t can never
be known. Vorontzoff, Russian ambassador at London, who had earlier been
a bitter enemy of Pitt, now expressed the fervent desire that death had
carried off his weary old frame, rather than that of the potential
Saviour of Europe. The words are instinct with prescience. The
personality and the actions of Pitt were alike a summons to a life of
dignity and manly independence. His successors had perforce to take a
course not unlike that which they were about to censure in him; and the
distrust which the Czar Alexander felt for them in part accounts for the
collapse at Tilsit and the ensuing years of bondage to Napoleon.

The disintegrating effects of the party system, or rather of its
factious use by the Whig leaders, have been explained in these pages.
Its first result was seen in the divergence of the careers of Pitt and
Fox. The cause of Reform ought to have received their undivided support;
but little by little they were edged apart, and their hostility was
perhaps the most lasting of the many evils wrought by the unnatural
Coalition of Fox and North. For a time Pitt gathered around him a
national party, which became avowedly so on the junction of the Old
Whigs in 1794. But in the last years of his life the denuding influences
of partisan and personal feuds disastrously thinned his following. From
the refusal of George to grant Catholic Emancipation, and the consequent
resignation of Pitt in the spring of 1801, we may trace three sinister
results. The Union with Ireland was bereft of its natural sequel,
Catholic Emancipation; the Ministerial ranks were cleft in twain; and
the crisis brought to the front Addington, a man utterly incapable of
confronting Napoleon. Had Pitt remained in power, the Peace of Amiens
would have been less one-sided, its maintenance more dignified; and the
First Consul, who respected the strong but bullied the weak, would
probably have acquiesced in a settlement consonant with the reviving
prestige of England. But though the Union Jack won notable triumphs in
the spring of 1801, yet at London everything went awry. Moved by
consideration for the King, then recovering from lunacy, Pitt weakly
promised not to bring forward Catholic Emancipation during his life, an
act which annoyed the Grenville-Windham group. His rash promise to
support Addington tied his hands in the following years; and even after
the renewal of war he too scrupulously refrained from overthrowing a
Ministry whose wea