POLITICAL CONDITIONS IN THE REIGN OF GEORGE III
Modern English politics may be fairly said to begin about the accession of
George III. The conflict of Liberalism and Toryism can no doubt be traced
farther back. But though the same principles may have been at stake during
the Civil War, or even in the time of the Lollards, the general movement
was slow, and the connection with modern politics less definite. About the
middle of the eighteenth century society began to group itself more
permanently, and a train of events was started which can be traced
continuously to our own time. Movement also became more rapid, and the
appearance of the social fabric has been more changed in the last hundred
and fifty years than it was in the preceding fifteen hundred. It is
possible, therefore, to get a substantially accurate explanation of modern
politics by a survey of the recent period alone. So many causes have been
crowded into those few years that the weight of the others is almost
negligible. The history of Liberalism is, for practical purposes, the
history of Liberalism since 1760. This chapter will therefore examine the
political condition of England about that date.
The political structure changed little between 1760 and 1820. At the end of
that period, as at its beginning, power was in the hands of a class which
monopolized every privilege of race, sex, creed, and rank, and disposed, at
its discretion, of the fortunes of all inferior persons. Ireland and the
Colonies were subordinated to Great Britain, women to men, Catholics and
Dissenters to Churchmen, manufacturers, traders, and workmen to landowners.
{43} The classification of humanity, for political purposes, was complete.
The machinery of the State was controlled by a governing class, bound to
listen to the complaints of its subjects, but not submitted to their
authority. The temper of this class as a whole, though it was nominally
divided into Tories and Whigs, was essentially Tory. The two sections
disputed between themselves, and some of the Whigs expressed Liberal
opinions on particular subjects. But the general mental habit of both
parties was that of Toryism. It was not until after the Reform Act of 1832
that even the germ of a Liberal party made its appearance in English
politics, and it was not until after the Reform Act of 1867 that such a
party held office. The history of Liberalism in the early period of its
growth is the history of its slow and painful progress through people who
did not consciously accept it.
The general Tory view of political society was most forcibly expressed
after the French Revolution. The proclamation of the equality of
individuals which that implied was met by very clear and explicit denials.
It is obvious that Toryism was thus strung to its highest pitch, and that
it may have been less aggressive in temper before the violence of the
Revolution inflamed it. But though it was exaggerated by the Revolution, it
was not essentially altered, and the language of the Tories of 1820 may
fairly be taken to illustrate the mental habit of Tories of 1760. The root
principle of government was that it should be controlled by the wealthy
owners of land. There was some free voting in towns. But most borough seats
could be bought, and many were in the absolute disposition of the nearest
landowner. The owners of freeholds worth forty shillings a year voted in
county elections, and were comparatively independent. But no voter, however
sturdy and self-reliant, had a real voice in politics. The landed gentry
took politics for their business, and if the voter could draw attention to
what he conceived to be a grievance, the landowner decided whether any
remedy should be applied. "The country gentlemen," said Lord North, "are
the best and most respectable objects of the confidence of the people."[29]
Wilberforce described {44} the same class as "the very nerves and ligatures
of the body politic."[30] The manufacturing class and traders were looked
upon with a curious and comical jealousy. The great growth of these classes
at the end of the century meant a new form of wealth and a new form of
political power, and Sir William Jones probably spoke the feelings of most
of his class when he opposed a motion for the Reform of Parliament in 1793.
He said "it had ever been his opinion, since he began his political career,
that the country had too much of a commercial turn, and that its commerce
would soon become more than a match for its virtues. The petitioners
proposed a measure that evidently tended to throw weight into a scale which
preponderated too much already. He asserted that boroughs, bought and
controlled by men of property, formed the only balance to the commercial
influence, which was increasing by too rapid strides, and which ought to be
checked."[31] So Robert Jenkinson, afterwards Earl of Liverpool, "thought
the landed interest, which was the stamina of the country, ought to have
the preponderant weight, the manufacturing and commercial interest the next
place, and then those whom he styled 'the professional people.'" He
therefore opposed attempts to reform Parliament, because "the counties and
many of the populous boroughs were required for the return of country
gentlemen. The commercial towns secured the election of certain persons in
that line, and the close boroughs for the election of the professional
people."[32] He thus divided society into nicely graded classes, and
constructed the whole political system with a view to securing that each
class should express just the value which he attached to it. Corrupt town
constituencies were to be preserved in the constitution in order that the
landed gentry might preserve their monopoly of politics against the men of
commerce. But a more striking, because a more innocent, revelation of the
arrogance of the dominant class is contained in Lord John Russell's record
of his discovery of intelligence among employers of labour. Russell was a
Whig, and lived long enough to become a Liberal. In 1810, {45} when he was
a young man, he made a pilgrimage through England, and solemnly made this
entry in his diary. "The first of the few remarks still to be made is the
singular quantity of talent we found amongst the manufacturers. There was
not one master manufacturer of Manchester or Leeds ... that might not be
set apart as a man of sense, and hardly any that, besides being
theoretically and practically masters of their own business, were not men
of general reading and information."[33] What are we to think of social
estimates, when a young nobleman makes a note of signs of intelligence
among captains of industry in the conscientious spirit in which his modern
successors record traces of civilization among Papuans or the inhabitants
of the Congo? The public privileges of the two classes corresponded with
these private estimates of their relative importance. Political offices as
a matter of course were reserved for the landed proprietors. A trader was
sometimes made a knight or a baronet, but never a peer.[34] The best
appointments in the Army and Navy and what is now called the Civil Service
were distributed in the same way. A Member of Parliament must have a
definite income derived from land.[35] A similar qualification was required
in Justices of the Peace. No one could kill game who was not a landowner,
or a person holding a licence as gamekeeper from a landowner. If a man died
in debt, his plate, furniture, and stock in trade might be seized by his
creditors, but his land could not. In every way land was invested with
peculiar rights. There were in fact only three ways in which a man might
rise to political importance without being a landowner. A few naval
officers of high rank had risen from mean beginnings. Servants of the East
India Company sometimes acquired vast fortunes in India, and forced their
way into domestic politics by sheer weight of wealth. A lawyer of {46} the
humblest birth might fight his way up to the Woolsack, and become a peer of
the realm. But as a rule the ordinary avenues were open only to the
landowning class.
The wage-earning common people were more contemptible than the merchants
and manufacturers. On no account were they to be admitted into the
political ring. "Send the people to the loom and the anvil," said Lord
Westmoreland, and there let them earn bread, instead of wasting time at
seditious meetings.[36] "I do not know," said Bishop Horsley, "what the
mass of the people in any country have to do with the laws but to obey
them."[37] "It requires no proof," said the Lord Justice Clerk from the
bench, "to show that the British Constitution is the best that ever was
since the creation of the world, and it is not possible to make it
better.... A government in every country should be just like a corporation;
and in this country it is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a
right to be represented; as for the rabble who have nothing but personal
property, what hold has the nation upon them?"[38] So Pitt "did not
consider those to be the best friends of the people who were always goading
them to bring forward petitions, and encouraging the agitation and
discussion of political affairs."[39] Castlereagh, the last great leader of
the Tory reaction, "always maintained that in a representative government
the preponderance of property and high station was more conducive to order
and general prosperity than that of mob orators or needy adventurers.... He
was no friend to a system which was to be directed by men who had no other
influence than what they could acquire by pandering to the low interests
and lower passions of a misguided rabble."[40] The most consistent of all
the Tories was Windham, a country gentleman of considerable learning and
practical good sense, and the intimate friend of Pitt. He began his
political {47} career as a Whig, but turned Tory after the outbreak of the
Revolution, and died without a shred of Whiggery left to him, except a
qualified dislike of the Slave Trade. He seldom lost an opportunity of
depreciating the common people, and of excluding them from politics. "He
could not see the harm there was of preventing all endeavours to explain to
a poor, illiterate fellow, whose extent of powers was but barely adequate
to the task of procuring food for his own subsistence, points which had
divided the opinions of the ablest writers."[41] Referring to the case of
Bloomfield, a labourer, who wrote a poem called "The Farmer's Boy," he said
that "he had doubts how far it was proper to encourage ideas of literary
profit or renown in those who had been bred to a useful trade."[42]
Speaking against a Bill for the suppression of bull-baiting, he said that
the petition from Stamford against the Bill came from "a body of sober,
loyal men, who attended to their several vocations, and never meddled with
politics."[43] When Whitbread introduced a Bill to provide a public school
in every parish, Windham opposed it. "The increase of this sort of
introduction to knowledge would only tend to make the people study
politics, and lay them open to the arts of designing men."[44] The
publication of the proceedings in Parliament was to be suppressed for
similar reasons. "The people at large were entitled to justice--they were
entitled to every favour that could be shown to them consistently with
their own safety, on which depended their own happiness--they were entitled
to every advantage they could possibly be capable of enjoying, as much as
the proudest person in the state; but they had not education to enable them
to judge of political affairs.... He confessed he never saw any man of a
low condition with a newspaper in his hand, and who read any of it, without
comparing him to a man who was swallowing poison under the hope of {48}
improving his health."[45] Though Windham did not succeed in persuading the
House to exclude the reporters, the basis of his case was generally
accepted by the Tory party. Plunket described the working classes in the
same style as Windham. "He was willing to allow to them the enjoyment of
every constitutional privilege which they were entitled to possess; he
never could consider that nice discussions on the very frame of the
constitution, on the most essential changes in the institutions and
fundamental laws of the country, were calculated for minds of such
intelligence and cultivation."
Politics, in a word, were bad for the lower classes. "These men, the nature
of whose employment and whose education disallowed them to be statesmen,
might, however, learn enough to become turbulent and discontented
subjects."[46] Government was not to be according to the will of the
people, who were incapable of directing that will rightly. "If, to our
misfortune," said Canning, "we had found a popular assembly existing under
the direct control of the people, forced to obey its will, and liable to be
dismissed by its authority,... it would have been the duty of wise
legislators to diminish its overbearing freedom, and to substitute in its
place a deliberative freedom."[47] Even public meetings were only to take
place under the sanction of the superior class. "Far was it from him," said
Castlereagh, in introducing his Six Acts, "to call on the House to do
anything that would operate against the ancient and sacred right of the
people to petition, under the protection and with the sanction of the
magistrates, or the other constituted authorities of the land.... But
meetings not called under such authorities, convened by men without
character, rank, or fortune, were in all probability called for improper
objects, and therefore were a fit subject for the animadversion of the law,
and it was but reasonable that they should assemble under circumstances
that gave a sort of prima {49} facie security against outrage."[48] There
was a general presumption that a popular meeting was a seditious meeting,
and if any such meeting was held at all, its respectability must be
guaranteed by members of the upper classes. These opinions, aggravated as
they were by the excesses of the French Revolution, may be taken as fairly
representative of Toryism during the whole of the reign of George III.
The natural consequence of this general depreciation of the poorer people
was that they were injured in other ways than mere disfranchisement. The
whole scheme of society was so constructed as to prevent them from ever
rising above the station in which they were placed. No facilities were
provided for their education by the State, in spite of the obvious
inadequacy of private enterprise. A Scottish Act of 1696 had compelled
landowners to provide schools in every parish of Scotland. But in England
the neglect was gross and widespread. A Select Committee reported in 1818
that not more than 570,000 children were publicly educated. As the number
of children of school age was about 2,000,000, this meant that only one
child in four received any sort of education. As the teaching was often
hopelessly inefficient, the case was much worse even than the figures
themselves showed; and as affairs had considerably improved during the
twenty years before the Committee began its inquiry, it would probably be
fair to assume that in 1788, immediately before the outbreak of the
Revolution, only one poor child in ten received any substantial mental
training. Lancaster the Quaker began to found schools in 1801, and the
British and Foreign and National Societies commenced operations a few years
later. No systematic teaching of the poor had been previously attempted
except by private benevolence. But it must not be supposed that even
charity was always disinterested. Lurking behind many of these projects was
the belief in education as a precaution against disorder. Wilberforce spoke
of popular education in language which showed that he believed in it not
merely because it helped the poorer people to develop their natural
capacities. Referring to {50} the political disturbances of 1819, he asked,
"If a proper notion of the sacredness of property had been given to the
people, would they have passed such resolutions as those by which they had
disgraced themselves at Barnsley?"[49] The governing class thus used
education partly, at any rate, as a measure of police. Ignorant poverty
meant danger to wealth.
The poorer people, being kept in such a state of intellectual degradation,
were naturally criminal to a far greater degree than at the present day,
and the criminal law punished their offences with such savagery that juries
often acquitted guilty persons rather than expose them to the consequences
of an adverse verdict. In 1819 there were still on the Statute Book two
hundred felonies punishable with death. When it was proposed to substitute
transportation for life for the death penalty in the case of stealing goods
worth five shillings from a shop, Lord Ellenborough, the Lord Chief
Justice, protested in the House of Lords in the name of himself and all his
colleagues on the bench.[50] Conspicuous in ferocity were the Game Laws. In
1816 it was made a crime punishable with transportation for seven years for
any person to be found at night in possession of a net or a snare.[51]
Spring-guns and man-traps might be set by any landowner about his premises.
The public prisons were dens of vice and breeding-places of disease. Women
were flogged in public till 1817, and in private till 1819, and
transportation meant prostitution for nine women out of ten, if not on the
voyage, at any rate after they reached the colony.[52]
While the general state of the common people was so low, some of them had
religious consolations. Those of them who belonged to the Church of England
were elevated above Dissenters and Catholics, as country gentlemen were
elevated above themselves. The same habit of mind persisted in religion as
in politics. A particular Church, connected with the ruling class, and
staffed by {51} its members and dependents, was termed the Church of the
nation. Others existed only on sufferance. The conditions of their
existence were prescribed by the members of the dominant sect.
Free-thinkers were punished for blasphemous libel. Dissenting Christians,
whether Protestant or Catholic, were excluded in different degrees from
public life. Persecution of an active sort was at this date very rare, and
Dissenters, at any rate, enjoyed a qualified legal immunity. The Test and
Corporation Acts, passed in the reign of Charles II, were still in force,
and bound practically every public officer to take the sacrament according
to the rites of the Church of England. As a Liberal Churchman of the time
put it, "The Saviour of the world instituted the Eucharist in commemoration
of His death--an event so tremendous that afflicted Nature hid herself in
darkness; but the British Legislature has made it a qualification for
gauging beer-barrels and soap-boilers' tubs, for writing Custom-House
dockets and debentures, and for seizing smuggled tea."[53] But breaches of
these Acts were regularly committed, and were regularly covered by the
passing of an annual Act of Indemnity. The Catholics were in much worse
case. A whole code of penal laws had been contrived against them in the
reign of William III, and in Ireland, where three-fourths of the people
were Catholics, the code had been a fearful engine of oppression. Catholics
were by these laws excluded, not only from Parliament and public offices,
but from the Army and Navy and the legal profession. A Catholic could not
have a priest as his private chaplain. He could not send his children to be
educated abroad. He could not inherit land. He could not own horses above a
certain value. The exclusions were still absolute in 1760. The grosser
interferences with private liberty were, like the Acts against Dissenters,
not commonly enforced, though so late as 1793 a zealous Scottish Protestant
claimed his right to tender a Protestant oath to a Catholic landowner, and,
on his refusal, to take possession of his estate.[54] But such enjoyments
as were possessed by the members of these inferior Churches, including the
deliberate {52} mitigations of the existing law, were concessions from
their superiors. All was a matter of permission and connivance, and not of
right. It was the benevolence of masters which they had to acknowledge, and
not the association of equals. "It is idle to hope," said Castlereagh in
1801, "that Dissenters of any description can ever be so zealously attached
subjects as those who are of the established religion; but the question is,
what system, without hazarding the powers of the State itself, is best
calculated, if not warmly to attach, at least to disarm the hostility of
those classes in the community who cannot be got rid of, and must be
governed?" Pitt, eleven years earlier, displayed less insolence, but was as
firmly opposed to any idea of equality between sects. "The Dissenters had a
right to enjoy their liberty and property; to entertain their own
speculative opinions, and to educate their offspring in such religious
principles as they approve. But the indispensable necessity of a certain
permanent church establishment, for the good of the state, required that
toleration should not be extended to an equality.... He had no idea of such
levelling principles as those which warranted to all citizens an equality
of rights."[55] This is the essence of Toryism, to grant to others such
indulgences as we think fit, and to retain the consciousness of our own
superior worth and power, even while we refrain from abusing them.
Within the borders of Great Britain the Tory philosophy was expressed most
crudely and practised most universally in the relations of men and women.
Women were made only for those purposes which they could fulfil in
connection with men. They must be trained only in those qualities which men
required in them, irrespective of their own varying capacities and
dispositions. They must not engage in any occupation where they might
compete with men. Their political conditions were prescribed by men. Even
the moral rules which regulated their private conduct were settled by men,
who degraded the wretched prostitute while they permitted themselves the
indulgence which produced her downfall. When a woman married a man her real
{53} property passed to him for his life and her personal property
absolutely, and the subordination of her judgment to his, enjoined upon her
by the marriage service, was secured by this deprivation of her economic
independence. "The profession of ladies," said Mrs. Hannah More, "to which
the bent of their instruction should be turned, is that of daughters,
wives, mothers, and mistresses of families."[56] "Men," said Mrs. Barbauld,
"have various departments in life; women have but one.... It is, to be a
wife, a mother, a mistress of a family."[57] Association with a man being
the beginning and end of a woman's course of life, her whole mind was to be
trained, not according to her capacities, but according to what a man would
want of her. Almost every contemporary treatise on the education of women
emphasizes the necessity of suppressing the woman's intellect in the
presence of the man's. "If you have any learning," said Dr. Gregory in a
very popular work, "keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who
generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts
and a cultivated understanding."[58] "Young ladies," said Mrs. Barbauld,
"ought only to have such a general tincture of knowledge as to make them
agreeable companions to a man of sense,"[59] and she persuaded Mrs.
Elizabeth Montagu to abandon her scheme of endowing a women's college.
Toryism has never elsewhere been so remorseless in warping nature to its
own prejudices, and no slave was ever more carefully trained to
intellectual feebleness and triviality, or more carefully educated in
submission and docility towards his master, than was the ordinary young
English lady of the end of the eighteenth century.[60]
If this was the general atmosphere of feminine education, it is not
difficult to understand the ferocious contempt which was poured upon Mary
Wollstonecraft, who suggested that women should even take part in affairs
of State. Even Fox, who came nearer to {54} pure Liberalism than almost any
of his contemporaries, spoke with derision of Woman Suffrage.[61] After the
great war with France, demonstrations of the working classes in favour of
Reform were frequently attended by women. This drew from Castlereagh a
coarse and brutal condemnation. Speaking in favour of his Six Acts, which
were intended for the suppression of these popular demonstrations, he said:
"There was one point on which he should propose no law; it was the part
which women had borne in the late transactions, for he trusted that it
would be sufficient to restrain them from similar conduct in future, to let
them know that when the French republicans were carrying on their bloody
orgies, they could find no female to join them except by ransacking the
bagnios and public brothels. He was happy that no female had attended any
public meeting in the metropolis. Such a drama would, he trusted, be put an
end to by the innate decorum and the innate sense of modesty which the
women in this country possessed, and which would purge the country of this
disgrace."[62] Castlereagh was an honest and chivalrous man according to
the standards of his time. But which showed the greater appreciation of the
real worth of woman, and the greater respect for her real interest, the
workman who permitted her to take an active part in political affairs, or
the nobleman who hinted that if she so much as showed herself at a public
meeting, she was no better than a whore?
Eighteenth-century Toryism was less definitely extended beyond the
boundaries of Great Britain than is its modern equivalent. The conception
of a nation as a unit in human society had little weight in politics until
after the French Revolution. Before that great event the mass of a people
was regarded more as an appendage to the titular head of the State than as
an aggregate of human beings with claims to control their lives without
foreign interference. It was only when nations came to be regarded as
collections of individual men and women, whose individual security and
happiness were the first objects of their government, and no longer as mere
lumps of weight in the {55} balance of power, that the independence of a
nation became an important thing in itself. The revolt of the American
Colonies, which fired the train of modern Liberalism, was an assertion not
only of individual rights as against government, but of the rights of one
homogeneous and self-contained community against another. But Toryism had a
more ancient and a more thorough experience in Ireland. A clearer example
of the egoistic use of one nation by another could hardly be found in
history. From the day when the first English raiders descended upon the
Irish coast down to the day when George III ascended the throne the
paramount object of the English Government in Ireland had been the
maintenance of English and not of Irish interests. It was no longer a case
of subjugation and forcible repression. But it was still a case of
conscious and deliberate employment of the territory and resources of a
conquered people for the benefit of the conquerors. The Irish were left the
semblance of freedom, but they were so hedged round with limitations and
qualifications that they would have resented slavery no more bitterly. The
strength of their limbs served only to aggravate the fretting of their
chains. They had a Parliament which could legislate only as the English
Parliament allowed. They could engage in industry, but only in such
industries as the English Government, ever jealous for the English
manufacturer, permitted. They could make goods for export, but the English
Government kept the most lucrative branches of foreign and colonial trade
for its own people, and practically confined the Irish to supplying such
goods as it required for its own domestic consumption. Englishmen owned
land in Ireland, and spent the rents in England. English clergy owned cures
in Ireland, and did their duties by deputy. The whole system was absentee,
and the fate of Ireland was always decided abroad.
But the worst of the grievances of the Irish were the penal laws against
Catholics, by which racial and religious Toryism combined to deprive of
property and exclude from public life, not a sect, but almost an entire
people. Of all the instruments of foreign tyranny, religious disabilities
are the most hateful, and {56} if economic abuses did more to impoverish
the Irish, the penal laws did most to poison their temper. The Irishman's
enemy pursued him into his most private heart, and as the wound was
deepest, so the resentment was most fierce. The laws were not enforced so
mercilessly as they had been fifty years before. But they remained on the
Statute Book, and kept alive the memories of the more active persecutions
of the past. The whole nation was thus aggrieved. The Protestants suffered
no less than the Catholics from the legislative and commercial grievances,
and if the religious disabilities tended to sunder the dominant caste from
the rest of the people, both sects tended to forget their mutual hostility
in their hatred of the common enemy. Towards the end of the century a few
English statesmen foresaw the inevitable explosion, and urged that the
recognition of Irish nationality was the only way to establish good Irish
government. Not even an Irish Parliament could work if it was closed to the
vast majority of the people. "The Catholics," said Fox, "are no longer a
party. The parties now to be dreaded in Ireland are, on the one hand, a few
people holding places of great emolument, and supporting corruption and
abuses; and, on the other, the Irish nation.... I no longer apprehend any
danger to Ireland from disputes between the Catholics and the Protestants;
what I apprehend is the alienation of the whole Irish people from the
English Government."[63] "God never intended one country to govern
another," said Shelburne, "but that each country should govern itself."[64]
"In a mighty empire," said Dr. Laurence, "which enjoyed the blessing of a
free constitution pervading the whole, where two independent Parliaments
existed, that which was the more illustrious and exalted in character, in
authority, and in jurisdiction, he should have expected, would have felt it
to be its peculiar duty to cultivate, protect, and foster in the other,
whatever could be there discovered of the true parliamentary spirit. And
what was that spirit? A zealous attachment of each and all to their proper
constitution, a conscious sense of their own {57} dignity, a reverence for
themselves, a vehement and a jealous love of independence."[65]
These Whigs, speaking after the French Revolution had shaken old political
systems to their foundations, expressed the Liberal theory of the Empire,
that local control of local affairs is not only the best preventive of
English egoism, but also the best cure for local feuds. But in 1760, thirty
years before the Revolution, few Englishmen of either party could be
persuaded, in dealing with Ireland, to consult anybody's interest but their
own. In 1778 Bills were introduced to abolish most of the restrictions upon
Irish trade with England and the Colonies. So vehement was the opposition
aroused by these proposals that we are assured by a contemporary authority
that "a foreign invasion could scarcely have created a greater alarm."
Petitions poured in from every quarter except the City of London. Even the
errors of the English manufacturers displayed their bitter and unreasoning
jealousy. An old Statute had permitted the importation of Irish sailcloth.
This Statute was overlooked, and one of the new Bills proposed, in effect,
to enact what was already law. But this was opposed as fiercely as the
rest, and the most disastrous consequences were predicted from a practice
which had been in operation for half a century. The efforts of Burke and
the other champions of Ireland were powerless in this whirl of selfishness.
Most of the proposed reforms were abandoned, and his disinterested conduct
cost Burke his seat for Bristol.[66] No other events of the time so clearly
showed how the great majority of Englishmen regarded Ireland.
Such was the general scheme of Toryism, an elaborate system of
distinctions. A small class of male, rich, Church of England landowners
controlled and regulated the whole of political society. This class
monopolized public honours and dignities of every kind, and in each of
their separate spheres of aristocracy smaller personages lorded it over
those without the pale. Some were invested with all the privileges at once,
others might content themselves with one or two. Everywhere some one was
{58} exalted and some one depressed, irrespective of their natural
capacities and their intrinsic worth. It is not suggested here that active
tyranny was at all common. The Catholics were not persecuted as they had
been in the reign of William III. Dissenters were generally indulged. The
education of women, bad as it was, was substantially better than in the
time of the later Stuarts. The working classes enjoyed a much higher degree
of comfort and security than was to be theirs for a century to come. But
the atmosphere of Toryism remained. The test of a political system is not
how it operates in a state of equilibrium, but how it shows itself in the
face of changes. Condescension and indulgence are no less the marks of
tyranny than persecution and confiscation, and its essential nature is
revealed when the inferior asks to be permitted to think and act for
himself. When economic and psychological changes began to break down the
old acquiescence in arbitrary disposition, Toryism became active, positive,
and subjugating.
Formally contrasted with the political party which was called Tory, was the
political party which was called Whig. In many respects the contrast was no
more than formal. The fundamental assumptions of the two parties about the
comparative worth of classes were the same, though the Whigs relied more
than the Tories upon commercial places like the City of London. In theory
there was substantial difference between the two conceptions of the State.
The Tories preferred strong government, and inclined towards the Crown, as
its titular head. The theory of Hobbes thus expressed the Tory mind: "The
Covenant of the State is made in such a manner as if every man should say
to every man, 'I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this
man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy
right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner.' This done, the
multitude so united is called a Commonwealth."[67] In this view association
in political society is association in surrender. The essence of it is
subordination. The Whigs, on the other hand, inclined towards Locke. "Men
{59} being by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put
out of this estate and subjected to the power of another without his own
consent. The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural
liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other
men to join and unite into a community."[68] The essence of this
association was delegation and not surrender. The subject conferred power
without abandoning his right to control the use of it. The theory of Locke
was afterwards incorporated by Rousseau and the other French thinkers into
their revolutionary philosophy, and at the end of the eighteenth century
its effect was tremendous. It contains the germ of complete Liberalism, But
in England it was long embedded in a mass of circumstances which prevented
it from attaining to full growth. The people who held it were aristocrats
and landowners, and they converted the potentiality of Liberalism into the
fact of Whiggery. Whiggery, in short, was nothing but Liberalism qualified
by interest.
To this extent Whigs and Tories were distinguished. The Whigs, in the line
of old controversies, inclined to Parliament as against the Crown. Society,
according to Locke, was based upon a sort of contract. Each member, subject
to the corresponding rights of his neighbours, was entitled to enjoy such
property as he acquired without interference by others. For the common
good, certain general rules are contrived by agreement, and the State is
entrusted with all powers necessary for protecting the common interest of
the whole as well as the separate interests of the individual members. As
the State affects all, so it must act with the consent of all, and a
representative Parliament is the only means of expressing that consent.
This argument puts the supreme control of the State in the hands of
Parliament. If the Tories had any definite theory of this nature, it was
more that of Hobbes, who suggested that the State was imposed upon Society
for the purpose of maintaining order among mutually hostile individuals.
The two schools of thought were {60} thus led to emphasize, in the one
case, the need for Parliamentary control, and in the other, the need for a
strong executive Government. But this theoretic distinction, though it
contained the seeds of many practical divergences, did not correspond, in
the year 1760, to any great difference of character. The Whigs as a body
were aristocratic, they were Protestant, they were Church of England, they
were territorial, they were male. The sole point in which they were
substantially more Liberal than the Tories was the toleration of opinion.
They inherited from Locke a much more real belief that a man had a right to
think as he pleased, and to express his opinions as he pleased. They were
more willing that other people should differ from themselves. They had no
doubt of their own superiority, but they did not abuse their inferiors.
They remained themselves orthodox, but they declined to persecute.
This general toleration must not be rated at too high a value. Religion was
a cold and lifeless thing among the governing class, and the Wesleyan
movement, which began about this time to breathe a new moral spirit into
the common people, was treated by the bulk of fashionable society with
extreme contempt. Toleration sprang more often from indifference than from
generosity, and when the French Revolution broke out most of the Whig
aristocracy deserted to the Established Church as one of the strongholds of
reaction. Religion then became valuable to property. So long as it meant
little, they gave it liberty. When restriction became useful to the
magistrate, liberty was forgotten. It was only a small section of the Whigs
that, at any particular date between 1760 and 1820, could be found steadily
and conscientiously practising Liberal ideas even in religion. In the early
part of that period Liberalism existed only among the body headed by Lord
Rockingham, of whom Edmund Burke was the brains and the tongue. Burke thus
attacked the Catholic disabilities: "To exclude whole classes of men
entirely from this part of government cannot be considered as absolute
slavery. It only implies a lower and degraded state of citizenship; such is
(with more or less strictness) the condition of all countries in {61} which
an hereditary nobility possess the exclusive rule." He admits that "this
may be no bad form of government," but declares that in the Irish case the
indirect hardships produced by the Protestant ascendancy are more even than
the indirect. "They are rivalled, to say the least of the matter, in every
laborious and lucrative cause of life; while every franchise, every honour,
every trust, every place down to the very lowest and least confidential
(besides whole professions) is reserved for the master cast.... If they who
compose the privileged body have not an interest, they must but too
frequently have motives of pride, passion, petulance, peevish jealousy, a
tyrannic suspicion, to urge them to treat the excluded people with contempt
and rigour." This is pure Liberalism, perceiving that the whole man is
depreciated by his political disabilities.[69] So Fox said of the Catholic
claims: "Though they require only qualification for corporations,
Parliament, and offices under Government, the object is of great magnitude
to them. It is founded on the great principle of requiring to be placed on
a footing of equality with their fellow-subjects."[70] This insight was
rare, and it was confined almost entirely to matters of religion.
Discussion of political and proprietary institutions was as hateful to the
ordinary Whig after the Revolution as to any Tory, and even Burke always
drew the line at Unitarians. This Church had been excluded from the
Toleration Act of William III, and in 1792, the year in which Burke wrote
his _Letter to Langrishe_, Fox introduced a Bill to put them in the same
position as other Dissenters. Some of the Unitarians, especially Priestley
of Birmingham, had written and spoken in favour of the Revolution, and a
Unitarian society had celebrated the anniversary of the fall of the
Bastille. Burke's support of the Catholics may have been partly due to his
reverence for the antiquity of their creed, which was, if anything, more
venerable and more august than his own. {62} The Unitarians were
revolutionaries in religion and in politics alike, and were opposed to the
Established Church. "Let them disband as a faction," said Burke, "and let
them act as individuals; and when I see them with no other views than to
enjoy their own conscience in peace, I for one shall most cheerfully vote
for their relief." Fox was beaten by two to one, and the Unitarians were
not relieved until the end of the French War.
With the exception of this Rockingham section, and the small section which
at a later date took the Liberal view of the French Revolution, there were
no Whigs who showed a real tendency towards Liberalism. They suffered, for
the most part, no uneasiness at aristocratic monopolies, and had no
illusions about the equal worth of all human beings and their right to
equal opportunities. They believed in a governing class as firmly as the
Tories, and but for their religious freedom and their dislike of
prosecutions for seditious libels the Rockingham Whigs were not much better
than the rest. Government must always remain in the hands of aristocracy.
There must be an element of representation in order to prevent an abuse of
the governed by men endowed with absolute power. But representation must be
of classes and interests, and not of persons; and it must always be
qualified by property. "Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a
State that does not represent its ability as well as its property. But as
ability is a vigorous and active principle, and as property is sluggish,
inert, and timid, it can never be safe from the invasions of ability unless
it be out of all proportion in the representation."[71] The franchise must
be confined to men of substance, and so long as there was a fair
representation of all classes, except those who had no property, it was of
little importance that whole centres of population had no representatives
at all, while some depopulated districts had almost as many representatives
as electors. The individual voter did not count. He voted as representing
an interest. One manufacturing town would be able to protect the industries
of all. One seaport {63} would maintain the interest of all. It was a
sufficient check on a Government that there was one channel of
communication through which its subjects might make their complaints
audible.
The elector thus appointed had no power to suggest or to originate. He
could only check and prevent. So Burke, in his speech on a Bill for
Shortening the Duration of Parliaments, said: "Faithful watchmen we ought
to be over the rights and privileges of the people. But our duty, if we are
qualified for it as we ought, is to give them information, and not to
receive it from them; we are not to go to school to them to learn the
principles of law and government. In doing so we should not dutifully
serve, but we should basely and scandalously betray the people, who are not
capable of this service by nature, nor in any instance called to it by the
constitution.... They can well see whether we are tools of a court or their
honest servants ... but of the particular merits of a measure I have other
standards." Philip Francis was no less explicit: "In the lowest situations
of life the people know, as well as we do, that wherever personal industry
is encouraged, and property is protected, there must be inequalities of
possession, and consequently distinction of ranks. Then come the form and
the order, by which the substance is at once defined and preserved.
Distribution and limitation prevent confusion, and government by orders is
the natural result of property protected by Freedom."[72] In plain English,
the Whigs regarded man not as a political, but as a proprietary animal. The
object of the State was to protect man as the owner of property. Man as a
living creature was not its concern. If he could acquire property he came
within its consideration. If he could not, it would not help him; he must
fend for himself. He had a right to its protection against interference,
but he must expect no positive help. Equal worth, equal rights, and equal
opportunities were principles of which the Whigs knew as little as the
Tories themselves.
Between 1760 and 1820 there were only two prominent Whigs who approached
complete Liberalism. Others occasionally used {64} language which led in
the same direction. Lord Moira was not far away in 1796, when he opposed a
Bill for suppressing public meetings. "He could not believe that the
Almighty made any part of mankind merely to work and eat like beasts. He
had endowed man with reasoning faculties, and given him leave to use them."
Whitbread was as near when he introduced a Bill to enable justices to fix a
minimum wage instead of leaving workmen to charity and the Poor Law.
"Charity afflicted the mind of a good man, because it took away his
independence--a consideration as valuable to the labourer as to the man of
high rank."[73] But the Whig leaders whose settled habits of mind were most
Liberal were Shelburne and Charles James Fox. Shelburne's Liberalism was
deep and philosophic, that of Fox impetuous and practical. But both, though
they were never friendly with each other, had substantially the same
sympathies in all controversies of their time. Shelburne seems to have had
no social prejudices. He was an intimate friend of Bentham the Utilitarian,
of Priestley the Unitarian, of Price the Dissenting parson-economist, and
of Horne Tooke the Radical. He even appointed a Dissenting minister as
tutor to his son. In politics he held opinions which were astonishingly in
advance of those of his contemporaries. He was a Free Trader. He favoured
the election of local authorities, the abolition of alehouses, the
encouragement of workmen's clubs and friendly societies, annual national
holidays, cheap county courts, the conversion of prisons into reformatory
institutions, and national compulsory education.[74] This practical
Liberalism was inspired by original Liberal theory. The old feudalism and
government by territorial aristocracy must go, and the middle and working
classes must take its place. After the fall of the Bastille he said: "The
nonsense of feudality can never be revived.... The Bastille cannot be
rebuilt. The administration of justice {65} and feudality cannot again go
together.... The rest ... may be very safely left to public opinion and to
the light of the times. Public opinion once set free acts like the sea
never ceasingly, controlling imperceptibly and irresistibly both laws and
ministers of laws, reducing and advancing everything to its own level."[75]
In drawing up a series of reflections on society he laid down "one
fundamental principle, never to be departed from, _to put yourself in the
power of no man_."
"Constitutional liberty consists in the right of exercising freely every
faculty of mind or body, which can be exercised without preventing another
man from doing the like.... No man can be trusted with power over
another.... No gratitude can withstand power. Every man from the monarch
down to the peasant is sure to abuse it."[76] The territorial theory he
despised. "It would have been happy if the right of primogeniture was
destroyed altogether or never had existed."[77] He said that the middle and
working classes were sure to govern England in the long run, and not only
published an English edition of Condorcet's _Life of Turgot_, in order to
spread sound economic ideas among them, but even proposed to found a
non-party and Free Trade newspaper to be called _The Neutralist_.[78] He
welcomed the rise of the new industrial democracy. "Towns," he said, "will
be always found the most open to conviction, and among them the tradesmen
and middling class of men. Next to them are the manufacturers [_i.e._, the
workmen], after which, but at a great distance, comes the mercantile
interest, for in fact they belong to no country, their wealth is movable,
and they seek to gain by all, which they are in the habit of doing at the
expense of every principle; but last of all come the country gentlemen and
farmers, for the former have had both their fortunes and their
understandings at a stand ... and the farmers, who, uneducated and centered
in their never-ceasing pursuit of gain, are incapable of comprehending
anything beyond it."[79] This frank acceptance of the new order at home and
abroad, and this wise confidence in the good sense of the {66} classes who
were coming into power contrast very forcibly with the frantic
denunciations of Jacobinism in which Burke taught most of his
contemporaries to indulge. Shelburne was generally suspected and disliked
by his associates, and the only explanation seems to be his undisguised
indifference to the conventions of the old order.
Fox was as Liberal in his own way as Shelburne, and if his Liberalism was
less wise, it was much more lively. Even his vices seem not to have
impaired what was a rare and beautiful nature. He never took sides coldly.
As a mere debater he excelled. He was a perfect master of words, and no
English orator has ever surpassed him in readiness, in force, in the
arrangement of a case, in simplicity and directness of statement. But his
finest quality was his warmth of heart. He was a very spendthrift of
sympathy, and every speech of his on behalf of the Americans against
England, of the Indians against Warren Hastings, of Revolutionary France
against her foreign invaders, of the Irish Catholics against their
Protestant oppressors, or of the English common people against their
reactionary Government, had a reality which was absent from the more
splendid utterances of men like Sheridan. Even Burke, who was allied with
Fox in such fierce contests as those about America, Warren Hastings, and
Catholic disabilities, never felt a cause as Fox felt it. Fox had that very
rare and admirable faculty of inserting himself into the very heart of the
oppressed and of resenting their wrongs as if they had been his own. Even
in his greatest moments, when he denounced the treatment of the Americans
or of the Hindoos, Burke was external to the object of his sympathy. He was
a sort of divine arbiter, condemning wickedness because it violated an
eternal principle. Fox was never more than human, and if he was always less
majestic than Burke, his sensitiveness was far more acute. "The defeats of
great armies of invaders," he said, "always gave me the greatest
satisfaction in reading history, from Xerxes' time downwards."[80] A man
who can feel the ardour of a patriot in a struggle more than two thousand
years old may {67} be a bad philosopher, but he is the best possible
champion of struggling colonies, of oppressed nationalities, and of peoples
whose governors deprive them of the rights of liberty and discussion. His
defence of democratic institutions shows how Fox got into the heart of
Liberalism. "We are compelled to own that it gives a power of which no
other form of government is capable. Why? Because it incorporates every man
with the State, because it arouses everything that belongs to the soul as
well as to the body of man; because it makes every individual feel that he
is fighting for himself, and not for another; that it is his own cause, his
own safety, his own concern, his own dignity on the face of the earth, and
his own interest on the identical soil which he has to maintain."[81] It
was this capacity for seeking human beings rather than forms which made Fox
such a champion of liberty during the great war with France. He never
thought out his principles, and his instinct for their application was not
always unerring. There are some early instances of factious opposition,
which do him no credit. But he stood the great test of the French
Revolution, and if others provide posterity with more of the philosophy of
Liberalism than he, no other ever preached it more honestly or more
courageously in his day.
With these exceptions the Whig party of the end of the eighteenth century
contained few believers in Liberalism. The parties were indeed less sharply
divided at the accession of George III than they are at the present time.
Groups of statesmen, like the Rockingham Whigs, were united on general
principles of government. Districts, like the City of London and
Westminster, showed a general inclination towards democratic institutions.
But party ties were largely personal, and George III deliberately set
himself to break down divisions of opinion by bribery and intimidation, and
to consolidate a majority of the Commons in a union which had nothing in
common but its subserviency to the Crown. The labels of Whig and Tory could
not then be applied so surely as those of Liberal and {68} Conservative
to-day. Liberal opinions are therefore to be found only in a state of
partial distribution. The Rockingham Whigs were Liberal in maintaining the
supremacy of Parliament over the Crown, in claiming the rights of free
election and free discussion for the electors, in advocating the abolition
of religious disabilities, and especially in defending the American
colonists against arbitrary government from England. But even they had no
belief in a wide franchise, and some of them, who lived into the French
Revolution, even became violently reactionary. Liberalism was thus a matter
of patchwork at the best, and it would be difficult to find any
considerable party of men who were united in a substantially Liberal
political creed until 1868, when Gladstone's first Government came into
power. The general tone of government up to the outbreak of the Revolution
was Tory, tempered in some quarters by Liberal views of special subjects.
After the Revolution, though the general aspect was more definitely Tory, a
real Liberal appearance was assumed by a small section of the Whig party,
and the growth of modern Liberalism actually began.
* * * * *
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