The state of Europe thirty years ago was far more dead and hopeless
than now. There were no wars, certainly, and no expectations of wars.
But there was a dull, beaten-down, pent-up feeling abroad, as if the
lid were screwed down on the nations, and the thing which had been,
however cruel and heavy and mean, was that which was to remain to the
end. England was better off than her neighbors, but yet in bad case.
In the south and west particularly, several causes had combined to
spread a very bitter feeling abroad amongst the agricultural poor.
First among these stood the new poor law, the provisions of which were
rigorously carried out in most districts. The poor had as yet felt the
harshness only of the new system. Then the land was in many places in
the hands of men on their last legs, the old sporting farmers, who had
begun business as young men while the great war was going on, had made
money hand over hand for a few years out of the war prices, and had
tried to go on living with grayhounds and yeomanry uniforms—“horse to
ride and weapon to wear”—through the hard years which had followed.
These were bad masters in every way, unthrifty, profligate, needy,
and narrow-minded. The younger men who were supplanting them were
introducing machinery, threshing machines and winnowing machines, to
take the little bread which a poor man was still able to earn out of
the mouths of his wife and children—so at least the poor thought and
muttered to one another; and the mutterings broke out every now and
then in the long nights of the winter months in blazing ricks and
broken machines. Game preserving was on the increase. Australia and
America had not yet become familiar words in every English village, and
the labor market was everywhere overstocked; and last, but not least,
the corn laws were still in force, and the bitter and exasperating
strife in which they went out was at its height. And while Swing and
his myrmidons were abroad in the counties, and could scarcely be kept
down by yeomanry and poor-law guardians, the great towns were in almost
worse case. Here too emigration had not yet set in to thin the labor
market; wages were falling, and prices rising; the corn-law struggle
was better understood and far keener than in the country; and Chartism
was gaining force every day, and rising into a huge threatening giant,
waiting to put forth his strength, and eager for the occasion which
seemed at hand.
You generation of young men, who were too young then to be troubled
with such matters, and have grown into manhood since, you little
know—may you never know!—what it is to be living the citizens of a
divided and distracted nation. For the time that danger is past. In
a happy hour, and so far as man can judge, in time, and only just in
time, came the repeal of the corn laws, and the great cause of strife
and the sense of injustice passed away out of men’s minds. The nation
was roused by the Irish famine, and the fearful distress in other
parts of the country, to begin looking steadily and seriously at some
of the sores which were festering in its body, and undermining health
and life. And so the tide had turned, and England had already passed
the critical point, when 1848 came upon Christendom, and the whole of
Europe leapt up into a wild blaze of revolution.
Is any one still inclined to make light of the danger that threatened
England in that year, to sneer at the 10th of April, and the monster
petition, and the monster meetings on Kennington and other commons?
Well, if there be such persons amongst my readers, I can only say that
they can have known nothing of what was going on around them and below
them, at that time, and I earnestly hope that their vision has become
clearer since then, and that they are not looking with the same eyes
that see nothing, at the signs of to-day. For that there are questions
still to be solved by us in England, in this current half-century,
quite as likely to tear the nation in pieces as the corn laws, no man
with half an eye in his head can doubt. They may seem little clouds
like a man’s hand on the horizon just now, but they will darken the
whole heaven before long, unless we can find wisdom enough amongst us
to take the little clouds in hand in time, and make them descend in
soft rain.