The controlling man in England was William Pitt, able, proud, cold, ambitious. Personally honest, his policy sounded the deepest depravities of statecraft. Under his administration India was looted, ravaged, enslaved; Ireland coerced and dragooned; France outlawed because she dared to kill a king and call into life a republic; Europe bribed to a generation of war; freedom of thought, and speech, and conduct denied, and the cause of feudalism given a new lease of life. The aims and ends of this man’s statesmanship were eternally bad; his methods would have warmed the heart of a Jesuit. He would not stoop to base deeds himself, would not speak the deliberately false word, would not convey the bribe, would not manufacture counterfeit money, would not arm the assassin, would not burn cities nor massacre innocent women and children. No, no!--he belonged to what Lord Wolseley complacently calls “the highest type of English gentleman,” and his lofty soul would not permit him to do things like these himself. He would not corrupt Irish politicians to vote for the Union; but he would supply Castlereagh with the money from which the bribes were paid. He would not himself debauch editor or pamphleteer to slander a political foe, and deceive the British nation; but he supplied funds to those who did. Nor would he have put daggers into the hands of fanatics that they might do murder; but he protected and aided in England those who did. Not a political criminal himself, he used criminals and garnered the harvest of their crimes. Not himself capable of political theft, he countenanced the political thief, approved his success, and as a receiver of stolen goods, knowing them to have been stolen, haughtily added huge gains to his political wealth. The same lofty-minded minister who had debauched Ireland--an enemy to Irish independence--made war upon free speech and political liberty in England, and exhausted the resources of diplomacy and force to stamp out the revolutionary movement of France. Under his sanction, his emissaries attacked the French Republic by forging and counterfeiting her paper currency; by arming her factions the one against the other; by corrupting her trusted leaders; by nerving the hand of the assassin when the corruptionist could not prevail. That London harbored the Bourbon and his paid assassin was due to the influence of William Pitt. That the Bourbon could land on the French coast the emissaries who came to rouse Vendeans to revolt, or to murder Bonaparte in Paris, was due to the position of William Pitt.