‘A nation entrusted to a school-boy’s care’
As the foregoing events demonstrate, the House of Commons lurched back and forth when it went about managing the nation’s financial busiÂness. When Pitt cared to dazzle, the House adopted his enthusiasm and composed meticulously crafted code-writings to show off his and its virtuosity in financial matters.
When Pitt nodded or winked, the House dozed. The problem appeared, Janus-like, with two faces. One can see the House of Commons (like the Bank of England) seduced by a great leader, that is, a member with superior political skills. Certainly Sheridan’s quotÂable observation - and that of other members and scholars - stands in for this rather facile attempt to understand the problem. On the occasion of Pitt’s Sinking Fund, Land Tax Redemption and Tax on Incomes his performance was a one-man show staged for the benefit of his governing majority. Michael Duffy’s The Younger Pitt assesses Pitt’s handling of public finances at the close of the century.He cultivated the active, doing men of business, the most conscienÂtious back-benchers and the opinion formers, and he used them to man the Commons committees - that most effective and influential tool for managing Commons’ business and over which he kept a very tight control It was management by contrived, persuasive influence,
rather than by Party discipline, but it proved very effective.70
The Commons Select Committee, Duffy also remarks, served as ‘an extremely flexible multi-purpose weapon’ in the hands of Pitt’s strongman-style 114 ‘The average price of peace and war’ leadership.71 In short, Pitt was a master of the parliamentary theatrics essential to maintaining control over his colleagues. There is no shortage of biography around which to revolve the history of the House of ComÂmons in the interval 1783-1801. Pitt the Younger inherited the perquisites of power.
His father had served twice as first Treasury Lord. A family friend procured a seat in Commons as soon as Pitt could constitutionally take the oath required of members, that is, at the age of 21. When George Hanover called on him to form a government in December 1783, the versifier of the doggerel Rolliad taunted the younger Pitt: ‘A nation entrusted to a schoolÂboy’s care’.72Financial wizardry was a talent much in demand in the 1780s and 1790s. The royal assent to the National Debt Reduction Act (more commonly the Sinking Fund Act) was reported to the House on 26 May 1786. This was two days shy of Pitt’s 27th birthday. Alexander Hamilton celebrated his 26th birthday on 11 January 1781, the same year that Congress chartered HamilÂton’s Bank of North America (26 May 1781).73 The meteoric careers of Pitt and Hamilton illustrate the importance of political economy as a developed talent. The intersection of words and numbers supplied the opportunity for ambitious members to acquire and display their skills. Members of legislaÂtive assemblies with financial smarts found themselves much in demand in times of financial crisis.
A Pitt-centred narrative offers a lively relation; it is suitable for ready display on a biographical frame. It is not the only viable perspective that might be employed, given a time-line launched on 19 December 1783 when Pitt took the reins of power. By revolving matters around the mandatory nature of parliamentary competence, a modestly different but more nuanced view emerges. Through the 1770s governments embarked upon programs to advance the national agenda by fulfilling an increasingly broad range of service missions. The canonical list of such missions appears in Segment 1 of the Standard Model. See Appendix: The Parliamentary Model and The Standard Model, this volume. Stakeholders demanded distribution of benÂefits to them and solace for their burdens. The House of Commons found itself frequently inspired to harness both public and private stakeholders to the joint purpose of fulfilling a well-defined responsibility to civil society that Commons found attractive.
In the flourish much favoured in the last half of the century the House of Commons had assessed these projects to be of ‘great Utility’ or to the ‘public Advantage’. These projects possessed, in a word, their own motive power. Pitt was not in command of canals, taken as projects turning on merit outcomes or featuring legislative process finely detailed for the use of stakeholders. Canals preceded Pitt’s ascension to power; canals and railways followed his demise. Pitt was not the sun in any solar system; he was following a path tracked by powerful forces which marked out his course, as it were, in advance of his arrival on the political scene.In the study interval, government ambitions required both increased governÂment spending and robust parliamentary procedures. At a high level of abstracÂtion, government-as-vendor dominated the landscape and this domination obscured the differences between members who were eager to engage in canalÂbuilding and, on the other hand, members of an assembly who were obliged to tend provincial sensitivities in a world-wide empire. Or, reader’s choice, a government that tended to the sensitivities of bond-buyers or committed its resources to grinding rebel provinces into submission. This vision found its expression in Burke’s dictum - at the opening of the 1790s - that government was a contrivance tasked to meet human wants with man-made answers; this dictum recapitulated the Hamilton-Madison vision articulated for the ConÂtinental Congress in 1780-81. This vision converted the typical government official into a dealer in compliance. What officials had on offer was goodness and fairness. What inhabitants offered the government, on the narrowest view, was their compliance with programs crafted for their benefit or to alleviate their burdens. In Dauntonian terms consumer-inhabitants traded their trust, suitably commodified, for the goodness and fairness that government offered.
‘Governments rule by means of law’, Martin Loughlin has observed, ‘because by maintaining such rule-derived expectations, they foster the allegiance of their citizens, which is, in turn, power-generating’.74 Loughlin sums up the transactional nature of this settlement, given that the eightÂeenth century finished off command and control as the exclusive means of government accomplishment.
In my rephrasing of Loughlin’s analysis, ‘governments bind themselves’ to do business with consumer-inhabitants (as opposed to subject-inhabitants) because ‘rule of law values... are perceived by the governors as well as the governed as prudential necessities rather than as universal moral values’.75This vision matured by the last third of the eighteenth century. It was profoundly attractive to all classes of stakeholders, from rural landowners and urban business owners to private householders. The needs and wants of the citizen-consumer model framed the ideal behaviour of both governors and the governed. Blackstone and Bentham along with Burke and Jefferson accepted the transactional nature of the relationship between consumerÂinhabitants (my term) and public officials. In the largest sense transactional analysis was the only reliable means of sorting out the connection between the aspirational level of discourse - why does political society exist? - and the technical, which deals with the daily grind by which officials cash out consumers’ expectations through the sale of goods and services by governÂment agencies and entities.