had been printed, was laid before the House. At this crisis he received a bullet in the side while fighting a duel with Martin, a hanger-on of Bute whom he had assailed in his paper. The mob roared in favour of Wilkes; but the Commons condemned No. 45 as a wicked libel, and expelled its author from his seat. He was soon afterwards declared by the King's Bench guilty of libel; but this was balanced by the Chief-Justice's decision against general warrants as illegal.

About this time Pitt received a legacy of £3,000 a-year from a veteran baronet of Somersetshire who wished to console the statesman for his fall. But wealth could not bring rest to the victim of disease. During the session which began in January 1765, Pitt appeared only once in Parliament. Shut up in his bedroom at Hayes, he heard the sounds of the political sea only as a dull murmur. During this withdrawal of the great man from active life, his kinsman George Grenville took that fatal step which led to the loss of the American colonies. A bill for laying on the transatlantic settlements the same stamp duties as prevailed in England passed into law (March 22).

Benjamin Franklin, once a printer's apprentice, but 1765 now the agent for Pennsylvania and a politician of no mean mark, warned the government that the colonists would never submit to bear the burden.

The battle of the regency, though of infinitely less importance, excited more interest. A slight attack of that mental malady which afterwards prostrated the king, made it necessary that this matter should be arranged. The chief quarrel was about the insertion of the name of the king's mother. The government had actually induced the king to consent to her exclusion, when a reaction, brought about by Bute and his friends, caused her name to be placed on the list. The king then sought to be delivered from the bondage of Grenville's cabinet. His uncle Cumberland, coming to the rescue, tried thrice to coax Pitt out of seclusion into office; but in vain. A

new ministry of leading Whigs was formed under the Premiership of the Marquis of Rockingham, an able, rich, and influential member of the Upper House. General Conway and the Duke of Grafton became Secretaries of State, while the veteran Newcastle got the Privy Seal.

The Stamp Act, fruitful in discontents, surged up to the surface of debate at once. There were three opinions prevailing on this celebrated question. Grenville and the king, although a gulf now severed them in other things, thought force the true way of dealing with the refractory colonists. Pitt thought the Act a flagrant breach of the Constitution. Rockingham held that while Parliament had an undoubted right to tax the colonies, this Act was "unjust and impolitic, sterile of revenue, and fertile in discontents." The private secretary of Rockingham, who had lately entered Parliament for Wendover in Bucks, adopted the last view and enforced it with striking eloquence. He was an Irishman of thirty-five, named Edmund Burke, who had studied law for a while in the Temple, and had afterwards devoted himself to a literary life. Macaulay has drawn attention to the fact that this session of 1766 witnessed the opening of Burke's career in the Commons, and the close of Pitt's. "It was indeed a splendid sunset and a splendid dawn."

The Stamp Act was ultimately repealed. The Commons were also led by Rockingham's cabinet to condemn general warrants as illegal, and to forbid the seizure of papers in cases of libel. But the ministry was certainly weak, though it was exceptionally free from corrupt practices. Rockingham's honesty, indeed, hastened his fall; for all the jobbers and place-hunters united with his conscientious opponents in pushing him out of office. Pitt then undertook the formation of that "Mosaic" Ministry, which Edmund Burke has so graphically painted. The Duke of Grafton became. First Lord of the Treasury; witty Charles Townshend

July 1766

took the Exchequer; General Conway and Lord Shelburne acted as Secretaries of State. The Great Commoner surrendered that title, and to every one's surprise accepted a peerage or, to quote Chesterfield's apt words, "he fell upstairs" into the House of Lords. As Earl of Chatham he received the minor office of Privy Seal. The truth is, the great orator's mind became unhinged about this time. Gout and the excitement of public life had done an evil work on him, and he sank into a long eclipse which darkened the next three years. He could bear no noise. Houses all around his villa at Hayes were bought up that he might be muffled in silence. He took odd fancies. Trees were sent down from London to be planted by torchlight. The cooks in his kitchen needed always to keep the spits going, for they did not know the second when a dinner might be called for. From such fantastic humours and the deep gloom which followed them, a sharp fit of gout set him free. But he had then (1768) resigned the Privy Seal.

During Pitt's mysterious retirement, and presumably without his approval, Townshend had recourse to the dangerous precedent of taxing the American colonies. He laid import duties on tea, lead, glass, paper, and painters' colours. The discontent in the colonies was revived. The whole amount to be raised was only £40,000; but the colonists objected to the principle, not to the amount. They formed defence associations and held colonial congresses.

The affairs of John Wilkes now came again to the surface. Taking advantage of a general election in 1768, he came over from France and stood for London. Rejected there, he carried the election for Middlesex. Riots followed. Wilkes was seized as an outlaw and thrown into prison. After he had spent two months there, the Court of King's Bench decided on reversing his sentence. For publishing a letter against Lord Weymouth, one of the Secretaries of State, he was expelled from the House

of Commons. He was again returned for Middlesex almost unanimously. As often as the Commons expelled him, the electors of Middlesex returned him. At last a Colonel Luttrell was put up to oppose him, and the Commons decided that the colonel, although he had received fewer votes, was the member for the shire. Then every tongue and pen, from Chatham in the Peers down to Junius* in the Public Advertiser, fought for the freedom of election. Wilkes became the most popular man in England. Before he came out of jail in 1770 he had obtained damages in the Common Pleas for £4,000 against Lord Halifax for false imprisonment and illegal seizure of papers. As Alderman, Sheriff, and Lord Mayor of London, he ran the round of civic splendour, and continued to represent Middlesex in the Commons for many years.

*Junius. The letters signed "Junius" began to appear in the Public Advertiser on January 21, 1769, and continued till 1772. It is still uncertain who was the writer of them; but the name supported by the best evidence is that of Sir Philip Francis, then an official in the War Office, and afterwards a member of Council in Bengal. Woodfall, the publisher, was prosecuted. His acquittal showed that the freedom of the press had been completely established.

CHAPTER XII.

HEROES OF THE COTTON MILL.

Wool deposed-James Kay- Hargreaves - The Spinning-jenny — Arkwright's water-frame-Crompton's mill-Parson Cartwright — The

power-loom-Results.

THE

HE old English staple, Wool, gave way in the course of the last century to a foreign intruder, called Cotton. Instead of the snowy fleece so long associated with our national wealth, the down of a tropical pod came to be the leading material of our insular manufacture. It took little hold at first, since cotton thread could not be made strong enough to form the entire fabric of a stuff. Calicoes were therefore made, in which linen and cotton threads were combined. When Sir Robert Walpole was fighting for excise, the spinning and weaving practised in Britain were of the simplest kind-the finger and thumb or the spinning-wheel rolling the thread, and a loom and hand-shuttle combining these clumsy threads into cloth. The men to whom we owe the mighty change since accomplished well deserve the title of "Heroes of the Cotton Mill," because of the fortitude they displayed in fronting the calumny and loss which descended on them all in the ungrateful generation they adorned. These "heroes" merit also a place in the story of our nation, because to the wealth they created we may certainly in great measure ascribe that national strength and depth of resources which kept Great Britain afloat during the Napoleonic storm, and which have since enabled her to bear her enormous load of debt.