerful in appearance. However sad the lot of the slaves, they had been bought and paid for under the old law by their masters, just as if they had been cattle or any other marketable produce, so that if they were to be set free by law, the money spent on them must in honour be returned to these masters, or otherwise they would be ruined, and a great injustice would be done. To compensate the owners, and thus honourably to free every slave, required a large sum of money, not less than £20,000,000; but so changed had become public opinion throughout England, and consequently in Parliament, that the money was voted in 1833. For the last few years Wilberforce had been in failing health, and his old place in the House of Commons knew him no more; but Buxton had valiantly carried on the work, in a spirit best illustrated by some words of his own:—
"The longer I live, the more certain I am that the great difference between men, between the feeble and the powerful, the great and the insignificant, is energy,invincible determination—a purpose once fixed, and then, death or victory! That quality will do anything that can be done in the world, and no talents, no circumstances, no opportunities, will make a two-legged creature a man without it."
Wilberforce just lived to hear the glorious news which crowned his life and work, and to realise that from that day forward there would not exist a slave in any British colony. It was the great triumph of righteousness, and humbly he thanked God that his had been the privilege of leading the little army which had gone on from strength to strength until its mission was accomplished. Two or three days later he passed peacefully away, and immediately after his death this letter, signed by all the leading members of both Houses of Parliament, was sent to his son:—
"We being anxious upon public grounds to show our respect for the memory of the late William Wilberforce, and being also satisfied that public honours cannot be more fitly bestowed than upon such benefactors of mankind, earnestly request that he may be buried in Westminster Abbey, and that we, with others who agree with us in these sentiments, may have permission to attend the funeral."
So to the Abbey he was brought. All public business was suspended, and public men of every rank followed him to the grave. Members of Parliament were there in numbers to show their reverence for one whose eloquence had ever been put to the noblest uses, and, fitly enough, his body was laid close to the tombs of Pitt and Fox.
"If you carry this point in your life, that life will be far better spent than in being prime minister many years," a much-loved friend had said to Wilberforce when he first resolved to devote himself to the cause of the slave, and to set aside all thought of his own career and ambition. The young enthusiast had counted the cost, but it had not changed him from his determination, and though he lived and died plain William Wilberforce, member of parliament, the Abbey roll of honour is made richer by his name, and he rests worthily in the Statesmen's Corner, great as any of those among whom he lies.
Just as Wilberforce was nearing the close of his life, a young spinner in some mills near Glasgow, glowing with enthusiasm, was resolving to offer himself as a medical missionary to China or Africa. David Livingstone, for he it was, came of homely Scottish stock.
"The only point of family tradition I feel proud of is this," he declared. "One of my forefathers, when on his death-bed, called his children round him and said, 'I have searched diligently throughout all the traditions of our family, and I never could find there was a dishonest man among them.... So I leave this precept with you, Be honest.'"
[image]DAVID LIVINGSTONE.
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DAVID LIVINGSTONE.
And perfectly honest David Livingstone certainly was to the end of his days. Though he went to work in the mills when ten years old, his love of books made him learn eagerly in every spare moment and on so late into the night, that his mother, half in anger, half in pride, often went to him at midnight and carried off every available light. However David was a sturdy youth, or twelve hours' work each day in the factory added to six hours' reading would have ruined his health. He was twenty-five when he offered himself to the London Missionary Society, and he was sent for a three months' trial to a training-place in Essex. But when he had to deliver his first sermon, every idea fled from his brain. "I have forgotten all I had to say, friends," he announced frankly, and left the pulpit. But for his other sterling qualities, this would have put an end to his career. As it was, he was given another three months and came successfully out of the ordeal, after which he went for two years to a London hospital. Africa was to be his destination, "Don't go to an old station," Dr. Moffat, the veteran missionary, said to him on the eve of his ordination. "But push on to the vast unoccupied district to the north, where on a clear morning I have seen the smoke of a thousand villages no missionary has ever reached." Kuruman, an important station of the Missionary Society, more than seven hundred miles up country, was his first halting-place after leaving Cape Town, and he set himself with great energy to learn the language of the natives, acting at the same time as their doctor. In this last capacity he soon made his name famous, and patients came to him over enormous distances. Splendid patients they were too, he always declared, perfectly obedient and of extraordinary courage. When once he had mastered their language, which he did in a short while, he combined his missionary and medical work very happily.
In 1843 he left Kuruman to form a new station about two hundred miles to the north-east at Mabotsa, and whilst here he married a daughter of Dr. Moffat, a girl who had lived among missionaries for many years, and so was accustomed to the rough, solitary existence which would be her lot. "My time," wrote Livingstone to a friend, "is filled up with building, gardening, cobbling, doctoring, tinkering, carpentering, gun-mending, farriering, preaching, schooling, teaching, and lecturing, while my wife, in addition to her usual work, makes clothes, soap, and candles, and teaches classes of children."
Gradually it dawned upon Livingstone that a great work awaited him in the interior, but it was a work which he must face alone. "I must not be a more sorry soldier than those who serve an earthly sovereign," he wrote to the Directors of the Mission, to whose care he commended his family. "And so powerfully am I convinced it is the will of God, that I will go, no matter who opposes."
Therefore in 1852, having seen his wife and children off to England, he started in his Cape waggon and again made for Kuruman, after leaving which he was constantly harassed by parties of Boers, who believed he was teaching their slaves to rise in revolt. But he reached the land of Sebituan, a friendly chief, safely, and found the warmest welcome awaiting him. As doctor and missionary his hands were full, and seeing the field of work opening all around him, he grew more and more anxious to become the pioneer missioner to the very interior. Fever, he realised, would be his worst enemy. "I would like," he wrote in his journal, "to discover some remedy for that terrible disease. I must go to parts where it prevails most and try to discover if the natives have a remedy for it.... I mean to open up a path to the interior or perish. I never have had the shadow of a doubt. Cannot the love of Christ carry the missionary where the slave trade carries the trader?"
The travels of Livingstone through that unknown country which he practically discovered, would have to be closely followed on a map from point to point to be made clear. Otherwise they are a mere string of strange names. He set out in the November of 1853. "I had three muskets for my people and a double-barrelled gun for myself," he said. "My ammunition was distributed through the luggage, that we might not be left without a supply. Our chief hopes for food were in our guns. I carried twenty pounds of beads, a few pounds of tea, sugar, and coffee. One tin canister was filled with spare clothes, another was stored with medicines, a third with books, and a fourth with a magic lantern. A small tent, a sheep-skin, and a horse-rug completed my equipment, as an array of baggage would have excited the tribes." Four years later, worn out by frequent attacks of fever, but otherwise perfectly satisfied with the result of his journeyings into parts where as yet no other Englishman had penetrated, Livingstone sailed for England, having heard nothing of his family for three years. He at once became the hero of the hour; dinners were given, speeches were made in his honour, and he was asked to equip and command a government expedition for the exploration of that part of South-Eastern Africa through which the river Zambesi flows. After some consideration he decided to undertake this, though it meant that from henceforth he would cease to be a missionary pure and simple. But he looked at the question in its broadest aspect. "Wherever I go," he said, "I go as the servant of God, following the leadings of His Hand. My ideal of a missionary is not that of a dumpy man with a Bible under his arm. I feel I am not my own. I am serving Christ in labouring as well as in preaching, and having by His help got information which I hope will bring blessing to Africa, am I to hide the light under a bushel, because some will not consider it sufficiently or even at all missionary? I refrain from taking any salary from Missionary Societies, so no loss is sustained by any one."
In the March of 1858 he returned to his work, and Mrs. Livingstone started with him to go at least as far as Kuruman. This second Zambesi expedition lasted nearly six years, and as Livingstone stood on the shores of Lake Nyasa, he was able to feel that he stood where no white man had ever stood before him. Three years later, Bishop Mackenzie and six missionaries followed him here, but among the many sorrows which fell upon him about this time, was the death of the "good bishop" from fever, the death of his own wife, and the growing feeling that the extreme unhealthiness of the district would make anything like colonisation impossible. His third great journey, commenced in 1866, was his last, and when more than three years passed by without any tidings of him, owing to his long stay in the country of the cannibal Manyema, the editor of theNew York Heraldequipped an expedition to go in search of him the man in charge of it being Henry Stanley, whose orders were "to find Livingstone, living or dead." It was in 1871 that the two men met face to face at Tanganyika, and the relieving party found the object of their search almost alone, worn out, fever-stricken, cut off from all news of his children, and as near to despair as was possible to one of his strong faith and brave nature. But when Stanley, after many attacks of fever, returned to Europe, he could not persuade his companion to leave the country, which held him as a magnet. He was determined to find the sources of the Nile, and the determination cost him his life. The district through which he fought his way has been described as "one vast sponge," and was poisonous to the last degree. His strength failed, and though his faithful natives bore him along on a litter with the utmost tenderness, his sufferings were terrible. He died on the first of May 1873, alone save for his natives, "the greatest and best man who ever explored Africa." Believing that to labour is to pray, if the work be done for God's glory and not for self-advancement, David Livingstone's life had been one long prayer, and throughout those lonely dangerous journeyings the sense of God's Presence had been his stay and comfort. Around the last hours of the brave man a veil is drawn. But who can doubt that the love of God overshadowed him, and made even that desolate, marsh-like place a road of light, along which the worn-out traveller passed to Him, his one true goal?
His native servants behaved with beautiful devotion, and would not leave him alone in death. His heart they buried where he died, but as best they could they embalmed his body, and by slow stages made their way towards the coast with their precious burden, which they were determined somehow to get to England. At one time every one of them was stricken down by the terrible fever, but on they went for many a month, through swamp and desert and through hostile lands. Nothing could daunt them. Their master must lie in his home, far away, over the seas. When at last they reached Zanzibar and handed over the trust they had so loyally guarded, they barely received a word of thanks. But one friend of Livingstone's came forward just in time, and undertook to pay all expenses for two of their number to go to England and be present at the funeral. Susi and Chuma, two of the slaves the Doctor had freed, and his most devoted attendants, were chosen to go with their master till the end of his journey. It was almost a year after his death when the great traveller was borne into the Abbey, and those two stood there among the mourners, awe-struck but contented. Their task was accomplished; the white man who had been their deliverer lay among his own people.
A very simple inscription, ending with the words, "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold. Them also must I bring," marks the place in the nave where, with a curious significance, Livingstone, an architect of the Empire, lies close to other architects, Sir Charles Barry, Sir Gilbert Scott, and John Pearson, whose works are to be seen in the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and Westminster Hall.
We cannot leave these lovers of humanity without one glance at the statue of the good Earl of Shaftesbury, the friend of little children and of all those who were desolate and oppressed. Possessed of all that could make life attractive to him, he devoted himself to his dying day to the service of his fellows, and his name will go down to history as the liberator of the white slaves in England. For, as Wilberforce championed the negro, Shaftesbury fought long and steadily in the cause of the women and children employed in factories and collieries, who worked sometimes for thirty-six hours at a time under the most appalling conditions. At last he forced Parliament to take action, and to pass the Ten Hours' Bill, besides insisting that factory inspectors were appointed to see that all workers were protected as the law intended they should be. That was his greatest work, but to tell of all that he did would fill a volume with a record of golden deeds. Ever ready to lead an unpopular cause; an enthusiast without being a fanatic; strong, clear-headed, steadfast, reliable, and single-hearted, he stands out a noble figure in the social history of the nineteenth century. Just before his death, in 1885, his friend, Dean Stanley, in writing to him, spoke of Westminster Abbey as the place where he should rest. But the old man shook his head and begged to be buried in his country home.
However, the Abbey could not altogether refrain from doing him honour, and through streets lined with people, many of them the poorest in the land, most of them wearing some outward sign of mourning, a bit of black ribbon or a scrap of crape, followed by deputations from almost every charitable association, the coffin was carried to Westminster. Around it stood high and low, rich and poor. The wreaths sent by royal princes lay Bide by side with the tributes from the flower-girls and the boys on the training-ships. A mighty volume of sound ascended to the vaulted roof, as the familiar hymn was sung—
"Let saints on earth in concert sing,With those whose rest is won,For all the servants of our KingIn earth and heaven are one!"
"Let saints on earth in concert sing,With those whose rest is won,For all the servants of our KingIn earth and heaven are one!"
"Let saints on earth in concert sing,
With those whose rest is won,
With those whose rest is won,
For all the servants of our King
In earth and heaven are one!"
In earth and heaven are one!"
Then the organ ceased, the Blessing was given, and the great procession left the Abbey to the march of the coster-mongers' band, to the tramp of thousands of feet, whose way in life he had made more easy and more blessed.
In the north aisle of the nave rest three great men, builders in another way, who have served the world by their thoughts—Newton, Herschel, and Darwin.
Sir Isaac Newton made one of the most wonderful discoveries in the world of science and nature, the law of gravitation, and also invented a method by which the whole course of a comet could be calculated. On his monument you will see a globe, covered with constellations and the path of a comet, while below are groups of children weighing the sun and the moon. The long Latin epitaph was one which greatly offended Dr. Johnson, who said that "none but philosophers could understand it."
Sir John Herschel was the son of a distinguished father, and from his boyhood he resolved to follow in his father's footsteps. "To put my shoulders to the wheel, and to leave the world a little better than I found it," was the ideal he set before himself whilst at Cambridge, and in this spirit he carried on the work of making a careful study of the stars in the southern hemisphere, which had never been done before.
Besides astronomy he was devoted to books, especially to poetry, and translated many of Schiller's poems, as well as parts of the "Iliad," into English. "Give a man," he said, "once the taste for reading good books, and you place him in contact with the best society in every period of history, with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest of characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages."
His eyes were fixed on the stars; his heart was ever set on those things that are above. These are the beautiful words in which he has described the object and the end of all his study:—
"To spring even a little way aloft, to carol for awhile in bright and sunny regions—to open the doors of the human mind to let in light and knowledge, always sure that right will come right at last—to rise to the level of our strength, and if we must sink again, to sink not exhausted but exercised, not dulled in spirit, but cheered in heart—such may be the contented and happy lot of him who can repose with equal confidence on the bosom of the earth, or ride above the mists of earth into the empyrean day."
He died loaded with honours in 1871, though no man sought fame or honour less.
"Enough if cleansed at last from earthly stain,My homeward step be firm, and pure my evening sky."
"Enough if cleansed at last from earthly stain,My homeward step be firm, and pure my evening sky."
"Enough if cleansed at last from earthly stain,
My homeward step be firm, and pure my evening sky."
Thus had he written, and how could longing soar higher?
[image]CHARLES DARWIN.
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CHARLES DARWIN.
Charles Darwin was perhaps the greatest man of the three, for after long years of patient hard work, bravely carried on through bad health, he produced as the result of his experiments a wonderful book called "The Origin of Species," in which he explained how the world, instead of being created all at once as it is to-day, has grown slowly and very gradually, through many processes, just as we ourselves, our minds, and all our powers have developed from a state of savagery into our present state of civilisation. When first Darwin published his work explaining all this, some people were frightened and horrified, and declared that he wanted to upset all the old ideas about God and religion. But thus they had said whenever a new discovery had been made, and yet with each new discovery we have only learnt more and more how great God is, and how—
"He moves in a mysterious wayHis wonders to perform."
"He moves in a mysterious wayHis wonders to perform."
"He moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform."
His wonders to perform."
So all such great discoverers as Newton, Herschel, and Darwin give us in reality the same message, which is never to be afraid of truth, for truth comes from God, and the only danger is when we doubt, even for a moment, that it must come triumphant out of every honest discussion.
CHAPTER XIX
PITT AND THE STATESMEN'S CORNER
When William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, was buried in the north transept at Westminster Abbey in the year 1778, Parliament having decreed that "he ought to be brought near to the dust of kings," and not lie in St. Paul's Cathedral, earnestly though the City of London begged for this favour, he drew to that part of the Abbey so many distinguished ministers of the Crown, that it soon received the name of the Statesmen's Corner, in distinction to the Poets' Corner which Chaucer had created. Pitt the elder and Pitt the younger, Fox, Canning, Palmerston, Castlereagh, Grattan, and Gladstone—these are the names which most closely belong to the Statesmen's Corner, and through their lives we can catch glimpses of English political life from the reign of George II. down to our own day.
William Pitt entered Parliament in 1735, and joined the party calling themselves the Patriots, rallying round the Prince of Wales, who was always at enmity with the King and Queen. This party naturally included any one opposed to Walpole, still the all-powerful minister at Court. The Patriots were young men, talented and vigorous, and their first signal victory was obtained when they forced Walpole into declaring war against Spain, that country, they insisted, having systematically hampered, injured, and insulted British traders, in spite of treaties and negotiations. Walpole was before all else a peace minister; but the Patriots, supported by the country, declared that war was necessary if England was to uphold her position and power on the seas, and Pitt, full of energy and eloquence, was one of the most powerful, though one of the youngest, among the Patriots. This war, as Walpole had foreseen, was but the prelude to a general disturbance; England became involved in Continental quarrels, and the Stuart party seized this opportunity of making a final, though unsuccessful attempt to place Prince Charles Edward on the throne. After nine years a treaty of peace was signed at Aix-la-Chapelle, and broadly speaking, the result of the war, so far as this country was concerned, was that we had been successful on the seas, in Canada, and in India, unsuccessful on the Continent. Walpole had resigned, Newcastle was a Prime Minister "who had neither judgment nor ability," and Pitt became more and more the ruling power. The year 1757 saw him virtually Prime Minister, and with his whole might he set himself to arouse a national spirit in England, to make the people see that our real future lay not in the Continent, but in the Colonies. "I can save this country, nobody else can," he said confidently at this time, and it was no vain boast. The years which followed were glorious years. In India, France had joined with a powerful native prince to oust the British traders, and had been utterly defeated at Plassey by the genius of Clive, who had but a handful of troops as against seventy thousand. That victory made the British masters of the whole province of Bengal, and laid the foundations of our Indian Empire. From henceforward the French power in India rapidly declined. In America an equal triumph crowned Pitt's policy. In Wolfe he had found a man able to do in the West what Clive did in the East, and Canada became a British Colony. Wolfe himself fell in the great struggle for Quebec, as did Montcalm, his rival French general, and a monument stands in the north ambulatory of the Abbey to the memory of the gallant young leader, who died in the hour of his victory. "It is necessary to watch for a victory every morning for fear of missing one," was the remark of Walpole's son Horace. And the nation felt that it was Pitt whose policy and whose power had made all these things possible. Parliament was entirely in his hands, he swayed the Commons by his eloquence just as he impressed them by his strength; the King supported him, and the people adored him.
But in 1760 George II. died, and his second son George, who succeeded him (Frederick Prince of Wales having died), did not care for a minister so fearless and independent. Neither was Pitt without enemies. When he saw that his opponents, supported by the King, were determined to make a peace with France of which he could not approve, he resigned, after making a powerful speech though he was very ill at the time. His words concluded thus: "It is because I see in this treaty the seeds of a future war that it meets with my most hearty disapprobation. The peace is insecure, because it restores the enemy to his former greatness; the peace is inadequate, because the places gained are no equivalent for the places surrendered." Before a year was over, all that Pitt foretold had come to pass, and England was again at war with Spain. Bute, who had been virtually Prime Minister since Pitt gave up office, now resigned, leaving in power Grenville, the leader in the House of Commons, and in a very short time Grenville brought forward a measure concerning America, which was so short-sighted and so opposed to the colonial spirit, that it could only have a disastrous ending. Practically all North America was in British hands, and it was divided into thirteen different States, besides Canada. Those States had their own Colonial Assemblies, but the supreme power rested with the British Parliament. In 1765 Grenville brought in the Stamp Act, by which American colonists had to use legal paper stamped in England for all their agreements, and this was carried without the consent of the colonists, as they had no representatives in Parliament, so that besides imposing a tax on them, Parliament had really tampered with one of their most sacred rights as British subjects. The Act was very badly received in America, and relations became so strained that Pitt, to whom any matter affecting the Colonies was very dear, came out of his retirement to protest against the Act, and brought all his splendid fearless eloquence to bear on the subject. "This kingdom has no right to tax the Colonies," he argued, and he went on to declare—
"I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.... The Commons of America have ever been in possession of their constitutional right of giving and granting their own money. They would have been slaves if they had not enjoyed it.... A gentleman asks, 'When were the Colonies emancipated?' I desire to know when were they made slaves? ... I stand up for this kingdom. I maintain that our legislative power over the Colonies is sovereign and supreme in every circumstance of government and legislation. But taxation is no part of the governing or legislative power. Taxes are a voluntary gift and grant of the Commons alone. When therefore in this House we give and grant, we give and grant what is our own. But in an American tax what do we do? We, your Majesty's Commons for Great Britain, give and grant to your Majesty—what? Our own property? No; we give and grant to your Majesty the property of your Majesty's Commons of America. It is an absurdity in terms. I beg leave to move that the Stamp Act be repealed absolutely, totally, and immediately; that the reason for the repeal be assigned because it was founded on an erroneous principle. At the same time let the sovereign authority of this country over the Colonies be asserted in as strong terms as can be devised, that we exercise every power except that of taking their money out of their pockets without their consent."
Pitt still held his sway over the House of Commons, and the Act was repealed. A few months later he was again Prime Minister, but now no longer as William Pitt, the great Commoner. He had accepted a title, to the disappointment of many of his followers, who had revered him in the past for his entire independence; and after he sat in the Lords as Earl of Chatham, his influence never made itself felt in the same way. Besides, his health continually broke down, bravely though he struggled against it, and he was often laid aside for many months at a time. During one of these periods, another irritating Act was passed, taxing all the tea, glass, and paper imported into America, and as this occurred just when the sore feelings over the Stamp Act had been allayed, it was particularly unfortunate. The Colonists looked on it as an act of revenge for their victory and determined to resist it, while the King was unfortunately surrounded by a party, of which Lord North was the chief, who urged him, whatever the cost might be, to force America into submission. Lord North becoming Prime Minister was the signal for an outbreak of public feeling in America; riots occurred, and some tea-laden ships in Boston harbour were boarded, the tea being all thrown into the water. Again Chatham raised his voice on the side of consideration, of common sense, and of conciliation.
"My Lords," he said, after he had used one telling argument after another to prove how useless and irritating had been the action of the Government, driving these loyal sons of the old country into actions which were the result of despair, and which in cooler moments they would heartily regret, "I am an old man, and I plead for a gentle mode of governing America, for the day is not far distant when America may vie with these kingdoms, not only in arms, but in arts also.... If we take a transient view of those motives which induced the ancestors of our fellow-subjects in America to leave their native country to encounter the innumerable difficulties of the unexplored regions of the western world, our astonishment at the present conduct of their descendants will naturally subside. There was no corner of the world into which men of their free and enterprising spirit would not fly with alacrity rather than submit to the slavish and tyrannical principles which prevailed at that period in their native country. And shall we wonder, my Lords, if the descendants of such illustrious characters spurn with contempt the hand of unconstitutional power, that would snatch from them the dearly-bought privilege they now contend for? My Lords, proceed like a kind and affectionate parent over a child whom he tenderly loves. Instead of these harsh and severe proceedings, pass an amnesty on their youthful errors; clasp them once more in fond, affectionate arms, and I venture to affirm you will find them children worthy of their sire."
But his powerful pleading fell on deaf ears. All in vain did he urge that though the Government might be revenged on America, no Government could conquer it. In 1775 war, terrible as a civil war, broke out between the old country and the new. The Congress raised an army, and set at the head of it George Washington. "The man first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen," solemnly declared that from henceforth the United Colonies would be free and independent States, and carried on the campaign with the utmost success, assisted by France. Dismayed at last and astonished, Lord North and his ministers began to talk of conciliation. But it was too late. Two British forces, each of about four thousand men, had been forced to surrender to the American troops. No longer was it possible for England to make terms.
At home there was consternation, irresolution, and a sense of deep resentment against the Government which had so blundered. Chatham was a dying man, but he yet had something to say. Weakness, irresolution, or fear were unknown words to him, even though now he admitted—
"I tremble for this country; I am almost led to despair that we shall ever be able to extricate ourselves."
On the 7th of April 1778 he lifted up his voice for the last time, this time against an ignominious surrender, which the discomfited Government, terrified by the action of France, were all too ready to accept. Conscious himself of his fast-ebbing strength, Chatham, the Imperialist minister of the eighteenth century, summoned all his old fire and eloquence to his aid, and spoke with intense feeling, rejoicing, he said, "that the grave had not yet closed on him, pressed down as he was by the hand of infirmity."
Panic-stricken, the Government were inclined to offer absolute independence to all the Colonies. Chatham vigorously opposed the idea.
"His Majesty," he declared, "succeeded to an empire as great in extent as its reputation was unsullied. Shall we tarnish the lustre of this nation by an ignominious surrender of its rights and fairest possessions? Shall this great kingdom, that has survived whole and entire the Danish degradations, the Scottish invasion, the Norman Conquest, that has stood the threatened invasion of the Spanish Armada, now fall prostrate before the house of Bourbon? Shall a people that seventeen years ago was the terror of the world, now stoop so low as to tell its ancient and insatiate enemy, 'Take all we have: only give us peace.' In God's name, if it be absolutely necessary to declare for peace or war, and the former cannot be preserved with honour, why is not the latter commenced without hesitation? My Lords, any state is better than despair. Let us at least make an effort; and if we must fall, let us fall like men!"
With this brave appeal Chatham sat down exhausted. A few moments later he was carried fainting out of the House, which at once adjourned. And within a month, he who has been described as "the first Englishman of his time," had passed from the troubled arena of politics.
[image]WILLIAM PITT FIRST EARL OF CHATHAM.
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WILLIAM PITT FIRST EARL OF CHATHAM.
His monument in the Abbey shows him to us as he must often have looked when, wearing his Parliamentary robes, he addressed the House in that clear, sweet voice of his, which he could use with such wonderful effect, and the sculptor has well caught the expression of his fearless strength. Near him stand Prudence and Fortitude; below is Britannia, Mistress of the Seas; and the inscription tells how, under his administration, Great Britain was exalted to a height of prosperity and glory, unknown in any former age.
His second son, William, was born in 1759, the year that was perhaps the most successful in his father's life, and as he was too delicate to go to school, the older man personally supervised the early education of this his favourite child. When quite small, Chatham began to give him lessons in public speaking, making him stand on a platform to recite poetry or speeches, and later on teaching him to argue their points. With such a teacher and such a ready pupil, it is not surprising to hear of excellent progress made.
Little Willy Pitt, as he was called, soon showed in which direction his inclinations lay. "I am glad I am not the eldest son," he remarked, when he was seven, "as I want to speak in the House of Commons like papa."
He was only nineteen when his father died, but it was he who had helped the old statesman to his place in the House of Lords on the last day of his life, he who assisted to carry him out, and he who stood as chief mourner at that impressive funeral in the Abbey, his elder brother being abroad. The thought of any life but a political and a public one, never entered his mind, and two years later he became a member of Parliament. The first step up the ladder was taken. Already a trained speaker, his gifts were at once recognised by the House. Members of both parties generously praised him, and prophesied that his would be a great career. "I doubt not," said honest William Wilberforce, "but that I shall one day see him the first man in the country." His likeness to his father was remarkable. "Language, gesture, and manner were all the same," wrote his delighted tutor. "All the old members recognised him instantly, and most of the young ones said this was the very man they had so often heard described."
But it was not on his father's merits that William Pitt sprang into immediate fame; his own personality was his passport.
Thirteen years before, another young man had entered Parliament, Charles James Fox, the brilliant, excitement-loving son of Lord Holland. After Eton and Oxford he had been sent abroad to complete his education, but so great were his follies and extravagances, that his father had to firmly summon him home. This mandate, we are told, "he obeyed with great reluctance," and he seems to have gone back with an extensive wardrobe of clothes in the latest and most costly fashions, leaving behind him enormous debts in every town he had visited.
Lord Holland, who flattered himself that he had studied the world and human nature with great attention and success, decided that a seat in the House of Commons would best steady this irrepressible young man, and provide him with occupation and ambition, so, though he was only nineteen, and therefore legally not entitled to become a member, he was duly elected, the Speaker, by wilful or accidental oversight, offering no opposition. He too from the first delighted the House as a speaker, for he was fresh, forcible, and graceful, with a great personal charm of manner and an entire absence of conceit, and no one gave a more cordial welcome to Pitt than he did, little dreaming in how short a time this young man would be his lifelong and his successful rival. Rockingham, who had succeeded North as Prime Minister, died suddenly in 1782, and from every point of view Fox appeared to be the man who ought to have succeeded him. But the King cordially disliked Fox, and sent instead for Lord Shelburne. Fox, ever impetuous and hasty, refused to serve under him, and Shelburne turned to Pitt, who thus at the age of twenty-three became Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons. A year later Lord Shelburne resigned, and the Premiership was offered to Pitt, an honour greater perhaps than any honour ever offered to a young man of twenty-four. He declined it; the Duke of Portland accepted it; and Fox became leader in the House of Commons, with what seemed to be a strong coalition Government at the back of him. For the moment the Whigs were all-powerful, and against them stood Pitt, who refused to be a member of any coalition, with a handful of men who had belonged to the old Chatham party. No one hated the present arrangement more than the King, and before long he saw an opportunity of crushing it. Fox, chiefly by his own magnetic influence, had carried a bill concerning India through the Commons, but the Lords, influenced by the King, threw it out, whereupon he dismissed the Government, and persuaded Pitt to accept the office of Prime Minister. Never before had such a state of things prevailed. The Premier was a youth of twenty-four, with a majority of two to one against him in the House of Commons! Whatever he brought forward was defeated. Fox used all his eloquence against him, and over and over again he was put in an impossible position. Pitt, Lord Rosebery has told us, was never young. Certainly, at this crisis, his patience, his caution, his firmness, and his cool judgment would have done credit to a statesman of half a century's experience. He did not make a mistake, and gradually he won the country to his side. Before many months were over, Parliament was dissolved; an election had taken place; and Pitt came back into power with a large majority. For seventeen years he remained in office. Nothing could have been greater than the contrast between him and his strenuous opponent Fox, who was the most impulsive, genial, and lovable of men; extravagant in every direction, in his likes, his hates, and his sympathies; easily stirred and able to pour forth a torrent of passionate eloquence; living always in the excitement and impulses of the moment, with never a thought for the morrow. Pitt, on the contrary, was cool and thoughtful. He stood, as it were, aloof from all the world, though on the rare occasions when he unbent, he was full of charm. "Smiles were not natural to him," said a contemporary. "He is," said Wilberforce, who unfeignedly admired him, even though he could not always follow him, "one of the most public-spirited and upright men I ever knew." And he was called upon to guide the ship of State through troubled waters. It was his task to raise the money in payment of the American war bill, for a debt of about twenty millions stared him in the face. Then he had to face more than the usual amount of difficulty with Ireland, where the celebrated Dublin Parliament which Henry Grattan, its brilliant leader, had forced Fox to agree to, proved itself so unable to cope with the task undertaken, that riots and disturbances broke out in every quarter. Pitt believed that only one solution was possible, namely, that instead of a separate Parliament at Dublin, the Irish members with the Scotch should sit at Westminster, and in the year 1799 he brought in the Act of Union, which was carried during the next session, in spite of a strong speech against it by Grattan, who was dragged from his sick-room for the occasion. Pitt had also to contend with a restless wave which swept over England, the result of the French Revolution. But though the young minister was always ready for reform, he would have nothing to do with violent changes or with revolution, neither was he afraid to bring in such measures as seemed likely to repress the revolutionary spirits in England. The French leaders, not content with having executed their king and queen, and having waged war on Austria, when that country moved to rescue the luckless Austrian princess, now Queen Marie Antoinette, went to the further length of declaring that every country not agreeing with the doctrines of the Revolution was to be regarded as an enemy, and was to be forced into war. For some while Pitt managed to hold the English people from plunging into the conflict. He was altogether a peace minister. But public opinion was too strong for him; the old hatred of France was there, and the events of the last few years had fanned it into life. Pitt had to bow to the will of the nation, though it was the French who finally declared war in 1793 by an attack on Holland, after which England could no longer stand aloof, though Fox, in his hot-headed way, declared that in his opinion we had no right to demand the withdrawal of French troops from the Netherlands. From that time until the day of victory at Waterloo in 1815, the fight between England and France continued with more or less intensity.
And the final issue was due in no small degree to Pitt, who, though he hated the war, had during his long ministry of peace freely spent millions of pounds on the British navy, recognising that so long as England was mistress of the seas she was safe. From the moment, too, that war was declared, he threw himself heart and soul into every measure for carrying it through successfully; never for a moment did he show a weak front, or fail to be the leader in every sense of the word. When Napoleon, elated by his series of triumphs on the Continent, prepared to invade England, it was Pitt who gave an impetus to the volunteer movement by himself raising a force of 3000 men, and placing himself at their head. "His spirit will lead him to be foremost in the battle, and I am uneasy at it," said Wilberforce; "yet it is his proper post, and I can say nothing against it." In an incredibly short time a volunteer force of 300,000 was enrolled, "their good sense and firmness supplying their want of experience." But though his spirit was as strong as ever, his delicate frame was giving way under the high pressure at which he had lived. True to his promise to Wilberforce, he had pushed forward the Abolition of Slavery Bill, and he did not relax an effort as regards his war policy, though on the Continent Napoleon was still all victorious. Wellesley, a young soldier, had just come back from India with a good reputation, and Pitt, then a dying man, sent for him. He knew that what England wanted now was a great soldier to lead her armies; her navy was safe under such commanders as St. Vincent, Collingwood, and Nelson. For hours he talked to Wellesley, only ceasing when he fainted from exhaustion. "The greatest minister that has ever ruled England," was the verdict of the soldier statesman. Then came the news of the victory at Trafalgar, saddened only by the death of the heroic Nelson. But Pitt was drifting far away from all these things. His mind wandered as his life flickered out; only just at the end there was a rally. "Oh my country!" he cried; "how I leave my country!" That was his last thought and his last speech.
When the usual proposal was brought forward that he should be buried at Westminster at the expense of Parliament, and that a monument should be erected, Fox characteristically felt bound to oppose it. "He could not honestly," he said, "call a man an excellent statesman who had consistently supported so bad a system." But when it was further suggested that Parliament should pay the debts he had left and provide for his nearest relations, no one agreed so cordially or so readily as Fox. Wrong-headed he often was; wrong-hearted never.
Into the same grave as his father William Pitt was laid in the presence of all the distinguished people of the day, his pall-bearers being six men each of whom had been, or was to be, a Prime Minister of England. "The figure of the first William Pitt," wrote Wilberforce, "seemed to be looking down with consternation into the grave of his favourite son, the last perpetuator of the name he had ennobled. It was an affecting ceremony."
Pitt was still a young man, only forty-seven, yet into those years he had crowded a glorious life, and it was with truth that the herald proclaimed over his grave, "He lived not for himself, but for his country."
Eight months later, Fox, who did not live to enjoy the power his rival's death had placed within his reach, was buried close to him in the Abbey. During his short spell of office, he had carried Wilberforce's Slave Bill, and had frequently said he could retire happily when once that bill was made safe. He disdainfully refused a Peerage. "I will not close my politics in that foolish way," was his remark. Near together too, though not in the Statesmen's Corner, are the monuments of these two whose lives were throughout so interwoven. Pitt towers in lonely state over the west door, standing there as if he were about to pour forth his magnificent eloquence on the statues below and charm them back into life for one brief moment. Fox lies surrounded by weeping figures, one of whom represents the negro whose cause he had so powerfully championed. And so the great Mother Church gathers them both to herself, claiming each as a noble son of England.
Henry Grattan, the Irishman, is buried close to Fox, his friend and hero. He had often told his followers that he wished to lie in a quiet churchyard of his loved Ireland, but they had other ideas. "Well then," he said resignedly, "Westminster Abbey!" His funeral had a very distinctive touch, for it was attended by hundreds of Irish children from various charitable institutions, all of whom wore dresses of bright green.
Next to the imposing monument of Chatham is a statue to Lord Palmerston, that most English of statesmen. He went into political life more from a sense of duty than from any particular liking for it, or from any feelings of ambition. But into every office that he held he carried with him a sturdy independence, a dogged tenacity of purpose, a fund of common sense, and a very clear idea of what he meant to attain. Add to this that he was the essence of good-nature, the most genial of friends, simple and straight, manly and cheery, and we have some idea of the man whom the nation insisted on having for Prime Minister, when he was over seventy years of age, at a critical moment when it was felt that only a strong, fearless, popular statesman could guide the ship out of the storm.
And then, in contrast to the kindly, contented Palmerston, comes the tomb of Lord Castlereagh, a statesman as much out of touch with the people as "Pam" was their hero. He was Secretary of State for War in those days when the struggle with France was beginning, and because at first things went badly he was made the scapegoat. It was he who planned that combination of forces which at last broke down the French resistance, but that was not realised till long afterwards; in those early days his policy was not successful, so it was unpopular. He stood aloof from all men; he was cold, indifferent, wanting in tact, with no gifts as a speaker, and yet, looking back now on his work, it is easy to see how well he faced a period of unexampled difficulty. Nevertheless, he was invariably misunderstood, and therefore unjustly disliked, so that at last his mind gave way under the storm of hatred and abuse levelled against him, and, in a dark moment, he put an end to his life. Even at his funeral in the Abbey, the crowds could not forget their dislike of him, and shouted exultantly as the coffin was carried inside the doors. But the Abbey gave him a welcome and a resting-place.
On the opposite side stand the statues of the three Cannings: George Canning, the statesman; his youngest son, Lord Canning, first Viceroy of India; and their cousin, Lord Stratford de Radcliffe, "the wise old man of the East," who was our ambassador at Constantinople during those years which led up to the Crimean War, and whose influence, supported by the Government at home and France, made it possible for Turkey to hold Russia at bay. The verse on the statue:
"Thou third great Canning, stand among our bestAnd noblest, now thy long day's work hath ceased;Here silent, in our Minster of the West,Who wert the voice of England in the East,"
"Thou third great Canning, stand among our bestAnd noblest, now thy long day's work hath ceased;Here silent, in our Minster of the West,Who wert the voice of England in the East,"
"Thou third great Canning, stand among our best
And noblest, now thy long day's work hath ceased;
Here silent, in our Minster of the West,
Who wert the voice of England in the East,"
is the work of Tennyson, who has only written one other epitaph in the Abbey. Close together are the monuments of Sir Robert Peel and Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Peel was the Minister who, in the face of violent opposition, caused the tax on imported corn to be repealed, thereby making bread cheaper; and Disraeli, who first won his reputation by the persistent manner in which he fought this policy of Peel's, doggedly forged his way to the front against much prejudice, until he, though not an Englishman by race, held the proud position of being the loved and trusted Prime Minister of Queen Victoria. The statue of Beaconsfield—for by his own desire he was buried next to his wife in the country churchyard at Hughenden—casts its shadow over the grave of William Ewart Gladstone, whose family only consented to his being laid there on the condition that Mrs. Gladstone should eventually rest beside him, even as Lady Palmerston lay by her husband's side. The coffin which contained this old statesman, who was better loved and better hated perhaps than any public man of our generation, was placed for some time in Westminster Hall, and nearly a quarter of a million people passed through to pay their last token of respect. The time has not yet come when his place in English history as a statesman can be fairly judged, but friend and foe alike can bear tribute to his brilliant intellect; his talents as a financier; his excellent learning; his wonderful personality; his rich eloquence; his generous sympathies; his stainless private life; and to those other qualities which his political opponent Lord Salisbury so finely described as making him "a great Christian." "God bless you, and this place, and the land you love," had been his last public utterance, and in the spirit of that message we leave him, who in life stirred up such sharp dissensions, sleeping peacefully in the Abbey.