lish orator whose words
were a power, a power not over Parliament only but over the nation at
large. Parliamentary reporting was as yet unknown, and it was only in
detached phrases and half-remembered outbursts that the voice of Pitt
reached beyond the walls of St. Stephen's. But it was especially in
these sudden outbursts of inspiration, in these brief passionate
appeals, that the might of his eloquence lay. The few broken words we
have of him stir the same thrill in men of our day which they stirred in
the men of his own.

[Sidenote: His statesmanship.]

But passionate as was Pitt's eloquence, it was the eloquence of a
statesman, not of a rhetorician. Time has approved almost all his
greater struggles, his defence of the liberty of the subject against
arbitrary imprisonment under "general warrants," of the liberty of the
press against Lord Mansfield, of the rights of constituencies against
the House of Commons, of the constitutional rights of America against
England itself. His foreign policy was directed to the preservation of
Prussia, and Prussia has vindicated his foresight by the creation of
Germany. We have adopted his plans for the direct government of India
by the Crown, plans which when he proposed them were regarded as insane.
Pitt was the first to recognize the liberal character of the Church of
England, its "Calvinistic Creed and Arminian Clergy"; he was the first
to sound the note of Parliamentary reform. One of his earliest measures
shows the generosity and originality of his mind. He quieted Scotland by
employing its Jacobites in the service of their country and by raising
Highland regiments among its clans. The selection of Wolfe and Amherst
as generals showed his contempt for precedent and his inborn knowledge
of men.

[Sidenote: Plassey.]

But it was rather Fortune than his genius that showered on Pitt the
triumphs which signalized the opening of his ministry. In the East the
daring of a merchant-clerk made a company of English traders the
sovereigns of Bengal, and opened that wondrous career of conquest which
has added the Indian peninsula, from Ceylon to the Himalayas, to the
dominions of the British crown. Recalled by broken health to England,
Clive returned at the outbreak of the Seven Years' War to win for
England a greater prize than that which his victories had won for it in
the supremacy of the Carnatic. He had been only a few months at Madras
when a crime whose horror still lingers in En