For seventeen years he remained in office. Nothing could have been greater than the contrast between him and his strenuous opponent Fox, who was the most impulsive, genial, and lovable of men; extravagant in every direction, in his likes, his hates, and his sympathies; easily stirred and able to pour forth a torrent of passionate eloquence; living always in the excitement and impulses of the moment, with never a thought for the morrow. Pitt, on the contrary, was cool and thoughtful. He stood, as it were, aloof from all the world, though on the rare occasions when he unbent, he was full of charm. "Smiles were not natural to him," said a contemporary. "He is," said Wilberforce, who unfeignedly admired him, even though he could not always follow him, "one of the most public-spirited and upright men I ever knew."
And he was called upon to guide the ship of State through troubled waters. in payment of the American war bill, for a debt of about twenty millions stared him in the face. Then he had to face more than the usual amount of difficulty with Ireland, where the celebrated Dublin Parliament which Henry Grattan, its brilliant leader, had forced Fox to agree to, proved itself so unable to cope with the task undertaken, that riots and disturbances broke out in every quarter. Pitt believed that only one solution was possible, namely, that instead of a separate Parliament at Dublin, the Irish members with the Scotch should sit at Westminster, and in the year 1799 he brought in the Act of union, which was carried during the next session, in spite of a strong speech against it by Grattan, who was dragged from his sick-room for the occasion The entire room was faced with polished granite..
Pitt had also to contend with a restless wave which swept over England, the result of the French Revolution. But though the young minister was always ready for reform, he would have nothing to do with violent changes or with revolution, neither was he afraid to bring in such measures as seemed likely to repress the revolutionary spirits in England. The French leaders, not content with having executed their king and queen, and having waged war on Austria, when that country moved to rescue the luckless Austrian princess, now Queen Marie Antoinette, went to the further length of declaring that every country not agreeing with the doctrines of the Revolution was to be regarded as an enemy, and was to be forced into war.
For some while Pitt managed to hold the English people from plunging into the conflict. He was altogether a peace minister. But public opinion was too strong for him; the old hatred of France was there, and the events of the last few years had fanned it into life. Pitt had to bow to the will of the nation, though it was the French who finally declared war in 1793 by an attack on Holland, after which England could no longer stand aloof, though Fox, in his hot-headed way, declared that in his opinion we had no right to demand the withdrawal of French troops from the Netherlands. From that time until the day of victory at Waterloo in 1815, the fight between England and France continued with more or less intensity.