THE FIRST MOVEMENT TOWARDS LIBERALISM
Three great events, or series of events, combined to produce the process of
individual emancipation, which is the subject of this book. The first was
the economic transformation, called the Industrial Revolution, which began
about 1760 and ended about 1830. The second was the American Rebellion,
which ended in the recognition of the independence of the United States in
1783. The third was the French Revolution, in part at least a consequence
of the American Rebellion, which ended in the establishment of a Republic
in 1793.[82] The first operated to change the conditions of life of the
English people. The second and third operated to communicate to them ideas
for which their new conditions of life had made them ready. Revolutions are
never the product of circumstances alone, or of speculation alone. They are
begotten by speculation acting upon circumstances. New ideas falling upon a
people who have no reason to seek change bring forth little fruit. New
ideas falling upon a people who have cause for discontent may bring forth
fruit a hundredfold. England, at the end of the eighteenth century, was a
society in a state of rapid economic {70} change, which produced a
disposition in the mass of the community to alter institutions adapted for
more stable conditions. From America and from France came the preaching of
the right of the individual to control his own life, which precisely suited
the case of those whom swift alterations of the economic structure exposed
to injury.
For the purposes of this work it is not necessary to examine the industrial
changes in detail. They had four leading features: the discovery of new
processes of manufacture, the invention of machinery, the application of
power, and the improvement of communications. The application of coal,
instead of wood, to the smelting of iron, and the introduction of powerful
machinery in the cotton and woollen industries, enormously increased the
production of goods, and with that the demand for workpeople and the size
of towns. In 1761 Brindley and the Duke of Bridgewater began constructing
canals, which enabled goods to be carried about the country in greater bulk
and with more speed than was ever possible with packhorses and carts. James
Watt obtained his first patent for the steam-engine in 1769, and by the end
of the century it was established in almost every industry of importance.
All these changes combined to increase to an enormous extent the quantity
of manufactured articles. But they did much more. They altered the
distribution of population, and they altered the whole system upon which
industry was based. Two things were of vital importance for the working of
the new inventions. The iron industry had formerly been situated in the
South of England, where the forests of Sussex provided ample fuel. The
coal-beds lay in South Wales and the North of England, and the iron mines
lay conveniently beside them. The iron industry accordingly disappeared
entirely from Sussex, and was re-established in the other districts. The
coal and iron industries determined the situation of the industries which
required steam power and machinery. The cotton industry found another of
its necessities in the climate of Lancashire. The woollen industry was
transferred from Norfolk, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, and
{71} Devonshire to the West Riding of Yorkshire. These geographical
redistributions of industry, in the course of half a century, shifted the
bulk of the population to the Midlands and the North.
The change was not merely geographical. Machinery required additional
capital expenditure, and steam power must be used on a large scale if it
was to be profitable. For the old manufacturer, a workman managing tools or
a hand machine in his own cottage, was substituted the new manufacturer, a
capitalist employing large numbers of artisans in his factory, managing his
large machines, which were operated by his steam power. The old system was
a system of small and scattered master workmen, producing and selling their
own goods. The new system was a system of closely aggregated wage-earners,
producing goods for a common employer, who provided the machinery, the
power, and the superintendence, and sold the product of their labour for
his own profit. This feature of the Industrial Revolution was as important
as its redistribution of industry. It meant a considerable loss of
independence among the working class, and it meant the birth of an entirely
new class, the employers of labour, whose wealth and importance were
destined to rival and eventually to surpass that of the landed gentry.
The most obvious consequence of these economic changes was the conversion
of the rustic cottager into the town-dwelling artisan, and the growth of
the towns presented difficulties and created grievances of which previous
generations had had little experience. The towns were designed at hazard,
with little adaptation to the needs of the present, and with no view to the
needs of the future. They were hastily planned and hastily built. The
problem of the slum, previously recognized only in London and a few
seaports and country towns, was now to be found in every little factory
town which sprang up in the potteries, the textile districts, and the coal
and iron districts. Narrow streets, dark courts, houses built back to back,
inadequate sanitary appliances, deficient water-supply, bad drainage, every
evil thing which to-day stares at the sad eyes of progress, was planted at
a thousand spots where before there had at least {72} been open country and
fresh air. Factory and housing legislation were unknown. Men toiled twelve
or fourteen hours a day in bad air, in excessive heat or cold, and with
insufficient light. Women, who had been accustomed to weave, and spin, and
bake, and brew in their own cottage homes, followed their industries into
the factories. Some of them toiled underground in coalpits. A child of six
might be worked for fourteen hours a day in a mine, as a chimney sweep, at
a potter's oven, or in a cotton mill. Pauper children were farmed out to
employers under conditions which were no better than slavery. Wages, in the
absence of any real combination among the workpeople, were at the
discretion of the employers, and naturally fell to the lowest possible
level. Some trades were better than others, and some employers were better
than others. But the evidence collected by different Parliamentary
Committees between 1800 and 1840 is overwhelming proof of general, if not
universal, degradation. The managing class seems to have believed that
leisure was dangerous, even for little children, and the poor were made
slaves, lest they should become dissolute.
The conditions of life and labour, bad as they were, were often made worse
by the precarious nature of employment. At the present day, invention
seldom inflicts great shocks upon labour. Improvements are constant but
gradual. In the hurry of the Industrial Revolution, invention proceeded at
an accelerating pace, and the introduction of some new appliance into a
single industry might reduce the demand for labour by a quarter, or a half,
or even three-quarters, and almost depopulate a town at a single blow. Some
trades were more fortunate than others in this respect, but almost all
suffered. All alike were injured by the constant wars in which the country
was involved. These wasted capital, increased the taxation of the
necessaries of life, and, by disturbing foreign trade, made profits
speculative, and so made it difficult for the most benevolent manufacturer
to establish his business upon the basis of high and steady wages for his
workfolk. The country was never actually invaded, so that industry was
never ruined, as it was ruined in Germany and other parts of {73} Europe.
Even Napoleon clothed his troops in Yorkshire woollens when he set out to
conquer Russia. But the production of wealth, which so increased in spite
of war, was chiefly for the benefit of the employing and investing classes.
The share of the working class was undoubtedly much less in proportion than
their share under the old system. But their lot was made harder still by
high prices, and especially by the high price of corn. The growth of
population had, by the end of the eighteenth century, made it impossible
for the country to supply all the wheat required for domestic consumption.
The war checked imports, bad harvests reduced the home supply, and a
vicious protective tariff completed the work of natural causes. Between
1785 and 1794 the average price of a quarter of wheat was about 50s.
Between 1795 and 1801 it was about 87s., and at a later date it rose to a
still greater height. The industrial population was thus distressed by bad
conditions of life, fluctuations of employment, long hours, low wages, and
high prices. When we recollect that this society was composed very largely
of ignorant men, we are not surprised to find many of them disaffected and
even turbulent. The man who knows, or thinks that he knows a remedy for his
misery is often dangerous. But he is never so dangerous as the man who
knows nothing of causes and effects, has never pondered over a question of
economics, and, as he has never sought an explanation for the present, can
have little idea of how he can most wisely direct the future. The progress
of the Industrial Revolution was thus accompanied by suffering and
discontent among the labouring population.
These economic changes led directly to psychological changes, and the new
thinking was not merely the expression of unreasoning discomfort. An
entirely new class appeared in society. The employers of labour were added
to the other elements of the middle class, the merchants and shipowners,
the barristers and doctors, and the better sort of clergy and attorneys.
The new class, larger and more wealthy than any of the others, was
dominated by no traditions, either for good or evil, and it depended for
its existence and growth upon qualities of enterprise and adaptability,
which territorial wealth neither required from {74} nor fostered in its
owners. The rise of the capitalist employers meant a great increase in the
Liberal spirit, and their influence eventually broke down the Toryism of
the old landed interest. The manufacturers were perhaps more Liberal than
they knew, and their unconscious influence on political habits of mind was
as great as their deliberate expression of new ideas. The whole atmosphere
in which they lived was fatal to Conservatism, and new ideas moved more
rapidly among them than among those who were surrounded by the stereotyped
forms and persisting influences of a feudal land system. Manufacture, by
its constantly changing processes, accustoms those who engage in it to the
idea of continual adaptation and improvement. Its organizers are never
afraid of change in itself, and they always refer established things to
standards of utility. They are intolerant of any thing which appears to
subject convenience to forms. The early capitalists were therefore little
disposed to set much store by the distinctions of sects and orders. They
were wealthy, and were naturally not inspired by zeal for the wider
distribution of wealth. They were employers of labour, and were naturally
not anxious to strengthen labour in its demand for higher wages and better
conditions. But they were ready to accept, not manhood suffrage, but the
reform of rotten boroughs; not the disestablishment of the Church, but the
removal of the disabilities of Dissenters and Catholics; not social reform,
but the abolition of the protective tariff; not State education, but the
mitigation of the ferocities of the criminal law; not the appropriation of
the unearned increment of land, but the destruction of the antiquated
ceremonies which made its transfer difficult and expensive. The general
effect of the rise of this class was to strengthen Liberalism, not so much
by a direct assault upon Toryism as by overbearing Conservatism. One
positive piece of Liberal work is due to them. Their whole industrial
system was built up in free and open competition. They hated the
interference of the State, and it was they who, in a subsequent generation,
abolished Protection. But at the time with which this chapter is concerned,
their chief value lay in that they had none of the aristocratic Tory's
antipathy {75} to new ideas as such. They had no love of political
monopolies which were not their own.
The effect of the Industrial Revolution upon the minds of the working class
was infinitely more acute. The employers had no aversion to change. The
employed had every reason to seek for it. While they became, as dwellers in
towns, more exposed to the infection of new ideas, they encountered new
hardships, which made them more sensitive. Political doctrines, which
hardly stirred the mind of a cottager, dividing his time between
manufacturing and tilling a small plot of ground in open country, sounded
loudly in the ears of an artisan, quickened by contact with machinery and
constant intercourse with his fellows in the factory or in the street,
cramped by living in a sunless court in a crowded town, earning a bare
subsistence by exhausting labour, or thrown out of work by the introduction
of a new machine or the bankruptcy of his employer. Even in the absence of
systematic education, there is a kind of intellectual development which is
inevitable in industrial society. Friendly societies, Trade Unions, crowded
workshops, closely packed dwellings, all tend to stimulate the exchange of
ideas, and however clumsy the industrial organization of the period may
have been, it inevitably produced a new quickness of thinking. The
character of that thinking was determined by the conditions of life.
Political disability may have nothing, it cannot have much, to do directly
with economic distresses. But no people in a state of bodily misery was
ever yet persuaded by the most logical argument that the one is not
connected indissolubly with the other. They are wretched. They cannot
control their circumstances. Does it not follow that if they could control
their own circumstances they would cease to be wretched? Economic
discontent invariably produces political discontent, and that whether the
sufferer has a voice in his government or not. It is always to the
advantage of society that he should have such a voice. If he has a vote he
may overturn a Government. But he will not overturn all government. He may
expel a party. He will not subvert the State. Whether a trade depression
will produce a {76} revolution or only a General Election depends on
whether the bulk of the working people are enfranchised or not. In the one
case the party system provides discontent with an alternative. In the other
there is no hope of constitutional change. Probably only the excitement of
the war with France saved England from violent internal disturbances at the
end of the eighteenth century. The sense of national power is a good
anodyne for personal misery, as governing classes have always been aware.
But if there was no great disaster, there was grave unrest. All
circumstances combined to make the preaching of new social principles
popular and their application to the existing state of society fierce.
It was not merely a vague and general suffering which stimulated political
discussion among the working classes at this time. They had definite
grievances, which were obviously produced by their disfranchisement and
could only be removed by their admission to political power. When the
Industrial Revolution began, there was still on the Statute Book the Act of
Elizabeth, which allowed the magistrates to fix wages in proportion to the
prevailing local price of corn. It is doubtful whether this method of
establishing a minimum wage based on the standard of bare subsistence could
have been used successfully in the new conditions. Country gentlemen might
have been able to make an accurate guess at a fair wage when industry was
stable and competition not acute. They would certainly be incompetent in
the age of machinery, of violent fluctuations of trade, and of intense
competition between employers. The only people who can ever fix minimum
wages are the employers and workmen themselves, acting through
representatives. But the Act offered at least the opportunity of
experiment, and any attempt to preserve a decent standard of life among the
workpeople would have been better than the alternative of leaving the
standard to the discretion of the employer, who would naturally be disposed
to make it low. The agricultural labourers made several attempts to get
their wages fixed in this way.[83] For {77} various reasons the Act was not
enforced, and in 1795 the magistrates began to adopt the alternative of
granting poor relief regulated by the price of corn. This was the fatal
Speenhamland policy, which, by securing a subsistence to all labourers,
irrespective of their work, degraded their character by making up wages to
the subsistence level, whatever their amount, induced employers to reduce
wages for pauper labourers and independent labourers alike, and, by
enormously increasing the burden of rates, seriously injured the whole
agricultural industry.
A similar experience befell many of the artisans, especially the cotton
weavers. In 1795 Whitbread introduced a Bill, which proposed to apply the
principles of the Elizabethan Act to the workers in towns. It was read a
second time without opposition, but got no farther. Thirteen years later a
second Bill was defeated by the Economists and _laissez faire_. It was
honestly believed by theorists and by the few practical politicians who,
like Pitt, were beginning to study political economy, that wages could only
be fixed by bargaining between employers and employed, and depended upon
the extent of the wages fund, the amount left after the employers had paid
the rent of their land, the interest on their capital, and their own
profits. This fund was always assumed to be fixed. Any attempt to increase
it meant a reduction of profits, and a reduction of profits meant a less
inducement to employers to establish industries, and consequently a
reduction of employment. To some extent the argument was sound. During the
rapid transition from hand labour to machinery, it might have been worth an
employer's while to employ large numbers of men at low wages rather than a
small number of men with expensive machinery. A slight increase of the
average wage might have turned the balance in favour of the machinery. But
the argument as a whole ignored two facts. The first was that the
inducement offered to the employers was excessive, and that they might
still have established as many factories, even if their profits had been
somewhat less. The second was that an increase in wages {78} would have
been followed by increased efficiency and an increased production of
wealth, leaving larger sums to be given to employers and employed alike.
These considerations did not weigh with the early economists. Wages were
left to what was called free bargaining, in which the comparatively wealthy
employer got the better of his comparatively poor workmen.
This refusal of redress by legislation was the more exasperating because it
was accompanied by a prohibition of redress by combination. Parliament
would neither help the workmen nor allow them to help themselves. Attempts
to organize Trade Unions were discouraged or actively suppressed. In 1799
and 1800 two Combination Acts were passed, which made illegal all contracts
between workmen for obtaining an advance in wages, for reducing hours of
employment, for preventing employers from employing any particular workman,
or for controlling any person in the management of his business. Breach of
the Acts was made a criminal offence, punishable by fine and
imprisonment.[84] Combinations of employers were nominally prohibited in
precisely the same way, but in the political circumstances of the time the
law was enforced only against the men. Trade Unions, in fact, continued to
exist, and in many trades they succeeded in arranging wages with the
masters. So long as the relations of employers and employed were friendly,
the Acts were left alone. But when a strike began they were brought into
operation, and the workpeople were forcibly reminded of the consequences of
political impotence. Large numbers of them were thus reduced to the same
state as the agricultural labourers, and lived on scanty wages, eked out by
charity and the Poor Law.
The Industrial Revolution thus gradually transformed society, and created
what were substantially two new classes of people, of which the first was
by nature averse to Conservatism, and the second was by circumstances made
restless and eager for change. The successive events of the American
Rebellion and the French Revolution fell upon this changing society like
flame upon {79} stubble. But a few years before the dispute with the
Colonies came to a head, there took place a sort of preliminary
demonstration of the principles which that controversy forced into
prominence. Speculation had brought a small body of Englishmen to definite
support of manhood suffrage, annual Parliaments, and the substitution of
pledged delegates for representatives with freedom of action. These
principles were simply the logical extreme of Liberalism. If every man is
to be regarded as equal with every other, then every man must have a vote.
If every man ought to have a vote, he must be allowed to exercise it as
soon as he becomes entitled to it, and therefore Parliament must be
dissolved every year in order to permit the new voters to express their
wishes. If every man ought to have a vote, he must be allowed to vote not
merely on general principles of policy, but on details, and his
representative must be instructed to vote for or against without using his
own discretion. This abstract reasoning had not affected any large
proportion of the population. The Duke of Richmond was the most
distinguished of these speculators; John Cartwright, a naval officer, who
afterwards became a major in the militia, was the most voluminous of their
writers; their most effective workers were men like the clerical Horne
Tooke and Wyvil; and their largest following was in the county of
Yorkshire. As a political force they counted for nothing at all. But the
affair of Wilkes and the Middlesex election brought the whole subject of
representative government vividly into the public eye, and the political
philosophers found their doctrines for a short time popular.
Between 1768 and 1770 there was a distinct tendency in politics towards the
reform of Parliament, the reduction of the number of rotten boroughs, and
the restriction of the influence of the Crown. This was produced by bad
harvests and industrial depression. The expulsion of John Wilkes from the
House of Commons in 1770 brought this discontent to a head, and provoked
not only dangerous riots in London, but also violent discussion of
political principles. Wilkes was a disreputable person, though not more
disreputable than some men who enjoyed {80} the confidence of the Crown and
Parliament. He was obnoxious to the Government of the day, and after twice
beating the Tory candidate for Middlesex, was twice expelled from the
House. The Government and the House thus asserted their right to refuse to
accept the chosen representative of the electors, and, in effect, to
dictate to them what representative they should choose. It did not require
any pedantic process of reasoning to show that this was the negation of
representative government, even of the qualified representative government
of that time. The right of election is nothing unless it is the right to
elect whom the electors please. Within the metropolitan area the House of
Commons was fiercely attacked, and there was more than one conflict between
the Courts of Law and the Executive. The main question was whether the
House of Commons was to be a private assembly of gentlemen, managing public
affairs as irresponsibly as they managed their own estates, or whether it
was to be a public assembly, chosen by the community and responsible to it.
"What were the relations between the House of Commons and the
constituencies? Could the House dictate to the constituencies whom they
should elect? If it could, did it not follow that members were neither
representatives nor delegates, but an absolute oligarchy?" From this the
public proceeded to inquire not only whether the House was right in
expelling an elected member, but by what title those who voted in favour of
expulsion held their own seats. The scandals of the existing system were
obvious. Even at that day, before the growth of the great towns, the
distribution of seats bore no relation to the figures of the population.
The county of Cornwall returned as many members as the whole of Scotland.
London, Westminster, and Middlesex, the most densely populated part of the
kingdom, returned only eight members, while Cornwall returned forty-four.
Out of 513 English and Welsh members, 254 were returned by only 11,500
voters, and six constituencies had less than four voters each. Bribery and
corruption was thus made an easy task. Boroughs were bought and sold like
landed estates, and Lord Chesterfield complained in {81} 1767 that the
Indian adventurers had so raised prices that mere inherited wealth could
not compete with them.[85] The expenses of elections were enormous, and in
some cases reached L30,000 or L40,000.[86] Inside the House, members, who
had thus acquired their seats either by nomination or by purchase, had
nothing to fear from their constituents, and many of them could be bought
by the Crown with little difficulty. In 1770 no less than 192 of them held
offices under the Crown, and were directly under its influence.[87] A House
of this sort could only be endured without complaint while it acted in
harmony with public opinion. So long as politics were no more than a
business for gentlemen, it mattered little how gentlemen acquired their
interest in it, or how they employed their interest when they had got it.
But the disputes about Wilkes made people think that politics concerned the
electors as well as the legislators, and when the voters of Middlesex found
that the gentlemen in the House refused to accept their representative,
they, and other voters like them, began to inquire fiercely into the whole
system.
Wilkes actually made use of some of the logical Liberal or Radical terms of
speech for his own purposes. In No. 19 of the _North Briton_, he wrote of
the right of the people "to resume the power they have delegated, and to
punish their servants who have abused it," and he invited his constituents
to give him their "instructions." Whether Wilkes honestly held the Radical
faith or not, he preached it with great popularity and success, and he
stood for much more than he was. He was unquestionably a scoundrel. But he
was expelled from the House because he was a demagogue. Persecution
converted him from a blackguard into a standard of battle, and "Wilkes and
Liberty" became the cry of all who valued free government. Liberty has
always owed as much to the folly and extravagance of its enemies as to the
wisdom and devotion of its friends.
The contest ended in the victory of Wilkes and the electors of {82}
Middlesex, and the popular ardour was quickly cooled. But two permanent
marks were left upon English politics. The first was of infinite
importance, as indicating a breach in the aristocratic monopoly of public
affairs. The public meeting became a regular means of expressing opinion
and of influencing Parliament. In August, 1769, a meeting was held in
Westminster Hall at which seven thousand people were said to be
present.[88] Many meetings were also held of the freehold voters of the
different counties, who were at this time almost the only independent
voters in the country. These passed resolutions, sent instructions to their
members, and approved petitions.[89] The second permanent change effected
by the Wilkes controversy was the establishment of the Society of the
Supporters of the Bill of Rights. This was founded in 1769 to assist
Wilkes, the prime mover being Horne Tooke, the Vicar of Brentford.[90] The
fundamental principles of this Society were Radical, and it proposed to
test every candidate for Parliament by inviting him to pledge himself to
equal distribution of seats, annual Parliaments, and the exclusion of
placemen from the Commons, and to take an oath against bribery. The Society
was soon superseded by the Constitutional Society, which maintained the
same principles, and from this time political associations outside
Parliament have remained a permanent feature of English life.
When the immediate controversy had subsided, the course of domestic
politics remained uneventful for a few years. The King and Lord North were
slowly buying up the House of Commons, and establishing a practical
despotism which proved far more dangerous to the public than the more
obvious tyranny of the Stuarts. The Rockingham Whigs looked with jealous
eyes upon this revival of their ancient enemy, the power of the Crown. Even
as it stood, Parliament was better than Monarchy. Parliament acted
according to law, the Crown at its discretion or caprice. Parliament was
responsible in some {83} measure to the people it governed, the Crown was
not responsible at all. Parliament was an instrument which could be
wielded, however clumsily, by the nation; the Crown was an active and
independent agent, which could only be expelled for misbehaviour, after the
mischief had been done. If the Crown were allowed to overcome the
resistance of Parliament, the last check on its power would be gone. This
small body of Whigs therefore laboured, though with little success, to
maintain the purity and independence of the Commons by the exclusion of
placemen and the reduction of sinecures. The American War brought the whole
question of government to an issue, and the struggle, which had seemed to
end in the English Revolution of 1688, was fought out again across the
Atlantic. The dispute between England and the Colonies was simply whether
the Colonies were to be governed despotically or in accordance with their
own wishes. The stamp duty and the tea duty, which figured so largely in
the quarrel, imposed no real burden on the Americans, and would not, by
themselves, have caused any difficulty. Even the elaborate commercial
restrictions, which used the Colonies for the interest of the Mother
Country in the same way as they used Ireland, had produced little
ill-feeling. What really happened in the first fifteen years of George
III's reign was that a community of civilized men, united by their common
geographical situation and common interest, and sundered from an older
civilization by some thousands of miles of ocean, became resolved no longer
to be governed in accordance with the ideas of that older civilization. The
Americans, in a word, had acquired a nationality of their own. While the
French held Canada, the danger of invasion from the North kept the
colonists eager for the British connection. The expulsion of the French in
1763 left the colonists free from external menace, and without this
pressure towards union, the essential differences of the two societies made
themselves felt. The dispute about taxation would undoubtedly be settled by
all modern lawyers in favour of England. Parliament had the legal right to
impose taxes on the Americans, nor was there anything {84} morally wrong in
asking them to contribute to the cost of their own defence. But the
proposal to tax was only evidence of a persisting habit of disposition. The
Americans were not interested in the affairs of Europe. They preferred to
manage their own business. The English Government made the fatal error of
first irritating them by arbitrary interference, and then alienating them
by force. In 1783 George III acknowledged the independence of the United
States of America.
The war produced a direct conflict between Liberalism and Toryism. Did the
Colonies exist for the benefit of the Mother Country or for their own? Had
or had not one section of the Anglo-Saxon race the right to compel another
section? Was a homogeneous society two thousand miles away to be governed
by an English Government in a way of which it disapproved? Subsequent
generations have settled the Empire upon Liberal principles, and have
decided to treat a colony of white men as an independent nationality. The
Tories of the American Rebellion decided otherwise, with disastrous
results. But in losing the American Colonies, England escaped a greater
disaster. It was a choice between losing the Colonies and losing domestic
liberty. Never was the relation between foreign and domestic policy more
vividly displayed. Never was it more clearly demonstrated that a political
philosophy is one and indivisible. The Tories could only conquer in America
by principles which would enable them to conquer in England also. This was
always present to the minds of the Whigs, who had no doubt that in fighting
for the Americans they were fighting their old enemy of the Revolution.
Liberalism and Conservatism were in this case identified. The Whigs, in
maintaining the principle of representative government, were defending an
established institution. The Tories, in endeavouring to destroy local
self-government by principles which struck at the root of domestic
self-government, were revolutionaries rushing headlong into reaction. "I
deny," said one of their champions, "that there is any such thing as
Representation at all in our Constitution, but that the Commons are taken
out of {85} the people, as the democratic part of the Government, not
elected as representatives of the people, but commissioned by them in like
manner as the Lords are commissioned or appointed by the Crown. If the
Commons were the representatives of the people, the people might control
them, and the instructions of the electors would be binding upon the
members."[91] The Whig doctrine, opposed to this negation of Parliament,
was stated most forcibly by Burke, in his _Address to the King_. In this
manifesto he said: "To leave any real freedom to Parliament, freedom must
be left to the Colonies. A military government is the only substitute for
civil liberty. That the establishment of such a power in America will
utterly ruin our finances (though its certain effect) is the smallest part
of our concern. It will become an apt, powerful, and certain engine for the
destruction of our freedom here. Great bodies of armed men, trained to a
contempt of popular assemblies representative of an English people; kept up
for the purpose of exacting impositions without their consent and
maintained by that exaction; instruments in subverting, without any process
of law, great ancient establishments and respected forms of government; set
free from, and therefore above, the ordinary English tribunals where they
serve,--these men cannot so transform themselves, merely by crossing the
sea, as to behold with love and reverence, and submit with profound
obedience to the very same things in Great Britain which in America they
had been taught to despise, and had been accustomed to awe and humble....
We deprecate the effect of the doctrines which must support and countenance
the government over conquered Englishmen."[92]
{86}
The matter was indeed worse than a mere corruption of the army. The people
who used the army would be as much demoralized as the army itself, and
every Tory civilian would be converted into an active enemy of his own
freedom. Burke, whose speeches on this subject are a treasure-house of
political wisdom, saw straight into the heart of the matter. "There are
many whose whole scheme of freedom is made up of pride, perverseness, and
insolence. They feel themselves in a state of thraldom, they imagine that
their souls are cooped and cabined in unless they have some man, or some
body of men, dependent on their mercy. This desire of having some one below
them descends to those who are the very lowest of all, and a Protestant
cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling
Church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that the
peer, whose footman's instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain from
a jail. This disposition is the true source of the passion which many men
in very humble life have taken to the American war. _Our_ subjects in
America; _our_ colonies; _our_ dependants."[93] It was not argument, but a
habit of mind, which Burke encountered. Even without a victory in America,
the corruption of the Tory mind was bad enough. It was precisely in the
temper of the American War that Tory statesmen, after the French
Revolution, afflicted their own countrymen. But from the utter loss of the
temper of independence England was saved by the loss of the Colonies. The
power of the Crown seemed to be strong even after the war. But a train of
events in the mind had been started which could not be stopped, and in
feet, when George III abandoned his hold over the Americans, he abandoned
also his hold over the English.
This victory was decisive, and it is difficult to see in what other quarter
it could ever have been won. There was no country in Europe where such a
definite assertion of the right of {87} a people to control their
government was likely to be made. Even France, where a few years later the
assertion came with ten times greater vigour, owed much to the American
rising. The French Government, which allied itself with the Americans to
injure its old enemy England, by that very act destroyed itself. The final
result of its exertions was precisely the opposite of what it intended, and
what, at first sight, it achieved. Apparently, it humiliated England and
elevated itself. Actually, it saved England and destroyed itself. Its
subjects were exposed in America to the fatal contagion of liberty. They
brought it back to their own country, and in ten years the French
Government had perished, and the whole of Europe was infected.
It cannot safely be asserted that the Revolution in Europe would have been
so successful but for the American Rebellion. The general ignorance and
apathy of the poorer classes, and the general acceptance of established
things which prevailed among the others, were weights which few Europeans
would have tried to lift, or could have lifted if they had tried. In the
American Colonies were gathered people of a different complexion. The
Rebellion was not that purely noble and disinterested thing which lovers of
liberty would have wished it to be. But the people concerned were such as
made certain their maintenance of a noble principle, even from bad motives.
The stocks from which they sprang were among the most vigorous of the
English race. The lives which most of them lived made them hard and
self-reliant. The distance which they lived from the Mother Country
weakened the influences of tradition. Their institutions were in some
districts reminiscent of the English. But in general it would be fair to
say that they had no aristocracy and no privileged Church, land was free to
all, the women were trained to vigour and independence no less than the
men. Except in a few of the older settlements every circumstance tended to
foster individuality, and left a man free to raise himself by his own
exertions to positions of dignity and power. As Tom Paine put it in the
Second Part of his _Rights of Man_, "So deeply rooted were all the
Governments of the old world, and so effectually {88} had the tyranny and
the antiquity of habit established itself over the mind, that no beginning
could be made in Asia, Africa, or Europe, to reform the political condition
of man. Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as
rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think." The
significance of this great event could hardly be exaggerated. One of the
oldest and most powerful monarchies had been humiliated by a people who
proclaimed, as the foundation of their new State, the equality of all
individuals within it. The presence of the United States was a perpetual
reminder to the discontented and the suffering among the older peoples that
successful revolt was possible, and that constitutions might stand fast
which did not confer privileges upon any class in the community. It would
be absurd to pretend that the American people have not often fallen short
of their own ideals. But the ideals were at least established. It was no
small thing that a State should have come into being whose founders
proclaimed in their Declaration of Independence that "We hold these truths
to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights
Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed." There are not less than five historical or
logical errors in that sonorous passage. But it acted on the old world like
the voice of God among the dry bones.
Opinion in England seems to have been generally favourable to the war.
Opposition was most marked among the commercial classes, whose trade was
seriously injured by the loss of the colonial market and the destruction of
shipping. Such as it was, it encouraged the organization of public opinion
outside Parliament, which had been previously practised in the affair of
Wilkes. The attack was properly directed against the Crown. The City of
London led the way in December, 1779, by resolving "that the various
measures which have brought the landed and {89} mercantile interest of this
country into its present reduced and deplorable situation could not have
been pursued to their actual extremity, had it not been for the abuse of
the present increased, enormous, and undue influence of the Crown." There
followed a meeting of the freeholders of Yorkshire. This assembly protested
against the multiplication of sinecures and pensions "from whence the Crown
had acquired a great and unconstitutional influence, which, if not checked,
might soon prove fatal to the liberties of this country," and a committee
was appointed to prepare a plan for an association to promote economic
reform and restore the freedom of Parliament. Great excitement was caused
at this meeting by the indiscreet remarks of a gentleman called Smelt, who
had been one of the tutors of the Prince of Wales. He appears to have
argued that the King's influence was too little rather than too great, and
the indignation produced by his remarks shows how widely independent
opinion dissented from the servility of Parliament.[94] Similar meetings
were held in nearly thirty different counties and boroughs, and in most of
them committees of correspondence were appointed. Deputies from some of
these committees met in London in March, under the chairmanship of Wyvil,
the Yorkshire clergyman. The deputies published a memorial which described
the state of government as "a despotic system," declared that "the whole
capacity of popular freedom had been struck at," and referred in plain
terms to the "venal majority" in the House of Commons. The memorial
demanded that one hundred new members should be sent to Westminster to
represent the counties.[95]
This external pressure produced some effect even upon Parliament, corrupt
though it was. In April the House of Commons resolved by a majority of
eighteen "that the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and
ought to be diminished." Resolutions in favour of economical reforms were
passed without divisions, and Burke introduced a Bill for reducing
expenditure {90} by about L200,000 a year and for abolishing some of the
worst of the sinecures. But the tide soon ceased to flow in Parliament. The
Gordon Riots in June, 1780, gave the Tories a very useful weapon against
popular agitation. The Duke of Richmond actually introduced a Bill for
manhood suffrage and annual Parliaments on the very day when the Protestant
mob began the work of plunder and arson. But any attempt at political
reform was at this time hopeless. There was no unanimity among the
reformers. The Duke of Richmond was a logical Radical. Fox supported annual
Parliaments and opposed manhood suffrage. Burke, who was active in
proposals to suppress corruption, would not accept even triennial
Parliaments, and though he had no objection to slight changes in the
distribution of seats, hated equally all drastic changes in the franchise
and in the composition of the House of Commons. A dissolution of Parliament
and an election, at which the King spent nearly L50,000 in buying votes,
strengthened the Tory Government, and even Burke's plans for economical
reforms were generally defeated.
The campaign in the country persisted, and in May, 1782, William Pitt
revived the question of political reform in the House of Commons. There can
be no doubt that Pitt was then and for some time afterwards in favour of
considerable changes, and but for the accident of the French Revolution, he
would probably have abolished many of the rotten boroughs and extended the
franchise by the end of the eighteenth century. His speech of 1782 was
hardly less vigorous in its denunciations of royal and aristocratic
influence than were the speeches of Fox in the House and those of the
country meetings outside it. But he was at this time only a new member,
with none of that mastery of the assembly which he afterwards acquired. His
motion for a Special Committee was beaten by 161 votes to 141, and fifty
years elapsed before the cause received such powerful support again. Pitt
did indeed introduce a Bill in 1785 which provided for the purchase of a
certain number of rotten boroughs and the transfer of their members to the
counties and London, and for the establishment of a permanent compensation
fund which should be {91} applied to similar objects in future years, as
the population passed to the unrepresented industrial towns of the North.
But in this scheme he acted without his colleagues. By 248 votes to 174 the
House refused him leave to introduce the Bill, and he never made a second
attempt. Five years later the French Revolution made him a determined
opponent of the cause which he had once supported.
So far as Parliament was concerned, the Liberal movement for political
reform made no headway. In other channels the Liberal tide moved quietly
but steadily. In 1778 relief was obtained by the Roman Catholics from some
of their worst disabilities. In that year Sir George Savile's Bill
abolishing the penalties upon priests and Jesuits who were found teaching
in schools, and the infamous rule which dispossessed a Papist owner of real
property in favour of the next Protestant heir, was passed in both Houses
without opposition. But even this slight measure of justice aroused great
hostility in the country, and two years later the Gordon Riots showed that
the persecuting zeal of Protestantism was not yet dead. The Dissenters were
the next to move, but in their case Conservatism was too powerful. In 1787,
dissatisfied with the annual Acts of Indemnity, which preserved the stigma
of inferiority while relieving them of its legal penalties, the
Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists attempted to procure the repeal
of the Test Act and the Corporation Act. Their case was presented in the
House of Commons by a Churchman named Beaufoy in 1787 and again in 1789.
North opposed him on the grounds that abolition would endanger the
Established Church, which was an essential part of the British
Constitution. Fox took the true Liberal view, declared that no Church
should be Established which was not the Church of the majority of the
people, and went so far as to say that "if the majority of the people of
England should ever be for the abolition of the Established Church, in such
a case the abolition ought immediately to follow." Pitt was no bigot, but
consulted the Archbishop of Canterbury. A meeting of the {92} Bishops
decided against abolition by ten votes to two.[96] Pitt, therefore spoke
against the motion, which was defeated.[97] But the cause was not hopeless.
The voting in 1787 was 178 against 100. In 1789 it was 122 against 102. But
in 1792, when a similar motion was made by Fox, the conditions were
altered. The French Revolution had broken out. The property of the French
Church had been confiscated. Dr. Priestley, the most copious of the
Dissenting writers, had expressed his desire to disestablish the English
Church. Dr. Price, the most popular of the Dissenting preachers, had
praised the acts of the French revolutionaries. All the fears of reaction
rallied to support the Establishment, and the motion was beaten by 296
votes to 105. It was not brought forward again for nearly forty years.
The right of free discussion, so essential to the maintenance of political
and religious liberty, gained some additional protection in 1791, when
Fox's Libel Act was passed. Prior to that date juries had been confined in
libel cases to answering two questions: was the document published? and
what did its words mean? The judge then decided whether the meaning put
upon the words by the jury constituted a libel or not. This system gave a
great advantage to the Government in all cases of seditious or blasphemous
libel, and prosecutions of printers and journalists were very common. The
judge was a lawyer, and probably Tory in his opinions. He was connected
with Government, with the propertied classes, and with the Established
Church. Any attack on existing political, proprietary, or religious
institutions was therefore tested by a man who was probably prejudiced in
favour of all three, and might actually have defended in the House of Lords
the policy which had been attacked by the prisoner at the bar. Judges like
Lord Mansfield and Lord Camden had shown themselves, during the Wilkes
controversy, to be honourable and upright. But the danger existed, and even
if the judge's power was not consciously abused, it was always {93} liable
to be affected by class prejudice.[98] Fox's Libel Act gave to the jury the
right to decide whether a publication was libellous or not. After the
outbreak of the French Revolution, when the middle classes showed
themselves as bigoted as the upper, even trial by jury was but a poor
protection to an avowed Republican or atheist. But the new principle was
safer than the old, and it was something even to have asserted that a man's
political opinions should be judged by his fellow-subjects, and not by a
member of the governing class. The Act implied, in the minds of those who
voted for it, a reversal of the old conception of State and subject. So
long as the supremacy of the State was assumed, criticism of government was
inevitably regarded as improper. It was, in effect, the servant rebuking
the master. On the other hand, when the right of the subject to control the
State becomes the basis of political reasoning, criticism of government is
no more than the master rebuking the servant. The passing of Fox's Libel
Act is a proof that political minds were in a state of transition, and
suggests, no less than Pitt's proposals for reform, that but for the French
Revolution political estimates might have been revised, and political
institutions readjusted, at a much earlier date than they were.
One other transaction of this period is of importance in the history of
Liberalism. In 1785 the House of Commons resolved that Warren Hastings
should be impeached for his conduct of affairs in India. Hastings had been
Governor-General under the East India Company, whose territory and
influence had been enormously increased since the victories of Clive and
the expulsion of the French twenty years before. The prime mover in the
impeachment was Burke, who devoted to the preparation of the charges and
the conduct of the trial enormous industry, and an eloquence so tremendous
that to this day no man can read his speeches without shaking with horror
and indignation. {94} The Company had been guilty of every vice which the
disposing mind displays when it is brought into contact with weaker
peoples. It had developed the art of exploitation to perfection. Its agents
were in the country to make money for their shareholders, and in pursuing
the interest of their shareholders they did not forget their own. The
natives were exposed to a double confiscation, and every consideration of
good government was not seldom subordinated to this universal rapacity. The
agents bribed and forged, they abused judicial process, they broke treaties
and sold their allies, they made war upon those peoples whom it was
convenient to treat as their enemies, and when they wanted an excuse for a
campaign of their own they hired out British soldiers to a native
destroyer, and entrusted to him the work of massacre and pillage which they
were unwilling to undertake themselves. The inhabitants of India were not
at that time acquainted with the classics. Had they been, they might more
than once have quoted with grim justice against the British those words
which the Latin historian put into the mouth of one of their own ancestors:
"Slaughter and plunder are in their vocabulary synonymous with Empire, and
when they have made a desert they call it peace."[99]
Hastings was in fact incomparably better than his predecessors, and after
the trial had dragged on for more than seven years he was acquitted by the
Lords. But the proceedings had established the great principle that
morality is to be observed by white races in dealing with black, and that
even though forms of government may be different, the objects of government
are the same in all parts of the world, the happiness of the governed and
not the enrichment of the governor. The impeachment cost Burke fourteen
years of unremitting labour. But though he failed in his immediate object,
and though the improvement in the methods of Indian government was slow,
the permanent effects of his work remained. Burke's speeches were often
overcharged, and if {95} Hastings had been as bad as Burke believed him to
be, he would have been supernaturally bad. But indignation on behalf of an
alien race is not so common that we can afford to spare even its excess. A
later generation of Englishmen, reading some of the sorry pages in the
history of our modern Empire, may regret the absence from us of Burke's
imagination, sympathy, and inexhaustible wrath. Acts of Parliament passed
in 1772 and 1784 gave the Crown political control over the East India
Company, and the complete transfer of the Company's rights in 1858
established the government of India upon a political and no longer upon a
commercial basis. Blemishes there are still, but there are few systems of
government in the world which are less influenced by the desire to promote
the selfish ends of the governors. The transformation of English opinion
with regard to India began with Burke.
On the eve of the French Revolution there seemed to be a very good prospect
of reforms in the English Constitution. The Catholics had made an actual
advance. The Dissenters had every reason to be hopeful. The Tory leader
himself had shown sympathy with free election and the enfranchisement of
the new industrial districts. But the fate of English liberties lay in the
hands of the French Government. If Turgot and the French reformers had had
their way, the Revolution might have been averted, or at least mitigated.
The triumph of the French privileged classes made reform impossible, and
made it certain that revolution would be violent and universal. In May,
1776, Louis XVI, impelled by faction and his bad wife, dismissed the one
statesman who could have made absolute monarchy tolerable to the French
people. By the end of 1793 he and the Queen had perished on the scaffold,
the nobility were dead or in exile, and a French Republic was proclaiming
with even greater emphasis than the American the doctrines of individuality
and natural right. The shock to established things was terrific. This was
not a matter of a handful of colonists in a remote part of the world. It
was a whole nation, and that {96} in the heart of Europe, which had not
only risen against monarchy but had destroyed it, and with it aristocracy
and the Church. Every institution upon which political society was based
had vanished in the flood, and the French people, not content with
establishing new principles at home, were calling upon the common people
abroad to do the like, and were announcing their intention of carrying help
wherever it was required. It is difficult to imagine in these days with
what feelings those who believed in class distinctions and privileges and
the aristocratic monopoly of government witnessed the triumph of an
assembly which issued this Declaration of Rights.
"I. Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their
rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public
utility.
"II. The end of all political associations is the preservation of the
natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty,
property, security, and resistance to oppression.
"III. The nation is essentially the source of all sovereignty; nor can any
individual or any body of men be entitled to any authority which is not
expressly derived from it."
The Declaration affords as ample material for criticism on logical and
historical grounds as the American Declaration of Independence. But its
plain meaning was the same: that the subordination of the individual to the
institution was at an end, and that everything in politics was to be tested
in future by its effect upon human beings, irrespective of their rank,
wealth, creed, or occupation, or sex. In a word, it was the source of
modern Liberalism.
In England the Revolution was at first regarded with general approbation,
or at least indifferent curiosity. To Whigs like Fox and Mackintosh, as
well as to Radicals like Price and Cartwright, it was a matter of
exultation to see the end of absolute monarchy in France. Even a Tory might
view with equanimity the summoning of a French Assembly which bore some
resemblance to the English. Even a lawyer might rejoice at the fall of the
Bastille, the symbol of arbitrary government, {97} and the negation of the
English rule of law. But as the Revolution swept beyond the constitutional
forms, when the mob broke loose in Paris, when the King's head was cut off,
when the heads of men and women who were noble in character as well as rank
were carried through the streets on pikes, when the property of the Church
was confiscated, and when members of the old nobility of the most splendid
nation in Europe exhibited their destitution in every town of England, the
bulk of the English people hurried into reaction. If anything beyond the
mere excesses of the Revolution was required to turn a timid friend into a
frantic enemy, it was the Assembly's proclamation of its intention to help
all other peoples to follow its example. There is no people which hates
political bloodshed more than the English. There is no people which more
stubbornly resents foreign interference in its domestic affairs. Both these
national characteristics were offended by the Revolution, and their offence
was the opportunity of Toryism. Burke's _Reflections on the Late Revolution
in France_ was published in 1791, and gave voice to the national dislike of
violent political changes. The book, with its deep reading of human nature,
its insistence on the continuity of national growth, and its contempt for
those who thought to alter a political society by reasoning in the
abstract, was the wisest book which the Revolution produced on either side.
But it was full of errors of fact, and it made no allowances for the
horrible suffering which the old system had imposed upon the common people
of France. If it expressed the opinions of a wise Conservatism, it was also
made the textbook of selfishness and monopoly. Every person who owned
property or privilege was roused by it into hatred of any change which
threatened to extend the political rights of the majority. The governing
class marshalled itself to defend its own. From the moment when Burke
published his book to the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth
century, hardly a single Liberal measure was passed into law. The fate of
the Dissenters has already been described. Parliamentary Reform fared no
better. In 1792, 1793, and 1795 Charles Grey, afterwards Earl Grey, brought
the subject {98} before the House of Commons. In 1782 Pitt had been beaten
by 161 votes to 141. In 1793 Grey was beaten by 282 to 41, and in 1793 by
258 to 63. The Dissenters were not admitted to public offices till 1828.
The Catholics had to wait till 1829. Parliament was not reformed till 1832.
Nor was the Tory spirit displayed simply in neglect. It was active and
vicious. During the long interval between the beginning of the Revolution
and the triumph of the Whigs in 1831, the Press was gagged, political
associations were broken up, combinations of workmen were prohibited, the
Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, public meetings were forbidden or
violently dispersed, and large numbers of worthy and respectable men were
transported or kept in prison, in many cases without trial. Free
institutions endured, but they ceased to operate. Liberty was kept, but in
chains.
The man who determined the course of this reaction was William Pitt, and
though much of its evil must be ascribed to the state of general opinion,
his personal responsibility was very great. He seems to have assumed that
failure would follow every attempt at change, and though he was in favour
of the Reform of Parliament, of Catholic Emancipation, of Free Trade, and
of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and was not hostile to the removal of
the disabilities of Dissenters, he abated every one of his principles
without seriously attempting to put them into practice. He was one of the
greatest politicians and one of the worst statesmen England has ever had.
He managed Parliament with astonishing success, and hardly ever used it for
a good purpose. His failure to reform the House of Commons increased
discontent and made government more difficult. His failure to emancipate
the Catholics before the Union with Ireland was the final and decisive
cause of the Rebellion of 1798, and his failure to emancipate them after
the Union was the chief reason why that measure did nothing to improve the
condition of Ireland or its relations with England. His failure to abolish
the Slave Trade, when even Tories like Windham were against it, prolonged
for twenty years a system of human misery and {99} degradation such as had
never been known in any civilized part of the world. His system of finance
burdened the country with an unnecessary load of debt. His failure to
adjust the customs tariff to the new conditions of a population which was
no longer self-sufficing increased distress and discontent with it. His
chief enterprise, the war with France, was begun in folly and conducted
with incompetence, and it was not until after his death that it was
efficiently conducted to a successful issue. The one thing which he did was
to maintain a strong central government in the United Kingdom. But to this
maintenance of government he sacrificed almost everything for which
government exists. "The Pilot who weathered the storm" flung all the cargo
out of the ship, and steered her from the high seas into dangerous
shallows, from some of which she has not yet escaped.
* * * * *
{100}