Bygones Worth Remembering Volume I Part 6

The Chartists had held a Convention in London the week before the 10th, and were unable to obtain any place of meeting except a small social inst.i.tution in John Street, Tottenham Court Road, which could not seat 150 persons at the Convention table. The hall was lent to them by the most pacific body of politicians in London--the followers of Robert Owen. Yet Mr. Thomas Hughes adopted and authenticated Kingsley's incredible belief, that the country was in danger of these earnest but entirely impotent Chartist pet.i.tioners; and Mr. Hughes actually quotes believingly in his introduction to "Alton Locke" a statement that: "The Duke of Wellington declared in the House of Lords that no great society had ever suffered as London had during the proceeding, while the Home Secretary telegraphed to all the chief magistrates of the kingdom the joyful news that the peace had been kept in London."*

* Prefatory Memoir of Kingsley's Works, by Thomas Hughes, p. 13.

Never did the craziest despotic Government in Europe engage in such a political imposture. It was pitiable that the Duke of Wellington should have had no more self-respect than to compromise his great career by fortifying London against an imaginary enemy. The Government had plentiful information and must have known the truth--the contrary of what they alleged.

It may be said in extenuation of these affected Ministerial terrors, that the Parisian revolution of that year had communicated unrest to the people of England. It had inspired them with pleasure, but not with insurgency, for which they were as uninclined as they were unprepared, and none knew this better than the Duke of Wellington. The Parisian population had seen military service. They understood the use of arms, had them, and knew how to settle their differences at the barricade.

London had never seen a barricade. The people were all unused to arms, and were without the means or the knowledge to storm a police station.

Yet, according to Canon Kingsley, Wellington told the Government "that no capital had gone through such days as England had on the 10th of April," when no man was struck--no man was killed--no riot took place anywhere. It would seem that ignorance, rashness, wildness, and irresponsible language are by no means peculiar to the working cla.s.ses.

We must cease to wonder at the Duke of Wellington when an accredited publicist like Judge Thomas Hughes, who was educated at Rugby, could tell the world himself that "It is only by an effort that one can realise the strain to which the nation was subjected."

On that awful day, n.o.body was reported as found looking into a shop window with a predatory glare in his eyes, and no account came up from the provinces that a single Chartist was observed to peep over a hedge in a menacing manner.

I was out on the 10th of April. On Sunday, the night before, I was the lecturer at John Street The audience was composed largely of delegates to the dreadful Convention that so perturbed the "Iron Duke."

My advice to them, published at the time, was to "Beware of the police,"

and not to strike again if they were struck. Many of them, I knew, were willing to die for their country, if that would save it. They would serve it much better by dying without resistance, than dying with it. If any were killed whilst walking in the procession their comrades should move quietly on. Nothing would tell more strongly on public opinion than such heroic observance of order. Hetherington, one of the bravest who walked in the ranks, told me he would do it. The Government, by their ostentatious provocation, in garrisoning the Bank with soldiers, crowding Somerset House with them, parading troops on Clerkenwell Green, had brought, it is computed, more than two millions of persons into the streets. The conclusion to which the Chartist leaders came, was that the Government wanted to create a conflict, shoot down a number of the people, and then proclaim to Europe that they had "saved Society,"

by murder, as one of their chief special constables did soon after in Paris.

As I had been personally a.s.sociated with all the chief Chartists, in prison and out, from the beginning of the movement, I can speak with some knowledge of them on that day.

On the morning of the 10th of April, Mr. C. D. Collet, the well-informed Secretary of the People's Charter Union, myself, Richard Moore, and others, organised a band of forty persons, who were to distribute themselves over London, note-book and pencil in hand, in the character of reporters. The police took kindly to us, and gave us good positions of advantage, where we could see everything that took place thereabouts, and even protected us from being incommoded. We were there to watch the police, not the people, as the disorder, if there were any, would come from them. My station was in Bridge Street, Blackfriars, where a row of constables was drawn up. I found a coa.r.s.e, plethoric alderman, going from man to man, saying only three words: "Strike hard to-day."

The people behaved admirably. Not a blow was struck which gave a colourable ground for outrage on the part of the police. In justice to the police, it ought to be said, neither did they incite disorder.

At night the Home Secretary spent the money of the State, in telegraphing to all the mayors in the land "the day had pa.s.sed off quietly," thus creating a false terror everywhere that London had been in danger--danger of the Government's creating.

The Bull Ring Riots in Birmingham in 1839, when I was resident there, were created entirely by the magistrates, who introduced a hundred London policemen into the town, which led to the loss of life and property.

I and others on the deputation to Mr. Walpole told him at the time, when the railings were broken down in Hyde Park, that if he made a show of soldiers and policemen, people were sure to be killed. At the peril of his own reputation, he kept them out of sight, and no disorder took place, though violent members of the Government tried to destroy Mr. Walpole for his wise and n.o.ble forbearance. Dean Stubbs, in his interesting book on Charles Kingsley, says (p. 97): "On the 10th of April, 1848, a revolution was threatened in England. One hundred thousand _armed men_ were to meet on Kennington Common and thence to march on Westminster, and there to compel, by physical force, if necessary, the acceptance of the People's Charter by the Houses of Parliament." Could such a lunatical statement be written by any one, and his friends not procure a magistrate's order for his removal to the nearest asylum? How were the "hundred thousand" to get the arms into London--if they had them. Whence were they to procure them? Where could they store them, seeing that at that time there was not a single place of Chartist meeting that was not known to be in debt, unless its rent was paid by the charity of some well-to-do sympathiser? What were muskets or pikes to do against the stone walls of the Houses of Parliament or the Bank? How were cannon to be drawn from the centre of London to Kennington Common with ample service of powder and shot?

Marvellous is the history which Churchmen can write!

The utterly groundless and incredible representations of the "10th April," which Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes published, as we have seen, were to my amazement resuscitated as late as 1902 for the historic instruction of the students of the Working Mens College in Great Ormond Street, London, by Mr. R. P. Lichfield, vice-princ.i.p.al of the college, who for forty-seven years has rendered it important service, for which all friends of education for workmen are grateful. Yet in his address to the students (October 1, 1902), he tells them that in 1848 "the wave of democracy which swept over Europe gave fresh impetus to the Chartist agitation. On the memorable 10th of April it looked as if we were to have a revolutionary outbreak on the Parisian pattern. This we were saved from, partly by an army of volunteers, special constables, partly by the Duke of Wellington's discreet placing of his troops.... The attempt to overawe Parliament by a 'physical force' demonstration was a fiasco." The world knows a good deal of historians who draw upon their imagination for their facts, but here is a responsible teacher, drawing upon his terrors of fifty years ago, for statements which n.o.body believes now or believed then, who knew the facts. The Duke of Wellington's great name in war imposed upon amateur politicians. The Duke--contrary to his reputation for military veracity--readily lent himself to the Government of that day, that they might figure before the country as the deliverers of England, from the nation-shaking a.s.sault of a miscellaneous crowd of penniless and unarmed combatants, who had neither cannon nor commissariat. Everybody was aware that the knowledge of the Iron Duke, outside war, was very limited, and his political credulity was unbounded. At the end of the Peninsular War he wrote to the Government of that day, informing them "the bankers of Paris were furnis.h.i.+ng large sums to Revolutionists in England." Only old residents in Bedlam would believe that. There were no leaders of Revolutionists in England, to whom the money could be a.s.signed or consigned, and bankers were the last persons in the world to subscribe money for a wild, speculative, and uncertain enterprise. No spy of Pitt, or Sid-mouth, would have sent home so insane a report, from fear of instant dismissal from their sinister employment.

This is but a sample of the airy, false, and fictionary foundation on which the Legend of the Tenth of April was built. These incidents of historic perversion, though bygones of half a century ago, are worth remembering.

CHAPTER VIII. THE CHARTISTS OF FICTION

The Chartists have made as much noise in the world as they knew how--yet to the generation of to-day they are ambiguous. They have had no historian. Carlyle went to look at them in prison, and defamed them with that bitterness and contempt he had for partisans who lacked the sense of submission to the dictates of those superior persons who knew what was best for everybody, of whose aspirations they knew nothing, and for whose needs they had no sympathy. Chartism, however, has won conspicuous treatment in fiction. What it was in fact, is a very different thing.

There is the Church Chartist by Canon Kingsley, and the Positivist Chartist by George Eliot, drawn by two famous artists. The pictures are hung upon the line in the great gallery of literature. So brilliant is the work of Kingsley that it has imposed on so accomplished a connoisseur as Dean Stubbs, who, in his life of the fervid Rector of Eversley, has taken it for a painting from real life. I present the Church Chartist first.

In my time I have seen much good done by Christians with a view to extend their faith. Some few, like Samuel Morley, who excelled all lay Dissenters I have known in the manly sense of the dignity and independence of Nonconformity, would do generous things from the humaneness of their own minds alone. Some Quakers and Unitarians have had this quality. Others, Churchmen, Roman Catholics, and orthodox Christians, I have known to mitigate privation for the "Lord's sake,"

not for humanity's sake. This was to some extent the case of the Rev.

Frederick Denison Maurice, Canon Kingsley, and their n.o.ble colleagues, Edward Vansittart Neale, Judge Thomas Hughes, and J. M. Ludlow.

They became Christian Socialists not so much because they cared for Socialism, as Maurice owned his "object was not to Socialise society, but to Christianise Socialism." Startled by the dislike and even resentment against Christianity expressed by men of poverty and intelligence at being asked to adopt a belief which brought them no relief, Maurice, Kingsley, and their a.s.sociates concluded that privation was the cause of alienation from the Church. In like manner Dissenters thought that it was the bad condition of industrial life which kept working people from chapel. None realised that alienation from Christianity had its seat in the understanding--in intellectual dissatisfaction with the tenets of Theology. The absentees from church and chapel alleged that no relief came of belief, and never had since the days when manna fell in the Jewish wilderness, and loaves and fishes were miraculously plentiful on the hills of Galilee. There was no sense or profit in adopting a faith which had been unproductive for nearly 2,000 years. It had taken the slave, the serf, and the hired worker a long time to see this. But at last experience had told upon the thoughtful. But the theologians neither in the dominant, nor dominated camps perceived it.

Very generous is Kingsley's sympathy, in "Alton Locke," with the lot of working people, but he believed that when the rebellious shoemaker fully realises that good priests would mitigate the lot of those who labour in workshops or in fields and mines, he will become reconciled to the Thirty-nine Articles. Alton Locke is a Church Chartist--not one of the Chartists of real life whom I knew, who were current in Kingsley's days, who signed the famous doc.u.ment which Place drew and Roebuck revised.

They had principles. They did not seek paternal government of friendly Churchmen, nor of Positivists, nor that n.o.bly organised kind of pa.s.sive competence which Mr. Ruskin meditated for the people. The real Chartists--like the Co-operators--sought self-government for the people by the people. The alienation of the people from church and chapel was not founded on lack of spiritual patronage, or thirst for it, but from intellectual dissatisfaction with theological tenets.

Christians, from the Vatican to the Primitive Methodist conventicle, are all so persuaded of the infallibility of their interpretation of the Scriptures, and are so convinced of the perfect sufficiency of their tenets for the needs of all the world, that they regard difference of opinion as springing from wilful misunderstanding, or from the "evil heart at enmity with G.o.d"--a mad doctrine beneath the notice of the average lunatic. Natural variety of intellect, the infinite hosts of personal views, and the infinitude of individual experience--which silently create new convictions--are not taken into account, and conscientious dissent seems to the antediluvian theologian an impossibility. Even the most liberal of eminent Unitarians in England, W. J. Fox, regarded, what we now know as the Agnostic--hesitation to declare as true that which the declarer does not know to be so--as a species of mental disease.

That Kingsley lived in a refracting medium, in which the straightest facts appeared bent when placed in it, was evident when he wrote: "Heaven defend us from the Manchester School, for of all narrow, conceited, hypocritical, and atheistic schemes of the universe the Cobden and Bright one is exactly the worst." There was no reason why Kingsley should be a Chartist, since he had all he wanted secured, and had contempt in his heart for Chartist tenets. He wrote: "The Bible gives the dawn of the glorious future, such as no universal suffrage, free trade, communism, organisation of labour, or any other Morrison pill measure can give." He exulted in the existence of the forces which made against the people. He exclaimed: "As long as the Throne, the House of Lords, and the Press are what I thank G.o.d they are!" he was grateful.

The state of things which existed, it was the object of Chartism to change.

These rampant ideas of Kingsley were far from being Chartist sentiments.

At a meeting in Castle Street, London, the Rev. Charles Kingsley and Mr.

Thomas Hughes were present, working men comprising the audience, an old grey-headed Chartist, of a Republican way of thinking, whose experience of monarchy was limited to his share of taxation for its support, hissed at the introduction of the Queen's name. Mr. Hughes, then a young athlete, turned upon the old Six Points politician and said: "Any one who hissed at the Queen's name would have to reckon with him"--meaning that he would knock him down, or put him out of the meeting. If, at a Chartist meeting, one athletic leader had similarly threatened an old grey-headed Royalist who hissed some Republican name, it would have been described, in all respectable papers, as "a ruffianly proceeding." The Hughes incident showed Christian Socialist sympathy with Chartism was not of an enthusiastic character. At other times Mr. Hughes had n.o.bler moods, but he, like Kingsley, had few qualifications for delineating Chartists.

Judge Hughes, like Canon Kingsley and his Christian Socialist colleagues, saw everything in the light of Theology. He saw nothing else by itself. He relates "the appearance of a little grey, shrivelled man at the grave of Mr. Maurice at the cemetery at Hampstead, one of the staff of the leading Chartist newspaper," as a proof of his conversion.

This was grat.i.tude, not conversion. Had I not been at the Bolton Co-operative Congress at the time, I should have been at the same grave.

When the news came of Maurice's death, it did not occur to his friend, Mr. Neale, that the Congress would pa.s.s a resolution in honour of Maurice. I suggested it to him, and he said to me, "You had better draw up the resolution," which I did, and moved it. It was unanimously and gratefully pa.s.sed. Though I was foremost to express the respect of working men, and the sense of obligation they were under, for Maurice's great services to Co-operation, and his establishment of the Working Men's College, it did not imply that I had come to accept the Thirty-nine Articles. Relevant appreciation, real grat.i.tude, and admiration, do not imply coincidence of opinion on other and alien questions.

How little the creator of Alton Locke was a Chartist, or a sympathiser with Chartism, was seen when he described "Mr. Julian Harney and Feargus O'Connor and the rest of the smoke of the pit." Kingsley said "his only quarrel with the Charter was that it did not go far enough." All his meaning was that it should have comprised social, instead of political reform, which was what all who were opposed to political freedom said.

This only meant that he wanted Chartists to take up social, and drop political reform. This appears in the pa.s.sage in which he said, "The Charter disappointed me bitterly when I read it. It seemed a harmless cry enough, but a poor, bald, const.i.tution-mongering cry as ever I heard. The French cry of organisation of labour is worth a thousand of it."* Organisation of labour is a great thing, but it is not political equality or liberty. Kingsley's Chartist had no political soul.

There is n.o.ble sympathy with labour, and there are pa.s.sages which should always be read with honour in "Alton Locke." But the book is written in derision of Chartism and Liberal politics. Alton Locke himself was like his creator. Kingsley's acts were the acts of a friend, his arguments the arguments of an enemy; and Alton Locke, despite the n.o.ble personal qualities with which he is endowed, was a confused political traitor, who bartered the Kingdom of Man for the Kingdom of Heaven, when he might have stood by both.

* Prefatory Memoir, by T. Hughes, p. 16.

So much for the Church Chartist. Now turn to the Positivist Chartist, and see whether there be any backbone of political emanc.i.p.ation in him, or whether his vertebra is of jelly, like Alton Locke's. To the Positivist Chartist is given the stronger name of "Radical."

One of the remarkable volumes George Eliot gave to the world bears the name of "Felix Holt, the Radical." But when she comes to delineate the Radical, he turns out to be a Positivist--of good quality of his kind, but still not a Radical.

As Canon Kingsley drew the Church Chartist, so George Eliot drew the Positivist Radical. Neither drew the selected hero as he was, but as each thought he ought to be.

A Radical is one who goes to the root of things. He deals with evils having a political origin, which he intends to remove by political means. Radicals were far older than the Chartists. Radicalism was a force in reform before Chartism began. The Radical more or less evolves his creed by observation of the condition of things surrounding him; the Chartist had his creed ready made for him. The Chartist may be said to begin with political effects, the Radical with political causes. Anyhow, the Radical was always supposed to know what he was, and why he was what he was. Felix Holt was not built that way. George Eliot had greater power of penetrating into character than Kingsley, but she made the same mistake in Felix Holt that Kingsley made in Alton Locke. Felix Holt is a revolutionist from indignation. His social insurgency is based on resentment at injustice. Very n.o.ble is that form of dissatisfaction, but political independence is not his inspiration. Freedom, equality of public rights, are not in his mind. His disquiet is not owing to the political inability of his fellows to control their own fortunes.

Content comes to Felix when the compa.s.sion of others ameliorates or extinguishes the social evils from which his fellows suffer. He is the Chartist of Positivism without a throb of indignation at political subjection. That may be Positivism, but it is not Radicalism.

Felix Holt discloses his character in his remark that "the Radical question was how to give every man a man's share in life. But I think that is to expect voting to do more towards it than I do."

"A man's share in life" was the Baboeuf doctrine of Communism, which English Radicals never had. Holt's depreciation of the power of voting was the argument of the benevolent but beguiling Tory. It was part of the Carlylean contempt of a ten-thousandth part of a voice in the "national palava." This meant distrust, not only of the suffrage, but of Parliament itself. When both are gone, despotism becomes supreme. When Felix Holt talked so, he had ceased to be a Radical--if he ever was one.

The power of voting has changed the status and dignity of working men--not much yet, but more will come. Hampered and incomplete as the suffrage is, it has put the workers on the way to obtain what they want, though they are a little puzzled which turning to take now they are on the road.

Felix Holt continues: "I want the working men to have power.... and I can see plainly enough that our all having power will do little towards it at present.... If we have false expectations about men's characters, we are very much like the idiot who thinks he can carry milk in a can without a bottom. In my opinion the notions about what mere voting will do, are very much that sort" Felix declares that all the "scheme about voting and districts and annual parliaments [all points of the Charter]

will not give working men what they want."*

* See "Felix Holt, the Radical," vol i. pp. 265-266, Blackwood's edition of George Eliot

Felix has much more to say in disparagement of political aspiration which is like reading one of Lord Salisbury's speeches when he was Lord Cranborne, but without the bitterness and contempt by which we knew the genuine Salisbury mind. The Eliot spirit is better--the argument more sympathetic, but the purport is the same. It means: "Leave politics alone. You will find all the redress that is good for you elsewhere."

This, if true, is not Radicalism which sought to help itself, and not rise by compa.s.sion. Radicals may have expected too much from political reform--they may have thought political power to be an end instead of a means whereby better public conditions can be obtained, by which social effort could better be compa.s.sed, and its projects carried out. It is true that social condition can be improved by men of purpose and character under despotism, but this does not prove that despotism is desirable, since it can make itself at will an effectual obstacle to progress, and as a rule does so. The policy of seeking the best political condition in which social progress can be made, is Radicalism.

The policy of contentment with things as they are, seeking social condition apart from politics, is Socialism, as it has been understood in England. "Felix Holt," like "Alton Locke," abounds in n.o.ble sentiments, exalts the character of working men, vindicates their social claims with eloquence. But Felix Holt was no more a Radical than Alton Locke was a Chartist. Alton Locke is against Chartism. Felix Holt is against Radicalism. Sir Leslie Stephen has written the most fascinating estimate of the writings and genius of George Eliot that has been produced. He has interesting things to say of Felix Holt, but it does not occur to him to say what he was so well able to say, whether he was a Radical or not--or if one, of what species. Therefore it has been necessary to place before the reader the evidence which will enable him to decide the question for himself.

In reference to this chapter, Mr. J. M. Ludlow wrote to me, saying: