Sketches of Reforms and Reformers, of Great Britain and Ireland Part 10

Wardlaw--Rev. JOHN ANGELL JAMES, of Birmingham. Of Mr. James' course in the early stages of the anti-slavery movement, I cannot speak with certainty. But, during the controversy growing out of the apprentices.h.i.+p, and in the later efforts for the overthrow of slavery and the slave trade throughout the world, the contributions of his pen and voice to the cause received additional influence from his position as one of the most conspicuous leaders of the Congregational body of Great Britain. He has also been among the foremost of the dissenting clergy in advocating the principle of Voluntaryism, in its application to ecclesiastical affairs and the education of the people. Perhaps, at the present time, he stands at the head of the denomination which he adorns by his talents and virtues. Mr. James has a high reputation as a writer and preacher on both sides of the Atlantic. It was not my fortune to hear him in the pulpit, but I can bear testimony to his power over audiences on the platform. He has the external qualities, the physical embellishments, of an orator: a well-proportioned person--a voice of great compa.s.s, and as flexible and rich as a flute--a singularly expressive countenance, polished manners, and a graceful gesticulation.

These are the frame and border of that grand and beautiful picture which his strong mind and glowing imagination paint before admiring a.s.semblies. He captivates and converts more by winning grace than conquering power; more by the charms of his rhetoric than the severity of his logic. Let it not be inferred from this that his speeches are devoid of argument. Far from it. They abound in that ingredient, without which all public addresses become the mere sounding bra.s.s and tinkling cymbal of an unbridled imagination, or the sound and fury of hollow declamation, signifying nothing but the emptiness of the mere word-spouter. I only mean to say, that his reasoning is not sent into the world bald, but is embellished with artistic skill, and that his speeches bear the hearer onward to conviction in a mixed current of strong argument, elevated sentiment, witty allusions, and happy hits.

His appeals to the n.o.bler feelings of the supporters of the cause he is advocating, are fully equaled by his adroitness in sweeping away the objections its opponents have strewed in his path, leaving prostrate antagonists to admire the skill and courtesy with which the victor waved rather than hurled them to the ground. In the select social circle he is as attractive as when eliciting public plaudits on the rostrum; and though an ecclesiastical leader, and ready to defend his religious tenets on suitable occasions, his liberal sentiments and courteous bearing toward all sects, have won him troops of friends in every denomination and cla.s.s of Christians, from Bishops in lawn to Quakers in drab.

Even an incomplete list of clergymen who bore conspicuous parts in the contests detailed in the last chapter, would be unpardonably defective if it omitted to name Rev. JAMES HOWARD HINTON, an able Baptist preacher, and the author of a history of this country--and Rev. WILLIAM BROCK, an eloquent divine of the same denomination--and Rev. WILLIAM BEVAN, of the Congregational church, whose pamphlet on the Apprentices.h.i.+p did much toward terminating that system--and Rev. JOHN BURNET, of the same church, one of the keenest debaters the English pulpit affords.

CHAPTER XX.

British India--Clive and Hastings--East India Company--Its Oppressions and Extortions--Land Tax--Monopolies--Forced Labor and Purveyance--Taxes on Idolatry--Amount of Revenue Extorted--Slavery in India--Famine and Pestilence--The Courts--Rajah of Sattara--Abolition of Indian Slavery--British India Society--General Briggs--William Howitt--George Thompson as an Orator--Lord Brougham's Opinion--Mr. Thompson's Anti-Slavery Career--His Visit to India--His Defense of the Rajah--Advocates Corn-Law Repeal--Is Elected to Parliament.

Near the close of the seventeenth century, English s.h.i.+ps occasionally skirted the coast of Hindostan, anxious to exchange a roll of flannel or a pack of cutlery for a case of muslins or a bag of spices. A surgeon from one of these vessels was called to attend upon the daughter of the reigning Prince, and succeeded in curing her of a dangerous disease.

Being asked what reward he would have for his services, he refused to receive any gift for himself, but solicited commercial privileges for his countrymen. They were granted; and English trading factories were established at Madras and Calcutta. These purely trading posts became the germs of a power which, shooting out its gigantic branches, ultimately spread over the largest and most fertile portion of the peninsula of Hindostan. Robert Clive, a clerk in the Madras factory, laid the foundation of British empire in India. Warren Hastings, a clerk in the factory at Calcutta, erected upon this foundation a towering superstructure, whose blighting shadow now covers a million square miles of territory, inspiring awe in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a hundred millions of people. The dominion of Britain over this immense area and population is justifiable neither by the mode in which it was obtained, nor the manner in which it has been exercised. Obtained by force, fraud, and cunning, it has been exercised in a spirit of avarice which might tingle the cheek of a Shylock with shame, and of oppression which gives verity to the fabulous tales of Oriental despotisms in the olden time.

The whole of Anglo-India is ruled primarily by the Government of Great Britain, but a large portion of it is governed practically by the English East India Company. These sovereigns in Leadenhall street execute their mandates through a small body of Directors, who acknowledge a slight allegiance to a Board of Control in Downing street.

They derive their authority from the Charter of the British Crown, and rule India by permission of the British people. The fundamental principle of their government is, to make India subservient to their pecuniary interests, regardless of its own. Proceeding on the plan of realizing as large a profit as possible on the capital invested, they have taxed the land to the utmost limits of its capacity to pay, making every successive province as it fell into their hands a pretext and a field for higher exactions, and boasting that they have raised the amount of revenue beyond what native rulers were able to extort. They have monopolized every branch of trade that could be made productive, employing in the prosecution the smallest number of laborers, at the lowest rate of wages. The instructions of the Company to their Indian agents have been to make as large remittances as possible. This done, little concern has been felt as to the means employed by the thousand or twelve hundred Englishmen sent thither to enrich their employers and ama.s.s private fortunes by plundering the country. The periodical invasion of these hordes of needy adventurers has been like the march of the locusts of Egypt--before them was fertility and beauty; behind them was barrenness and desolation. For the Company to listen to the complaints of the natives, was a sickly sentimentality unbecoming a great mercantile a.s.sociation; to demand inquiry, was an impertinence; to redress grievances, no part of the obligations imposed by the charter.

The Hon. F. J. Sh.o.r.e, who spent fifteen years in India, part of the time as a judge of one of the higher courts, says: "The British Indian Government has been practically one of the most extortionate and oppressive that ever existed in India; one under which injustice has been and may be committed, both by the authorities and by individuals, (provided the latter be rich,) to an almost unlimited extent, and under which redress for injuries is almost unattainable." All unprejudiced authorities agree that Anglo-Indian rule has been worse than that of either of its predecessors, the Hindoos and Mahometans.

From a ma.s.s of doc.u.ments before me, I will select a few items in support and ill.u.s.tration of these general statements.

The great curse of India is the _Land Tax_. The principle on which the Government acts is, that it is the owner of the soil, and that the occupiers are only tenants at sufferance, though their t.i.tles can be traced backward till lost in the haze of antiquity. While under Hindoo rule, the people paid to the Government an annual tax equal to one-sixth of the produce of the soil. The Mahometans, having partially subdued the Hindoo Princes, increased the tax to one-fourth of the produce. Then came the civilized and Christianized English. Asking as a boon the permission to erect two or three warehouses on the coast, they pursued for many years the humble occupation of factors, dealing in silks, muslins, rice, spices, and precious stones. Growing rich, insolent, strong, and rapacious, they overrun the finest provinces, bribing, swindling, butchering the native Princes. Well secured in their regal seats, trading became a secondary occupation, subservient to the arts of diplomacy and the strategy of arms. Having conquered, they resolved to plunder. They apportioned the soil among surveyors and collectors, whose duty it was to levy and collect the land tax. The cupidity of the conquerors increasing by what it fed upon, they ultimately directed the tax to be fixed at a money value, before the crops were ripe, and to be rated at the highest capacity of the soil in the most fruitful seasons.

The result is, that in the most favorable years it absorbs one-third of the produce; in medium years, two-thirds; in years of scarcity, and in unproductive localities, the whole, and more than the whole--the deficiency in the latter case being made up from neighboring farms or districts, or by selling personal property. The average of this tax is variously estimated at from two-thirds to three-fourths of the annual produce. The Company instructs the collectors, that "if the crop be even less than the seed sown, the full tax shall still be demanded. If the occupier be unable to pay, the deficiency is to be made up by a.s.sessing it on the entire village or neighborhood. If these be unable to pay it, then on an adjoining village or district--limiting, in such cases, the a.s.sessment to ten or twelve per cent. of the value of the land, lest it injure the next year's revenue!" The immediate consequences of this extortion are appalling. Thousands of all cla.s.ses, ages, and s.e.xes, are turned out of their homes, and wander about in nakedness and want, begging and plundering, selling their children into slavery or giving them to those who will feed and keep them as servants, while other thousands perish of hunger in the jungles and the highways, or are swept off by diseases incident to such squalor. In a single year, famine alone has carried away a million of the population of a land fertilized by a thousand rivers, and fecund of vegetation under the warm blushes of a tropical sun.

Next to the land tax, the most noxious fruit of British rule is a system of Government _Monopolies_, covering not merely the luxuries, but the necessaries of life. The chief of these are in corn, rice, salt, indigo, and opium. The district washed by the mouths of the Ganges produces immense stores of corn and rice. The sea, in the contiguous district of Madras, throws up large quant.i.ties of the most beautiful salt. But, though the one district furnishes a surplus of what the other is dest.i.tute of, they cannot interchange commodities without paying a monopoly tax to the Government, which amounts to a positive prohibition.

Even the owner of a plantation bordering on the ocean, whose liberal waves line it with salt, cannot gather in the product without subjecting himself to heavy fines and imprisonment. It is all seized by the Government, and doled out at such prices as to create an annual revenue of from 2,000,000 to 3,000,000. The opium monopoly is still more odious. On the finest corn-lands of Benares, Behar, and part of Bengal, the inhabitants are compelled to grow this pernicious drug, and this alone. The poppy is planted amid curses, its produce is purchased by extortion, carried forth by violence, and sold to work the ruin of millions. The opium being manufactured, the East India Company takes it all, giving the growers such prices as it pleases. Not long ago, while selling it at Calcutta at sixty s.h.i.+llings per pound, it allowed but two s.h.i.+llings per pound to the miserable cultivators. In 1839, it exported to China alone 2,700,926 in value; and for many years past its annual profit from the opium monopoly has been estimated to exceed a million sterling. Other monopolies might be mentioned; but these will suffice as a specimen.

Another branch of British extortion is what is termed _Forced Labor and Purveyance_. In procuring supplies for camps; cattle, sheep, and other food for European soldiers; carriage for troops or civil functionaries; provisions for jails and implements for convict laborers; trains of workmen for the Government and for privileged persons--in short, in any levy for civil or military exigencies, whether in peace or war, the most cruel exactions are practiced. Out rush the myrmidons of Government, or privileged Europeans, and seize cattle, camels, sheep, carts, corn, fruits, and whatever is needed, and wherever found. On highways, at fairs, on farms, they seize on men, horses, and carriages, to transport their loads, throwing the effects of the owners into the roads; and entering shops and dwellings, they carry off what pleases their fancy, gratifies their appet.i.tes, or supplies their necessities. When one of these military or civic cavalcades is pa.s.sing over the country, it scatters terror far and wide. An eye-witness says: "As soon as the people perceive the _cortege_ approaching, accompanied by a police officer, they run and hide themselves. You may see, sometimes, half a village scampering over the fields, pursued by one or more officers in full hue and cry." As long ago as when Hastings traveled in state from Calcutta to Benares, to plunder Cheyte Sing of his treasures and his territories, he expressed his astonishment to see the inhabitants flying at his approach, shutting up their shops, and escaping to the woods.

Seventy years have scarcely modified the rigors of the conquering Briton, or abated the terrors of the subdued Indian.

The rapacity of the English rulers cannot be better exemplified than in the fact, that while British societies have sent missionaries to convert the natives to Christianity, and on the first Monday of every month tens of thousands in two hemispheres invoke Divine blessings on "India's coral strand," the East India Company has levied taxes on travelers who would visit the Temple of Juggernaut or bathe in the waters of the Ganges, taxing the devotee before he threw himself under the wheels of the idol, taxing the widow before she leaped on the funeral pile of her husband, taxing the mother before she offered her offspring to the crocodile on the banks of the sacred river, and taxing Hindoos for becoming Christians, and on their refusal to pay, torturing them with thumb-screws, and with standing in the burning sun, bearing heavy stones on their shoulders.

By these and like means, England wrings from this wretched people an annual revenue of more than twenty millions sterling. Besides this amount, there are numerous incidental drains upon the resources of the country, of which no account is rendered or kept, and untold sums extracted by the unlicensed extortion of individuals and squads, making the naturally fertile and beautiful peninsula that stretches from the snows of the Himalaya mountains to the sands of Cape Comorin, the plundering-ground of England.

And more than this: during ten years of English boasting, immediately following the abolition of slavery in her West India Colonies, that in whatever part of the world her flag floated in dominion, there the air was too pure to be inhaled by a slave, the chattel bondmen of British India were to be counted by millions, held in servitude by permission of British laws, which British power could have revoked at any moment by a dash of the pen.

The calamitous consequences of this long-continued system of oppression and extortion can hardly be overrated. The ancient public works have fallen into decay. Public improvement has languished. The roads, bridges, and ca.n.a.ls, are in the most deplorable state. Education and the arts are neglected. Native property-holders are ruined by taxation. The laboring poor sink into the arms of beggary, while surrounded by foreigners who riot in plenty. The earth refuses to yield her natural increase in return for n.i.g.g.ardly culture. And the country has been wont to relieve itself of its redundant squalor by famines which sweep its table lands, and by pestilences, which, having depopulated its towns, take to themselves wings, invade distant nations, cross wide oceans, and scourge every part of the world.

In return for all these inflictions, and for a trade which crowds her ports with the richest products of Asia, one would suppose that Great Britain, which boasts of its judicial and munic.i.p.al inst.i.tutions, might give to India a tolerable internal government. Not so. It could hardly be more wretched. Its internal affairs are conducted for the same ends for which its taxes are collected--enriching and aggrandizing the rulers. Indians are excluded from every honor, dignity, and station, which the meanest Englishman can be induced to accept. A writer of probity and experience informs us, that the public offices are sinks of every species of villainy, fraud, chicane, favoritism, and injustice.

The courts are a libel on the very semblance of justice. Practically, there is no law for the mult.i.tude. Often but a single magistrate can be found in a district as large as the State of Connecticut. He cannot hear a tenth of the causes demanding his attention. The distance, the expenses, the hopelessness of getting a hearing, deter thousands from seeking it. Those hardy enough to attempt it, on arriving at many of these tribunals, find them conducted, not in the Hindostanee language, which the suitor understands, nor in the English, which the judge speaks, but in the Persian, which neither suitor nor judge knows a word of. Justice, or rather _judgment_, is sold to the wealthy, and denied to the poor. If an influential native, in the pay of the Company, or an Englishman, is prosecuted, the prosecutor may deem himself fortunate if he and his witnesses are not seized and imprisoned by order of the Court. If the Government prosecutes for a fine or a tax, torture is sometimes applied to extort confession and payment. Judge Sh.o.r.e denounces the inferior courts as sinks of villainy. As to the Supreme Court, sitting at Calcutta, it has been regarded with an undefined and unintelligible horror since the day when Impey, at the instigation of Hastings, sentenced to death Nuncomar, the head of the Hindoo race and religion, on a trumped-up charge of forgery--a venial offense in the code of Indian morals.

And this is a feeble picture of England's government of India, a picture that all the plausible and brilliant extenuations of Macaulay, in his sketches of Clive and Hastings, do not obscure.

I will give an ill.u.s.tration of the mode by which England has extended her territory in India.

In the vicinity of the holy city of Benares, on the banks of the sacred Ganges, resides Purtaub Sing, an ill.u.s.trious Hindoo prince, better known as the RAJAH OF SATTARA. He once sat on the throne of Sattara, but for ten years has been the captive of the British Government, subsisting on its charity. He is descended from the renowned Sivajee, whose skill and courage, in the seventeenth century, delivered the Mahrattas from the Mahometan yoke of the successors of Tamerlane, and founded the mighty Mahratta empire. This warlike people, so long the terror of the English in India, made their home in the fastnesses of those mountains whose blue summits watch the distant coast of Malabar, and on the rich table lands stretching eastward from their tops, and the alluvial valleys which slide westward from their base, into the sea of Arabia. In 1817, after a checkered contest of thirty years, during which the cavalry of the Mahrattas often carried dismay and havoc among the white villas sprinkled around Madras, and the rice fields cl.u.s.tering among the mouths of the Ganges, their empire fell before the superior military skill and political intrigues of the British. At that time, Purtaub Sing, a youth of eighteen, was the rightful possessor of the Mahratta throne. By treaty with his conquerors, a small portion of the territory he had lost was allotted to him; he was placed on the throne of Sattara, and made tributary to the Government of Bombay. The mind of the prince was liberal and acute; his habits frugal and temperate; his character humane and n.o.ble; and for twenty years his just and beneficent rule rendered his dominions among the happiest and most flouris.h.i.+ng in India. For his many virtues and wise administration, the Directors of the East India Company, in 1835, presented him a rich gift and a eulogistic vote of thanks. The neighboring Government of Bombay had long had its greedy eye on this prosperous princ.i.p.ality. Having exhausted the arts of flattery and chicane to induce the Rajah to relinquish his throne in favor of a fawning creature of its own, it fastened a quarrel upon him in respect to certain revenues arising under the treaty of 1817. He appealed to the Board of Directors at London. They decided in his favor, and sent their decision to the Governor of Bombay. This was in 1835. The decision was withheld from the Rajah, and he was kept in profound ignorance of the result. The Governor now had recourse to the blackest crimes, to convict him of treasonable designs against the British power in India.

Charges were preferred, and he was brought to trial before Commissioners appointed to determine his case. It was in vain that he denied the jurisdiction of the tribunal, and offered to submit the matter to the Board of Directors. He was p.r.o.nounced guilty by a majority of the Commissioners, on evidence since proved to have been perjured and forged. General Lodwick, the English Resident at his Court, who sat on the Commission, denounced the testimony, as a ma.s.s of perjury and forgery. The honest soldier was removed from his post, and Colonel Ovans, an unscrupulous agent of the Bombay Government, appointed in his place. Not daring to punish the Rajah on the strength of such a trial, the new Resident was instructed to spare no pains to entrap the unwary Prince. After two years of vexatious dispute, and fruitless efforts to inveigle him, desperate measures were employed to accomplish the rapacious purposes of the Bombay Government. The Prince was dragged from his bed at midnight, torn from the palace of his ancestors, carried nine hundred miles across the country, and imprisoned in Benares. His estates were confiscated, his private treasure seized, his entire territory secured to the East India Company, and one of its creatures placed on the vacant throne. Twelve hundred of the Rajah's subjects, with tears and lamentations, followed their Prince into exile, leaving their wealth to their persecutors, and bestowing on them their blistering curses.

This black crime was perpetrated in 1839. The princ.i.p.al witnesses against the Rajah have since confessed their guilt, disclosed the names of their suborners, and the sums paid for their villainy. In vain has the deposed Prince appealed for justice to the authorities of the Company, both in England and India. And this is the way that England extends her dominions in India--the England that lifts her red hands in holy horror at Texan annexation and Mexican invasion.

But it would be unjust to suppose that all Englishmen have looked with indifference, much more with approval, on the administration of Indian affairs. From the day when Edmund Burke made the old oaken arches of Westminster Hall ring with his thundering philippics against Warren Hastings, whose splendid administrative qualities for a time dazzled and drew the public eye from his gigantic crimes, down to the day when George Thompson shook the India House by his lightning eloquence in defense of the deposed Rajah of Sattara, a few jealous eyes have watched the rulers of India. It is only within the past ten or twelve years that any considerable portion of the British people has uttered a hearty protest against English oppression in the East, and demanded justice for its Oriental brethren. Some palliation for half a century's indifference may be found in the profound ignorance in which the ma.s.s of the English people were steeped in relation to their Indian empire. Till a late period, even men of intelligence supposed the functions of the East India Company were chiefly commercial, and never dreamed that it marshaled an army in the field three times as numerous as that which conquered at Waterloo; that its agents reigned over a population seven-fold that of England, with a power and splendor equaling Roman proconsuls in the days of Caesar; that it deposed and crowned princes at pleasure, giving away thrones erected by the successors of Tamerlane; that the Great Mogul himself, reposing under the mere shadow of his ancestral greatness, was in reality but the t.i.tled pensioner of a Company, whose arms, intrigues, and extortions had scattered terror, strife, and poverty from the pine forests of Afghanistan to the cinnamon groves of Ceylon. But a better day has dawned for India. A people which, in the stormy times of Clive and Surajah Dowlah, of Hastings and Maharajah Nuncomar, hardly knew the locality of the island that sent out their oppressors, and which, in milder days, found it impossible to waft their complaints across 15,000 miles of ocean, now breathe their pet.i.tions in the ears of a listening Parliament, and through generous champions make even the great court of the India House echo the utterance of their wrongs. Many improvements in Indian affairs have already been secured. The eye of an influential party in England is fixed upon Hindostan, never to be withdrawn, till British rule ceases to vex the peninsula, or ceases wholly to exist. Tens of thousands of the best minds in the kingdom would prefer to see that rule instantly s.h.i.+vered in atoms, and the army, with the cowardly plunderers that throng in its train and hide behind its bayonets, driven in defeat and disgrace from India, than that it should exist for a single day, except to make atonement for past offenses. And to no man is this change in public opinion so justly attributable as to GEORGE THOMPSON.

It has already been stated that a better day has dawned on British India. The first purple streaks of the morning were seen when Earl Grey's administration abolished the last remnants of the maritime monopoly of the East India Company, and opened the Indian trade to the whole commercial marine of the kingdom--an important step in a line of policy, which, for many years, had been gradually circ.u.mscribing the ancient powers and privileges of the company.[6] The full-orbed sun arose when, ten years later, chattel-slavery ceased in all the vast regions stretching from the highlands whence spring the sources of the Indus and the Ganges, southward to where "the spicy breezes blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle," elevating millions of serfs to the condition of men, and verifying the words of our Whittier, that

----"Every flap of England's flag Proclaims that all around are free, From farthest Ind to each blue crag That beetles o'er the western sea."

[6] Since 1813 all British subjects have been permitted to trade to the East Indies under certain restrictions, which were wholly removed in 1833-4.

This great boon, out of which the slaves of India were defrauded six years by a political trick, in which the Duke of Wellington bore a dishonorable part, was a consequence rather than the cause of a broad and comprehensive movement among the Abolitionists of Great Britain, set on foot by the benevolence of Joseph Pease, and the eloquence of George Thompson, for redressing the wrongs of India. In July, 1839, "The British India Society" was formed, in the presence of a large audience, in Freemason's Hall, Lord Brougham in the chair. Soon after, auxiliary societies were organized in Manchester and Glasgow. Lord Brougham, and Messrs. Clarkson, O'Connell, Cobden, Bright, William Howitt, Joseph Pease, Gen. Briggs, Dr. Bowring, and George Thompson, were among the officers of these a.s.sociations.

The main objects of the British India Society were declared to be, to inform the public of the history of the British acquisitions in India, and the character of the British rule therein; to make known the condition of the natives; to introduce more extensively the cultivation of cotton, and to develop the resources of the country; to abolish slavery, and put an end to injurious monopolies; to stay the march of famine, and quench the l.u.s.t of conquest; to mitigate the land tax, and secure for the inhabitants a practical recognition of their claims to the soil; and to awaken in behalf of that distant people the sentiments of a genuine sympathy, and a proper sense of national responsibility in the empire which claims to govern them.

These n.o.ble objects have been kept steadily in view during the past ten years. The soul of the enterprise has been Mr. Thompson. He has been greatly aided by Major General John Briggs, a generous and gallant soldier, who spent thirty years in India, traveled over most of the Peninsula, administered the Government in several provinces, and has published two able works on the Land Tax, and on the Cotton Trade of India. Mr. William Howitt, so favorably known in our country as a writer of taste and research, has given many of the best productions of his pen to the same cause. Numerous public meetings have been addressed by Brougham, O'Connell, Bowring, Thompson, Briggs, and others; valuable pamphlets issued; and a great amount of startling information spread before the public eye. A radical change in the administration of Indian affairs is demanded by a body daily increasing in numbers and influence, whose advocates have found their way into the Board of Directors, the Court of Proprietors, and the Halls of Parliament.

I will now speak more particularly of Mr. Thompson. At the close of his speech on the occasion of the formation of the British India Society, Lord Brougham said: "I have always great pleasure in listening to Mr.

Thompson, who is the most eloquent man and the most accomplished orator whom I know; and as I have no opportunity of hearing him where he ought to speak, inside the walls of Parliament, I am anxious never to lose an opportunity of hearing him, where alone I can hear him, in a public meeting like the present." This is high eulogy, but it will not be deemed extravagant by those who have listened to its subject in his happiest moods.

Mr. T. was bred in a mercantile house in London. While a clerk, business could not prevent the gratification of his fondness for books, nor the cultivation of his remarkable native powers of elocution. He devoured libraries, and mingled in the debating clubs of the metropolis. In 1830, having read the great speech of Rev. Dr. Thomson, of Edinburgh, in favor of immediate emanc.i.p.ation, he embraced the doctrine, and soon after was invited by the London Anti-Slavery Society to traverse the country, and bring its objects before the people. His addresses in Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and other large towns, drew throngs of hearers; and so great was their influence, that the West India body, taking the alarm, employed Mr. Peter Borthwick (afterward, like Mr. T., elected to Parliament) to meet him, and present the slaveholding view of the question. This was the very stimulus needed to bring out all the powers of Thompson; for Borthwick was an able, ardent, and accomplished advocate. They measured swords on many a field in the presence of thousands, their encounters often extending through several successive evenings. Most unflinchingly and right gallantly did Borthwick bear himself in these conflicts. He was a foeman worthy of the glittering blade of his antagonist, and many a time did he feel its piercing point and excoriating edge. But the advocate of Slavery was not an equal match for the champion of Freedom; and he could hardly have been, had their relative positions been reversed. As it was, he was invariably overthrown. Thompson shook him from the point of his weapon, quivering and bleeding, at every crossing of swords. Many of Mr. Thompson's speeches were reported. They are crowded with pa.s.sages of power and beauty. Master of the facts of his case; skilled in its logic; expert in the arts of attack and defense; apt in quotations and allusions; fertile in ill.u.s.trations; singularly perfect in the command of language, still his _forte_ lay in the power of his appeals to the humanity, the sense of justice, the hatred of oppression, the innate love of liberty, of his hearers. When rapt with his theme, his frame throbbing with emotion, the perspiration dripping from his forehead and hands, his voice pealing like a trumpet, his action as graceful and impetuous as that of a blood-horse on the course, the hearer who, for the moment, could stifle the sentiment that Slavery was the most atrocious system under heaven, might be trusted to sleep quietly on his knapsack in the breach, when it spouted a torrent of fire.

The next year after the pa.s.sage of the West India abolition act, Mr.

Thompson visited this country, where he remained till driven from our sh.o.r.es for advocating the natural equality of man, and his inalienable right to liberty. We would not permit a foreigner to interfere with our inst.i.tutions--it was offensive, indelicate, impertinent. Probably Nicholas, the Sultan, Ferdinand, Victoria, Louis Philippe, and Metternich, thought just so when we interfered with Poland, Greece, South America, Ireland, France, and Germany. Not knowing the particulars, I shall not go into the details.

Returning to England, Mr. T. joined his old a.s.sociates for the overthrow of the West India apprentices.h.i.+p. When victory crowned their exertions, his brilliant services, with those of the more sober but not less efficient Joseph Sturge, were specially commended by Lord Brougham in one of his great speeches in the House of Peers.

Mr. Thompson now turned his attention to the affairs of British India.

Having formed the British India Society, and established auxiliary a.s.sociations in various parts of England, he, in 1842-3, visited India.

His fame as the advocate of the rights of the natives had preceded him.

In several parts of the country, he was greeted with long processions of richly-caparisoned elephants and camels, with cymbals and trumpets, and the gorgeous pomp customary in the festivities of orient climes. But he visited India for business, and not for show. He traveled through the upper provinces, held conferences with the people, gathered a store of important information, and, having been personally solicited by the Rajah of Sattara and the Emperor of Delhi, to present their claims before the British Parliament, he returned to England.

On a murky afternoon, in the dingy hall of the Court of Proprietors, in Leadenhall street, which was filled by merchants and speculators in India stocks, eager to pocket the spoils wrung from a people whom they had first conquered and then plundered, a tall man, personally unknown to but few present, rose from one of the back benches, and, with a pile of dog-eared doc.u.ments before him, proposed to bring the case of the deposed Rajah of Sattara to the consideration of the Court. At this announcement, a few members, not so dozy as the majority, turned their heads to see who this intruder could be. It was not long before he had thoroughly roused these free and easy gentlemen to a full sense of consciousness. Mr. George Thompson (for he was the man) began to spread out the unmitigated rascality of the transactions I have detailed. He was soon interrupted. His right to be there was questioned. But he was the proprietor of a sufficient amount of stock to ent.i.tle him to be heard. He went on. He was called to order. He would not come, but still went on. They proposed to take down his offensive words. He begged them to be patient, and he would soon give them something worth taking down.

He was declared impertinent. He insisted that his speech was decidedly pertinent. Clamor was tried. His voice pierced the din, with the defiance that "he _would_ be heard." He was denounced as the feed agent of the Rajah. He repelled the charge in a pa.s.sage of cutting power. He was threatened. But he rode on the surges of too many mobs, in the turbulent days of the West India discussion, to be frightened at a tempest in the East India House. He still held his ground, and kept up a heavy and well-directed fire. The excitement was intense, the turmoil continuing till three o'clock in the morning. It was one of the stormiest sessions which had ever taken place in that stormy hall. It revived the recollection of the days when Lord Clive, the founder of the Anglo-Indian empire, encountered Sullivan, the prince of London merchants, and the chairman of the Company, who had tabled infamous charges against him; or the days when Warren Hastings, laden with rupees and flushed with triumphs, measured powers with his deadly foe, Sir Philip Francis, the author of Junius. Above the war of this tempestuous night, the trumpet-voice of the gallant Thompson was heard, cheering on the band that rallied to the defense of the dethroned Rajah. It was an era in the history of the Indian Court of Proprietors. Justice, humanity, right, honor, were strange words to be echoed from arches which had so long looked down on fraud, cruelty, oppression, and avarice. Thanks to George Thompson, these words are becoming more and more familiar in that temple of Mammon.

When the Corn-Law struggle was approaching its crisis, Mr. T. yielded to the solicitations of the League to again advocate its cause before the country. He had been an agent of the League previous to going to India, and his peculiar eloquence contributed essentially to the rapid change of public opinion during the years 1841-2. In the last year of the Corn-Law contest, he fought shoulder to shoulder with Cobden, Villiers, Bright, and Wilson, and no Free Trade chief carried over that triumphant field a brighter blade or a stouter s.h.i.+eld than he.

As a testimonial of their regard for his many services in the cause of civil and religious liberty, the Lord Provost and Magistrates of Edinburgh presented him, in June, 1846, with the freedom of their venerable city. A higher honor awaited him. At the general election in 1847, Mr. Thompson was returned to the House of Commons for the Tower Hamlets, by the largest majority, over a popular opponent, obtained by any member of the new House.

In addition to the reforms already mentioned, he is the advocate of Universal Suffrage, of a dissolution of the union of Church and State, of Free Education, of Retrenchment in all departments of the Government.

In a word, he is a radical democrat.

I have already spoken of his powers as an orator. His logic is not of the firstly, secondly, thirdly sort--a didactic, pulpit sort of logic--but a sort in which all the numerals are combined, and confounded, and sent home with the accelerated momentum of geometrical progression. His rhetoric is not so systematic as Campbell's, nor so stiff as Blair's, but leaps spontaneously from a fruitful mind, from an observation of men and things active and broad, from a sympathy with the grand in nature, and the beautiful in art. He attacks an opponent with a general pell-mell of argument, fact, appeal, sarcasm, and wit, not the more easily repelled because this onset of "all arms" is not arrayed according to the precise rules of art, but comes from unexpected quarters, and in unantic.i.p.ated forms. He deals seriously with the great facts of his subject, and specially addresses himself to the higher parts of man's nature--the reason, the conscience, the affections. Yet can he gambol in playful humor, throwing the galling arrow of sarcasm, scattering the _jet d'eau_ of wit, or with a stroke of his crayon, drawing the ludicrous caricature, imitating to the life any peculiarity in the tone or manner of his antagonist--gliding from grave to gay, from lively to severe, with charming grace. His speeches might be set down merely as rare specimens of elocution or declamation, but for one peculiarity. They deal largely with the facts, the details of the case in hand. He _reads up_ on every topic he discusses. His stores of facts are relieved of all dryness or repulsion in the presentation, by the panoramic style in which he marshals them before the eye, all clad in the garb furnished forth by a rich elocution and lively fancy. Here lies his strength; for a single apposite fact outweighs, with the ma.s.s of men, a whole volume of abstract reasoning or florid declamation. His story charms like a well-acted tragedy or well-written novel.

If India shall ever enjoy a Government which protects its rights and promotes its prosperity, its happy millions will p.r.o.nounce no name with more grateful accents than that of their early friend and advocate, George Thompson.

CHAPTER XXI.

Cheap Postage--Rowland Hill--His Plan Proposed in 1837--Comparison of the Old and New Systems--Joshua Leavitt--Money-Orders, Stamps, and Envelopes--The Free Delivery--London District Post--Mr.