THE DISRUPTION OF THE EMPIRE; AND REFORM The War, 1775-83.—The war that began at Lexington de veloped into a war of Great Britain against half the world—the Bourbon Powers of France and Spain, Holland, and "the armed neutrality of the North" formed by the Scandinavian States, Russia and Prussia, in defence of the rights of neutrals. But for the legislation of 1782-83, which freed Ireland from the fetters imposed in 1719 on her legislative and economic autonomy, a sec ond civil war against united Protestants and Catholics might have been added. The incompetence of Lord North's ministry to avert the struggle in the North American colonies and to anticipate or prevent the intervention in 1778 of France in the struggle, was exhibited in the conduct of the war itself. The army was quite inadequate for the tasks imposed upon it ; and the navy had been allowed to fall far below the strength required to assure the command of the sea. It was the loss of the command of the sea which was responsible for Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown (1781), and which for two years placed Great Britain and the empire in the gravest peril it had so far faced. Lord North's ministry stands convicted of unpardonable and preventable blun ders, which rightly shattered the system of personal government embodying the principles of George III. At the commencement of the struggle a majority in Great Britain supported the ministry against the powerful, eloquent and determined opposition of a large minority voiced by Chatham and Burke, and above all Charles Fox. The disasters, the corruption, the lack of unity in policy and direction slowly turned the minority into a majority which by a vote of the House of Commons ended the ministry of Lord North (March 1782). The American catastrophe thus saved tie system of responsible parliamentary government working through a cabinet, representing a committee of the party which had and could retain a majority in the House of Commons ; it ad ministered the coup de grace to the delusive ideal of a "Patriot King," ruling as well as reigning through a legislature dominated by "The King's Friends" and through departmental chiefs de pendent both for power and policy on the Sovereign who was his own prime minister. Had North's ministry known its business it could have crushed the armed resistance of British subjects in America before France had either the power or the will to inter vene. Despite Washington's heroic efforts the American "rebels" realized that without France they must be beaten in the end, and Burgoyne's disaster at Saratoga (1777) was more persuasive at Paris than Franklin's diplomacy. With French intervention in 1778 Great Britain was at bay with the crisis which ministerial lethargy and blindness had created. Fortunately, Great Britain had great men in her hour of need whose splendour and obstinacy redeemed the government's blunders. India was saved by Warren Hastings ; Canada by Carleton ; Gibraltar by Elliott ; the command of the sea by Rodney. But Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown convinced even the king that the war in North America must be abandoned. A separate treaty (1783) with the American colonies granted the independence proclaimed in 1776. The 13 North American colonies passed out of domestic British history. The United States of America (a new republic in the new world) were born. The tragedy of their birth, both for the mother from whom they sprang and for the child thus ushered into the political firmament, was the black and angry memories of the issues raised and of the struggle itself which were to poison for a century and a half the relations of the two great branches of the English speaking race.
With her other enemies Great Britain also made a disadvan tageous peace. St. Lucia and Tobago, Senegal and Goree, Pondi cherry and the French establishments in Bengal went back to France ; Florida and Minorca to Spain. Fox, who negotiated the peace with Vergennes, obtained as counter-concessions some West India islands for Great Britain. France might indeed be content. Her navy had shown itself remarkably capable, and in the dis ruption of the British empire the world decided that she had inflicted a mortal wound on her secular antagonist.
A reconstructed Whig party under Lord Rockingham took the place of North's effete and discredited ministry. Burke's fine measure of economic reform, apart from the restoration of the cabinet system, was a notable achievement. On Rockingham's death Fox made the capital blunder of his life when he combined with North in the coalition Government, rightly resented by the nation and hateful to the king, whose unconstitutional acts in securing the defeat of the "India Bills" in the House of Lords and in dismissing the ministers, were condoned as an arbitrary re tribution on a cynical disregard of the principles of a regenerated public life. The young Pitt's courage in accepting office was re warded by a sweeping victory at the general election; and if the king had satisfied his vengeance on the Whigs and "the deserter" North, Pitt had made himself indispensable to the Crown. The nation, like the House of Commons, welcomed the youthful prime minister not as "a chip of the old block," but as "the old block itself." Pitt completed the work of the Rockingham Whigs in noise lessly securing that the prime minister should be the head of the cabinet, that the cabinet should be a cabinet, not a group of de partmental executive chiefs, and that it must depend on the con fidence of the House of Commons. He reorganized the govern ment of India successfully, though on less drastic lines than Fox's ill-fated measure ; he reconstituted national finance and credit, and by the establishment of the Consolidated Fund laid the basis of the modern system; his economic treaty with France (1786), and the reduction and simplification of an antiquated code of contra dictory tariffs proved his grasp of the principles of Adam Smith; the Canada Act of 1791 and the commencement of the colony of New South Wales in Australia opened a new chapter in the evo lution of the British empire ; a sane and peaceful foreign policy restored the shattered prestige of Great Britain in Europe. Pitt suffered three serious defeats. His proposals for placing the eco nomic and financial relations of Great Britain and Ireland on sound lines were rejected in Ireland and dropped in England; his moderate schemes of parliamentary reform, urgently needed, were defeated by the ministerial party and abandoned by the prime minister ; in 1791 his ultimatum to Russia had to be withdrawn; and his failure to support Warren Hastings, and his personal atti tude towards the charges which led to his impeachment, that started in 1788, was a regrettable error of judgment, when Hast ings's services both to India and Great Britain are impartially measured. It is no less unquestionable that if his powerful influ ence had been used as freely as his eloquence for the abolition of the slave trade, it would not have been deferred until 1807.
By 1789 the country was yearly becoming more ready for large and continuous instalments of political, economic and so cial reconstruction, and the organized demand for reform was creating an educated public opinion within and without par liament which would have proved irresistible before the century closed. It was across this Great Britain marked by such minds and characters as Howard, Hannah More, Wilberforce and Simeon, Bentham, Paine, Godwin and Cartwright, Arkwright, Cavendish, Black, Herschel, Crompton and John Hunter, the young Wordsworth and the young Coleridge, Crabbe, Cowper and Burns, that first the sunshine and then the deepening shadows of the French Revolution fell. Although Great Britain did not at first recognize it, the 18th century had really closed three years before ; in Goethe's phrase, the Cannon of Valmy (1792) pro claimed the opening of a new age and a new world.
(C. G. Ro.)