ove all it clung to the young minister
whose ideas were its own, who, alien as his temper seemed from that of
an innovator, came boldly to the front with projects for a new
Parliament, a new finance, a new international policy, a new imperial
policy, a new humanitarian policy. It was this oneness of Pitt's temper
with the temper of the men he ruled that made him sympathize, in spite
of the alarm of the court, with the first movements of the revolution in
France, and deal fairly, if coldly, with its after-course. It was this
that gave him strength to hold out so long against a struggle with it.

[Sidenote: Pitt and the War.]

But as the alarm deepened, as the nation saw its social, political, and
religious traditions alike threatened, the bulk of Englishmen swung
round into an attitude of fierce resistance. The craving for
self-preservation hushed all other cravings. What men looked for in Pitt
now was not the economist or the reformer, but the son of Chatham, the
heir of his father's courage, of his father's faith in the greatness of
England. And what they looked for they found. Pitt was no born War
Minister; he had none of the genius that commands victory, or of the
passionate enthusiasm that rouses a nation to great deeds of arms. But
he had faith in England. Even when she stood alone against the world he
never despaired. Reading him, as we read him now, we see the sickness
and the gloom of his inner soul; but no sign betrayed it to the world.
As the tempest gathered about them, men looked with trust that deepened
into awe on the stately figure that embodied their faith in England's
fortunes, and huddled in the darkness round "the pilot that weathered
the storm." But there were deeper and less conscious grounds for their
trust in him. Pitt reflected far more than the nation's resolve. He
reflected the waverings and inconsistencies of its political temper in a
way that no other man did. In the general swing round to an attitude of
resistance, the impulse of progress had come utterly to an end. Men
doubted of the truth of principles that seemed to have brought about the
horrors of the Revolution. They listened to Burke as he built up his
theory of political immobility on the basis of an absolute perfection in
the constitution of things as they were. But even in this moment of
reaction they still clung unconsciously to a belief in something better,
to a trust that progress would again be possible, and to the man who
ref