第440章 WILLIAM PITT(20)

One part only of Pitt's conduct during the last eight years of the eighteenth century deserves high praise.He was the first English minister who formed great designs for the benefit of Ireland.The manner in which the Roman Catholic population of that unfortunate country had been kept down during many generations seemed to him unjust and cruel; and it was scarcely possible for a man of his abilities not to perceive that, in a contest against the Jacobins, the Roman Catholics were his natural allies.Had he been able to do all that he wished, it is probable that a wise and liberal policy would have averted the rebellion of 1798.But the difficulties which he encountered were great, perhaps insurmountable; and the Roman Catholics were, rather by his misfortune than by his fault, thrown into the hands of the Jacobins.There was a third great rising of the Irishry against the Englishry, a rising not less formidable than the risings of 1641 and 1689.The Englishry remained victorious, and it was necessary for Pitt, as it had been necessary for Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange before him, to consider how the victory should be used.It is only just to his memory to say that he formed a scheme of policy, so grand and so simple, so righteous and so humane, that it would alone entitle him to a high place among statesmen.He determined to make Ireland one kingdom with England, and, at the same time, to relieve the Roman Catholic laity from civil disabilities, and to grant a public maintenance to the Roman Catholic clergy.Had he been able to carry these noble designs into effect, the Union would have been an Union indeed.It would have been inseparably associated in the minds of the great majority of Irishmen with civil and religious freedom; and the old Parliament in College Green would have been regretted only by a small knot of discarded jobbers and oppressors, and would have been remembered by the body of the nation with the loathing and contempt due to the most tyrannical and the most corrupt assembly that had ever sate in Europe.But Pitt could execute only one half of what he had projected.He succeeded in obtaining the consent of the Parliaments of both kingdoms to the Union; but that reconciliation of races and sects, without which the Union could exist only in name, was not accomplished.He was well aware that he was likely to find difficulties in the closet.But he flattered himself, that by cautious and dexterous management, those difficulties might be overcome.Unhappily, there were traitors and sycophants in high place who did not suffer him to take his own time, and his own way, but prematurely disclosed his scheme to the King, and disclosed it in the manner most likely to irritate and alarm a weak and diseased mind.His Majesty absurdly imagined that his Coronation oath bound him to refuse his assent to any bill for relieving Roman Catholics from civil disabilities.To argue with him was impossible.Dundas tried to explain the matter, but was told to keep his Scotch metaphysics to himself.Pitt, and Pitt's ablest colleagues, resigned their offices.It was necessary that the King should make a new arrangement.But by this time his anger and distress had brought back the malady which had, many years before, incapacitated him for the discharge of his functions.He actually assembled his family, read the Coronation oath to them, and told them that, if he broke it, the Crown would immediately pass to the House of Savoy.It was not until after an interregnum of several weeks that he regained the full use of his small faculties, and that a ministry after his own heart was at length formed.