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prevented his reaching the highest pinnacle: first, he was wanting in compactness of matter and strength of style, which come by care and diligence in writing, he left too much to inspiration and too little to study; second, he was wanting in moral stalwartness. One biographer remarks of him: "Recklessness and vice can hardly fail to destroy the influence of the most splendid abilities and the most humane and generous disposition. Though thirty-eight years in public life, he was in office only eighteen months." The ideal orator and statesman must be every inch a man, heart as well as brain.

It is remarkable that one whose youth was so dissolute, whose whole life was partly given to vice, should accomplish so much as a statesman. Nothing but the strongest of constitutions and the most cheerful and buoyant of dispositions could have withstood so much. But for his dissolute habits which lost him public confidence, his brilliant intellect and his political sagacity might have won for him the highest honors in the gift of the English people. His eloquence was in great measure neutralized by his reputation for recklessness. The people could not dissociate him from the gamester. They had too much self-respect to yield themselves entirely to his influence. These words of Dr. Price, thundered from the pulpit, more than any other one cause, thwarted Fox in his ambition to become premier: "Can you imagine that a spendthrift in his own concerns will make an economist in managing the concerns of others; that a wild gamester will take due care of the state of a kingdom?" Notwithstanding Fox's fascinating influence and his immense popularity with his countrymen, they withheld their suffrages from him. They admired his talents, but their verdict was, "thus far shalt thou go and no farther." This indifference on the part of his countrymen stung him into partial reform. He set to work with redoubled energy to the business of the House and

became more and more influential in state affairs. Posterity must credit him with the reforms he made in his character, and look beyond to the ennobling, far-reaching influence of his career, for his life was a stirring protest against human oppression. In the darkest hour of the early history of America he dared to be the first to raise his eloquent voice against the hateful Stamp Act and the tyranny of George III.

Fox's speeches on American affairs come to us only in fragments, but he joined with Chatham and Burke in opposition to the Stamp Act and "taxation without representation." Other of his published speeches are as follows :

I. On the "East India Bill," delivered in the House of Commons, December 1,. 1783.

2. A second speech on the "East India Bill," dwelling on the "Secret Influences" to defeat it, delivered in the House, December 17, 1783.

3. "The Westminster Scrutiny," a speech on the investigation of the election returns from the city of Westminster, delivered in the House, June 8, 1784.

4. On the "Russian Armament," delivered in the House, March 1, 1792.

5. On "Parliamentary Reform," delivered in the House, May 26, 1797.

6. On the "Rejection of Bonaparte's Overtures," an answer to Pitt's proposal not to treat with Bonaparte, delivered in the House, February 3, 1800.

THE AMERICAN WAR

From a speech on conditions in America, delivered in the House of Commons in 1780, by Charles James Fox. He was the first to deplore the attitude of the British king toward the American colonies, and to rejoice in the resistance and the triumphs of the colonists.

We are charged with expressing joy at the triumphs of America. True it is that, in a former session, I proclaimed it as my sincere opinion, that if the ministry had succeeded in their first scheme on the liberties of America, the liberties of this country would have been at an end. Thinking this, as I did, in the sincerity of an honest heart, I rejoiced at the resistance which the ministry had met to their attempt. That great and glorious statesman, the late Earl of Chatham, feeling for the liberties of his native country, thanked God that America had resisted. But, it seems, "all the calamities of the country are to be ascribed to the wishes, and the joy, and the speeches of Opposition." O miserable and unfortunate ministry! O blind and incapable men! whose measures are framed with so little foresight, and executed with so little firmness, that they not only crumble to pieces, but bring on the ruin of their country, merely because one rash, weak, or wicked man, in the House of Commons, makes a speech against them!

But who is he who arraigns gentlemen on this side of the House with causing, by their inflammatory speeches, the misfortunes of their country? The accusation comes from one whose inflammatory harangues have led the nation, step by step, from violence to violence, in that inhuman, unfeeling system of blood and massacre, which every honest man must detest, which every good man must abhor, and every wise man condemn! And this man imputes the guilt of such measures to those who had all along foretold the consequences; who had prayed, entreated, and supplicated, not only for America but for the credit of the nation and its eventual welfare, to arrest the hand of power meditating slaughter, and directed by injustice!

What was the consequence of the sanguinary measures recommended in those bloody, inflammatory speeches? Though Boston

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was to be starved, though Hancock and Adams were proscribed, yet at the feet of these very men the Parliament of Great Britain was obliged to kneel, flatter, and cringe; and, as it had the cruelty at one time to denounce vengeance against these men, so it had the meanness afterwards to implore their forgiveness. Shall he who called the Americans " Hancock and his crew shall he presume to reprehend any set of men for inflammatory speeches? It is this accursed American war. that has led us, step by step, into all our present misfortunes and national disgraces. What was the cause of our wasting forty millions of money and sixty thousand lives? The American war! What was it that produced the French rescript and a French war? The American war! What was it that produced the Spanish manifesto and Spanish war? The American war! What was it that armed forty-two thousand men in Ireland with the arguments carried on the points of forty thousand bayonets? The American war! For what are we about to incur an additional debt of twelve or fourteen millions? This accursed, cruel, diabolical American war!

REJECTION OF BONAPARTE'S OVERTURES

Delivered in the House of Commons, February 3, 1800. Napoleon had usurped the government of France, had become First Consul, and had made overtures of peace to the king of England. Pitt the Younger, then prime minister of England, having no belief in the permanence of Napoleon's power, rejected the overtures. Fox condemned Pitt for refusing to treat, and censured him for the "severe and unconciliating terms in which a respectful offer of negotiation had been rejected."

I. ENGLAND THE AGGRESSOR

Sir, my honorable and learned friend has truly said that the present is a new era in the war, for, by traveling back to the commencement of the war, and referring again to all the topics and arguments which he has so often and so successfully urged upon the House, and by which he has drawn them on to the support of his measures, he is forced to acknowledge that, at the end of a

seven years' conflict, we are come but to a new era in the war, at which he thinks it necessary only to press all his former arguments to induce us to persevere. All the topics which have so often misled us all the reasoning which has so invariably failed all the lofty predictions which have so constantly been falsified by events

all the hopes which have amused the sanguine, and all the assurances of the distress and weakness of the enemy which have satisfied the unthinking, are again enumerated and advanced as arguments for our continuing war. What! at the end of seven years of the most burdensome and the most calamitous struggle in which this country ever was engaged, are we again to be amused with notions of finance, and calculations of the exhausted resources of the enemy, as a ground of confidence and of hope?

Gracious God! were we not told five years ago that France was not only on the brink and in the jaws of ruin, but that she was actually sunk into the gulf of bankruptcy? Were we not told, as an unanswerable argument against treating, "that she could not hold out another campaign— that nothing but peace could save her that she wanted only time to recruit her exhausted finances

that to grant her repose was to grant her the means of again molesting this country, and that we had nothing to do but persevere for a short time, in order to save ourselves forever from the consequences of her ambition and her Jacobinism?" What! after having gone on from year to year upon assurances like these, and after having seen the repeated refutations of every prediction, are we again to be gravely and seriously assured that we have the same prospect of success on the same identical grounds? And, without any other argument or security, are we invited, at this new era of the war, to conduct it upon principles which, if adopted and acted upon, may make it eternal? If the right honorable gentleman shall succeed in prevailing on Parliament and the country to adopt the principles which he has advanced this night, I see no possible termination to the contest. No man can see an end to it; and upon the assurances and predictions which have so uniformly failed, we are called upon not merely to refuse all negotiations, but to

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