lected their trust. Like them, Pitt could understand little of the
scene about him, that seething ocean of European change where states
vanished like dreams, and the very elements of social life seemed to
melt in a mist; his mind, like theirs, was baffled with doubt and
darkness, with the seeming suicide of freedom, the seeming triumph of
violence and wrong. But, baffled and bewildered as he was, he never
ceased to believe in liberty, or to hope that the work of reform which
he had begun might yet be carried into effect.

It was as the representative of this temper of the people at large, of
its mingled mood of terror at the new developements of freedom and yet
of faith in freedom itself, of its dread of progress and yet its hope of
a time when a larger national life should again become possible, that
Pitt had gathered the nation round him from the opening of the war. Much
indeed of the seeming weakness and uncertainty of his statesmanship
throughout the struggle sprang from the fidelity with which he reflected
this double aspect of national opinion. He has been blamed for fighting
the French Revolution at all, as he has been blamed for not entering on
an anti-revolutionary crusade. But his temper was that of the nation as
a whole. He shrank from the fanaticism of Burke as he shrank from the
fanaticism of Tom Paine: his aim was not to crush France or the
Revolution, but to bring the struggle with them to such an end as might
enable England to return in safety to the work of progress which the
struggle had interrupted. And it was this that gave significance to his
fall. It was a sign that the time had come when the national union which
Pitt embodied must dissolve with the disappearance of the force that
created it; when resistance had done its work, and the arrest of all
national movement had come to an end with the attitude of mere
resistance from which it sprang; when in face of a new France and a new
French policy England could again return to her normal political life,
and the impulses towards progress which had received so severe a check
in 1792 could again flow in their older channels. In such a return Pitt
himself took the lead; and his proposal of Catholic emancipation was as
significant of a new era of English life as the Peace of Luneville was
significant of a new settlement of Europe.

[Sidenote: Catholic Emancipation.]

In Pitt's mind the Union which he brought about in 1800 was more than a
mere measure for