CHAPTER IV

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND ENGLISH OPINION

The Revolution affected English society in two directly opposite ways. It

is unquestionable that its violence drove the majority into hostility not

only to Revolution, but to Reform. But many men and women welcomed the

triumph of its principles with an enthusiasm which was almost as

extravagant as the opposition of the rest. Those who had preached equality

in the days of Wilkes and the American War were encouraged to greater zeal,

and the bigness of the new shock awakened interest in masses of people who

had previously been apathetic. The Industrial Revolution had by this time

produced much of the social alteration of which some account has already

been given, and the artisans of the North offered a fertile soil for

doctrines which had previously fallen on barren ground. Political

speculation now for the first time attracted the serious attention of the

governing class. The new thinkers themselves belonged to all ranks, though

very few of them were to be found among the aristocracy. They all preached,

with more or less ardour, and with a more or less crude application of

logic to political conditions, the doctrine that every man had an equal

moral right with every other to control his own life. For practical

purposes the speculation of these primitive Liberals did not extend beyond

male limits. But some, of whom Mary Wollstonecraft was the most

conspicuous,[100] even made the same claim for every woman. When only one

woman in ten thousand had any substantial intellectual training, it was

natural enough that men should give little {101} thought to their political

rights. Until women were sufficiently educated to ask for equality in the

State, it was impossible that men should think seriously of granting it.

But the French Revolution, though its direct effect on the political

condition of women was insignificant, started, in their case as in that of

men, a train of events which has borne fruit in more modern times. The

emancipation of women from the control of men, which is the most profound

of all the social changes of the last fifty years, has been produced by

precisely the same changes in social ideas as those which have abolished

the political distinctions among sects and classes of men. It is only

another part of the process of the emancipation of the individual which is

called Liberalism.

The most obvious feature of this early Liberal movement is its neglect of

economic questions, and its concentration upon the mere machinery of

government. The science of political economy was indeed only in its

infancy, and Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, published in 1776, had

little effect upon practical politicians of any school until the beginning

of the nineteenth century. Political argument was therefore conducted in

these early stages very largely upon a theoretical basis, and Tories,

Whigs, and Radicals contended as mightily about the abstractions of natural

rights and sovereignty as the early Churches about the difference between

Homoousion and Homoiousion. Almost the only practical grievances alleged

against the old system were expensive wars and the maintenance of

sinecures. The early Reformers, though the doctrine of _laissez faire_ was

not formulated until half a century later, in fact believed it. They were

in economics what the Whigs were in politics. They hated the interference

of the executive, and they would probably have looked upon attempts to

alter economic conditions as meddling, which would restrict the liberty of

the citizen and increase the already dangerous influence of the Crown.

This indifference, or rather hostility, to economic reforms was shared by

all parties alike. Practically everybody agreed that it was a bad thing for

Government to interfere with trade, though few went so far as to condemn

the system of Protection. {102} Arthur Young disliked Government

interference as an economist. "All restrictive forcible measures in

domestic policy are bad."[101] Burke declared that his opinion was against

"an overdoing of any sort of administration, and more especially against

this most momentous of all meddling on the part of authority, the meddling

with the subsistence of the people."[102] Adam Smith, in his _Wealth of

Nations_ said that "According to the system of natural liberty, the

sovereign has only three duties to attend to ... I. The duty of protecting

the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies;

II. The duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society

from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty

of establishing an exact administration of justice; and III. The duty of

erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public

institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or

small number of individuals, to erect and maintain, because the profit

could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of

individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great

society."[103] This was the general opinion of the manufacturers, and in

1806 it was embodied in a Parliamentary Report on industrial conditions:

"The right of every man to employ the capital he inherits or has acquired

according to his own discretion without molestation or obstruction, so long

as he does not infringe on the rights or property of others, is one of

those privileges which the free and happy constitution of this country has

long accustomed every Briton to consider as his birthright."[104] The

aristocracy and the commercial classes alike distrusted an interference

which restricted their personal freedom.

The Radicals, who professed to be, and were much more alive to the

distresses of the labourers and artisans, were hardly less emphatic. "All

government," said Dr. Price, "even within a State, becomes tyrannical as

far as it is a needless and wanton exercise of power, or is carried farther

than is absolutely necessary to preserve the peace or to secure the safety

of the State. This {103} is what an excellent writer calls 'governing too

much.'"[105] "Government," said Godwin, "can have no more than two

legitimate purposes, the suppression of injustice against individuals

within the community and defence against external invasion."[106] Most of

the Radicals were in fact of the middle class, and few of them saw things

from the workman's point of view. However far they went, they were careful

to maintain the rights of property. "The phrase 'domineering rich' is

exceptionable," said Major Cartwright, "as it may, by cavillers, be

construed into an attempt to excite the poor to invade the property of the

rich. It is not by an invasion of such property that the condition of the

poor is to be amended, but by such equal laws as would have a natural

tendency to prevent injustice, and to benefit every class of the

community."[107] A free Parliament would allow every man an equal chance of

obtaining wealth. Neither Cartwright nor any of his associates seems to

have considered that, while wealth was accumulated in the hands of a small

class, equality, even of opportunity, was impossible without some measure

of State interference. What was needed by the working class was the removal

of taxes upon food and raw materials, a helpful instead of a degrading Poor

Law, the right to combine against their employers, and factory legislation.

But the speculators were more concerned to reduce the interference of

aristocratic government with the liberty of the middle class than to

increase the interference of any sort of government with the working class,

and they failed to see that the workmen's grievances were not the same as

their own. A man who was wellnigh pressed to death with heavy weights was

to be relieved by an improvement in the ventilation of the torture-chamber.

The Radicals[108] thus, in common with the Tories and the Whigs, ignored

economic problems, or assumed that they were {104} incapable of solving

them by political action. But their opinions, so far as they went, were

Liberal opinions. They made the individual the unit of political society,

and denounced all artificial barriers between ranks and classes. In his

younger days Cartwright held principles which led directly to

Republicanism. In his pamphlet _Take Your Choice_, which was published in

1776, at the height of the American dispute, he said: "How much soever any

individual may be qualified for, or deserve any elevation, he hath no right

to it till it be conferred upon him by his fellows.... It is liberty, and

not dominion, which is held by divine right."[109] The suffrage must be

extended to all adult men. "Personality is the sole foundation of the right

of being represented; ... property has, in reality, nothing to do in the

case.... It is a very fit object of the attention of his representative in

Parliament, but it contributes nothing to his right of having that

representation."[110] "We might as well make the possession of forty

shillings per annum the proof of a man's being rational, as of his being

free."[111]

But Cartwright, though a perfect specimen of the logical politician, and

reasoning on principles as purely Republican as those of Paine himself, was

a member of the middle class, and enjoyed, during a great part of his life,

a substantial income. He openly opposed the followers of Paine, and at a

meeting of the Society of the Friends of the People, which he helped to

found in 1792, he carried a resolution in favour of King, Lords, and

Commons.[112] This Society contained not only Radicals like Cartwright, but

Whig Reformers like Grey and the Duke of Bedford. Eventually, the logicians

were squeezed out, and the Society became a Whig organization, the least

vigorous of all those which worked for reform outside of Parliament. The

best of its members were practical politicians, who concentrated on active

and notorious abuses like rotten boroughs and the disfranchisement of large

towns.[113] Grey worked in {105} Parliament very steadily, and other

representatives of the Society spoke manfully on occasion in both Houses.

But as a whole it seems to have done little to arouse the feeling of the

country, and it was as vigorous in its condemnation of its more active

associates as in its attack upon the common enemy. Its principles were

essentially Whig, and not Liberal. "We profess," wrote Lord John Russell,

the chairman of the London Society in 1794, "not to entertain a wish 'that

the great plan of public benefit which Mr. Paine has so powerfully

recommended will speedily be carried into effect,' nor to amuse our

fellow-citizens with the magnificent promise of obtaining for them 'the

rights of the people in their full extent'--the indefinite language of

delusion."[114] So even Fox, though he said that "government originated not

only for, but from the people," and "the people were the legitimate

sovereign in every community," yet declared himself "a steady and decided

enemy to general and universal representation."[115] Sir Francis Burdett

and one or two other Members of Parliament took the purely Radical view.

But so late as 1818, when, after nearly twenty years of heated agitation,

Burdett moved resolutions in favour of manhood suffrage, annual

Parliaments, and equal electoral districts, Brougham said on behalf of the

official Whig Opposition: "As for universal suffrage, or the doctrine which

severed the elective franchise altogether from property, he begged leave to

observe that he never had at any time held it as less than the utter

destruction of the Constitution."[116] The Whig Reformers were thus

distinguished from the Radicals, and as they spoke contemptuously of the

extremists, so they were in their turn attacked as lukewarm and

time-serving. Even Fox himself did not escape censure, though he was always

careful to abstain from recrimination.[117] The real value of the Whigs was

that they opposed themselves steadily to all attempts to suspend the

ordinary law, to stifle public discussion, and to {106} govern the country

by the arbitrary power of the executive. In this cause Bedford and Grey and

Fox were heartily at one, and the various Bills for suspending the Habeas

Corpus Act, suppressing or restricting public meetings, and dissolving

political associations were always opposed by a compact body of members of

both Houses.[118] The few Whigs, who kept their heads in the face of

Revolutionary France, aimed at the old Whig objects, the supremacy of

Parliament over the executive, and the maintenance of the rule of ordinary

law.

When the Society of the Friends of the People had fallen into the hands of

the Whigs, Cartwright and Radicals like the Duke of Richmond, Dr. Price,

and Horne Tooke found a new outlet for their logical energies in the

Society for Constitutional Information, which had been founded in 1780. The

members of this Society were infinitely less experienced in practical

affairs than men like Grey, and some of their publications show a most

pedantic and ludicrous precision of reasoning from abstract principles.

Like all abstract politicians, they despised those who were content to

advance in opinion by easy stages. "How," asked Cartwright, "shall we speak

of the imbecile efforts of our professors of moderate reform--so much in

the nature of moderate honesty!--politicians whose abortive conceptions and

Sisyphean labours never can command the respect of Parliament, Prince, or

People? Can nothing cure these step-by-step Reformists of their

insanity?"[119] Their own doctrine was compressed on one occasion into the

following remarkable resolutions:

"1. Representation--'the happiest discovery of human wisdom'--is the vital

principle of the English Constitution, inasmuch as it is that alone which,

in a State too extensive for personal legislation, constitutes Political

Liberty.

"2. Political Liberty being a common right, Representation co-extensive

with direct Taxation ought, with all practicable equality, to be fairly and

honestly distributed throughout the community; the facility of which cannot

be denied.

{107}

"3. The constitutional duration of a Parliament cannot exceed one year."

The question of the ballot was on this occasion left open, and a prize,

consisting of the thanks of the Society, was offered for the best essay on

its advantages. The justification of the third proposition is a comical

instance of the way in which these theorizing politicians were carried away

from practical affairs.

"The truth of the third proposition in the Constitution or this Union is

made evident by the following, among other considerations:

"1. An Englishman, at twenty-one years of age, enters on his inheritance,

whatever it may be. 2. A greater inheritance descends to every one of us

from Right and the Laws than from our Parents; on which maxim Sir Edward

Coke (in his second Institute) remarks, 'Right is the best birthright the

subject hath; for thereby his goods, land, wife, children, his body, life,

honour, and estimation are protected from wrong.' 3. To no other 'Right'

than that of a People either personally or representatively making their

own Laws, whereby they may be 'protected from Wrong,' can this remark of

Sir Edward Coke possibly apply. 4. When Election is withholden for seven

years, then all who came of age since the preceding election are kept out

of their Inheritance and best Birthright. 5. Even supposing the

Representation of our Country were in other respects quite perfect, yet

septennial Parliaments would still deprive the whole Nation of its

political Liberty for six parts in seven of human life; and triennial

Parliaments must have a like effect for two years in every three; whence it

follows, that Parliaments of any duration exceeding One Year instead of a

protection from, would be an infliction of 'wrong'; contrary to the

Constitution, against Right, and destruction of Liberty."

This pedantry would destroy itself: by the application of the same

principles it could be proved that a General Election was necessary once a

month, or once a week, or once a day. But the real objection is that which

these _a priori_ Reformers constantly overlooked, the fact that a

Constitution is after all only {108} a machine contrived for certain

practical ends of government, that it must be arranged upon a basis of

convenience, and that infinitely greater hardship could be inflicted upon

the country by interrupting trade for one month in every twelve and

spending a million pounds in unproductive ways, than by forcing a small

portion of the population to abstain from voting even until it was as much

as twenty-eight years old.

These doctrines being based upon pure logic, and not upon practical

convenience, were naturally made applicable to all peoples without

distinction. "All being pure and genuine," said Cartwright, "the result

will be, a strict unity of form universally applicable; and exhibiting its

subject, political liberty, as evidently a common right and inheritance of

every people or nation; for to talk of English liberty, and French or

Spanish or Italian liberty, as different in nature is contrary to

reason."[120] It is easy to understand why men like Fox and Grey,

accustomed to grapple with the affairs of men who were swayed by prejudice,

tradition, interest, by everything but reason, were contemptuous of

political theories of this sort. No one who has been engaged in active

politics can fail to understand that men are infinitely variable, and that

what suits one race will not suit another. There was really only one

problem to consider. Given a society with a known history, composed of

human beings of a known character, and distributed among known conditions,

what form of government was best suited to their case? Origin, character,

social and economic distribution, and past history, are all different in

different peoples, and political institutions will inevitably differ also.

The Radicals were far enough away from real life. But with all their

incapacity for politics, they performed the great service of preaching the

political importance of individuality.

More influential than they were Tom Paine and his followers. These had

fewer men of experience in their ranks, they had less respect for existing

institutions, and they were as bitterly contemptuous of pioneers like

Cartwright as the pioneers in their turn were contemptuous of the Whigs in

Parliament. {109} Cartwright clung to King, Lords, and Commons, the

Established Church, and administration by men of property and rank. Paine

was a Republican, a theist, and a social reformer. The one had influence

among the aristocracy, the gentry, the manufacturers, and the

forty-shilling freeholders. The other was popular with the artisans and

tradesmen. But in general habit of mind the two men were very similar. The

differences were differences of class. Both belonged to the same species.

They were equally destitute of the historic sense, and equally incapable of

understanding that institutions must grow and change with society, and

cannot be praised or condemned according as, at any particular moment, they

do or do not correspond with the needs of the people who work them. Both

pushed theory to logical conclusions, irrespective of the course of events

in the past or the practical difficulties of the present. Of the two, Paine

had more political capacity. He had more genuine understanding of the

character of his audience, and his influence was infinitely more widespread

than that of any of the older men. Burke's _French Revolution_ drew a

volley of books and pamphlets from his opponents. The _Vindiciae Gallicae_

of Sir James Mackintosh was the best of these. But Mackintosh, no less that

Dr. Price, Mrs. Macaulay, and Mary Wollstonecraft, was outwritten and

outsold by Paine. Of the _French Revolution_ 19,000 copies were sold in

twelve months. In the same period Paine sold more than 40,000 copies of the

First Part of the _Rights of Man_.[121]

This famous book is marked by many of the vices of extreme opinions. Its

reading of events in France, in some of which Paine had taken part, was far

more accurate than that of Burke's treatise. Paine avoided the mistake of

taking the Revolution to be a mere outbreak of capricious violence, and

gave due weight to the intellectual revolution which had preceded it, and

to the economic distress which aggravated it. But though he knew France

better than Burke, he had not Burke's grasp of the idea of growth, of the

necessity of development rather than of reconstruction in politics, and he

could not understand that an institution, which {110} was now useless or

detrimental, might, in an older system, have been necessary to the

existence of society. Such phrases as Burke's "chain and continuity of the

commonwealth" had no meaning for him. Everything was to be cut off and

begun afresh. "Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself

in all cases as the ages and generations which preceded it."[122] "When we

survey the wretched condition of man, and the monarchical and hereditary

systems of government, dragged from his home by one power, or driven by

another, and impoverished by taxes more than by enemies, it becomes evident

that those systems are bad, and that a general revolution in the principle

and construction of governments is necessary."[123] Paine is here not

unlike the surgeon in Mr. Shaw's play, for ever eager to plunge his knife

into the vitals of the patient, without knowing either the history of the

disease or the chances of its cure. How much wiser is Burke's "I cannot

conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption,

to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may

scribble whatever he pleases. A man full of warm, speculative benevolence

may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it, but a good

patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most

of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve, and an

ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman."

Paine's prophecies were as extravagant as his reading of history was

inaccurate. "I do not believe," he said, "that monarchy and aristocracy

will continue seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries in

Europe."[124] After one hundred and twenty years Portugal alone has

attempted to follow the example of France, and it was eighty years before

even France expelled its last despot.

The truth lay midway between the two extremes. Burke was right in theory

and wrong in facts. Paine was right in facts and wrong in theory. Paine was

deceived by the events of his own time. He had personally assisted at the

making of two new {111} constitutions, and he exaggerated the ease with

which others might be made like them. This violent plucking out of ancient

loyalties seemed normal, when in fact it was altogether abnormal. In

America, separated from the old world and its old habits, the process had

been comparatively easy. In France, as subsequent events proved, it was of

enormous difficulty. Men who habitually build their houses on the sites of

abated earthquakes are not in a day to be twisted out of their habit of

submitting to illogical things like kings and nobles and Churches. Nor is

it often servility or credulity which produces that submission. In the vast

majority of cases it is only that they accept that to which they have been

accustomed, and require some outrageous provocation to make them change.

This was incredible to Paine. What was unreasonable was fraudulent, and

what was fraudulent to-day had always been fraudulent. "It is impossible

that such Governments as have hitherto existed in the world would have

commenced by any other means than a total violation of every principle,

sacred and moral. The obscurity in which the origin of all the present

Governments is buried implies the iniquity and disgrace with which they

began."[125] The obscurity seems a little less dense to us, and the King

and the Church appear as necessary in their proper order to the

consolidation of society and its advance out of barbarism. To Paine the

early king was only the head of a band of robbers, and the early Church was

contrived only to maintain him in power by investing him with superstitious

terrors. He assailed monarchy and aristocracy with a variety of scornful

epithets: "Nobility means No-ability." "Titles are but nicknames." "France

has outgrown the baby-cloaths of Count and Duke, and has breeched itself in

manhood." "The difference between a republican and a courtier with a

respect to monarchy is that the one opposes monarchy, believing it to be

something, and the other laughs at it, knowing it to be nothing." "As to

who is king in England or elsewhere, or whether there is any king at all,

or whether the people choose a Cherokee chief, or a Hessian hussar, for a

king, it is not a matter {112} that I trouble myself about." "The House of

Brunswick, one of the petty tribes of Germany." "The splendour of a throne

... is made up of a band of parasites living in luxurious indolence out of

the public taxes." "Monarchy is the master-fraud, which shelters all

others." A torrent of these gibes and sneers at things which to the

ordinary man and woman of comfortable surroundings were hardly less than

sacred, roused against Paine all that horror and aversion which in our own

day has been inspired by Mr. Lloyd George.

But the most disturbing part of Paine's book was not its epithets, but its

doctrine. Before him Radicals had argued more or less directly from the

assumption of natural rights that every man is invested at his birth with

rights against his neighbours, and that political constitutions must be

based upon these rights. The theory of natural rights came from Rousseau,

and the French Revolution claimed to be a practical consequence of it.

Paine brought it over from France in its crude simplicity, and preached it

more forcibly and more effectively than it had ever been preached before.

It was based on a false historical assumption. Every account of the

creation agreed that men are all born equal, of the same degree, and

endowed with equal natural rights. These, natural rights were the

foundation of all his civil rights. "Natural rights are those which

appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the

intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of

acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not

injurious to the natural rights of others. Civil rights are those which

appertain to man in right of his being a member of society. Every civil

right has for its foundation some natural right fore-existing in the

individual, but to the enjoyment of which his individual power is not, in

all cases, sufficiently competent. Of this kind are all those which relate

to security and protection." The basis of liberty is contained in the first

three articles of the Declaration of Rights of the French National

Assembly, the whole of which Paine quotes in full and declares to be "of

more value to the world than all the laws and statutes that have yet {113}

been promulgated." The first of these articles, if true, destroys every one

of the distinctions of class and creed which were dear to

eighteenth-century England. "Men are born, and always continue, free and

equal in respect of their rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can be

founded only on public utility." It followed from this premise that no one

class had any right to impose laws upon the rest of the community without

their consent. The nation must be the source of sovereignty, and no

individual or body of men could be entitled to any authority which was not

expressly derived from it. Monarchy, aristocracy, the Established Church,

the territorial system, and primogeniture, everything which gave artificial

advantages to one man over his neighbour, must be swept away. Given the

first assumption that all men are born equal, the rest follows as a matter

of course.

It is as easy to refute the doctrine as to state it. It is not historically

true that men are or ever have been born equal. It is not logically true

that a man is born with any rights or can ever acquire any except with the

consent of his associates. The historical basis must appear absurd to any

one who is acquainted with the theory of evolution and the early history of

family and tribal organization. The logical basis must appear equally

absurd to any one who is acquainted with the nature of a right. It is

impossible to conceive of such a thing as an abstract right apart from

definite human relationships. A right cannot exist in the air. It cannot

even attach to an isolated individual. A right is always a right against

some other, and postulates the association of its possessor with at least

one other human being. How can we with any propriety speak of the rights of

Robinson Crusoe before the arrival of Friday? The powers of Crusoe were at

first limited solely by physical considerations. When he took Friday under

his protection he acquired certain rights as against Friday, and at the

same time Friday acquired certain rights as against him. But this is only

to say that the natural power of each to do as he pleased, hitherto limited

only by natural forces, was thereafter limited also by certain rules of

conduct, recognized by both for observance so long as their {114} mutual

relations continued. The extent of those limits could only be defined by

their agreement. These are all the rights which any man can ever possess,

even in the most complex society. A right is nothing more or less than a

defined natural power. It may vary in the degree of its definition. It may

be enforced by all the authority of the whole community, and be called a

legal right. It may be enforced only by the pressure of the opinion of the

community or of a class, and be called a moral right. In neither case is it

a thing of spontaneous generation. It arises always out of the relations of

human beings with each other, and may always be tempered and qualified by

the nature of their relations.

Paine's mistake lay simply in using the word "natural" instead of the word

"moral." To assert that a man has a natural right to control his own

government is to assert what is demonstrably false. To assert that a man

has a moral right to control his own government is to assert simply that in

the writer's opinion a man ought to be allowed to control his own

government, and the dispute is simply about a particular problem of ethics.

Substitute the one word for the other in the passage above quoted, and what

is now a false statement of fact becomes a reasonable, if not an

unanswerable, argument. The quarrel between Paine and Burke, so far as it

was a practical quarrel and not merely a quarrel about terms, was a quarrel

about the precise manner in which certain common ethical principles should

be enforced. Government is merely the organization of human beings for

certain common purposes, and the structure is to be adapted solely to the

execution of those purposes. If a particular scheme means the abuse of one

section of the community by another, one of the ends of government, the

protection of all the human beings concerned, is not achieved, and the

scheme, if possible, should be altered. Once we come to the conclusion,

upon ethical principles, that every human being ought to have an equal

chance with every other of developing himself, it follows, not as a logical

deduction, but simply as a matter of practical convenience, that one class

ought not to be entrusted with the control of {115} others. A constitution

in itself has no merit. Its only value is as a piece of working machinery,

and it is to be tested not by the degree of its conformity to abstract

principles, but by its practical effects.

Burke himself, in fact, destroyed his whole argument against "natural

rights," not as a proposition of logic, but as a basis of political action.

He admitted that men had certain "real" rights: "to justice," "to the

fruits of their industry and to the means of making their industry

fruitful," "to the acquisitions of their parents, to the nourishment and

improvement of their offspring, to instruction in life, and to consolation

in death." But what is the difference between these "real" rights of Burke

and the "natural" rights of Paine? How are these rights created and

maintained, but by public opinion and current ideas of morality? And if

these, why not others? "It is a thing," said Burke, "to be settled by

convention." Tom Paine meant nothing else. But when Burke said, "As to the

share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to

have in the management of the State, that I must deny to be amongst the

direct, original rights of man in civil society," Paine might have asked in

what respect rights to justice and to the fruits of industry differed from

rights to control government. If the rules of justice are defined by

Government so that it becomes difficult, tedious, and expensive, how is the

poor man to exercise his right to justice? If Government taxes the raw

material of his industry, is not his right to the fruits of it being

impaired? In his _Present Discontents_ Burke had described clearly enough

the consequences of absolute power, the corruption of the governor and the

oppression of the governed. If government remains in the hands of a class,

it will inevitably be conducted in the interests of that class, and the

rules of justice and the regulation of industry will be contrived according

to its interests and not according to those of the general community. In

other words, the rights of the rest of society, however real, direct, and

original, are always liable to be diminished or destroyed by the caprice of

their governors. {116} Burke's admissions lead as inevitably to universal

suffrage as the false assumptions of Paine.

It must not be assumed that Paine was a mere theorizer. So far as the

interests of the mass of the people were concerned, he was the most

practical of reformers. Tories and reactionary Whigs appealed to "the

glorious Revolution of 1688."[126] Cartwright and the Radicals deduced

liberty from abstract hypotheses without considering to what practical uses

liberty was to be put. Paine came boldly forward with definite proposals

for social reforms, and it was this practical application of his principles

which made him to be detested where Cartwright was only despised. It was

bad enough to assail aristocracy. Words could hardly express the feelings

with which comfortable people listened to his attacks upon property. These

would seem moderate to a generation which has grown accustomed to

Socialism, as a creed if not as an institution, and his proposals were

little more drastic than those of the present Liberal Government. He

advocated graduated death duties, old-age pensions, maternity grants, the

right to work, and international agreement for the limitation of

armaments.[127] It is true that the language of his proposals was anything

but reckless. He was far from being an advocate of violent methods. "It is

always better to obey a bad law, making use at the same time of every

argument to show its errors and procure its repeal, than forcibly to

violate it; because the precedent of breaking a bad law might weaken the

force, and lead to a discretionary violation of those which are good."[128]

"The right of property being secured and inviolable, no one ought to be

deprived of it, except in cases of evident public necessity, legally

ascertained, and on condition of a previous just indemnity."[129] This is

the language of temperance. But the owners of property have little capacity

for reflection when their interests are attacked. They are seldom concerned

to examine the justice {117} of any infringement of their privileges, and

they find it difficult to distinguish between taxation and spoliation,

between appeals to natural justice and the negation of law. Paine's

adversaries did not believe in natural rights. But they believed in what

were far worse. They believed in natural wrongs. It was monstrous to

suggest that all men were entitled to equal opportunities. But it was quite

reasonable that the vast majority should be kept in a situation where they

could not be confident even of a bare subsistence. The good cause, if not

the logical reasoning, was Paine's. The right to property is, like all his

"natural" rights, or the "real" rights of Burke, a moral right, and its

extent is to be determined upon the same principles as every other. Violent

disturbances of it are bad, as violent disturbances of every right are bad,

not because they are disturbances, but because they are violent. There is

nothing more essentially vicious in a criticism of property in land or

machinery than in a criticism of property in a negro. As Burke said, "It is

a thing to be settled by convention."

Paine's suggestions for social reform were of little immediate importance,

and it was a hundred years before the first of them, a graduated death

duty, was passed into law. His value in his own day lay, not in his

practical proposals, but in his insistence upon the equal value of

individuals in the State. What the Whigs had practised partially and

obscurely Paine preached universally and with precision. His _Rights of

Man_ was the principal textbook of the new school of politicians, who, by

basing their politics upon individuality instead of class, eventually

transformed the English theory of government. The Reformers found

government the profession of a few families of landed proprietors, at the

best prevented from active abuse by an imperfect system of representation

of classes. They made it a thing of trust and responsibility, for which

every man must prove his competence by his readiness to act directly for

the benefit of those whom he governed. They found it an incident in the

lives of men of leisure. They made it an expression of the life of men of

all ranks alike. Omitting the false historical {118} assumption, there is

nothing substantially untrue in Paine's contrast of the old spirit with the

new. "Government on the old system was an assumption of power, for the

aggrandizement of itself; on the new, a delegation of power for the common

benefit of society."[130]

These new principles did not appear on the surface of politics until forty

years later, and not a single institution was in the interval altered in

the direction of Liberalism. The Whig Opposition broke into pieces, and the

majority joined the Tories.[131] The Church of England found itself for

once allied with the Wesleyans, whose Christianity was as much repelled by

Paine's _Age of Reason_ as its own aristocratic temper was repelled by his

_Rights of Man_. The governing class was driven into a paroxysm of fear and

rage by Paine's triple assault on aristocracy, property, and orthodox

religion, and every Conservative instinct was roused in its defence. Every

Reformer, moderate and extreme, was involved together in one denunciation.

Their opinions admittedly came from France, and every atrocity which had

taken place in France was due to those opinions. Voltaire was an atheist.

Rousseau was a profligate. The French aristocracy had been massacred. The

French Church had been stripped of its possessions. The French landed

proprietors had been spoiled. All this had been done in the name of the

rights of man. The English Reformers believed in the rights of man. These

had been proved by events in France to be incompatible with law, order,

religion, and morality. All who valued these must unite in their defence

against the deadly opinions. Belief in the rights of man marked an

Englishman like a contagious disease. Atheists, Theists, and Christians,

Trinitarians and Unitarians, Churchmen and Dissenters, Reformers, Radicals,

and Republicans, landowners, manufacturers, and artisans, people who

believed in vested interests and people who did not, all were Jacobins, and

all were swept away in one turbid flood of unreasoning invective.

{119}

Every proposal for change was opposed by the same arguments. Every

institution, good, bad, or indifferent, became a foothold for shuddering

Conservatism. Alteration became synonymous with evil; there was no good

save in establishment. Even the Slave Trade was strengthened against pious

Tory gentlemen like Wilberforce by the same arguments which defended the

representative system against the profane Republican artisans of

Lancashire. Thus Lord Abingdon claimed to have "incontrovertibly proved

that the proposition for the abolition of the Slave Trade is a French

proposition, that it is grounded in and founded upon French principles,

that it means neither more nor less than liberty and equality, that it has

Tom Paine's _Rights of Man_ for its chief and best support ... that it has

had in the colonies of France all the direful effects necessarily flowing

from such principles, namely, those of insubordination, anarchy, confusion,

murder, havock, devastation, and ruin."[132] Nearly thirty years after the

publication of Paine's book, Lord Wellesley, denouncing universal suffrage,

annual elections, and voting by ballot, said that, if carried into

execution, they "would be the destruction of all regular government, the

destruction of all religion, and the destruction of all private

property."[133] But the most ludicrous expression of this fear of change

occurs in one of Windham's speeches against the Bill to suppress

bull-baiting. The House of Commons solemnly listened to a solemn assurance

that the Bill was promoted by Methodists and Jacobins, and that it was

directed to the destruction of the old English character by the abolition

of all rural sports. "Out of the whole number of the disaffected, he

questioned if a single bull-baiter could be found, or if a single sportsman

had distinguished himself in the Corresponding Society ... the antiquity of

the thing was deserving of respect, for antiquity was the best preservation

of the Church and State."[134]

The controversy was not allowed to remain a mere matter {120} of words.

Both sides set themselves to organize machinery for the dissemination of

their opinions. The Radicals used the Society for Constitutional

Information. The extremists established the Corresponding Society, whose

branches, composed chiefly of the middle and working classes, corresponded

with similar societies in France, held meetings and published their

resolutions in the newspapers, and industriously circulated copies of the

_Rights of Man_. So vigorous were their operations that a Royal

Proclamation was issued in May, 1792, denouncing these "wicked and

seditious writings" and correspondence with "persons in foreign parts," and

exhorting all subjects of the Crown to discourage them.[135] In November

the Tories formed an Association for Preserving Liberty and Property

against Republicans and Levellers, which declared that "It appears from

history and observation, that the inequality of rank and fortune in this

happy country is more the result of every man's own exertions than of any

controlling institution of the State. Men become great who have greatly

distinguished themselves by the application of talents natural or acquired;

and men become rich who have persevered with industry in the application to

trade and commerce, to manufactures, and other useful employments."[136]

Such language was hardy enough in a society where public dignities were

monopolized by a few families, whose inherited wealth was augmented as

often by jobbery as by industry. The Association seems to have acted as a

private detective agency and sent reports and secret information to the

Government. But the honours of agitation rested, as usual, with the

reforming party. If their success was small, it was due less to the private

efforts of their opponents than to the superior resources of the Government

itself.

{121}

It is difficult to discover how widely the new ideas had spread by the end

of the century. The war with France, which lasted almost continuously from

1793 to 1815, probably drew off much of the national enthusiasm. A foreign

war is always favourable to the enemies of domestic liberty, and however

much their distresses may drive common men to hate their governors, they

generally hate them less than the national enemy. Industrious as they were,

the agitators were too closely identified with France to be popular, and it

was not till the end of the war that the middle and working classes as a

whole began to lend them a favourable ear. In the meantime, they were

regarded by the Government as infinitely more powerful than they really

were, and for thirty years they worked in constant danger of imprisonment

or transportation. They had been depressed, in common with Whigs like Fox

and Grey, by the ferocity of the French mobs. But the invasion of France by

the Duke of Brunswick and the complete victory of the new national

Government, restored their confidence at the same time as it reawakened the

terrors of the Tories. The most trifling expressions of sympathy with the

French people or their principles exposed them to spies and informers and

zealous loyalists.[137] On the 8th May James Ridgway and H. D. Symonds were

sentenced to four years' imprisonment for publishing Paine's works. On the

27th, for saying in a coffee-house, "I am for equality; I see no reason why

one man should be greater than another; I would have no king, and the

constitution of this country is a bad one," Mr. Frost was struck oft the

roll of attorneys and sentenced to an hour in the pillory and six months in

Newgate. On the 1st October Mr. Pigott and Dr. Hudson were tried for

drinking "The French Republic" in a coffee-house. At Leicester a man called

Vaughan distributed a handbill criticizing the war because it inflicted

hardship on the poor. He was sent to prison for three months. Benjamin

{122} Bull distributed the _Rights of Man_ at Bath, and was imprisoned for

a year.[138] Paine himself was tried for seditious libel in 1792, and in

his absence was outlawed. But the most ferocious punishments were inflicted

in Scotland. In England, short of high treason, there was no legal offence

possible except sedition or seditious libel, for which the punishment was a

term of imprisonment. In Scotland the offenders might be transported. In

September, 1793, the Rev. Thomas Fysche Palmer, Unitarian minister at

Dundee, for publishing an address couched in very temperate language, from

which it was proved that he had struck out some more extravagant

expressions, was sentenced to seven years' transportation. The Whigs in

Parliament protested against this monstrous sentence. But the House, by a

large majority, refused even to compel the Home Secretary to detain the

convict ship pending its revision.[139] In the same year Thomas Muir, a

gentleman of acknowledged respectability, was sentenced to fourteen years'

transportation for an offence of as trivial a kind as that of Mr.

Palmer.[140] Other Reformers, chiefly members of Corresponding Societies,

met at Edinburgh in December, 1792, in what they rashly called a "National

Convention." This consisted of delegates from Societies all over the

kingdom. It passed resolutions, appointed committees, and acted as a

permanent body of political delegates is accustomed to act, in order to

further the cause of Parliamentary Reform. There was nothing violent in the

objects, the proceedings, or the language of the Convention, which passed a

resolution in favour of government by King, Lords, and Commons without a

single dissentient voice.[141] But the French Revolution had begun by the

meeting of a "Convention," and the delegates, in addition to selecting that

unfortunate title, presented an address to the French National Convention,

and habitually addressed each other, in imitation of the French, as

"citizens." This was {123} enough for the Government. A representative

body, with a French title, in communication with the French Government, and

using French forms of speech, must meditate that sort of revolution which

had been contrived by the French people. It fell upon the delegates with

all the ferocity of despotism in a panic. William Skirving, Maurice

Margarot, and Joseph Gerald were transported for fourteen years, and

Alexander Callender was outlawed. English juries were less frantic than

Scottish. The members of the London Corresponding Society had done similar

acts in England. But in 1794, when several of them, including Horne Tooke,

were tried for high treason, all were acquitted.

The precise details of all these proceedings, and the widespread suffering

which they caused, are not important for this book. It is enough to state

here that there was much expression of discontent, and that the Government

dealt with it in the worst possible way. The wise course was to detach the

respectable agitators from the agitators who were not respectable by

substantial improvements in the franchise and the distribution of seats.

But the Government were incapable of drawing distinctions, and, by

confounding all sorts of discontent in their repression, alienated and

embittered even those whom they had it in their power to conciliate.

Evidence of any general conspiracy to alter the existing order by violent

means there is none. Nothing was ever published on behalf of the Government

itself which proved anything but constitutional and orderly expressions of

dissatisfaction, with occasional outbreaks of reckless language and

exceedingly rare instances of such acts as the purchase or manufacture of

weapons.[142] There were no collections of arms, no riots, except such as

were purely industrial, and no demonstrations of force. Not a single life

was ever taken or attempted by the Reformers, and the only dangerous

political disturbance of the {124} period was the outbreak of the Tory mob,

who looted and burnt the houses of Dissenters and Radicals at Birmingham.

But the governing class was afraid, and in its fear it struck out blindly

at everything which it disliked.

The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended in 1791, and the executive received

power to arrest and detain suspects without trial. At a later date,

extraordinary powers were created. A meeting held near London in October,

1795, was followed by an attempt to assassinate the King. The meeting was

orderly, and there was not a shadow of proof that there was any connection

between the two events. But the Government took advantage of the prevailing

indignation to create new crimes, and to increase the punishments for

existing crimes. The Treason Act made it an offence, punishable on a second

conviction with seven years' transportation, to "incite or stir up the

people to hatred or dislike of His Majesty's person or the established

Government and constitution of the realm," and extended the definition of

high treason. The Sedition Act prohibited the holding of meetings without

the presence of a magistrate, made it an offence punishable with death for

twelve persons to remain together after a magistrate had called upon them

to disperse, and declared that any house, where a substantial number of

persons beyond that of the resident family assembled for a common purpose,

should be treated as a disorderly house, unless specially licensed. In

1799, after the mutiny in the fleet at the Nore and the great Irish

Rebellion, in both of which the Society of United Irishmen had been

involved, new statutes made it a criminal offence, punishable by fine and

imprisonment, to belong to the Corresponding Society, or the Societies of

United Irishmen and United Englishmen, or to take oaths of secrecy. No

printer was to be allowed to conduct his business without obtaining a

certificate from a clerk of the peace. No attempt was made to discriminate

between the Corresponding Societies, whose violence was confined to their

language, and the other two societies, which had undoubtedly been concerned

in the mutiny and the Rebellion. Individual atrocities were ascribed to

French principles. The Reform Societies preached French principles. {125}

Therefore they were as guilty as the criminals themselves. In effect, all

organized political agitation was suppressed.

All these measures were steadily opposed by the small body of Parliamentary

Whigs who had not lost their belief in free government. Fox, Grey, and

Whitbread in the Commons, and Bedford, Lansdowne,[143] Moira, and

Lauderdale in the Lords, denounced every restriction upon the right of free

discussion, and at huge meetings at Copenhagen House and in Palace Yard

they protested against the Treason and Sedition Bills. They were not in

sympathy with the extremists, who often attacked them as bitterly as the

Tories themselves. There is nothing so obnoxious to violent opinions as

moderation. It seems to add hypocrisy to wickedness. But to those who can

see historical events in proportion the good service of this handful of

statesmen is beyond question. They maintained the purely Liberal view that

toleration is not to be confined to opinions of which we ourselves approve.

"All political libels," said Fox, "he would leave to themselves;

discussions on government, so far as they did not interfere with private

character, he would permit to pass entirely unrestrained."[144] "The best

security of a Government," said Tierney, "is in the free complaints of a

people."[145] "The safety of the State," said Grey, "could only be found in

the protection of the liberties of the people.... There never was an

extensive discontent without great misgovernment. The people ought to be

taught to look to Parliament with a confident expectation that their

complaints would be heard, and protection afforded to them. When no

attention was paid to the calls of the people for relief, when their

petitions were rejected, and their sufferings aggravated, was it wonderful

that at last public discontents should assume a formidable aspect?"[146]

Protests sometimes became threats. Fox declared in 1795 that if the Treason

and Sedition Bills were carried into law, the propriety of resistance to

government would no longer be a matter of morality but of prudence only,

and in this he was supported by Sheridan and Grey.

{126}

These Whigs at least contrived to see the popular point of view, and would

have suffered opinions which they would do nothing to promote. The Tories

saw no point of view but their own. They hated free discussion, because

they saw that it meant the end of the institutions which they cherished.

Discussion was to them only a stage on the way to rapine and murder. It

made, therefore, no difference whether discussion were honest and orderly

or not. They were resolute to maintain existing establishments, and the

most constitutional of critics was as much a public enemy as the most

ferocious of rebels. They drew no distinction between agitation and

revolution. They inquired into discontents, but only into their extent and

not into their causes. They applied violent remedies, not to the real

disease, but to its symptoms. The patient was noisy, and they beat him for

being noisy, when they ought to have cured the fever which produced his

delirium. The vice of their system lay not so much in their suppression of

disorder as in their neglect of reform. Order must be maintained by

government, even when the breach of it is the fault of government. But it

must be accompanied by redress of grievances. It is the business of a

statesman to manage his people, not to compel them, and however necessary

it may sometimes be for him to enforce the law, it remains the weakest, and

should always be the last of his instruments. It is useless for him to

maintain order unless it is accompanied by goodwill. Some men may be

constitutionally so disaffected that nothing can appease them. But the

majority can always be satisfied by a generous treatment of their

grievances. Even after the crisis of the Revolution Pitt might have made

the state of England more happy than it was. But what he did not do was not

so important as what he had not done. He believed in Parliamentary Reform,

in Catholic Emancipation, in the relief of Dissenters, in Free Trade. He

was in power from 1783 to the outbreak of the Revolution, and might have

conciliated the middle class and the Irish, diminished public corruption,

stimulated industry, and reduced the cost of living. This would not have

prevented all discontent. But it would have confined it to its essential

and irreducible minimum. {127} Whether this inaction was due to his own

lethargy or the incurable selfishness and stupidity of his associates and

supporters, it was undoubtedly responsible for a large part of his

subsequent difficulties. He left heaps of combustible material untouched,

and it was his own fault that it caught fire. In this unhappy state,

lurching between bitter discontent and savage repression, English liberty

struggled through the great war.

The affairs of Ireland furnished another battle-ground for contending

principles during this period. The complete subjugation of that country was

ended in 1782, when demonstrations of armed force wrested legislative

independence from an England surrounded by foreign enemies. The Irish

Parliament was left free to make such laws as it pleased for Ireland, and

the deliberate destruction of Irish industries in the interest of English

ceased for ever. But this independence, though won by the united efforts of

all creeds and classes, was the independence of a Protestant oligarchy. The

great bulk of the Irish people escaped an external only to submit to an

internal tyrant. The Irish Parliament, though patriotic in matters of

commerce, was hardly any more indulgent than the English in its religious

policy. Catholics were excluded from the Houses at Dublin as vigorously as

from those at Westminster, and few important mitigations of their lot were

obtained from their own countrymen. In 1792 Catholics were admitted to the

Bar, mixed marriages were allowed, and it was made legal for a Catholic to

educate his children abroad. In 1793 all public offices were thrown open to

them, except seats in Parliament and the highest places in the Army, the

Judicature, and the Civil Service. These changes removed the worst

disabilities of the upper and middle classes, who had now fewer

disabilities than their fellows in England and Scotland, and there was thus

exhibited a considerable reduction of Protestant insolence. The supremacy

of Pitt in England aroused great hopes that the last stones of the edifice

would soon be removed. Catholic emancipation would not have cured all the

ills of Ireland, any more than Parliamentary Reform would have cured all

the ills of England. An excessive population, {128} crowded into

agriculture by the destruction of manufactures, demoralized by landowners

who were too often thriftless or absentees, and deprived of education by

the laws which prohibited teaching by Catholic priests or laymen, was in a

condition which mere political reforms could do little to improve. What

Catholic disabilities did was to poison economic discontent by the memories

of racial and religious persecution. The conduct of the English Government

of the day was dangerously uncertain. The hopes of the Catholics were

roused in 1794 by the appointment of Lord Fitzwilliam as Lord-Lieutenant.

Fitzwilliam was notoriously in favour of the Catholic claims, even though

he was not authorized to make any promises on behalf of the Government. He

was too open in his professions of sympathy, and when Protestant bigotry

procured his recall, the apparent treachery only aggravated the bitterness

of old subjection. Catholic resentment and Protestant arrogance soon

brought matters to a crisis. Neither party gained credit from the rising of

1798. The excesses of the magistrates and the troops before, during, and

after the fighting were often of mediaeval atrocity, and the retaliation of

the rebels cannot be justified, though it is amply explained by the

character of the provocation. This fearful outbreak in the middle of the

French War satisfied the English Government that only by a Union could

Ireland be kept in peace. The good effects of the recent concessions had

vanished in this whirlwind of savagery, and Protestant and Catholic were

once more in the temper of the Middle Ages. Mutual goodwill could only be

restored by a common tutelage.

There was nothing bad in itself in the plan for a legislative Union. Had it

been carried through with a just regard for Irish opinion, and had it been

followed by a strict attention to the grievances of the common people, the

Union might have been one of the brilliant successes of the English race.

In fact it was itself effected by shameful means, and it was followed by

misgovernment as fatally unsympathetic as that which had preceded it.

English rule in Ireland was less ferocious in the {129} nineteenth century

than in the eighteenth. But it was no less conspicuous a failure. No

constitutional machinery can be better than the men who work it, and

Englishmen after the Union showed themselves no less unimaginative and

egoistic than their predecessors. The objects of the Union were stated by

Pitt, with perfect good faith, to be the substitution of government by an

impartial authority for government by a faction which was steeped in the

memories of old oppression. "An impartial Legislature standing aloof from

local party connection, sufficiently removed from the influence of

contending factions to be advocate or champion of neither, being so placed

as to have no superstitious reverence for the names and prejudices of

ancient families, who have so long enjoyed the exclusive monopolies of

certain public patronages and property ... this is the thing that is wanted

for Ireland."[147] That was what was wanted for Ireland. What it obtained

was a Legislature as partial, as inextricably involved in local party

connection, and as closely wrapped about with superstitious reverence for

ancient families and their patronages and property as could have been

contrived. For half a century at least the government of Ireland remained

what it has always been in the hands of England, government by armed force,

in the interests of the landlords against the tenants, of the Protestants

against the Catholics. A system which Pitt devised as a protection against

the old abuses was converted into an effective engine for their

maintenance. Pitt was himself partly to blame for this disastrous failure.

He probably never saw the need for economic reorganization. But he saw

clearly enough the need for the ending of religious strife, which poisoned

the whole temper of the people and wasted on the jealousies of sects and

the hatred of government energy which would otherwise be free to run in

healthy and productive channels. His weakness in not pushing on with Lord

Fitzwilliam made the rebellion of 1798 inevitable. Similar weakness after

the Union made the constitutional change useless. It was undoubtedly part

of his original plan to emancipate the Catholics. But the King, the {130}

Church, and Protestant Ireland were too strong for him. Pitt resigned. The

Whigs came into office, with a Ministry which was united at least on the

Catholic question. The King again had his way, and rather than hold office

without fulfilling their Catholic pledges, they resigned in their

turn.[148] Pitt's course was clear. He should have refused to come back

without permission to do what he thought right. But he preferred the

convenience of the King, and accepted office on condition that the Catholic

question was left open. This was as effective as a definite refusal.

Canning persuaded the House of Commons in 1812, but Eldon in the Lords

defeated his colleague's Bill, and until Eldon could be expelled there was

no hope for Ireland. The friendly Tories would never unite with the Whigs

to defeat the hostile Tories. Nothing was done to solve the problem, and

Ireland, for a generation after the Union, was governed by coercion.

Throughout this wretched dispute the Whigs maintained the ancient doctrines

of their party with regard to religious disabilities. But the problem

aroused controversy about a second conception of more recent growth, the

conception of nationality. Burke had tried to treat Ireland as an equal

nation for commercial purposes. The Whigs of 1801 extended the idea to its

extreme limits. Had the Irish Parliament the right to surrender its powers

to a Parliament of the United Kingdom without receiving the approval of its

own electors? Unquestionably it had the legal right. Had it also the moral

right? The Whigs held that it had not. "What right," asked Sheridan, "has

the Irish Parliament to resolve that, instead of going back to their

constituents, they shall form part of a foreign legislature?"[149] "The

Union," said Fox, "is not an alteration, but a destruction and annihilation

of the Irish Constitution. Union therefore, like revolution, cannot be

justifiable but by the unequivocal {131} consent of the people."[150] Pitt

opposed this doctrine on the usual Tory ground. It led, he said,

immediately "to the system of universal right of suffrage in the people, to

the doctrine that each man should have a share in the government of the

country by having a choice for his representative; and then goes back to

the whole system of Jacobinism."[151]

The Union was therefore carried through the instrumentality of a

legislature bribed to betray its constituents. This transaction was much

worse than it appeared. The English Government which neglected the wishes

of the Irish people in this matter would neglect them in all others. The

Union was a supreme act of despotism, the fitting prelude to the systematic

disregard of Irish opinion which followed it. "There must," wrote Fox a few

years later, "be a fundamental change in the system of governing Ireland,

to give even a chance of future quiet there.... That there should be a part

of the United Kingdom to which our laws, nominally at least, extend, and

which is nevertheless in such a state as to call for martial law, etc., so

repeatedly, is of itself ground for reconsidering, at least, the system by

which it is governed."[152] The Tories could not understand, even in the

case of England, that it is the business of a governor to manage and not to

coerce the governed, and race and religion combined to obscure still

further their view of Ireland. The system remained what it had been and

was, and the consequences of this fatal negligence are with us to this day.

The foreign policy of the Government gave not a few opportunities for

expressions of Liberalism. The rights of nationalities were in issue in the

beginning of the French War, in the treatment of Ireland, in the descent

upon Copenhagen, and in the negotiations which followed the downfall {132}

of Napoleon. In all these cases the Whig Opposition stated the pure Liberal

doctrine. In that of the war with France, one section of them carried the

doctrine to an absurd extent. In origin, the war was unquestionably a war

of interference, an attempt to force upon the French people an obnoxious

government, and to compel them to abandon those new and revolutionary

principles which they had adopted for themselves. Pitt himself had

apparently no such object, and was hurried into the war partly by the

French threats of assisting other peoples to revolt, and chiefly by the

irresistible pressure of the English governing class. It is impossible to

read contemporary literature, the debates in Parliament, the newspapers,

the pamphlets of Burke and other acknowledged leaders of opinion, the

resolutions of corporations and public meetings, and the private

correspondence, without coming to the conclusion that the great bulk of

influential political society was inspired by a fanatical hatred of the new

opinions. Whatever pretexts may have been urged in public, and may have

been in fact held by comparatively sober people like Pitt, the impelling

force behind the English armies was dread of French principles. The sword

of the invader could not have been feared more than the fatal contagion of

his ideas. The Germans and Austrians, who invaded France in 1792 to restore

the monarchy, were less concerned to hide their motives than the English

Government. But there was little difference in substance between them. The

Continental Sovereigns moved of their own motion. The English Ministers

were carried on by their supporters.

Against a war of this kind the Whigs spoke forcibly and with justice.

Lansdowne described it as "a war, the alleged object of which was to repel

unprovoked aggressions, but the real one to prescribe laws to an

independent country."[153] It was "a metaphysical war; it was declared

against France on account of her internal circumstances."[154] Fox said it

was no better than the methods of the Inquisition. We were killing people

because they thought differently from ourselves. "How could we blame all

{133} those abominable acts of bloodshed and torture, which had been

committed from time to time under the specious name of religion, when we

ourselves had the presumption to wage a similar war?"[155] It was "the most

gross violation of everything sacred which could exist between nation and

nation, as striking at the root of the right which each must ever possess

of internal legislation."[156] "Whatever our detestation of the guilt of

foreign nations may be, we are not called to take upon ourselves the task

of avengers; we are bound only to act as guardians of the welfare of those

with whose concerns we are immediately entrusted."[157]

This language was wise, and its wisdom was proved by events. The Bourbons

were not restored. The temper of the French people was incredibly

stimulated. The new system which might have repelled by its violence and

rapacity became the centre of the national enthusiasm. It inflicted a

crushing defeat upon its foreign invaders and then proceeded to avenge this

additional injury by the massacre of those whom the invasion was intended

to assist. Whether Napoleon would have appeared in French history or not

without this strengthening of the Revolutionary system, it is impossible to

say. Certainly the foreign interference with the first Government

consolidated the nation, and prepared for Napoleon's use the most

formidable weapon that he could have obtained for the braying of Europe.

There is a tragic instance of that insight which is not foresight in the

correspondence of Castlereagh, and it shows how completely the English

Government misunderstood what they had done. "The only thing ... which

really dispirits me is, the unprecedented struggle of order against

anarchy, and the unfortunate facility with which France recruits her army

as fast as the sword exterminates it. A few days transforms their

ragamuffins into troops, which are not contemptible even when opposed to

the best soldiers in Europe.... It is the first time that _all_ the

population and _all_ the wealth of a great kingdom has been concentrated in

the field: what may be the result is beyond my perception."[158] {134} What

was going on was that anarchy was being reduced into order within the

boundaries of France, and no hatred of early extravagance or subsequent

tyranny need blind us to the courage, energy, and skill of those French

statesmen who, in the face of their enemies, built up the new system upon

the ruins of the old. The war made their task comparatively easy, and if it

diminished their strength, it made their material more workable. The

foreign invasion operated like a powerful electric current, and fused the

scattered particles of French nationalism into a solid bulk. The whole

fiery mass of France was being beaten and welded and forged into something

which Castlereagh could not understand: a nation, every member of which had

a personal interest in and a personal devotion to his nationality. Such a

thing had not been known before in France. But it was not long before even

Castlereagh was made to feel that in the councils of Europe the rights of

man might count for as much as government by orders.

The Whigs carried their maintenance of the equal rights of nationalities to

its inevitable conclusion that nations, no less than individuals, must be

bound by moral rules in their dealings with each other. Fox declared that

"the greatest resource a nation can possess, the sweet source of power, is

a strict attention to the principles of justice. I firmly believe that the

common proverb of honesty being the best policy is as applicable to nations

as to individuals ... and that cases which may sometimes be supposed

exceptions arise from our taking narrow views of the subject, and being

unable at once to comprehend the whole."[159] When he was almost at the

point of death he proceeded to suggest an international congress for

settling disputes. "He disapproved ... of any government pursuing under the

title of indemnities a system of partition of States, making some

republics, some monarchies, and annihilating the political existence of

others, without regard to moral rectitude or to the common feelings of

mankind, which considerations had more influence on the affairs of the

world than some politicians were aware. The partition {135} of Poland, the

seizure of Holland, the subjugation of Switzerland, and the division of

States, by the agreement of some, and by the fraud and rapacity of others,

had done more to destroy the confidence of mankind in each other than all

the other misconduct of the powers put together. In private society, when

men lost their confidence in one another, the compact was dissolved. The

same rule applied to States, for they were only aggregates of individuals.

He recommended to all the powers of Europe a system of justice and

moderation, as the only means of putting an end to the evils under which we

labour. He recommended a general congress, and that these principles should

be prevalent in its deliberations."[160]

These principles of international morality were applied most forcibly to

the destruction of the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in 1805. The Danes were

not hostile to us, and in common with all the other small peoples of Europe

they had every reason to fear Napoleon. The English Government knew that

Napoleon intended, if he could, to use the Danish fleet against them. The

English fleet accordingly was sent to Copenhagen to demand the surrender of

the Danish ships, and on receiving a very natural refusal, destroyed some

and carried off the rest. This proceeding is generally treated in English

schools as a matter for national gratification. To Liberals it appears a

very dangerous abuse of arbitrary power. Contemporary Europe was of the

same opinion, and the direct consequence of the affair was to range all the

Northern States on the side of Napoleon. We deprived him of the Danish

ships, and we threw into his hands the Danish army, and all the forces of

Sweden, Norway, and Russia as well. The chorus of denunciation in

Parliament was for once not confined to the Whigs. Even Windham said "he

would sooner have seen the Danish fleet in Buonaparte's hands than in ours,

under all the circumstances of the case."[161] Erskine lamented that the

whole course of civilization had been interrupted by this act. "If anything

could give delight in reading the history of civilized nations, it was the

progressive improvement that was to be traced {136} in law and civilization

amongst the nations of the world. This was the first instance in which the

principles of that amelioration had been trampled upon by us."[162] Lord

Moira spoke in the same strain. "As long as there was a power in Europe

which, from its regard to justice and to the rights of other States, could

form a sort of rallying-point to the oppressed, there was some probability

that the nations who were groaning under the yoke of a pitiless and

inexorable tyrant would have watched for some opportunity, and made some

exertion in common to throw it off. Such a power was this country, previous

to the late most unjustifiable and unfortunate attack upon Denmark; but by

this attack that hope had been completely extinguished."[163] Grey disposed

of the argument that reasons of State could justify immorality. "So far

from adding to the safety of the country, that point on which its safety

most particularly depended, he meant its honour, had not only been greatly

weakened, but had in fact received a mortal stab."[164] Prior to this

oppression of the Danes, England had had the chance of heading a European

movement for emancipation from Napoleon. Every small State might have

supported her as a protector, and every large one as an ally against a

dangerous rival. After the attack it became for the small States simply a

choice between two protectors, either of whom seemed to offer security

against the other if not against itself. The exasperation of the moment

swung the balance to the side of Napoleon, and England found herself face

to face with a hostile Continent.[165]

Fortunately for the country, the Government soon effected a great change in

their policy. For the first time they enlisted on their side what the

French had had from the beginning, the idea of nationality. The war had

entirely changed its character. Beginning as an interference with the

internal affairs of the French people, it had merged, since the rise of

Napoleon, into a struggle against a power which was as universal in its

appetite {137} as it was unscrupulous in its methods. Against this force,

which was so astonishing that it appeared to many pious Christians as

Anti-Christ himself, schemes and combinations had proved powerless. England

had escaped disaster because she was an island. The rest of Europe, with

the exception of Russia, had been beaten to the ground. These dynastic

contrivances of kings and emperors wanted the national spirit which

supported their adversary. To the common people in many parts of Europe

Napoleon appeared as a deliverer from their domestic oppressors, and the

little states of Germany and Italy, which he had carved out of the bigger,

were ready enough to see a champion of freedom in one who tyrannized only

over tyrants. The end began when he deposed a Spanish king and put his own

brother on the throne of the proudest and most exclusive nation of Europe.

The Peninsular War at last found England in her right place, at the head of

a league of nationalities. The Whig Opposition, always weak in numbers, was

now broken to pieces. Part of it repeated the old arguments, which applied

to everything but the present facts, hailed Napoleon as the champion of

liberty, and even expressed regret at his downfall at Waterloo. The wiser

men saw at once the significance of the Spanish expedition. Canning was now

the Tory Foreign Secretary. He found a hearty supporter in Grey among the

Whigs, and both felt an idea in what for Castlereagh was still no more than

a matter of business. "Of all the infamies ever incurred by a nation," said

Grey, "I think the greatest would have been to have appeared to abandon the

Spaniards."[166] "The allies have now been placed by France in the

situation in which France was originally placed by the allies. The success

of both has been occasioned by the spirit of resistance, produced by injury

and oppression; and my great hopes of the present confederacy are chiefly

derived from this, that it has arisen rather from the feeling of the

peoples than the policy of the Governments which it embraces."[167] The new

principle succeeded at last. The Spanish people, with English {138} help,

crippled Napoleon, the Russian people wore him out, and the German people

overwhelmed him. In 1815 the victory of Waterloo completed his destruction,

and the European peoples had at last leisure to look to themselves.

Comparing the England of 1815 with the England of 1790, the Liberals of the

time would find little cause for satisfaction. The economic problems of the

country were more acute, and the attempts to remedy them directly by

legislation and indirectly by encouraging combinations of workmen had been

defeated. A solitary Act of 1802, which did something to regulate the

conditions of parish children who had been apprenticed to private

employers, was the only measure of protection which had passed into law.

Parliamentary Reform and Religious Emancipation seemed more remote than

ever. The principle of nationality had been violated in Ireland, and if the

recognition of it in the later stages of the war gave some ground for

future confidence, hope was soon to be dispelled.

Unhappily for the common people, the spirit of nationality had been used

only as a means and not as an end by the various enemies of Napoleon. No

sooner was the common enemy destroyed than the victorious monarchs sat down

to cut up and distribute Europe among themselves. They had fought, not the

French, but the French Revolution, and when the main conflagration had been

extinguished, they had still to stamp out the burning embers which had been

blown about its borders. The young Republics which had been created were to

be restored to their old rulers, and all the ancient monarchies were to be

re-established, and where necessary strengthened by the acquisition of new

territory. There is something almost ludicrous to modern eyes in the

spectacle of these kings and emperors and their chancellors and envoys

assigning and allotting human beings, by millions together, without

inquiring into the wishes or interests of those with whom they dealt.

England participated in the game, and Toryism and Liberalism were again

brought into conflict. {139}

The Tory view, expressed by Castlereagh and Liverpool, was hardly less

callous than that of the Tzar Alexander himself. There is hardly a word in

any of their speeches or dispatches which shows any tenderness for men and

women as such. Human beings to them were only subjects. The old form of

Europe was to be restored, subject only to such changes as were necessary

to strengthen the principal enemies of Revolutionary France. To the balance

of power was to be sacrificed all local or national independence. "Upon the

subject of Austria and Prussia," wrote Lord Liverpool, "we must always

expect a degree of jealousy on the part of every French Government. It is

quite essential, however, to any balance of power that these two monarchies

should be made respectable. The principle recognized in the early part of

this year, that Austria should have a population in the whole of about

27,000,000 of souls, and Prussia one of about 11,000,000, appears to be

quite reasonable, and ought to give no umbrage to France."[168] Lord

Liverpool wrote of "souls," but if he had been writing of cattle his

language would have been no different. Castlereagh was no better. The

Congress of Vienna, at which this vivisection of a continent took place,

had in his eyes two objects, to check France and to check Russia. Prussia

and Austria must therefore be aggrandized. Italy might be the next free

people and become as dangerous as France, and the dream of her unity and

independence must be subordinated to the necessity of at once strengthening

Austria against Russia and of suppressing those small states upon which

Napoleon had conferred independence. Venice, an ancient Republic, was

handed over to Austria. Lest France should infect Italy, the Genoese

Republic must be annexed to the Kingdom of Piedmont. Lest Russia should

dominate Sweden, Norway must be taken from Denmark and given to Sweden. In

order that Holland might be strengthened against France in the North, she

must be allowed to annex Belgium. Prussia must be strengthened, but not too

much, and accordingly the Kingdom of Saxony was cut in half. The Poles had

been {140} divided between Russia, Austria, and Prussia in 1792. They now

expressed a desire for independence, but in vain.[169] Austria and Prussia

must be maintained at all costs. Castlereagh regretted that they should be

sacrificed and left them to their fate.

The Whigs protested warmly against this infamous disposition of the affairs

of unconsenting peoples. Particular acts, in particular the partition of

Poland, it was not in the power of England to prevent. But that was no

reason why she should give them her formal sanction. "England," said the

young Lord John Russell, "might have appeared as a member of a confederacy

to oppose France without sanctioning any of those acts of pillage by which

the deliverance of Europe has been disgraced. If she was not able to

prevent those acts, she need not have soiled her fair fame by appearing to

countenance them."[170] But other matters were entirely within the control

of England. She had entered into a treaty with Russia and Sweden, by which

she bound herself not only formally to transfer Norway from Denmark to

Sweden, but actually to compel the Norwegians by force of arms to submit to

their new masters. Even Canning, who, though a member of the Government,

held Liberal opinions in foreign affairs, declared that "if the question

now was, whether consent should be given to the treaty, he had no

hesitation in saying that he would refuse it."[171] Wilberforce "considered

the partitioning of States against their will a most despotic sacrifice of

public rights."[172] Lord Grenville appealed "to the old-established and

true principles of national law in opposition to the new-fangled doctrine

of utility, or, in other words, the subversion of all moral principle," and

denounced "the horrible injustice by which an unoffending people were to be

bent to the dominion of a foreign power."[173] Grey expressed the complete

Liberal theory. "The principles are the same in the one case and the other,

whether between individuals or {141} between States. No matter to what

degree the impunity of power might silence the claims of right, its nature

cannot be altered; it is equally sacred, equally important, and is equally

to be recognized, in every attempt to protect the weak against the

strong.... The rights of the Sovereign over his subjects are not the rights

of property. They do not confer the privilege of transferring them from one

to another like cattle attached to the soil.... The Sovereign might

withdraw himself from their protection. He might absolve them from their

allegiance to himself; but he had no right to transfer their allegiance to

any other State. It became, then, the right of the people to decide to whom

their allegiance should be given."[174] He dealt in fitting terms with the

contention that it was after all for the benefit of the Norwegian people.

"Can it be argued," he asked, "that any country shall be obliged to accept

what a foreign State thinks proper to consider as happiness? No sort of

tyranny can, in my judgment, be conceived more complete than that a

Government should undertake to force another people to submit to that

system which such Government may regard as happy, although that people may

think quite the contrary."[175] Neither the reluctance of Canning nor the

attacks of the Whigs could prevent the outrage. The British fleet blockaded

the Norwegian ports, and the Norwegian people submitted to their new

masters.

* * * * *

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