which I think the present Act provides. No one needs be in the dark as to whom he is trusting in a limited liability company. No doubt many foolish schemes will be concocted, and many companies be got up for the sole benefit of individuals; but that will not tell against the soundness of the principle. Every day rogues establish (and unfortunately get credit in) private trading concerns, and continually villanies are perpetrated in trade by men beside whom burglars are mild knaves, but over whom, alas! the mercantile laws of this country throw their shield of protection.

It is only during the last year that joint-stock banks limited have been founded to any extent. Out of forty-six altogether established in England to 31st December, 1862, thirty-six were registered in the previous twelve months (none have been established in Ireland or Scotland). Hitherto there have been no failures, and some instances of most remarkable success. Some of the oldest and most respectable private banks are enlarging their proprietary, and transacting their business on the limited liability principle. It is obvious a large proprietary of traders will bring custom, and consequently profit, to a bank, and thus enable traders to be their own bankers. Ten years hence it may be demonstrated that banking business can be successfully conducted on this basis; but until they have passed through similar crises as have occurred in each of the last decades, it will be premature to speak positively.

If the principle of limited liability is right to be applied when seven or more persons associate together for purposes of trade, it is difficult to understand why two or more persons may not trade on the same conditions; and yet the attempts to make it legal have met with the most strenuous opposition, both from the highest commercial and legal authorities; but the success that has attended public companies will doubtless lead the Legislature to sanction its extended application. Many of the arguments used above will apply in these cases, and many more might be adduced; but as the text has special reference to "public companies," we may not discuss "Limited Liability in private partnerships" in the present paper. B. M. B.

CHRISTIANITY AND CONTROVERSY.-Let us never forget that Christianity was planted, and has grown up, in storms. Discussion is favourable to it, and has ever been so. Let the wintry_blast come. It will but scatter the sere leaves, and snap off the withered branches; the giant tree will only strike its roots deeper into the soil, and in the coming spring-time put forth a richer foliage, and extend a more grateful shade.-HENRY ROGERS.

The Essayist.

WILLIAM PITT.

Concluded from page 225.

It is not necessary that we should follow the career of Pitt, step by step, during the ensuing two-and-twenty years: to do so minutely would demand volumes instead of pages, and convert an essay into a history; for, as Macaulay justly observed, "A full history of the life of Pitt, from this point, would be a history of England, or rather of the whole civilized world." We may, though, even within the limits assigned to us in this Magazine, briefly indicate the leading events of that period, in so far as they bear upon the character of the man whose biography we are sketching. With such an index before us, we may be better able to judge of his merits, and more inclined to look kindly upon his few imperfections.

As a Cabinet minister, the reign of William Pitt appears upon the page of history divided into two chapters, one extending from 1784 to 1793, a period of peace and prosperity at home and abroad; the other ranging from the declaration of war by France in Febru ary, 1793, until the close of his political career in the early part of the present century. As to the merits of his administration up to 1793, there seems to be but little, if any, controversy between the writers who have favoured us with their opinions upon the subject. During that period of nine years it was Pitt's good fortune to inaugurate many measures of no ordinary magnitude, which had the most beneficial effect upon the country at large, and upon the colonial dependencies of the empire abroad. He found the finances of the State in a mass of disorder and confusion,-revenue eaten away by the practice of smuggling, carried on very extensively on the coasts, as well as by frauds upon the Customs; the trade of the nation crippled by harsh regulations, and its prosperity clogged. His predecessor in office had increased the national debt, and made no provision whatever to meet the growing deficiency in the available income of the country. Pitt organized the national accounts, introduced measures to check frauds and practically destroy the smuggling trade; and in all his financial schemes acted on the maxim that "gradually to redeem and to extinguish our debt was an object which ought ever to be the wise pursuit of a Government, and should be the end of every financial operation." Exceptional expenditure he met by temporary taxes; and in a few years, instead of mourning over a deficiency, he could boast of an annual surplus of nearly one million, which he applied towards the reduction of the 1863.

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national debt. The legitimate development of the commercial resources of the kingdom he matured and fostered, extending to Ireland the benefits of his wise and patriotic measures. For the government of India he drew up a bill, which met with the appr al of the Board of Directors of the East India Company, and eventually became law, to remain upon the Statute Book long after he himself had passed away, and only replaced a few years since by the mode of government now happily existing in that vast empire under our beloved Queen. To the loyal subjects who had suffered by the outbreaks in Scotland and in America he procured the award of compensation. On the affairs of Ireland, long forgotten by men in his position, he ever bestowed a willing and anxious attention. He introduced a system of government for our Canadian dependencies, liberal in its character, beneficial in its results; under the influence of which they happily prospered, until some twenty-two years since, when it underwent some slight modifications, necessitated by the great progress the colonists had then made. When the extravagant demands of the then Prince of Wales and his political adherents were urged upon him, he boldly withstood their influence, and, almost single-handedly, maintained the credit of the State. When an illness of his Sovereign placed the nation and its affairs in a situation the most exceptional and the most perilous, he nobly stood firm to the principles of the Constitution; and at the risk of losing even the friendship of his future king, and of returning, perhaps, in a few weeks to the empty chambers of a poor and briefless barrister, he preserved the dignity of the prerogatives of the Crown, and saved the country from ruin. A grateful people held a meeting in London, and in forty-eight hours contributed £100,000, which they tendered to him as a free gift; but his reply was, "No consideration on earth shall ever induce me to accept it." A sinecure situation of £3,000 a year became vacant; the usages of official life made it his, and he could have accepted it without vacating his seat in Parliament, but he declined it; because by bestowing it upon another he was able to save the country a pension of £3,200 a year. A grateful Sovereign pressed upon him the acceptance of a vacant Garter, but, gratefully declining the high honour for himself, he asked that it might be bestowed upon his elder brother. The Wardenship of the Cinque Ports, worth about £3,000 a year, he at length accepted, only, however, because the King refused to permit him to decline the appointment. He laboured zealously and continuously for the removal of the penal restrictions imposed upon the Roman Catholic population of the kingdom; and by his exertions, aided by those of his noble rival, Fox, the liberty of the press was preserved to us, and the system of trial by jury placed upon a firmer and better footing. Well may we say with Lord Macaulay -though without that reservation with which the noble historian accompanies the statement, that during this period of nine years, at all events, William Pitt "". I was the honest friend of civil and religious liberty." His intimacy with Wilberforce was not without

its influence upon his mind. Their hearts beat in harmony upon the great question of the time, and of the abolition of the slave trade Pitt was again and again the warm and able advocate, making for it what even Lord Brougham admits to be "his finest speeches. With that noble lord we may indeed regret that the abolition of such a barbarous and inhuman trade was not effected in England in Pitt's time; but we frankly confess we cannot see the force of the charge which his lordship brings against the minister for not having made it a Cabinet measure during his term of office. Lord Brougham seems to forget that a perusal of the history of Pitt's political career shows him to have been thwarted in the Cabinet and in the closet now by his colleagues, and now by his Sovereignupon many measures he had much at heart, and this very one of the slave trade among the rest. When Lord Brougham, or the editor of his speeches-for whose comments he must be held responsible, alleges that because Mr. Pitt did not make this a Cabinet question, he "had not the enthusiasm for right and justice to risk in their behalf the friendship of the mammon of unrighteousness," he indulges in a vein of rhetoric which has not a shadow of fact upon which to rest, and shows his utter ignorance of the character of the man whose actions he attempts to malign. It is a significant fact that the greatest opponents with whom Pitt ever met in the House on the slave trade question were the representatives of these very Liverpool merchants, who, at a subsequent period, sent Henry Brougham to condemn what they themselves had so unhesitatingly supported.

On the 1st of February, 1793, the French Government, having eleven days previously beheaded their King, declared war against England; and during the remainder of his career Pitt appears before us as a war minister. Here condemnation falls heavily upon him from almost every quarter. Macaulay records that henceforward his name is associated "with arbitrary government; harsh laws harshly executed; with alien bills, with gagging bills; with suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act; with cruel punishments inflicted on some political agitators, with unjustifiable prosecutions instituted against others; and with the most costly and the most sanguinary wars of modern times." This summary of charges, brought by a writer of the position of Macaulay, is almost enough to stagger those even who are favourable to the youthful statesman; but their force is considerably weakened by the fact that, at the time the historian thus wrote, much of the materials which would have enabled him truly to estimate the actions of the man were not within his reach. To the noble writer, if he still lived, we might now fairly say, "Read the volumes which have recently emanated from the pen of Lord Stanhope; examine the ample and authentic details there given concerning Pitt's proceedings during this period of war abroad, and treason and rebellion at home; and reconsider the verdict you have long since passed upon the statesman of the time." Lord Brougham, in a speech delivered at Liverpool in

1812, said, "Pitt was immortal in the miseries of his devoted country, immortal in the wounds of her bleeding liberties, immortal in the cruel wars which sprang from his cold, calculating ambition; im mortal in the afflictions of England and the humiliation of her friends, through the whole results of his twenty years' reign, from the first rays of favour with which a delighted Court gilded his early apostasy." We have, but a moment ago, dwelt upon the inaccuracy of this noble lord's reasoning relative to Pitt's official conduct on the slave trade question. We may well content ourselves with passing over this series of denunciations as utterly groundless, coming from one who, almost in the same breath, gloried in being "the enemy of the immortal statesman." In 1812 the political adversary thus branded the man whose life we are depicting. In 1835 Lord Brougham spoke of William Pitt at a banquet in Liverpool in terms more like those of an impartial critic, to whose opinion age and research had lent every weight; and what were they?"Though I differed from Mr. Pitt in politics, I admit— who does not ?-that he was a great minister, a great orator, and a man of unsullied public virtue. I admit his great abilites, as every man who has the least regard for truth, or any candour in his composition must cheerfully allow."

Let us briefly, however, run over the charges thus made against the minister of the day. Success did not attend the arms of Britain during the greater part of Pitt's war ministry, it is true; but at least some portion of that blame is fairly to be attributed to divided command in the field, and the presence of a prince of the blood royal in military power in the camp. If the minister is to be personally blamed for failures, he may, on the same principle, claim the credit of successes in all military operations; and on this plea we are to attribute the victories of a Wellington in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, not to the ability of the general, or the valour of his troops, but to the operations of the Premier of the time, carried on at the official residence in Downing Street, London! It would be a very superficial reader of history indeed, who would place Pitt on the list of British statesmen below him who ruled the destinies of England in Wellington's triumphal hours; and if Pitt had had a Wellington in the camp to carry on his military operations against the enemy, his war policy would have been subject to no reproach. But why are those who so heartily condemn him for his military failures so very silent as to the naval successes achieved in his time? To whose credit are they to attribute the glorious victories of our navy under Howe, and Hood, and Nelson, if not to William Pitt, during whose government they were won? Of that navy Nelson himself declared, that during the early part of this war administration, "My seamen are now what British seamen ought to be, almost invincible; they really mind shot no more than peas." The triumphs on the sea counterbalance the failures on land, and we can afford to sympathize with, instead of condemning, the minister,