Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/897

Salomon: Williavi Pttt de Jiingere ■> 887 theme, were obscured by a heavy style and faulty perspective. The timeliness also of the introduction's appearance was open to question. It offered nothing in itself complete, and it was a bare promise, without performance, of a feat the success or failure of which only later vol- umes could determine. Enough of the work is now in print to justify an attempt at a verdict ; and one may presage, with a measure of con- fidence, that the vices of the introduction will disappear in the virtues of the completed work. The heavy style, previously in evidence, is here much alleviated: in so far as a foreigner may judge, this hindrance indeed has almost if not quite disappeared. The author no longer wanders from the path of his narrative; and of his whole undertaking, it is a pleasure to observe that the load, since he has settled to the collar, moves. Readers of Professor Salomon's introductory volume will recollect that the task which he has set himself is not light. His purpose, as enunciated there and repeated here, is not merely to write a biography of Pitt : the narrow bounds of family life are broken ; an adequate ac- count is attempted of the movements, passions, and conflicts of which Pitt was the centre; and that statesman is given his proper setting in English history during the stormy time when he was helmsman of the English state. In order properly to execute this purpose, the author justly observes the need of viewing Pit.t in two relations, the one to England herself, and the other to the history of Europe in the period of the Revolution. The present volume, covering the years of Pitt's public life from its beginning to 1793, deals largely, though not ex- clusively, with the first of these relations, as the next volume presumably will with the second. While chronology had dictated this order of treatment, the author, in the present portion of his work, by no means dissociates England from the Continent. In this connection, he ob- serves in fact, concerning England, that her decline between 1/63 and 1783 was not due, as is traditionally held, to the loss of America alone. On the contrary, the mistaken colonial policy which drove America to insurrection was but a single strand of a rotten cable ; England's political, social, and economic organization, like that of France, was unsuited to the time ; and England's problem was quite that of Europe and of the period, the adaptation of an antiquated system to the needs of a younger generation. It was the work of Pitt, as a constructive statesman, to initiate and fix in peaceful channels this reform in England, the counterpart of which, in France, cost that country the Revolution. Dr. Salomon, in his introductory volume, recounted what Pitt drew, for his assistance in this task, from his family's and his country's past. Starting from this foundation, the author opens the present volume with an able sketch of the situation and leaders in England at Pitt's entry into public life. Thence the narrative passes in turn to the combination of new Whigs and new Tories which gave England peace with America, and