Tuesday was the centenary of the death of William Pitt,
who, worn out by his long struggle with France, and heart-broken by the news of Austerlitz, lived only long enough to hear of Trafalgar. Our history provides no parallel to the career of one who was in the Cabinet at twenty-two, Prime Minister at twenty-five, and for two decades guided the destinies of England through the greatest crisis of the modern world. He had his faults and limitations, but no English statesman ever surpassed him in resolution and single-heartedness. As contrasted with even the best of his rivals, he towers above them, like Napoleon over his Marshals. The Morning Post has republished Coleridge's study of his character, in which the main complaint is that as a speaker he had no style or passion, and as a statesman no imagination or magnetism. Pitt's public character, indeed, may lack the minor graces, but he had in a colossal degree the great virtues. By the irony of fate, one who was at heart a lover of peace and reform had to spend his best years directing extravagant campaigns. "Mr. Pitt needs no monument. Eight hundred millions of irredeemable debt are his everlasting monument," said an orator in the House of Commons on the proposal to commemorate the dead' Minister ; but the cost of his Ministry was no desire of his own, but the iron compulsion of circumstance. His early career shows how far in domestic and economic policy he stood in advance of his age. And it is his chief merit that when the call came he forsook his natural preferences, and for long years waged a war which he - hated, and sank all other interests in the struggle with France. Such concentration is the mark alike of the patriot and the statesman. Nor at this moment must we forget that Pitt, the disciple of Adam Smith, was a great Free-trader as well as a great patriot.
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