WITH THE PEOPLE.
When the real history of the people comes to be written--which
will be the History, not of the Higher, but of the Lower Forms of
Civilisation--it will be found that, as regards the people of these
islands, they sank to their lowest point of degradation and corruption
in the middle of the eighteenth century--a period when they had no
religion, no morality, no education, and no knowledge, and when they
were devoured by two dreadful diseases, and were prematurely killed
by their excessive drinking of gin. No virtue at all seems to have
survived among all the many virtues attributed to our race except
a bulldog courage and tenacity. There are glimpses here and there,
when some essayist or novelist lifts the veil, which show conditions
of existence so shocking that one asks in amazement how there could
have been any cheerfulness in the civilised part of the community for
thinking of the terrible creatures in the ranks below. They did not
think of them; they did not know of them; to us it seems as if the
roaring of that volcano must have been always in their ears, and the
smoke of it always choking their throats. But our people saw and heard
nothing. Across the Channel, where men’s eyes were quicker to see, the
danger was clearly discerned, and the eruption foretold. Here, no one
saw anything, or feared anything.
How this country got through without a revolution, how it escaped
the dangers of that mob, are questions more difficult to answer than
the one which continually occupies historians--How Great Britain,
single-handed, fought against the conqueror of the world. Both
victories were mainly achieved, I believe, by the might and majesty of
Father Stick.
He is dead now, and will rule no more in this country. But all through
the last century, and well into this, he was more than a king--he was
a despot, relentless, terrible. He stripped women to the waist and
whipped them at Bridewell; he caught the ’prentices and flogged them
soundly; he lashed the criminal at the cart-tail; he lashed the slaves
in the plantations, the soldiers in the army, the sailors on board the
ships, and the boys at school. He kept everybody in order, and, truly,
if the old violence were to return, we might have to call in Father
Stick again.
He was good up to a certain point, beyond which he could not go. He
could threaten, ‘If you do this, and this, you shall be trounced.’
Thus the way of transgressors was made visibly hard for them. But he
could not educate--he taught nothing except obedience to the law; he
had neither religion nor morals; therefore, though he kept the people
in order, he did not advance them. On the other hand, under his rule
they were left entirely to themselves, and so they grew worse and
worse, more thirsty of gin, more brutal, more ignorant. So that, in
the long run, I suppose there was not under the light of the sun a
more depraved and degraded race than that which peopled the lowest
levels of our great towns. There is always in every great town a big
lump of lawlessness, idleness, and hostility to order. The danger, a
hundred years ago, was that this lump was getting every day bigger, and
threatening to include the whole of the working class.
Remember that as yet the government of this realm was wholly in the
hands of the wealthier sort. Only those who had what was humorously
called a stake in the country were allowed to share in ruling it.
Those who brought to the service of their native land only their hands
and their lives, their courage, their patience, skill, endurance, and
obedience, were supposed to have no stake in the country. The workers,
who contribute the whole that makes the prosperity of the country, were
then excluded from any share in managing it.
It seems to me that the first improvement of the People dates from
their perception of the fact that all have a right to help in managing
their own affairs; I think one might prove that the ideas of the French
Revolution, when they were once grasped, arrested the downward course
of the People--the first step to dignity and self-respect was to
understand that they might become free men, and not remain like unto
slaves who are ordered and have to obey. Then they began to struggle
for their rights, and in the struggle learned a thousand lessons
which have stood them in good stead. They learned to combine, to act
together, to form committees and councils; they learned the art of
oratory, and the arts of persuasion by speech and pen; they learned
the power of knowledge--in a word, the long struggle whose first
great victory was the Reform Act of 1832 taught the People the art of
self-government.
Fifty years ago, though that Act had been passed, the great mass of the
people were still outside the government. They were governed by a class
who desired, on the whole, to be just, and wished well to the people,
provided their own interests were not disturbed, as when the most
philanthropic manufacturers loudly cried out as soon as it was proposed
to restrict the hours of labour. It is not wonderful, therefore, that
the working classes should at that time regard all governments with
hostility, and Religion and Laws as chiefly intended to repress the
workers and to safeguard the interests of landlords and capitalists.
This fact is abundantly clear from the literature which the working men
of 1837 delighted to read.
As regards their religion, there was already an immense advance in the
spread of the Nonconformist sects and the multiplication of chapels. As
for the churches, I am very certain that the working man does not go
much to church even yet, but fifty years ago he attended service still
less often. A contemporary who pretends to know asserts that nine out
of ten among the working men were professed infidels, whose favourite
reading was Paine, Carlile, and Robert Taylor, the author of ‘The
Devil’s Chaplain.’ Further, he declares that not one working man in a
hundred ever opened a Bible.
I refrain from dwelling upon this state of things as compared with that
of the present, but it appears from a census taken by a recent weekly
newspaper (which, however, omitted the mission churches and services
in school-rooms and other places) that about one person in nine now
attends church or chapel on a Sunday.
As regards drink, a question almost as delicate as that of religion,
it is reported that in London alone three millions of pounds were
spent every year in gin, which seems a good deal of money to throw
away with nothing to show for it. But figures are always misleading.
Thus, if everybody drank his fair share of this three millions, there
would be only a single glass of gin every other day for every person;
and if half the people did not drink at all, there would be only one
glass of gin a day for those who did. Still, we must admit that three
millions is a sum which shows a widespread love of gin. As for rum,
brandy, and Hollands, the various forms of malt liquor, fancy drinks,
and compounds, let us reserve ourselves for the chapter on Taverns.
Suffice it here to call attention to the fact that there was no blue
ribbon worn. Teetotallers there were, it is true, but in very small
numbers; they were not yet a power in the land; there was none of the
everlasting dinning about the plague spot, the national vice, and the
curse of the age, to which we are now accustomed. Honest men indulged
in a bout without subsequent remorse, and so long as the drink was
unadulterated they did themselves little harm. Without doubt, if the
men had become teetotallers, there would have been very much more to
spend in the homes, and the employers would, also without doubt, have
made every effort to reduce the wages accordingly, so as to keep up the
old poverty. That is what the former school of philosophers called a
Law of Political Economy. The wages of a skilled mechanic fifty years
ago seem to have never risen above thirty shillings a week, while food,
clothes, and necessaries were certainly much dearer than at present. He
had savings banks, and he sometimes put something by, but not nearly so
much as he can do now if he is thrifty and in regular work. It is quite
clear that he was less thrifty in those days than now, that he drank
more, and that he was even more reckless, if that is possible, about
marriage and the multiplication of children.
As for the material condition of the people, there cannot be a doubt
that it has been amazingly improved within the last fifty years. It
is not true, as stated in a very well known work, that the poor have
become poorer, though the rich have certainly become richer. The
skilled working man is better paid now than then, his work is more
steady, his hours are shorter. He is better clad, with always a suit
of clothes apart from his working dress; he is better taught; he
is better mannered; he has holidays; he has clubs; he is no longer
forbidden to combine; he can co-operate; he holds meetings; he has much
better newspapers to read; his food is better and cheaper; he has model
lodging houses. Not only is he actually better; he is relatively better
compared with the richer classes, while for the last ten years these
have been growing poorer every day, although still much richer than
they were fifty years ago. Moreover, it is becoming more difficult in
every line, owing to the upward pressure of labour, to become rich.
His amusements no longer have the same brutality which used to
characterise them. The Ring was his chief delight, and a well-fought
battle between two accomplished bruisers caused his heart to leap
with joy. Unhappily the Ring fell, not because the national sentiment
concerning pugilism changed, but by its own vices, and because nearly
every fight was a fight on the cross; so that betting on your man
was no longer possible, and every victory was arranged beforehand.
There are now signs of its revival, and if it can be in any way
regulated it will be a very good thing for the country. Then there
was dog-fighting, which is still carried on in certain parts of the
country. Only a few years ago I saw a dozen dog-fights, each with its
ring of eager lookers-on, one Sunday morning upon the sands between
Redcar and Saltburn. All round London, again, there were ponds,
quantities of ponds, all marked in the maps of the period and now
all filled up and built over. Some, for instance, were in the fields
on the east side of Tottenham Court Road. Hither, on Sundays, came
the London working man with ducks, cats, and dogs, and proceeded to
enjoy himself with cat-hunts and duck-hunts in these ponds. There were
also bull-and-bear-baitings and badger-drawings. As for the fairs,
Bartholomew and Greenwich, one is sorry that they had to be abolished,
but I suppose that London had long been too big for a fair, which may
be crowded but must not be mobbed. A real old fair, with rows of stalls
crammed with all kinds of things which looked ever so much prettier
under the flaring lamps than in the shops, with Richardson’s Theatre,
the Wild Beast Show, the wrestlers and the cudgel-players, the boxers,
with or without the gloves, the dwarfs, giants, fat women, bearded
women, and monsters, was a truly delightful thing to the rustics in the
country; but in London it was incongruous, and even in Arcadia a modern
fair is apt to lose its picturesque aspect towards nightfall. On the
whole, it is just as well for London that it has lost its ancient fairs.
It is not in connection with working men, but with the whole people,
that one speaks of prisons. I do not think that our prison system at
the present day is every thing that it might be. There have been one
or two books published of late years, which make one uncomfortable
in thinking of the poor wretches immured in these abodes of solitary
suffering. Still, if one has to choose between a lonely cell and the
society of the prison birds by day and night, one would prefer the
former. Some attempts had been made in Newgate and elsewhere to prevent
the prisoners from corrupting each other, but with small success. Those
who were tried and sentenced were separated from those who were waiting
their trial; the boys were separated from the men, the girls from
the women. Yet the results of being committed to prison, for however
short a period, were destructive of all morals and the last shred of
principle. Not a single girl or woman who went into prison modest and
virtuous but became straightway ashamed of her modesty and virtue, and
came out of the prison already an abandoned woman. Not a man or boy
who associated with the prisoners for a week but became a past master
in all kinds of wickedness. In the night rooms they used to lock up
fifteen or twenty prisoners together, and leave them there all night
to interchange their experiences--and what experiences! Only those who
were under sentence of death had separate cells. These poor wretches
were put into narrow and dark rooms, receiving light only from the
court in which the criminals are permitted to walk during the day. They
slept on a mat, and in former days had but twenty-four hours between
sentence and execution, with bread and water for all their food.
Transportation still went on, with the horrors of the convict ship,
the convict hulks, and the convict establishments of New South Wales
and Tasmania. The ‘horrors’ of the system have always seemed to me
as forming an unessential part of the system. With better management
on modern ideas, transportation should be far better than the present
system of hopeless punishment by long periods of imprisonment. We can
never return to transportation as far as any colony is concerned, but I
venture to prophesy that the next change of the penal laws will be the
re-establishment of transportation with the prospect of release, a gift
of land, and a better chance for an honest life.
Meantime the following lines belong to Fifty Years Ago. They are the
Farewell of convicts about to sail for Botany Bay:
[Illustration: _THE DARBY DAY._]
Come, Bet, my pet, and Sal, my pal, a buss, and then farewell--
And Ned, the primest ruffling cove that ever nail’d a swell--
To share the swag, or chaff the gab, we’ll never meet again,
The hulks is now my bowsing crib, the hold my dossing ken.
Don’t nab the bib, my Bet, this chance must happen soon or later,
For certain sure it is that transportation comes by natur;
His lordship’s self, upon the bench, so downie his white wig in,
Might sail with me, if friends had he to bring him up to priggin;
And is it not unkimmon fly in them as rules the nation,
To make us end, with Botany, our public edication?
But Sal, so kind, be sure you mind the beaks don’t catch you tripping,
You’ll find it hard to be for shopping sent on board the shipping:
So tip your mauns afore we parts, don’t blear your eyes and nose,
Another grip, my jolly hearts--here’s luck, and off we goes!
Debtors’ prisons were in full swing. There were Whitecross Street
Prison, built in 1813 for the exclusive reception of debtors, who were
before this crowded together with criminals at Newgate; Queen’s Bench
Prison, the Fleet, and the Marshalsea. The King’s Bench Prison was the
largest, and, so to speak, the most fashionable of these prisons. Both
at the King’s Bench and the Fleet debtors were allowed to purchase what
were called the ‘Rules,’ which enabled them to live within a certain
area outside the prison, and practically left them free. They paid a
certain percentage on their debts. This practice enabled the debtor
to refuse paying his debts, and to save his money for himself or his
heirs. Lodgings, however, within the Rules were bad and expensive.
[Illustration: NEWGATE--ENTRANCE IN THE OLD BAILEY]
There was no national compulsory system of education; yet the children
of respectable working men were sent to school. The children of the
very poor, those who lived from hand to mouth by day jobs, by chance
and luck, were not taught anything. If you talk to a working man of
sixty or thereabouts, you will most likely discover that he can read,
though he has very often forgotten how to write. He was taught when
he was a child at the schools of the National Society, or at those of
the British and Foreign Society, or at the parish schools, of which
there were a great many. There were also many thousands of children who
went to the Sunday School. Yet, partly through the neglect of parents,
and partly through the demand for children’s labour in the factories,
nearly a half of the children in the country grew up without any
schooling. In 1837 there were forty per cent. of the men and sixty-five
per cent. of the women who could not sign their own names.
And there were already effected, or just about to be effected, three
immense reforms, the like of which the nation had never seen before,
which are together working for a Revolution of Peace, not of war,
greater than contemplated by the most sincere and most disinterested of
the French Revolutionaries.
The first was the Reform of the Penal Laws.
In the beginning of the century the law recognised 223 capital
offences. A man might be hanged for almost anything: if he appeared
in disguise on a public road; if he cut down young trees; if he shot
rabbits; if he poached at night; if he stole anything worth five
shillings from a person or a shop; if he came back from transportation
before his time; a gipsy, if he remained in the same place a year. In
fact, the chief desire of the Government was to get rid of the criminal
classes by hanging them. It was Sir Samuel Romilly, as everybody knows,
who first began to attack this bloodthirsty code. He was assisted
by the growth of public opinion and by the juries, who practically
repealed the laws by refusing to convict.
[Illustration: IN THE QUEEN’S BENCH]
It was not, again, until the year 1836 that counsel for a prisoner
under trial for felony was permitted to address the jury. In the year
1834, there were 480 death sentences; in 1838, only 116. In 1834, 894
persons were sentenced to transportation for life, and in 1838 only
266. Remember that this wicked severity only served to enlist the
sympathies of the people against the Government.
The second great step was the repeal of the Acts which forbade
combination. Until the year 1820, the people had been forbidden to
combine. Their only power against employers who worked them as many
hours a day as they dared, and paid them wages as small as they could,
who took their children and locked them up in unwholesome factories,
was in combination, and they were forbidden to combine. When the
law--an old mediæval law--was repealed, it was found that any attempt
to hold public meetings might be put down by force; so that, though
they could not combine, the chief means of promoting combination was
taken from them.
The third great step was the Extension of the Suffrage, so that now
there is no Briton or Irishman but can, if he please, have his vote
in the government of the nation. It is not a great share which is
conferred by one vote, but it enables every man to feel that he is
himself a part of the nation; that the government is not imposed upon
him, but elected and approved by himself.
Considering all these things, have we any reason to be surprised when
we learn that, on the Queen’s Accession, there was among the people no
loyalty whatever? Attachment to the Sovereign, personal devotion to the
young Queen, rallying round the Throne--all these things were not even
phrases to the working class. For they never heard them used.
_There was no loyalty at all, either to the Queen, or to the
institution of a limited Monarchy, or to the Constitution, or to the
Church._
For a hundred and fifty years there had been no loyalty among the
people. Loyalty left the country with James II. Not one of the
Sovereigns who followed him commanded the personal enthusiasm of the
people, not even Farmer George, for whom there had been some kind of
affection with something of contempt. From 1687 until 1837, which is
exactly one hundred and fifty years, not one Sovereign who sat upon the
Throne of England could boast that he had the love of the people. Not
one wished to have the love of the people. He represented a principle:
he governed with the assistance of a few families and by the votes of
a small class. As King he was a stranger. When he drove through the
streets, the people hurrahed; but they did not know him, and they cared
nothing for him.
Therefore the sentiment of loyalty had to be re-born. It could only be
awakened by a woman, young, virtuous, naturally amiable, and resolved
on ruling by constitutional methods. Yet in some of the journals
written for, and read by, the working men, the things said concerning
the Queen, the Prince Consort, and the Court were simply horrible and
disgusting. Such things are no longer said. There are still papers
which speak of the aristocracy as a collection of titled profligates,
and of the clergy as a crowd of pampered hypocrites, but of the Queen
it is rare indeed to find mention other than is respectful. Her life
and example for fifty years have silenced the slanderers. It has been
found once more possible for a Sovereign to possess the love of her
people.
The papers read by the working men were not only scurrilous, but they
were Republican and revolutionary. The Republic whose example they set
before themselves was not the American, which is Conservative, for of
this they knew nothing. Let us clearly understand this. Fifty years
ago America was far more widely separated from England than is China
now. The ideal Republic was then the earlier form of the first French
Republic. These people cared little for the massacres which accompanied
the application of Republican principles. I do not say that they wished
to set the heads of the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting on pikes, but they
thought the massacres of innocent women by the French an accident
rather than a consequence. They loved the cry of ‘Liberty, Equality,
and Fraternity,’ and still believed in it. They dreamed of a country
which they thought could be established by law, in which every man was
to be the equal of his neighbour--as clever, as skilful, as capable,
as rich, and as happy. The dream continues, and will always continue,
to exist. It is a generous dream--there never has been a nobler
dream--so that it is a thousand pities that human greed, selfishness,
ambition, and masterfulness will not suffer the dream to be realised.
Those who advocated an attempt to realise it flung hard names at the
Crown, the Court, the aristocracy, the Church, the educated, and the
wealthy. Presently they began to formulate the way by which they
thought to place themselves within reach of their object. The way was
Chartism. They wanted to carry six measures--Universal Suffrage, Annual
Parliaments, Vote by Ballot, Abolition of Property Qualification,
Payment of Members, and Equal Electoral Districts. Very well; we have
got, practically, four out of the six points, and there are many who
think that we are as far off the Millennium as ever. Yet there are,
however, still among us people who believe that we can be made happy,
just, merciful, and disinterested by changing the machinery. Changing
the machinery! The old party of Radicals still work themselves into a
white heat by crying for change in the machinery.
And now a thing which was never contemplated even by the Chartists
themselves--the really important thing--has been acquired by the
people. They are no longer the governed, but the governors. The
Government is no longer a thing apart from themselves, and outside
them. It is their own--it is the Government of the People of England.
If there is anything in it which they do not like, they can alter
it; if there is anything they agree to abolish, they can abolish
it, whether it be Church, Crown, Lords, wealth, education, science,
art--anything. They may destroy what they please: they may reduce the
English to an illiterate peasantry if they please.
They will not please. I, for one, have the greatest confidence in
the justice, the common-sense, and the Conservatism of the English
and the Scotch. The people do not, as yet, half understand their own
power; while they are gradually growing to comprehend it, they will be
learning the history of their country, the duties and responsibilities
of citizenship, the dangers of revolution, and the advantages of those
old institutions by whose aid the whole world has been covered with
those who speak the Anglo-Saxon speech and are governed by the English
law.
My friends, we are changed indeed. Fifty years ago we were, as I have
said, still in the eighteenth century. The people had no power, no
knowledge, no voice; they were the slaves of their employers; they
were brutish and ill-conditioned, ready to rebel against their rulers,
but not knowing how; chafing under laws which they did not make, and
restraints which kept them from acting together, or from meeting to ask
if things must always continue so. We are changed indeed.
We now stand upright; our faces are full of hope, though we are
oppressed by doubts and questions, because we know not which path, of
the many before us, will be the wisest; the future is all our own; we
are no longer the servants; we are the Masters, the absolute Rulers, of
the greatest Empire that the world has ever seen.
God grant that we govern it with wisdom!