In the year 1757--to go back ten years from the spring with which we are
dealing--the ordinary Englishman was a Balbus despairing of the State.
No phrase was then more common on English lips, or in English ears, than
the statement that the days of England's greatness were numbered, and
were fast running out. Unwitting the wider sphere about to open before
them, men dwelt fondly on the glories of the past. The old babbled of
Marlborough's wars, of the entrance of Prince Eugene into London, of
choirs draped in flags, and steeples reeling giddily for Ramillies and
Blenheim. The young listened, and sighed to think that the day had been,
and was not, when England gave the law to Europe, and John Churchill's
warder set troops moving from Hamburg to the Alps.
On the top of such triumphs, and the famous reign of good Queen Anne,
had ensued forty years of peace, broken only by one inglorious war. The
peace did its work: it settled the dynasty, and filled the purse; but
men, considering it, whispered of effeminacy and degeneracy, and the
like, as men will to the end of time. And when the clouds, long sighted
on the political horizon, began to roll up, they looked fearfully abroad
and doubted and trembled; and doubted and trembled the more because in
home affairs all patriotism, all party-spirit, all thought of things
higher than ribbon or place or pension, seemed to be dead among public
men.
The Tories, long deprived of power, and discredited by the taint or
suspicion of Jacobitism, counted for nothing. The Whigs, agreed on all
points of principle, and split into sections, the Ins and Outs, solely
by the fact that all could not enjoy places and pensions at once, the
supply being unequal to the demand--had come to regard politics as
purely a game; a kind of licensed hazard played for titles, orders, and
emoluments, by certain families who had the entrée to the public table
by virtue of the part they had played in settling the succession.
Into the midst of this state of things, this world of despondency,
mediocrity, selfishness, and chicanery, and at the precise crisis when
the disasters which attended the opening campaigns of the Seven Years'
War--and particularly the loss of Minorca--seemed to confirm the
gloomiest prognostications of the most hopeless pessimists, came William
Pitt; and in eighteen months changed the face of the world, not for his
generation only, but for ours. Indifferent as an administrator, mediocre
as a financier, passionate, haughty, headstrong, with many of the worst
faults of an orator, he was still a man with ideals--a patriot among
placemen, pure where all were corrupt. And the effect of his touch was
magical.