A Short History of English Liberalism Part 5

The direct consequence of this wanton abuse of power was to increase the disaffection of the common people and to stimulate the Whigs in Parliament.

Much as they hated Radicals, the Whigs were too honestly indignant to tolerate executive outrage of this kind, and too anxious to retain their own leaders.h.i.+p of const.i.tutional opposition, to leave all the work of protest to the Radicals themselves.[185] The citizens of London, York, Bristol, Nottingham, and other large towns sent addresses to the Prince Regent, and a great meeting of Yorks.h.i.+re voters was summoned by no less a person than Lord Fitzwilliam, the Lord-Lieutenant of the county. The Government was more frightened than ever, and contrived new methods of repression. Fitzwilliam was dismissed from his office, and Sir Francis Burdett was fined 2,000 and imprisoned for three months for publis.h.i.+ng a violent criticism in a newspaper. Castlereagh then introduced the notorious Six Acts. The drilling which had preceded popular meetings was made illegal. The trial of offenders was to be more expeditious. The magistrates were authorized to issue warrants to search for {148} arms. Transportation was made the punishment for a second conviction for seditious libel. Public meetings were restricted. Pamphlets were subjected to the same stamp duties as newspapers. A touch of comedy was lent to these proceedings by a grant of 1,000,000 for the purposes of building new churches. This had two objects. The first was to check the spread of Dissent. "It was their duty,"

said Lord Liverpool, "to take care that those who received the benefits of education should not be obliged to resort to Dissenting places of wors.h.i.+p by finding the doors of the church shut against them." But the second object was to prevent political agitation. "The recent increase of population," said the same statesman, "had taken place chiefly in the manufacturing towns; and it was impossible that great ma.s.ses of human beings should be brought together in the manner in which they were situated in these towns without being exposed to vicious habits, and to corrupting influences dangerous to the public security as well as to private morality."[186] The gravity with which such remedial measures as this were proposed shows how utterly the Tories had failed to understand their business. It is always the habit of a Tory to suppose that popular discontent is a matter of preaching. It is always preached up, and it can always be preached down. The people ask for bread, and the Tories offer them a dogma. The Government of 1819 was no wiser than its predecessors, and it applied itself with great diligence to convert the people by words from a disposition which arose directly out of a combination of low wages and high prices. They were saved by the forces of nature. The Regent ascended the throne as George IV in 1820, and his scandalous prosecution of his wife for a short time gave the people a new cry against the Government.

But with the defeat of the Bill of Pains and Penalties the popular feeling subsided. Ministers had imagined themselves to be faced with a conspiracy between the Queen and the populace like that which had placed Catherine II on the throne of Russia. But the death of the Queen removed the {149} leader, and good harvests, by bringing down the cost of living, reduced the sufferings of the people. The Tories remained in office for another ten years.

An attempt at economic reform was made at this time of crisis which deserves some notice. On the 16th December, 1819, Sir William de Crespigny moved that a Select Committee of the Commons be appointed to inquire into Robert Owen's scheme of co-operative production in New Lanark. Owen's experiment eventually failed. But as an experiment it was immensely valuable, and afforded abundant proof of the value of education, of the reduction of child labour, of a short working day, and of good conditions of housing and factory administration. Parliament could not have failed to profit by the study of such an excellent model. During the debate on Crespigny's motion, many professions of sympathy with distressed workmen were made, and not a few compliments were paid to the owner of the New Lanark mills. But Owen had made two dangerous blunders. As a Socialist he had spoken against private property, and his religious opinions were unorthodox. His scheme was therefore "subversive of the religion and government of the country," and Tories like Castlereagh, Pietists like Wilberforce, and individualist economists like Ricardo joined in denouncing it. The argument of Wilberforce shows with what conscientious frivolity these governors studied the condition of their subjects. If Owen's plan, he said, "proceeded upon a system of morals founded upon no religion whatever, but rather upon considerations of moral rect.i.tude of conduct only, he was of opinion that it behoved the House to be cautious how it gave its sanction to an inst.i.tution which did not acknowledge as one of its essential features that doctrine on whose truth and piety it was not for him now to enlarge."[187] Upon such barriers the motion was s.h.i.+pwrecked. It was lost by 141 votes to 16, and the working cla.s.ses were left to the tender mercies of compet.i.tion.

Everything at home seemed hopeless for the cause of {150} Liberalism. But while the demand for reform seemed to have grown weaker and its concession more remote, the aspect of foreign affairs was much more favourable. During this last period of Tory domination, which extended from the accession of George IV in 1820 to his death in 1830, the principle of nationality was steadily and courageously maintained. In capacity the members of these Tory Governments, with the exceptions of George Canning and Sir Robert Peel, were inferior to all who had held office before them since 1791.

Castlereagh, the strongest of the older men, killed himself in 1822.

Liverpool, who was Prime Minister from 1812 to 1827, was a respectable mediocrity. Sidmouth was rather less. Eldon, as Lord Chancellor, reigned supreme in the Lords, and nearly every measure of reform which was pushed through the Commons was overwhelmed in the Lords by his single argument.

"The change now proposed was in direct contradiction to what their ancestors had supposed to be the const.i.tution; whether they were right or not in that supposition was a matter which he would not take it upon him to decide."[188] But foreign affairs were happily outside the control of the House of Lords, and Canning, who joined the Government after Castlereagh's death, managed them in the temper of pure Liberalism. Except on the Catholic question, Canning was in domestic politics a Tory. But his zeal for the rights of nationalities was as warm as that of Fox himself, and he never failed to encourage the growth of that spirit which had finally overcome Napoleon. He became the acknowledged leader of European Liberalism. Even Castlereagh, after the great part.i.tion of Europe had been completed, had declined to interfere in foreign civil wars, or to a.s.sist in the coercion of rebellious nationalities. Canning turned the cold negations of his predecessor into warm encouragement and remonstrance.

The first difficulties arose in Spain. The expulsion of the French had been followed by the restoration of the Spanish dynasty, and the promises of free inst.i.tutions which had been used to stir up popular feeling were soon forgotten. Once {151} secure upon his throne, King Ferdinand proceeded with great vigour to suppress what elements of liberty he could discover in his dominions, and by 1822 the whole of Northern Spain was in a state of civil war and the South American Colonies were in revolt. The Holy Alliance had been contrived for just such circ.u.mstances as these. The French King sent an army into Spain to help King Ferdinand. That this was an outrage not even Castlereagh and Liverpool could deny, though it merely imitated the policy of the English Tories of 1793. They declined to join the Holy Alliance, and they addressed a strong protest to the guilty Powers. They declined, on the other hand, to go to war on behalf of one half of the Spanish people against the other. The system of Spanish government was for the Spanish people to decide. But the revolt of the Colonies gave Canning an opportunity of which he was glad to avail himself. At the earliest opportunity he formally recognized the revolutionary Governments. The establishment of a reactionary monarchy in Spain, where the issue of the civil war was in doubt, was one thing, the extension of the reaction to colonies which had set themselves completely free from their former rulers was another. There was no question here of appearing as a partisan in a domestic dispute. The Colonies were in fact independent. Was England to remain pa.s.sive while they were reduced once more into subjection? Canning was resolved that if despotism were to be the rule on the Continent of Europe it should not be extended beyond those limits. He "called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old,"[189] and no one who compares the present condition of South America with that of Spain will question the wisdom any more than the expediency of his act.

The affairs of Portugal produced a similar problem, and in 1826 Canning went so far as to send troops to Lisbon to protect the Portuguese Liberal Regency from Spanish invasion. In 1828 Don Miguel usurped the Portuguese throne and violated the const.i.tution which as Regent he had sworn to protect. The {152} Tory Government, which had lost Canning in 1827, and was now in the hands of Wellington, adopted the strict Liberal att.i.tude of not dictating to the Portuguese people how they should be governed. If they prevented France from supporting despotism, they could not, with any consistency, themselves support democracy. "Don Miguel," said Peel, "was the person administering _de facto_ the government of Portugal, and he could not think it prudent on the part of England to undertake to displace him and to dictate to the Portuguese who should be their ruler."[190] But the Government went farther than inaction. An expedition was fitted out in England by Portuguese refugees, and made a descent upon the Azores. A British s.h.i.+p fired on them and turned them back. It was the manner of the act rather than the act itself which was at fault. If the Government were bound not to a.s.sist the Const.i.tutionalists in Portugal, they were bound to prevent their own territory from being made a base for their operations.

The expedition should never have been allowed to sail. The use of armed force on the high seas was very unpopular, and Wellington was severely criticized by the Whigs. Their instinct was right, if their conduct was wrong. Wellington was in fact not so much refraining from interference in the domestic affairs of Portugal as suppressing a democratic movement. "We are determined," he wrote, "that there shall be no revolutionary movement from England on any part of the world."[191] He was equally determined, as subsequent events showed, that there should be no revolutionary movement in England itself. He would have drilled the English people as he allowed Miguel to drill the Portuguese, and if his policy was Liberal, his temper was Tory.

The debates on these Portuguese incidents are significant, not only because they reveal an almost universal acceptance of the principle of non-interference, but because they contain the ominous expressions of dissent from that principle which fell from the lips of Palmerston.

Palmerston had succeeded Canning at the Foreign Office, and he always claimed to be Canning's {153} disciple as well as his successor. He formally joined the Whig party in 1830, and with the brief interval occupied by Peel's administration of 1841, dominated the foreign policy of England until his death in 1865. He had all Canning's hatred of foreign tyranny, but, in his case, generosity was mixed with an arrogance and vanity which increased his difficulties and often defeated his objects. "If by interference," he said in the Miguel debates, "is meant interference by force of arms, such interference, the Government are right in saying, general principles and our own practice forbade us to exert. But if by interference is meant intermeddling, and intermeddling in every way, and to every extent, short of military force, then I must affirm that there is nothing in such interference which the laws of nations may not in certain cases permit.... In like manner as in a particular community any bystander is at liberty to interfere to prevent a breach of the law of that community; so also, and upon the same principle, may any nation interpose to prevent a flagrant violation of the laws of the community of nations."[192] The bystander in a street row is an exact description of Palmerston in his foreign politics. It is in these pa.s.sages that we find the explanation of a foreign policy which for a whole generation afterwards disturbed, irritated, and demoralized the whole civilized world. For the time being he continued Canning's policy with success. In spite of Wellington, he a.s.sisted to liberate the Greeks from the Turks in 1829, and it was largely owing to his bold opposition to France that Belgium burst the fetters imposed upon her by the Treaty of Vienna, and wrested her independence from Holland in 1830. In foreign affairs Liberalism had thus made a great advance since 1820. The interference in French domestic policy which was involved in the war of 1793 had never been repeated, and England, while herself respecting the rights of other nations, had actively a.s.sisted at the emanc.i.p.ation of Portugal, South America, Greece, and Belgium.

Even in domestic affairs the Tory barriers were being slowly {154} borne down by the rising tide. A humanitarian treatment of the lower cla.s.ses had already become apparent in legislation. The punishment of the pillory was abolished in 1816. The whipping of women was stopped in 1820. In 1823 Peel succeeded Sidmouth at the Home Office, and the temper of that department changed as conspicuously as that of the Foreign Office changed when Canning took the place of Castlereagh. Romilly had fought in vain for mitigations of the criminal law from 1808 to 1818. Sir James Mackintosh, after him, had met with slight success. Peel introduced Government Bills, and overcame even Eldon and the Bishops in the House of Lords. One hundred capital offences were abolished by a single one of these Bills. In 1827 it was made illegal for any one to use man-traps or spring-guns for the capture of housebreakers or poachers. In 1802 Peel had pa.s.sed a Bill for the protection and education of parish apprentices who were employed in manufactures. In 1819, 1825, and 1829 he applied similar regulations to the case of all children, whether paupers or not, who were employed in factories. The sum total of these restrictions was little enough, and they still permitted a child of ten to be worked for sixty-nine hours a week.

But they laid the foundation of our system of Factory Law. In 1824 the Combination Acts were repealed, and an instrument which had been frequently used for the disablement of workmen agitating for better terms of employment was thus taken from the employers. Even before the great Whig victory of 1831 there was thus strong evidence of a change in the temper of government. Political power was retained as jealously as ever. But the ruling cla.s.s was obviously losing its blind and obstinate reverence for antiquity and establishments. This change was due partly to the influence of Evangelical Christianity, which at this time guided a large section of the English middle cla.s.s, including Tories as solid as Wilberforce and Hannah More. This philanthropic Christianity had played a great part in the abolition of the Slave Trade, and it now operated to humanize in some measure the state of England. But the most powerful {155} influence of the time was a philosophy which was identified with revolution and free thought rather than with Toryism and religion. This was the philosophy of Bentham, or Utilitarianism.

Unlike the philosophies of men like Cartwright and Paine, Utilitarianism extended far beyond the boundaries of politics. It was a system of ethics from which political principles were deduced, and it was directed not only to political inst.i.tutions, but to social inst.i.tutions of every kind, including property and marriage. Burke's _French Revolution_, though primarily political, had in fact expressed a whole intellectual system, and its almost mystical Conservatism, believing in the irrational working of human instincts through illogical and hardly comprehended instruments, had been developed and extended by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Benthamism was a rationalistic and criticizing system, which referred everything to reason and experience, and would accept nothing merely because it had become by age the centre of human confidence. The intellectual Conservative tended to identify truth with antiquity. That an inst.i.tution had existed, that an idea had been generally accepted for a long period, was sufficient proof of its rightness; it should be criticized with reverence and modified, if at all, without substantial change. The Benthamite respected nothing and criticized everything. Armed with his own practical philosophy, he summoned every inst.i.tution and every idea to stand and give an account of itself, and if it failed to satisfy him, no degree of antiquity could save it from condemnation. Benthamism was thus a profoundly modifying force in other fields than that of politics. But for the purposes of this book it is not necessary to undertake a general examination of it.

Bentham began to preach his philosophy before the end of the eighteenth century. But its influence was not great until the French War had exhausted practical Toryism. Largely under the direction of James Mill the new thinking then began to make headway, and it had produced considerable political results even before the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the middle cla.s.s in 1832. {156} In the turmoil of warring theories Bentham laid about him with great impartiality. He had no sympathy with antiquity and prescription.

These were but "the infantile foolishness of the cradle of the race."[193]

But his contempt for historical Conservatism was equalled by his contempt for the conception of natural rights. "Rights, properly so called, are the creatures of law, properly so called; real laws give birth to real rights."[194] He had no patience either with appeals to history or with abstract reasoning. He was as ready as Paine to cut off society and begin it afresh, and as little ready as Burke to construct a theory in the air and apply it without regard to its practical effects. He had one guiding principle--that of utility, by which he meant a tendency to promote human happiness. Burke and Coleridge asked, "How has it grown?" Cartwright and Paine asked, "How does it conform to reason?" Bentham asked, "How does it work?" Every inst.i.tution--the monarchy, the Established Church, the law, property, marriage--was to be examined. If it promoted the general happiness, it might remain, however little it realized an abstract ideal.

If it did not, it must go, whatever its antiquity and splendour. c.u.mbrous legal forms and savage punishments which did not prevent crime must be abolished, even if they dated from the reign of Richard I. The House of Commons must be reformed, root and branch, because it was corrupt and selfish. Property was essential to the stability of society, and it must be preserved, whatever advantages it gave to one cla.s.s over another. Marriage must be made dissoluble, because, while divorce was impossible, indissoluble unions meant misery for many men and women.

It is easy to find fallacies in the philosophy of Benthamism. It is untrue to say that morality consists in the pursuit of pleasure. There are logical fallacies in the expression "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." Men do not habitually pursue their own interests, and if they are left free to pursue them it is not true that each of them will secure the greatest happiness for {157} himself. But whatever difficulties reasoners may find in the philosophy, there is no question that the practice of the Utilitarians was of immense value to society. The abstraction at which they aimed was not a mere abstraction. Cartwright wanted liberty as an end in itself. Bentham wanted happiness, which involved an indefinite number of tangible benefits. A Benthamite might reason absurdly about "self-interest"

and "happiness," but in effect he was seeking to improve conditions of life and to redress grievances. An a.s.sertion that it is the duty of Government to produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number might confuse a logician. To the ordinary Englishman, incapable of deep reasoning, it meant that it was his business, whenever he saw an abuse which could be remedied by legislation, to promote legislation to remove it. Utilitarianism provided a working formula for practical philanthropy.

Its direct influence upon politics was distinctly of a Liberal kind. Every man was to count for one, and no man for more than one. No man could know the interest of another better than the other himself, and each must be left free to pursue his own. A restricted franchise and government by a cla.s.s could not stand. Where each man's conduct was directed solely to the pursuit of his own interest this could only mean the abuse of the majority for the benefit of the minority. "Whatsoever evil it is possible for man to do for the advancement of his own private and personal interest that evil sooner or later he will do, unless by some means or other, intentional or otherwise, he be prevented from doing it.... If it be true, according to the homely proverb, that the eye of the master makes the ox fat, it is no less so that the eye of the public makes the statesman virtuous."[195] The argument is, of course, only partly true, and if it were entirely true it would be a poor argument for a wide franchise. If every man will, sooner or later, subject the public interest to his own, are we likely to be any more happy under a democracy than under an oligarchy? If all are corrupt, does it matter very much whether all or only a few have power? Democratic {158} government has its peculiar dangers, and it may be corrupted by absolute power no less than despotism or aristocracy. But it at least diffuses power among an infinitely greater variety of people, who are less likely to be animated by a single interest than a closely knit and h.o.m.ogeneous cla.s.s.

For the practical purposes of the time, where the privileges were all in the hands of the minority and the deprivations were all suffered by the impotent majority, the argument was good enough. It led to universal suffrage no less directly than reasoning from the abstract rights of man.

In practice some of the Benthamites stopped short at a middle-cla.s.s franchise. This cla.s.s was so large and so varied in character that it might be trusted to legislate for the nation as a whole. But the Benthamite reasoning went beyond this. It involved, as Bentham himself admitted, the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of women. James Mill and many of his friends would not go so far, and drew from William Thompson, in 1825, his _Appeal of One-Half of the Human Race_, which is the second of the great marks in the progress of English women.

Disputes about subjects of this sort, which were not yet practically important, did not weaken the general influence of the Utilitarians. Even where their philosophy was rejected, their sustained and general attack upon abuses produced its effect. They were allied with Tories like Wilberforce in abolis.h.i.+ng the Slave Trade. Romilly, Mackintosh, and Peel reformed the criminal law in the very spirit of Bentham. Sydney Smith, Jeffrey, Macaulay, Brougham, and the other Whigs, who since 1802 had written in the _Edinburgh Review_, habitually spoke with contempt of Utilitarians. But their practical politics were hardly different from those of James Mill and George Grote.[196] Restrictions on trade, excessive punishments for crime, costly and incomprehensible legal procedure, religious inequalities, anomalies {159} of the franchise, sinecures, jobs, all the fetters which hampered the individual in the pursuit of his own interest, were attacked by Whigs and Utilitarians together, and with the irregular a.s.sistance of Tories like Peel, the two contrived, between 1820 and 1850, to transform English politics.

The work of the Utilitarians was Liberal, so far as it went. Their insistence upon the equal value of all individuals led to the removal of restrictions upon liberty. No man could know the interest of another.

Therefore every man must be left, as far as possible, to himself. Each must control his own government. Each must be permitted to hold and to publish his own opinions. Trade and manufacture must be left to the unfettered discretion of traders and manufacturers. The Government must stand away from the individual, except when, as for national defence, some central control was inevitable. This course of reasoning led the Benthamites into the neglect of economic problems which was the great blemish of their practical politics. The economists had arrived at the theory of _laissez faire_ by a different route. Both schools now gave a scientific expression to the old English dislike of Government interference, which the Whigs cherished as part of their inheritance from the past, and the new middle cla.s.s as the result of their methods of industry. All four groups agreed in this claim for individual freedom, and the humanitarian tendencies of Benthamism were sacrificed to its pedantry. Enterprise was allowed full play. Protective duties were reduced and finally abolished. Compet.i.tion stimulated and encouraged the production of wealth. But while the masters profited, the workpeople suffered.

There is a very precise indication of the way in which the political economy of the day and the Utilitarian theorizing combined to neglect the peculiar miseries of the common people, in a speech of Joseph Hume. He was speaking against the Framework Knitters' Bill of 1812, which proposed to fix maximum and minimum rates of wages, and to prohibit the payment of workmen otherwise than in cash. Hume declared that the function of the State in economic matters was "to protect both {160} masters and workmen, and allow every individual to exert himself in employing his capital and labour in such an honourable manner as he may think best; every one in general being the best judge of his own abilities how to employ his stock in trade.... Viewing capitalists and artisans equally as traders, I consider an uncontrolled compet.i.tion as beneficial to both, and the strongest spur to ingenuity and industry.... If it should be more convenient or profitable for a workman to receive payment for his labour partly or wholly in goods, why should he be prevented from doing so? For if such a practice is inconvenient or injurious to any man, he will not work a second time for the master who pays him in that manner."[197] In the same speech Hume declared that he would put masters and men on an equal footing by the repeal of the Combination Acts, and the Acts were repealed, on Hume's motion, in 1824. This speech and the repeal of the Acts were Benthamite in essence. But equal treatment by the State was not equality, and to leave masters and men free to fight out their disputes was not to make each count for one and no one for more than one. Of what use was it to tell a workman that his uncontrolled compet.i.tion with his fellows was a spur to his ingenuity and industry, when it meant that a crowd of men, under pressure of starvation, undersold each other for a bare subsistence?

Of what use was it to put capitalists and workmen into a comparison as traders, when for the one holding out of the market meant merely a temporary loss of income, and for the other it meant dest.i.tution? Of what use was it to say that a workman who was deprived of part of his earnings by the truck system could refuse to work a second time for the master who paid him in that manner, when he had perhaps no means of travelling to find another, and when in any case there were so many men willing to fill his place on any terms that the master had no reason to fear his refusal? For all its philanthropy, Benthamism did not settle the problem of the conditions of life among the working cla.s.ses. Wages, hours of labour, ventilation, sanitary appliances, housing and the planning of towns, were all {161} left by the Utilitarians to this desperate system of individual bargaining. On this side their philosophy was as conspicuously deficient as that of Cartwright himself. But its results were positive, and it gave to the scattered impulses of Liberalism a coherence and a philosophic unity which they had hitherto lacked.

Apart from the new humanitarianism, there were other signs that the old Tory structure was breaking to pieces. Two of its main supports were destroyed before the Tory party left office in 1830. The Church of England was at last deprived of its political monopoly. Papists, Dissenters, and Jacobins had long enjoyed a common abhorrence, and all the progress which the two depreciated religious cla.s.ses had won before the French Revolution had been lost. In 1819 the Tory Government had actually spent 1,000,000, raised indiscriminately by taxing them as well as Churchmen, on building new churches to prevent the spread of their opinions. Ten years later each had won a signal victory over its hereditary enemy.

The state of Ireland since the Union had been such as to make all lovers of order and good government despair. A population of 7,000,000 was crowded on to land which was not extensive enough to support it. One-seventh of the people, it was said, lived by begging or robbery.[198] The rest farmed little patches of land for which many of them paid rent at the amazing rate of ten guineas an acre a year.[199] The average rate of wages was fourpence a day.[200] Squalor and disease were the lot of the majority of the inhabitants of a rich and fertile land. Their economic distress, which was due, at least in part, to the vicious, unsympathetic system of absentee landlordism, was aggravated by religious disabilities. Under the t.i.the Law a Protestant clergyman was ent.i.tled to one-tenth of the produce which a Catholic farmer could sc.r.a.pe out of his potato-patch. Poverty and ignorance combined with religious bitterness to make the {162} government of Ireland impossible. In every year since the Union the ordinary law had been suspended, and the English ruled Ireland only in the way of foreign conquerors. In 1822 they governed under the Insurrection Act, which empowered the Lord-Lieutenant to proclaim a whole county to be in a disturbed state, to compel all residents to keep in their houses between sunset and sunrise, to instruct magistrates to enter houses at night to see if the inmates were at home. Const.i.tutional government was at an end.

In 1821 Plunket, who was a Tory Irishman, introduced a Bill to relieve the Catholics from their disabilities. It was carried through the Commons by a majority which included such rigid Tories as Castlereagh, Wilberforce, and Croker, as well as Canning and Palmerston and the Whigs. The Lords, led by Liverpool, Eldon, Wellington, and Sidmouth, threw out the Bill. Canning introduced another Bill in 1822, which met the same fate. But a measure of a different kind was pa.s.sed into law in the same year, and did much to allay the bitterness, if it did little to improve the economic conditions of the Irish. This was an Act which extended the t.i.the Law to grazing land as well as to agricultural land, and at the same time enabled the t.i.the-owners to accept a money payment instead of a part of the actual produce. This relieved the peasantry of the obnoxious liability to hand over the actual produce of their labour to the representative of an alien Church.

The main grievance remained, and the struggle for complete emanc.i.p.ation now entered upon its final stage. In 1823 Daniel O'Connell founded the Catholic a.s.sociation, a gigantic league, which included Catholics of every rank, and levied a rent or annual contribution on all its members. In 1825 this had become such a formidable engine that an Act was pa.s.sed to suppress it. The law was evaded. It was directed against societies formed for political objects. The a.s.sociation was dissolved, and a new a.s.sociation was formed ostensibly for educational and charitable purposes. The Act suppressed societies which renewed their meetings for more than fourteen days. The new a.s.sociation sat for {163} fourteen days at a time, and described the meetings as "convened pursuant to Act of Parliament." The rent was paid as before, but was stated to be paid "for the relief of the forty-s.h.i.+lling freeholders," or "for all purposes allowable by law." The Act, in short, achieved nothing except to irritate the Catholics, and to show them that they could defy the English Government.

Under these circ.u.mstances, there was nothing for wise Protestants to do but to give way. A Bill was introduced relieving the Catholics of their political disabilities. It was accompanied by two other Bills, which were intended to mitigate the dangers of the first. One of these additional Bills, or "wings," was intended to take political power from the poorest, most ignorant, and least independent of the peasantry, by disfranchising the forty-s.h.i.+lling freeholders. The other was intended to conciliate and improve the character of the leaders of opinion, by endowing the Catholic clergy. The Emanc.i.p.ation Bill pa.s.sed the Commons by a majority of 21. The bigotry and stupidity of the Lords had not diminished since 1812, and they threw it out by 178 votes to 130. For four years more the Catholic a.s.sociation remained the dominant force in Irish politics, and every bitter and violent man in the country had a just ground for denouncing the English Government. The House of Lords made one more attempt to reduce Ireland to anarchy. Liverpool died in 1827, and was succeeded by Canning as Prime Minister. This subst.i.tution of a friend of the Catholics for an enemy meant the beginning of the end. Eldon, Wellington, Peel, and four other Ministers resigned, some of the Whigs joined the Cabinet, and the English Ministry was at last united in a policy of justice and wisdom. But the death of Canning a few months after he became Premier again shattered the hopes of Liberalism. The old party came back, with Wellington at their head, pledged to resist the Catholic claims. Within twelve months they had cut their own throats, and a trifling controversy in the Cabinet led not only to Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation, but to the entire destruction of the Tory system. {164}

Two boroughs, Penryn and East Retford, had been disfranchised for bribery and corruption. The question arose whether their members should be transferred to the counties in which they were situated or given to some of the large towns like Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham, which had no members at all. Huskisson, the President of the Board of Trade, took the Liberal view, and in an important division voted against the Government.

The letter in which he explained his action was accepted by Wellington as a resignation. His post was given to Vesey Fitzgerald, the member for Clare, who submitted himself for re-election in the ordinary way. To the consternation of the Tories, O'Connell himself came forward as a Catholic candidate. The Catholic a.s.sociation and the priests led or drove the voters to the poll, Fitzgerald was beaten out of the field, and O'Connell, disqualified by his religion, but with three-fourths of the Irish people at his back, claimed a seat in the House of Commons. The Government had the choice of two courses, neither of which promised them any credit. They might give way to organized illegality and emanc.i.p.ate the Catholics. They might exclude O'Connell and undertake a new civil war in Ireland.

Wellington was as good as a soldier as he was bad as a statesman, and he knew when a position had become untenable. He was now ready to retreat in good order. Peel supported him, and the two together controlled the Cabinet. The Relief Bill and the Bill disfranchising the freeholders were both law by the end of April, 1829.[201] The endowment of the clergy was abandoned. Two facts of vital importance were involved in this defeat of the Government. The first was that, for the first time in English history, a political a.s.sociation had compelled Parliament against its will to pa.s.s a measure into law. The people were beginning to control their Government.

The second fact was that the Irish had been forced into the belief that patience and endurance were less likely to succeed in obtaining redress than violence and {165} intimidation. The stupid resistance of the House of Lords had planted this idea ineradicably in the Irish mind, and the events of the next fifty years watered it and made it flourish to excess. The reaction of these events upon English politics resembled that of the success of the American Rebellion. The people were no longer at the disposition of the governing cla.s.s. What Ireland had done, England could do. All over the country Political Unions for Reform came into existence, and imitated the success of the Catholic a.s.sociation. In two years the old system came to an end.

Before the final breakdown of the Tory party the Dissenters had won for themselves the abolition of their disabilities. On February 26, 1828, Lord John Russell moved for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. There was nothing new to be said on either side of this controversy. Was or was not a Dissenter to count for as much in the State as a Churchman? Two quotations from the debate will set the two schools of thought in their places. Sir Robert Inglis, a Tory Churchman, said: "The question whether any man ought to be eligible to power is a question of pure expediency, not of justice; and such power may be regulated by s.e.x, by age, by property, or by opinions, without any wrong to any one's natural claims."[202] In other words, a disposing cla.s.s is to decide the social value of another cla.s.s in the interests of any inst.i.tution with which it is itself a.s.sociated.

Brougham replied in the language of pure Liberalism: "a.s.suming that no practical grievance exists, is the stigma nothing? Is it nothing that a Dissenter, wherever he goes, is looked on and treated as an inferior person to a Churchman?... Is it nothing even that the honourable baronet should say, as he has said this night, 'We will allow you to do so and so'? What is it that gives the honourable baronet the t.i.tle to use this language ...

but that the law encourages him to use it?"[203] On this occasion Liberalism won an unexpected victory. The motion for repeal was carried by 237 votes to 193, and Peel, accepting the decision of the {166} Commons, was able, after much labour, to overcome the resistance of the Lords.[204]

Two great breaches had thus been made in the edifice of Toryism, and the Liberal tide was now very high above the point at which it had been left by the French War. But events were moving more rapidly outside Parliament than within it. The large provincial towns were still growing larger and their demand for representation louder. A financial crisis in 1825 had injured industry. Bad harvests in 1829 and 1830 combined with the import duties on corn to increase the sufferings of the artisans and labourers. The latter were already much demoralized by the administration of the Poor Law, and the riots and disturbances in agricultural districts and factory towns alike were more serious than they had ever been. The demand for Reform was renewed with great vigour, and this time with success. The details of the final struggle are not important for this work. Several circ.u.mstances combined with the economic condition of the people to make agitation effective. Continental Liberalism won two great victories in 1830. Belgium shook off the yoke of Holland, and Charles X of France, expelled by a new revolution, took refuge in England. Both these events gave encouragement to English reformers. At the same time the Parliamentary Whigs, who had never before recovered the cohesion which they lost in 1793, were united under the leaders.h.i.+p of Lord Althorp in the Commons and Lord Grey in the Lords.

The Tories, on the other hand, were broken up by the surrender to the Dissenters and the Catholics. The Whigs, with a few exceptions like Lord Durham and Lord John Russell, had no liking for drastic changes. But the pressure in the country was too strong. A motion on some trivial matter connected with the Civil List overthrew the Ministry. The Whigs came in under Lord Grey, and introduced a Reform Bill which made a clean sweep of the {167} rotten boroughs, gave seats to all the large provincial towns, and enfranchised every townsman who occupied a house worth 10 a year. A defeat in Committee produced a dissolution and a great Whig victory at the polls. The Lords, indifferent alike to the trend of history and to the state of contemporary opinion, threw out a second Bill. A great clamour broke out all over the country, and at Bristol, Nottingham, and other places the sc.u.m of the populace destroyed an enormous amount of public and private property in riots. A third Bill was introduced in 1832, Wellington again led his forces in retreat, and the Bill received Royal a.s.sent on the 7th June, 1832. The people were at last the masters in their own house.

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CHAPTER VI

THE MIDDLE-CLa.s.s SUPREMACY

The significance of the victory of 1832 was immense. It broke up and reconstructed the whole of the machinery by which the old Toryism had managed the people, and it involved the first great revision of social values which had taken place in England. It was perhaps more important as a precedent for future changes than for what it was in itself. It was very far from implying the triumph of Revolutionary principles, though the spread of Revolutionary principles had alone made it possible. The Whigs themselves remained aristocratic and territorial, and they still dominated politics. The small group of commercial and manufacturing Members of Parliament was considerably increased by the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the new towns. But members continued for another generation to be chosen for the most part from the n.o.bility and gentry, and only their const.i.tuents and the tone of their policy were changed. Very few members and only a small proportion of the newly enfranchised cla.s.s had any belief in the equal worth of individuals in the State. The revision of values extended no farther than the middle cla.s.s. Capital was appreciated in relation to land.

Labour was still depreciated in relation to both. An end was put "to all the advantages which particular forms of property possess over other forms,"[205] but property as a whole was still supreme. The Reform Act was intended to enfranchise "the middle cla.s.s of England, with the flower of the aristocracy at its head, and the flower of the working cla.s.ses {169} bringing up its rear."[206] From their new elevation these looked down upon the ma.s.s of wage-earners as the old Tories had looked down upon them. "I would withhold from them," said Macaulay, "nothing which it might be for their good to possess.... If I would refuse to the working people that larger share of power which some of them have demanded, I would refuse it because I am convinced that, by giving it, I should only increase their distress. I admit that the end of government is their happiness. But that they may be governed for their happiness, they must not be governed according to the doctrines which they have learned from their illiterate, incapable, low-minded flatterers."[207] In just such language had Pitt referred to the working cla.s.s and the Corresponding Society. Just as the old Tories had held that the landed gentry were the natural leaders of the nation, so the new Whigs paid the same tribute to the upper and middle cla.s.ses combined. "The higher and middling orders are the natural representatives of the human race."[208] The disposing habit had come down a step. But it remained the disposing habit.

The new governing cla.s.s had that dislike of forms and liking of individual liberty to which reference has been made. The Parliamentary Whigs, no less than the manufacturers, were imbued with the same spirit. The natural bias of their party had always been in that direction. They had abolished slavery, had emanc.i.p.ated Dissenters and Catholics, had defended free speech during the reaction, and had finally subst.i.tuted the control of the middle cla.s.s of the common people for that of the aristocracy and the landed interest. In recent years they had been infected with the temper, even while they despised the philosophizing, of the Benthamites. In one respect they lagged behind the Philosophic Radicals. They were landed proprietors, and their adoption of Free Trade was slow and reluctant. It was as unnatural for them to lower the price of their tenants' corn as it {170} was for the manufacturers to reduce the hours of their men's labour. But their general tendency to restrict the action of Government was as marked as that of the avowed Utilitarians. They constantly, as in the reference to "happiness" already quoted, used the very language of the creed. The following words of Macaulay might have been spoken by Grote or Roebuck.

"The business of Government is not directly to make the people rich, but to protect them in making themselves rich.... We can give them only freedom to employ their industry to the best advantage, and security in the enjoyment of what their industry has acquired. These advantages it is our duty to give at the smallest possible cost. The diligence and forethought of individuals will thus have fair play; and it is only by the diligence and forethought of individuals that the community can become prosperous." The Reform Bill would thus indirectly conduce to the national prosperity. "It will secure to us a House of Commons which, by preserving peace, by destroying monopolies, by taking away unnecessary public burdens, by judiciously distributing necessary public burdens, will, in the progress of time, greatly improve our condition."[209]

"Reform," said Sydney Smith, "will produce economy and investigation; there will be fewer jobs and a less lavish expenditure; wars will not be persevered in for years after the people are tired of them; taxes will be taken off the poor and laid upon the rich;... cruel and oppressive punishments (such as those for night poaching) will be abolished. If you steal a pheasant you will be punished as you ought to be, but not sent away from your wife and children for seven years. Tobacco will be 2d. per lb.

cheaper. Candles will fall in price ... if peace, economy, and justice are the results of Reform, a number of small benefits ... will accrue to millions of the people; and the connection between the existence of Lord John Russell and the reduced price of bread and cheese will be as clear as it has been the object of his honest, wise, and useful life to make it."[210]

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There was therefore very little disposition among the Whigs to undertake economic reforms. "We can no more prevent time," said Macaulay, "from changing the distribution of property and intelligence, we can no more prevent property and intelligence from aspiring to political power, than we can change the courses of the seasons and of the tides."[211] But in the immediate present they would decline to change the distribution of property as firmly as to change that of political power. The two things in fact went together. Society was based on property; universal suffrage meant the confiscation of property. Therefore the franchise must be limited to the owners of property. "My firm conviction," said the same typical Whig, "is that, in our country, universal suffrage is incompatible, not with this or that form of government, but with all forms of government, and with everything for the sake of which forms of government exist; that it is incompatible with property, and that it is incompatible with civilization."[212]

This refusal to undertake anything in the nature of graduated taxation or social reform was accompanied by a dislike of the organizations by which the working people endeavoured to help themselves. After the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824 the number of Trade Unions had greatly increased.

The methods of these a.s.sociations were often of a violent and dangerous character. Any unusual poverty will produce disorder, even among men of good understanding. The effect on men of poor education is much worse. The new-found power of combining was thus often abused, intimidation and a.s.sault were common, and even murder was not unknown. To the Whigs, as to the philosophic Radicals, the whole system of Trade Unionism was nothing but tyranny and oppression. They failed to see the necessity for combination. They a.s.sumed that nothing could increase wages but an increase of production, and consequently that so long as the total earnings of a trade remained fixed a Trade Union could produce no result except a bad {172} temper. They ignored the possibility that the master's profits and the landlord's rent might both be reduced without injury to the industry as a whole. In all this the Utilitarians agreed with them. But theorists like Hume and Roebuck were compelled logically to admit that if a man was to be free to pursue his own interest, he was to be free to combine with others.

A Trade Union was thus not offensive to a Radical except when it abused its rights and acted oppressively. The Whigs had a much stronger objection. A Union to them was obnoxious in itself, probably because it had a social and political, as well as an industrial complexion. The Radical employer at least understood his men. The Whig landowner probably did not. Brougham described the Union leaders as "idle, good for nothing agitators," and declared that "the worst enemies of the trades themselves, the most pernicious counsellors that they possibly could have, were those who had advised them to adopt the line of conduct which they had followed since the repeal of the Combination laws."[213] Palmerston referred constantly in his correspondence to the rise of Trade Unions as a danger to the State.[214]

This is the style in which modern Tories spoke during the miners' strike of 1912. The grievances were ignored or not understood, and the attempts at self-help were treated only as evidence of a malicious and dangerous spirit.

This temper led the Government into one gross abuse of power. In 1834 an Agricultural Labourers' Union was formed in Dorsets.h.i.+re. Some foolish person thought it necessary to bind the members by an oath. One of the Statutes of the Revolution period had made it illegal to administer an oath to a member of any a.s.sociation. The Act had been pa.s.sed in consequence of the mutiny at the Nore and the activities of societies like the {173} United Irishmen, which were avowedly criminal. It had not been intended to apply, and it had practically never been applied to any other kind of society. It was suddenly revived in the case of the Dorsets.h.i.+re labourers.

Six of them were tried at Dorchester, found guilty, and sentenced to seven years' transportation. The ferocity of the sentence was surpa.s.sed by the indecent haste with which the Government hurried the wretched men out of the country. They proceeded exactly as the Tories had proceeded in the cases of Muir and Palmer. The prisoners were put on board a convict s.h.i.+p, which set sail before the matter could be discussed in Parliament. To the working man new Whig was but old Tory spelt differently. But on this occasion popular opinion was against the Government. The men were ignorant, but honest. Two of them were Methodist preachers. None of them was, in any real sense of the word, criminal, and the whole country was roused in their behalf. Pet.i.tions poured in from towns of every sort, from Oxford, Cheltenham, Leeds, Newcastle, and Dundee. Hume, Roebuck, and O'Connell spoke in the House of Commons. Twenty thousand workmen, headed by Robert Owen, marched on one occasion to Whitehall, and Melbourne was compelled to receive a deputation. Humanity and reason at last had their way, but it was two years before the prisoners received a pardon, and longer before they had all returned home. In this episode the country showed itself more Liberal than the Government, and the Whigs were sharply reminded that the Reform Act had changed their own situation no less than that of the Tories.

The case of the Dorchester labourers is sufficient proof that the Whigs had little understanding of the working cla.s.ses and little sympathy with their point of view. The agitation for the people's charter, manhood suffrage, annual Parliaments, vote by ballot, and the rest, never made any impression upon Parliament. The Chartists were sent to prison when they broke the law, their meetings were sometimes dispersed by force, and they were sometimes shot dead in the course of riots. For several years after the Reform Act the Whig Government was engaged in {174} watching and suppressing political agitation almost as regularly as the Tories before it. But more than one important economic reform was carried through Parliament about the same time, and conferred considerable benefits upon the common people. One was the Act of 1834, which reconstructed the Poor Law system. This was purely Benthamite, and the Report of Royal Commissioners, upon which it was based, was drafted by the Utilitarian, Na.s.sau Senior. The new Poor Law combined the thorough, scientific, mechanical principles of the theory of utility with the characteristic Benthamite avoidance of restrictions on liberty.

The old system had been promiscuous and charitable. Relief had been granted in many quarters promiscuously, and without regard to indirect consequences. Wages had been kept down, b.a.s.t.a.r.dy had been encouraged, no tests had been required to show that the applicants were really distressed.

Rates had in consequence increased enormously, and in one parish had reached such a height that the whole economic system had broken down, and industry had actually ceased. There were some remarkable exceptions,[215]