Lord Grey introduced the third Reform Bill on March 27, 1832. The first reading passed, as a matter of course, but when the division on the motion for the second reading came on on April 14, there was only a majority of 9 votes for the Bill: 184 peers voted for it and 175 against it. Of course Lord Grey and his colleagues saw, at once, that unless the conditions were to be completely altered there would be no chance whatever in the House of Lords for a measure of reform which had passed its second reading by a majority of only 9. The moment the Bill got into committee there would be endless opportunities afforded for its mutilation, and if it were to get through the House at all, it would be only in such a form as to render it wholly useless for the objects which its promoters desired it to accomplish. This dismal conviction was very speedily {174} verified. When the Bill got into committee, Lord Lyndhurst moved an amendment to the effect that the question of enfranchisement should precede that of disfranchisement. Now this proposal was not in itself one necessarily hostile to the principle of the Bill. It is quite easy to understand that a sincere friend to reform might have, under certain conditions, adopted the views that Lord Lyndhurst professed to advocate. But the Ministry knew very well that the adoption of such a proposal would mean simply that the whole conduct of the measure was to be taken out of their hands and put into unfriendly hands—in other words, that it would be utterly futile to go any further with the measure if the hostile majority were thus allowed to deal with it according to their own designs and their own class interest.

[Sidenote: 1832—The Peers and the third Reform Bill]

Lord Lyndhurst was a man of great ability, eloquence, and astuteness. He was one of the comparatively few men in our modern history who have made a mark in the Law Courts and in Parliament. As a Parliamentary orator he was the rival of Brougham, and the rivalry was all the more exciting to the observers because it was a rivalry of styles as well as of capacities. Lyndhurst was always polished, smooth, refined, endowed with a gift of argumentative eloquence, which appealed to the intellect rather than to the feelings, was seldom impassioned, and even when impassioned kept his passion well within conventional bounds. Brougham was thrilling, impetuous, overwhelming, often extravagant, scorning conventionality of phrase or manner, revelling in his own exuberant strength and plunging at opponents as a bull might do in a Spanish arena. Lyndhurst's amendment was one especially suited to bring to his side the majority of the Waverers. It was plausible enough in itself, and gave to many a Waverer, who must have had in his mind a very clear perception of its real object, some excuse for persuading himself that, in voting for it, he was not voting against the principle of reform. When the division came to be taken on May 7, 151 peers voted for the amendment and 116 against it, thus showing a majority of 35 against {175} the Government, by whom of course the amendment had been unreservedly opposed.

The country saw that a new crisis had come, and a crisis more serious than any which had gone before. There was only one constitutional course by which the difficulty could be got over, and that was by the King giving his consent to the creation of a number of new peers large enough to carry the Reform Bill through all its subsequent stages in the House of Lords. Other outlet of safety through peaceful means there was none. Lord Grey's Ministry could not possibly remain in office and see the measure, on which they believed the peace and prosperity of the country to depend, left at the mercy of an irresponsible majority of Tory peers. The King was most unwilling to help his ministers out of the trouble, especially by such a process as they had suggested, and in his heart would have been very glad to be rid of them and the Reform Bill at the same time. Charles Greville in his Memoirs makes several allusions to the King's well-known dislike for the Whig ministers and his anxiety to get the Duke of Wellington back again. Lord Grey and his colleagues, finding it hard to get the King to recognize the gravity of the situation, and to adopt the advice they had offered to him, felt that there was nothing left for them but to resign office. And the King was delighted to have a chance of recalling the Duke of Wellington to the position of Prime Minister. Under the date of May 17, 1832, Greville has some notes which well deserve quotation: "The joy of the King at what he thought to be his deliverance from the Whigs was unbounded. He lost no time in putting the Duke of Wellington in possession of everything which had taken place between him and them upon the subject of reform and with regard to the creation of peers, admitting that he had consented, but saying he had been subjected to every species of persecution. His ignorance and levity put him in a miserable light and proved him to be one of the silliest old gentlemen in his dominions." Greville goes on to say: "But I believe he is mad, for yesterday he gave a dinner to the Jockey Club, {176} at which, notwithstanding his cares, he seemed to be in excellent spirits, and after dinner he made a number of speeches so ridiculous and nonsensical beyond all belief but to those who heard them, rambling from one subject to another, repeating the same thing over and over again, and altogether such a mass of confusion, trash, and imbecility, as made one laugh and blush at the same time."

[Sidenote: 1832—The King seeks a Prime Minister]

The poor muddled-headed old King in fact could not understand that the question submitted to him allowed of no middle course of compromise. He seemed to think he had gone far enough in the way of conciliation when he offered to allow his ministers to create a certain number of peers. No concession, however, could be of the slightest use to the Ministry unless the power were conceded to them to create as many new peers as might be necessary to overbear all opposition to the Reform Bill. The struggle was in fact between the existing House of Lords and the vast majority of the nation. One or other must conquer. The only constitutional way in which the existing opposition of the House of Lords could be overborne was by the creation of a number of new peers great enough to turn the majority of the House of Lords into a minority.

Lord Grey and Lord Althorp were not, it is hardly necessary to say, men who shared in the popular sentiment, which would, if it could, have abolished altogether the hereditary principle in legislation. But Lord Grey and Lord Althorp read the signs of the times, and saw clearly enough that if the House of Lords were allowed to stand much longer in the way of the Reform Bill the result would be probably a political revolution which would abolish the House of Lords altogether. Therefore the ministers could make no terms with the King short of those which they had offered, and as the King did not see his way to accept their conditions there was nothing left for them but to resign office. Accordingly Lord Grey tendered his resignation and that of his colleagues, and the King, after much indecision and mental flurry, thought he could do nothing better than to accept the resignation, and try to find a set of ministers more suitable to his {177} inclinations. He sent for Lord Lyndhurst and entered into conversation with that astute lawyer and politician, and Lord Lyndhurst advised him to send for the Duke of Wellington. The Duke was sent for, but the Duke had not much to say which could lend any help to the King in his difficulties. Wellington saw distinctly enough that there was no alternative but that which lay in the choice between reform and some sort of popular revolution. We have seen already in these volumes how Wellington preferred to accept Catholic Emancipation rather than take the risk of plunging the country into civil war. In the case of the Reform Bill he would have acted, no doubt, upon the same principle if driven to the choice, but after the repeated and energetic denunciations of reform which he had delivered in the House of Lords he did not think that it would be a fitting part for him, even for the sake of helping the sovereign out of his constitutional trouble, to be the Prime Minister by whom any manner of Reform Bill should be introduced. Wellington therefore strongly urged the King to send for Sir Robert Peel, and declared that he himself would lend all the support he possibly could to a Peel Administration. Peel was sent for accordingly, but Peel was too far-seeing a statesman to believe that he could possibly hold office for many weeks unless he yielded to the full demands of the country, and his political principles would not have allowed him to go so far as that. He did his best to make it clear to the King that no administration but a reform administration could stand, and that, if a reform administration had to be accepted, there was nothing better to be done than to invite Lord Grey and Lord John Russell back again to office.

Meanwhile the country was aroused to a fervor of enthusiasm in favor of reform, which seemed only to increase with every delay and to grow stronger with every opposition. Public meetings were held in Birmingham of larger size than had ever been gathered together in England before, and resolutions were passed by acclamation which were almost revolutionary in their character. In many cities and towns appeals were made for a run on the {178} bank, a run for gold, and there were alarming signs that the advice was likely to be followed to such a degree as to bring about utter confusion in the money market. In the City of London an immense meeting was held, at which resolutions were passed calling on the House of Commons to stop the supplies unless the King accepted the councils of the Whig statesmen and gave them authority for the election of new peers. The overwhelming strength of the demand for reform may be easily estimated when it is remembered that the majority in the great cities and towns, and also in the counties, were for once of the same opinion. In more than one great political controversy of modern times, as in the free-trade agitation for example, it has happened that the town population were of one opinion and the county population of another. But at the time which we are now describing the great cities and towns were all nearly unrepresented, and in their demand for representation they were of one mind and one spirit with the county populations, which called out for a real and not a sham representation. There will probably always be a question of curious speculation and deep interest to the students of history as to the possibility of a great revolution in England if the King had made up his mind to hold out against the advice of the Whig statesmen and to try the last chance. It is certain that the leading Whig nobles were considering, with profound earnestness, what course it might be necessary for them to take if the King were absolutely to refuse all concession and to stand by what he believed to be his sovereign right to set up his own authority as supreme. If the choice should be forced on them, would these Whig nobles stand by the obstinate King or throw in their lot with the people? This grave question must have been considered again and again in all its bearings by the Whig leaders during that time of terrible national crisis.

[Sidenote: 1832—The Whig nobles and the military]

It would seem to be beyond all question that some, at least, of the Whig nobles were contemplating the possibility of their having to choose between the King and the people, and that their minds were made up, should the worst come {179} to the worst, to side with the people. Many years afterwards, during the State trials at Clonmel which followed the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, evidence was brought forward by the counsel for the defence of Mr. Smith O'Brien and his fellow-prisoners to prove that the Whig nobles during the reform crisis in England had been in communication with Sir Charles Napier, the great soldier, for the purpose of ascertaining how the army would act if there should come to be a struggle between the sovereign claiming despotic rights and the people standing up for constitutional government. All this, however, is now merely a question of interesting historical speculation. The King had tried Wellington, had tried Peel, had sent for Wellington a second time, and found that Wellington, though he dared do all that might become a man, saw nothing to be gained for sovereign or State by an attempt to accomplish the impossible, and William at last gave way. It was about time that he did so. William was becoming utterly unpopular with the great mass of his subjects. He who had been endowed with the title of the Patriot King was now to be an object of hatred and contempt to the crowds in the streets with whom from day to day he could not avoid being brought into contact. When his carriage appeared in one of the great London thoroughfares it was followed again and again by jeering and furious mobs, who hissed and groaned at him, and it was always necessary for his protection that a strong escort of cavalry should interpose between him and his subjects. Even in the London newspapers of the day, those at least that were in favor of reform, and which constituted the large majority, language was sometimes used about the King which it would be impossible to use in our days about some unpopular Lord Mayor or member for the City.

All this told heavily upon poor King William, who was a good-natured sort of man in his own way if his ministers and others would only let him alone, and who rather fancied himself in the light of a popular sovereign. He therefore made up his mind at last to accept the advice {180} of his Whig ministers and grant them the power of creating as many new peers as they thought fit, for the purpose of passing their importunate Reform Bill. The consent was given at an interview which the King had with Lord Grey and Lord Brougham, Lord Brougham as keeper of the royal conscience taking the principal conduct of the negotiations on behalf of the Government. The King, as usual on such occasions, was flurried, awkward, and hot-tempered, and when he had made up his mind to yield to the advice of his ministers he could not so far master his temper as to make his decision seem a graceful concession. Even when he announced that the concession was to be made the trouble was not yet quite over. Lord Brougham thought it necessary to ask the King for his consent in writing to the creation of the new peers, and hereupon the wrath of the sovereign blazed out afresh. The King seemed to think that such a demand showed a want of confidence in him which amounted to something like an insult, and he fretted and stormed for a while as though he had been like Petruchio "aboard carousing to his mates." After a while, however, he came into a better humor, and perhaps saw the reasonableness of the plea that Lord Grey and Lord Brougham could not undertake the task now confided to them without the written warrant of the King's authority. William therefore turned away and scratched off at once a brief declaration conferring on his ministers the power to create the necessary number of peers, qualifying it merely with the condition that the sons of living peers were to be called upon in the first instance. The meaning of this condition was obvious, and its object was not unreasonable from the King's point of view, or, indeed, from the point of view of any statesman who was anxious that the House of Lords should be kept as long as possible in its existing form. Nobody certainly wanted to increase the number of peers to any great extent, and if only the eldest sons of the living peers were to be called to the House of Lords each would succeed in process of time to his father's title and the roll of the peerage would become once again as it had been before.

{181}

[Sidenote: 1832—Passage of the third Reform Bill]

The political crisis was over now. When once the royal authority had been given for the unlimited creation of new peers there was an end of all the trouble. Of course, there was no necessity to manufacture any new batches of peers. As the Reform Bill was to be carried one way or the other, whether with the aid of new peers or without it, the Tory members of the House of Lords could not see any possible advantage in taking steps which must only end in filling their crimson benches with new men who might outvote them on all future occasions. The Reform Bill passed through all its stages in the House of Lords, not without some angry and vehement discussions, during which personal recriminations were made that would have been considered disorderly at the meeting of a parish vestry. One noble lord denounced the conduct of Lord Grey as atrocious, and even the stately Lord Grey was roused to so much anger by this expression that he forgot his habitual self-control and dignity and replied that he flung back the noble lord's atrocious words with the utmost scorn and contempt.

The Bill passed its third reading in the House of Lords on June 4, 1832, and received the royal assent on June 7. The royal assent, however, was somewhat ungraciously given. King William declined to give his assent in person, a performance which, at the time, seemed to be expected from him, and it was signified only by the medium of a formal committee. The Bill, however, was passed, the third Reform Bill that had been introduced since Lord Grey had come into office. The Reform Bills for Ireland and Scotland which had gone through their stages in the House of Commons immediately after the Bills relating to England and Wales were then carried through the House of Lords. The great triumph was accomplished.

It is not without historical interest to notice the fact that a long discussion sprang up at this time and was revived again and again, during many successive years, with regard to certain words used by Lord John Russell in expressing his satisfaction at the passing of the Reform Bill. He was endeavoring to calm the apprehensions of timid {182} people throughout the country who feared that the whole time of Parliament would thenceforward be taken up with the passing of new and newer Reform Bills, and he declared that the Government of which he was a member had no intention but that the Reform Act should be a final measure. It might have seemed clear to any reasonable mind that Lord John had no idea of proclaiming his faith in the absolute finality of any measure passed, or to be passed, by human statesmanship, but was merely expressing the confident belief of his colleagues and himself that the Bill they had passed would satisfy the needs and the demands of the existing generation. At the time, however, a storm of remonstrance from the more advanced Liberals broke around Lord John Russell's head, and he was charged with having declared that the Reform Act was meant to be a measure for all times, and that he and his colleagues would never more set their hands to any measure intended to broaden or deepen its influence. There were indeed popular caricatures of Lord John to be seen in which he was exhibited with the title of "Finality Jack." Lord John's public career proved many times, in later days, how completely his meaning had been misunderstood by some of those whose cause he had been espousing, for all through his honored life he continued to be a leader of reform. But the common misunderstanding of the phrase was in itself significant, for it seemed to foretell the fact that the Bill, with all the great changes it had introduced and the new foundations it had laid for the future system of constitutional government, was in itself indeed far from being a final measure. The authors of the Reform Bill had left what might now be called "the masses" almost altogether out of their calculations. The rate at which the franchise was fixed for town and country rendered it practically impossible that the artisan in the town or the laborer in the country could have any chance whatever of obtaining a vote.

[Sidenote: 1832—Some defects in the Reform Bill]

This was the one great defect of the Reform Bill introduced by Lord Grey and Lord John Russell. Perhaps it would not have been prudent for these statesmen, at that {183} time, to enter on the introduction of a more comprehensive measure. Perhaps Lord Grey and Lord John Russell would have preferred of their own judgment not to introduce too comprehensive a reform measure all at once, and to allow the franchise to broaden slowly down. But it is certain that almost immediately after the passing of the Reform Bill a profound feeling of disappointment began to grow and spread among the classes who found themselves excluded from any of its benefits, and who believed, with good reason, that they had rendered much practical service in the carrying of the measure. The feeling prevailed especially among the artisans in the cities and towns. In some of the towns the Reform Bill had distinctly operated as a measure of disfranchisement rather than of enfranchisement. In Preston, for instance, there had been so large a number of what we have called, adopting a more modern phrase, "fancy franchises" that something not very far removed from universal suffrage was attainable by the male population. These fancy franchises could not be justified on any principle commending itself to rational minds, and it was, moreover, an obvious absurdity to have one system of voting prevailing in this constituency and a totally different system prevailing in another. Therefore Lord Grey and Lord John Russell cannot be censured for their resolve to abolish the fancy franchises altogether. They were introducing an entirely new constitutional system, and it was evident that in the new system there must be some uniform principle as to the franchise. But it is none the less certain that the men who were disfranchised by an Act professedly brought in to extend the suffrage must have felt that they had good reason to complain of its direct effect upon themselves and upon what they believed to be their rights. Nearly forty years of agitation had yet to be gone through before the principal deficiencies in the Reform Act of 1833 were supplied by Liberal and Tory legislation.

Before closing this chapter of history it is fitting to take notice of the fact that the debates on the Reform Bill gave opportunity for the public opening of a great career in {184} politics and in literature—the career of Lord Macaulay. [Sidenote: 1832—Thomas Babington Macaulay] Thomas Babington Macaulay was a new member of the House of Commons when the first Reform Bill was introduced by Lord John Russell. He was the son of Zachary Macaulay, who was famous in his day, and will always be remembered as the high-minded philanthropist and the energetic and consistent opponent of slavery and the slave trade. Macaulay the son had, from his earliest years, given evidence of precocious and extraordinary intelligence and versatility. When he entered Parliament he found that his fame had gone before him, but his friends were not quite certain whether he was to be poet, essayist, historian, or political orator. As years went on, he proved that he could write brilliant and captivating poems; that he could turn out essays which had a greater fascination for the public than many of the cleverest novels; that he could write history which set critics disputing, but which everybody had to read; and that he could deliver political speeches in the House of Commons which, when correctly reproduced from the newspapers, appeared to belong to the highest class of Parliamentary eloquence. It may well be questioned whether any man could possibly attain supreme success in the four fields in which, from time to time, Macaulay appeared to be successful. At present we are only concerned with the speeches which he delivered in the House of Commons during the debates on the Reform Bills. Macaulay's appearance was not impressive, and he had a gift of fluency, a rapidity of utterance which continued, from first to last, to be a most serious difficulty in the way of his success as a Parliamentary orator. He appears to have committed his speeches to memory, and his memory was one of the most amazing of all his gifts; and when he rose to deliver an oration he rattled it off at such a rate of speed that the sense ached in trying to follow him, and the reporters for the newspapers found it almost impossible to get a full note of what he said. This was all the more embarrassing because his speeches abounded in illustrations and citations from all manner of authorities, authors, and historical incidents, and the bewildered {185} reporter found himself entangled in proper names which shorthand in the pre-phonetic days could but slowly reproduce. The speeches, when revised by the author, were read with intense delight by the educated public, and with all the defects of the orator's utterance he soon acquired such a fame in the House of Commons that no one ever attracted a more crowded and eager audience than he did when it became known that he was about to make a speech. We may quote here a characteristic description given by Greville of his first meeting with Macaulay in the early February of 1833, while the struggle over Lord Russell's third Reform Bill was still going on. "Dined yesterday," says Greville, "with Lord Holland; came very late and found a vacant place between Sir George Robinson and a common-looking man in black. As soon as I had time to look at my neighbor, I began to speculate, as one usually does, as to who he might be, and as he did not for some time open his lips except to eat, I settled that he was some obscure man of letters, or of medicine, perhaps a cholera doctor. In a short time the conversation turned on early and late education, and Lord Holland said he had always remarked that self-educated men were peculiarly conceited and arrogant, and apt to look down on the generality of mankind from their being ignorant of how much other people knew; not having been at public schools, they are uninformed of the course of general education. My neighbor observed that he thought the most remarkable example of self-education that of Alfieri, who had reached the age of thirty without having acquired any accomplishment save that of driving, and who was so ignorant of his own language that he had to learn it like a child, beginning with elementary books. Lord Holland quoted Julius Caesar and Scaliger as examples of late education, said that the latter had been wounded, and that he had been married and commenced learning Greek the same day, when my neighbor remarked 'that he supposed his learning Greek was not an instantaneous act like his marriage.' This remark and the manner of it gave me the notion that he was a dull fellow, for it came out in a {186} way which bordered on the ridiculous so as to excite something like a sneer. I was a little surprised to hear him continue the thread of conversation, from Scaliger's wound, and talk of Loyola having been wounded at Pampeluna. I wondered how he happened to know anything about Loyola's wound. Having thus settled my opinion I went on eating my dinner, when Auckland, who was sitting opposite to me, addressed my neighbor: 'Mr. Macaulay, will you drink a glass of wine?' I thought I should have dropped off my chair. It was Macaulay, the man I had been so long most curious to see and to hear, whose genius, eloquence, astonishing knowledge, and diversified talents have excited my wonder and admiration for such a length of time, and here I had been sitting next to him, hearing him talk, and setting him down for a dull fellow." We are here only at the opening of Macaulay's great career. Even at this time the world seemed to have made up its mind that Macaulay had a great career before him. At the present day, when more than forty years have passed over his tomb in Westminster Abbey, it is a question still keenly contested every now and then, whether Macaulay fully realized or barely failed to realize the expectations which men were forming of him on that day when Charles Greville met him for the first time, and was amazed to find, as the conversation went on, that he was sitting next to Macaulay.

[Sidenote: 1832—Death of Sir Walter Scott]

The year of the Reform Bill was marked by an event forever memorable in the history of literature. That event was the death of Sir Walter Scott. The later years of Scott's life, as we all know, had been darkened by the failure of his publishers, by the money troubles in which that failure had involved him, by the exhausting efforts he had to make to force his wearied mind into redoubled literary exertion, and, more than all, by the loss of the wife who had been his devoted companion for so many years. No words could be more sorrowful and more touching in their simplicity than those in which Scott declared that after his wife's death he never knew what to do with that large share of his thoughts which always, in other {187} days, used to be given to her. He had gone out to Italy, obeying the advice of his friends, in the hope of recovering his health under warmer skies than those of his native land, but the effort was futile. It was of no use his trying to shake off his malady of heart and body by a change of air. He carried his giant about with him, if we may apply to his condition the expressive and melancholy words which Emerson used with a different application. Scott was little over sixty years of age when he died—a time of life at which, according to our ideas of longevity at the present day, we should regard a man as having hardly passed the zenith of his powers and his possibilities. He had added a new chapter to a history of the world's literature. He had opened a new school of romance which soon found brilliant pupils in all countries where romance could charm. There have been many revolutions in literary rulership since his time, but Walter Scott has not been dethroned.



{188}

CHAPTER LXXIV.

THE EMANCIPATION OF LABOR.

[Sidenote: 1832—The slave trade]

The statesmen who had carried the Reform Bill soon found that they had taken upon themselves a vast responsibility. They had accomplished so great a triumph that most men assumed them to be capable of any triumph. It has to be remembered that they had succeeded in establishing one principle which, up to that time, had never been recognized, the principle that a constitutional sovereign in these countries cannot any longer set up his own authority and his own will in opposition to the advice of his ministers. Up to the days of William the Fourth, the ministers always had to give way to the sovereign at the last moment, if the sovereign insisted on maintaining his dictatorial authority. We have seen how one of the greatest of English statesmen, the younger Pitt, had bowed his judgment and even coerced into silence the remonstrances of his own heart and his own conscience, rather than dispute the authority of an obstinate and a stupid King. Lord Grey and his colleagues had compelled their King to listen to reason, and probably not even they knew at the time the full importance of the constitutional principle which they had thus established. In our own days, and under the rule of the first really constitutional sovereign who ever reigned in these countries, we seem to have almost forgotten that there ever was a time when the occupant of the throne was understood to have a right to govern the people according to royalty's own inclination or royalty's own notion of statesmanship. When the passing of the Reform Bill was yet the latest event in history, the people of these countries commonly, and very justly, regarded this assertion of the right of a representative Ministry to exact support from {189} the sovereign as one of the greatest triumphs accomplished by Lord Grey's Administration. The natural feeling therefore was to assume that the men who had done these great things could do greater things still, and from all parts of the realm eyes were turned upon them, full of confidence in their desire and their capacity to accomplish new reforms in every department of our constitutional and our social system.

The time was one especially favorable for such hopes and for such achievements. A new era had opened on the civilized world. New ideas were coming up regarding the value and the validity of many of our constitutional and social arrangements which had formerly been considered as inspired and sanctified forever by that mysterious influence, the wisdom of our ancestors. If education had not yet made much way among the masses of the people, at least the belief in popular education was becoming a quickening force in the minds of all intelligent men. Then, as ever since, the agitation for each great new reform began outside the walls of Parliament, and had to take an organized shape before it became a question for the House of Commons. The first great work to which the reformed Parliament applied itself, after the conditions of Lord Grey's Act had been allowed to take effect in remoulding the constituencies, was the abolition of negro slavery in the colonies of Great Britain. Domestic slavery and the slave trade had already been abolished, but in the minds of a great number of well-meaning, well-informed, and by no means hard-hearted men slavery in our colonies was a very different sort of institution from slavery in our own islands, or from the actual trade in slaves. The ordinary Englishman, when he troubled himself to consider such questions at all, had settled it in his own mind that slavery in England, or in any part of the British Isles, was incompatible with the free constitution of the realm, and that the forcible abduction of men and women from African sea-shores in order to sell them into slavery was an offence against civilization and Christianity. But this average Englishman did not see that there was anything like the same {190} reason for interfering with the system of slave labor as we had found it established, for instance, in our West Indian colonies. "We did not introduce the system there," it was argued; "we found it established there; we inherited it; and its continuance is declared, by all those who know, to be absolutely essential to the production of the sugar which is the source of profit and the means of living to the islands themselves, and an indispensable comfort, a harmless and healthful luxury, to millions of civilized beings who never stood under a tropical sky." The mind of the average Englishman, however, had been, for some time, much disturbed by the arguments, the pleadings, and the agitation of a small number of enlightened Reformers, at first much in advance of their time, who were making a pertinacious crusade against the whole system of colonial slavery. Some of these men have won names which will always be honored in our history. Zachary Macaulay was one of these. He was the father of the Macaulay whom we have just heard of as seated side by side with Charles Greville at Lord Holland's dinner-table. Zachary Macaulay had been the manager of a great West Indian estate, but he had given up the position because his conscience would not allow him to have anything to do with the system of slavery, and he had come home to devote his time, his abilities, and his earnestness to the generous task of rousing up his countrymen to a full sense of the horrors which were inseparable from the system. He was able to supply men like Brougham, like Fowell Buxton, and like Whitbread with practical facts beyond dispute to establish the realities of slavery in the West Indian colonies. Among the more obvious, although not perhaps even the most odious, accompaniments of the system were the frightful cruelties practised on the slaves, the flogging, the mutilation, and the branding of men, women, and children which formed part of the ordinary conditions of a plantation worked by slave labor. Over and over again it had been denied by men who professed to know all about the subject and to be authorities upon it that any such cruelties were practised on a well-regulated plantation belonging to a {191} civilized owner. It was constantly argued, with self-complacency, that the planter's own interests would not allow him thus to mar the efficiency of the human animals who had to do his work, and that even if the planter had no pity for them, he was sure to have a wholesome and restraining consideration for the physical value of his own living property.

[Sidenote: 1832—The horrors of the slave trade]

Zachary Macaulay and the Buxtons, the Wilberforces and the Whitbreads, were able to give innumerable and overwhelming proofs that the system every day was working such evils as any system might be expected to work which left one set of human beings absolutely at the mercy of another set of human beings. Many years after this great controversy had won its complete success for the English colonies, a chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States laid it down as law that a slave had no rights which his owner was bound to respect. Up to the time of which we are now writing, it was certainly assumed, in our West Indian colonies, as a self-evident doctrine, utterly beyond dispute or question, that a slave had no rights which his owner was bound to respect. The band of resolute philanthropists who had taken up the subject in England were able to show that frequent flogging of men and women was a regular part of the day's incidents of every plantation, and that branding was constantly used, not merely as a means of punishment, but also as a means of identification. It was a common practice when a female slave attempted to escape for her owner to have her branded on the breast with red-hot iron as an easy means of proving her identity if she were to succeed for a time in getting out of his reach. Numbers of advertisements were produced in which the owners, seeking through the newspapers for the recovery of some of their women slaves, proclaimed the important fact that the fugitive women were branded on both breasts, and that thus there could be no difficulty about their identification. We need not go further into the details of the subject, but it may be as well to mention that we have not touched at all upon the most revolting evidences of the horrors which seemed to {192} be the inevitable accompaniment of the slave system. Brougham was one of the first among leading Englishmen who threw his heart and soul into the agitation against colonial slavery. Long before that agitation approached to anything like success he had brought forward a motion in the House of Commons, directing attention to the evils and the horrors of the system, and calling for its abolition. For a time, successive Governments did not see their way to go any further than to endeavor to bring about or to enforce better regulations for the use of slave labor on the colonial plantations. Even these modest measures of reform had many difficulties to encounter. Some of the colonies were under the direct dominion of the Crown, were governed, in fact, as Crown colonies, but others had legislative chambers of their own, and refused to submit to the dictation of the authorities at home. These legislative chambers in most cases resented the interference of the home Government when it attempted to introduce new rules for the treatment of negro slaves, and the whole plantation interest rallied in support of the great principle that every owner of slaves had an absolute right to deal with them according to his own will and pleasure.

[Sidenote: 1832—Anti-slavery agitation]

It was loudly asserted by the planters and by the friends of the planters—and of course the planters had friends everywhere in England—that the sugar-growing business could not be carried on with any profit except by means of slave labor, and that the slaves could not be got to work except by the occasional use of flogging or other such needful stimulant. The negroes, it was loudly declared, would rise in rebellion if once it became known to them that the English Parliament was encouraging them to consider themselves as slaves no longer, and their mode of rising in rebellion would simply be a simultaneous massacre of all the planters and their wives and children. "See what you are doing!" many a voice cried out to the anti-slavery agitators; "you are preaching a crusade which will not merely end in the utter bankruptcy of the West Indian Islands, but in the massacre of all the planters, their wives, and their children." The agitators, however, were neither {193} dismayed nor disheartened. It would have taken a good deal of sophistry to confuse the conscience of Zachary Macaulay or Wilberforce. It would have taken a good deal of bellowing to frighten Brougham. The agitation went on with increasing force, and Brougham continued to denounce "the wild and guilty phantasy" that man has property in man.

In Jamaica the colonial legislature, pressed hard by the Government at home, passed an Act with the avowed purpose of mitigating the severity of the punishments inflicted on slave laborers. The Act, however, was, even on the face of it, absurdly inadequate for any humane purpose. The home Government had demanded, among other reforms, the entire discontinuance of the flogging of women. The colonial Act allowed the flogging of women to go on just as it had done before. The Jamaica planters were indignant at the course taken by the home authorities, and raved as if they were on the verge of rebellion against the Crown, and the well-meant interference of the Government at home seemed in fact to have done more harm than good. In Demerara, which was the Crown colony, some of the more intelligent among the negro slaves had heard scraps of talk which led them to believe that the King of England and his Government were about to confer freedom upon the colored race, and these reports spread and magnified throughout certain plantations, and the slaves on one estate refused to work. Their refusal was regarded as an insurrection and was treated accordingly. The most savage measures were employed to crush the so-called insurrection, just as in more recent, and what ought to have been more enlightened, days some local disturbances in Jamaica were magnified into a general rising of the blacks against the whites, and the horrors perpetrated in the name of repression startled the whole civilized world. In Demerara an English dissenting missionary, the Rev. John Smith, who had been known as a most kindly friend of the negroes, was formally charged with having encouraged and assisted the slaves to rise in revolt against their masters. He was flung into prison, was treated with barbarous {194} rigors such as might have seemed in keeping with some story of Siberia; he was put through the hurried process of a sham trial in which the very forms of law were disregarded, and he was sentenced to death. Even at Demerara and at such a time the court-martial which had condemned the missionary as guilty of the offence with which he was charged had accompanied its verdict with a recommendation to mercy on account of the prisoner's previous good character. But before it could be decided whether or not the recommendation was to have any effect, the unfortunate man died of the treatment he had received.

[Sidenote: 1830—Parliamentary action against slavery]

The story of the accusation, the trial, and the death created an immense sensation in England. Brougham, Buxton, Sir James Mackintosh, the historian and scholar, and many others aroused the public indignation by their rightful denunciations of the trial and the verdict. The Government condemned and reversed the proceedings at the trial, and when Brougham brought on a motion in the House of Commons, publicly branding with just severity the whole conduct of the Demerara authorities, his motion was only defeated by a small majority. Meanwhile, the agitation against the whole system of colonial slavery was receiving new impulse and new strength from the teaching of new events in the colonies, and in May, 1830, a great meeting was held in London to demand, not the mitigation, but the total abolition of slavery in every land over which the flag of England floated. This meeting was presided over by the great abolitionist, William Wilberforce, who had been out of public life for some time owing to severe ill-health, and who believed that he could not more fitly celebrate his return to the active work of philanthropy than by taking the chair at such a demonstration. Mr. Buxton proposed a resolution calling on the country to agitate for the total abolition of slavery in the colonies, and to be content with nothing else, and the resolution was carried by enthusiastic acclamation. Brougham at once became the champion of the great London meeting by a motion which he brought forward in the House of Commons. One of the greatest speeches of his lifetime {195} was made in justifying his appeal to the House for the total abolition of a system which admitted of nothing like partial, or what is called moderate, reform, and must either be swept out of existence altogether or remain a curse to those who enforce it as well as to those against whom it is enforced. Brougham's motion was defeated, of course. We say of course because it was only a motion made by an independent member, as the phrase goes, and was not proposed by the leader of a strong Government, determined to stake its existence on the carrying of its proposition. Every great reform, it may almost literally be said, is heralded in Parliament by the motions of independent members, who are sure to be defeated, but whose determined efforts have success enough to make the leader of the Government, or the leader of the Opposition, feel that the time is near at hand when the cause must be taken up by one or other of the great parties in the State.

Buxton raised the whole question in the following session; and then Lord Althorp, speaking for the Government, went so far as to offer a sort of compromise by suggesting that the colonies which in the future should give evidence of their sincere resolve to make distinct improvement in the condition of their slaves should be rewarded and encouraged by a permission to send their sugar into English ports at a reduced rate of duty. The country, however, had long outgrown the condition of mind in which this feeble and ridiculous proposition could be regarded as worthy of serious consideration. The notion of sacrificing any part of the country's revenues for the purpose of bribing the planters to deal a little less severely with their slaves was not likely to find much favor among the men who had thus far conducted the great agitation against slavery. The object of reformers such as Clarkson, Wilberforce, Buxton, Brougham, and Mackintosh was not merely that the negroes should be flogged less often, or that the negro women should not be flogged at all, but that the whole abominable system which made men, women, and children the absolute property of their owners should be brought to an end forever.

{196}

[Sidenote: 1833—A plan for the abolition of slavery]

At last it became evident to the Whig Ministry that something definite must be done, and that nothing would be considered definite by the country which did not aim at the total abolition of slavery. The hour had come, and the man who could best turn it to account in the House of Commons was already in his place. Lord Stanley, who had joined the Reform Ministry as Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, had since that time been moved to the higher position of Colonial Secretary, and to him was appropriately confided the task of introducing the measures which the Government had determined to take. The Lord Stanley of those days was in after years the Earl of Derby, whom some of us can still call to mind as one of the most brilliant orators in the House of Lords at a time when Brougham and Lyndhurst maintained the character of that assembly for parliamentary eloquence. Those among us who remember the eloquent Lord Derby, the Rupert of debate, remember him as a Tory Prime Minister or the Tory leader of Opposition in the House of Lords. But he began his great Parliamentary career as a Whig and as a Reformer, and he was one of the most zealous of Lord Grey's colleagues in pressing forward the great measure which was carried to success in 1832. Among those who can remember him there is only one opinion about the high order of his Parliamentary eloquence, and that opinion is that he was a worthy rival of Gladstone and of Bright. To him as Colonial Secretary was entrusted the task of bringing forward, in the House of Commons, the measures of the Government for dealing with the question of slavery in the British colonies. Stanley's speech was such a magnificent blending of reason and emotion, so close and so powerful in its arguments, so thrilling in its eloquence, that many of those who heard the speech naturally expected that it was destined to announce a bold and a comprehensive policy. A certain feeling of disappointment came up among the abolitionists when the measures were described which the Government had resolved to submit to the House of Commons. What Stanley had to propose was not a complete measure, but a {197} series of resolutions embodying the purposes of the Government's policy. It is enough to say that the Government proposed a plan which amounted to a scheme of abolition by stages. There was to be a certain period of apprenticeship, a term of fifteen years, during which the slaves, men and women, were to continue to work for their masters as before, under conditions gradually relaxing as the slave drew nearer to the time of emancipation, and then when that hour at length arrived the slave was to be free forever. This principle, however, was not to apply to children under six years old at the time of the passing of the measure, or to any children born after that time. The idea on which the whole scheme was founded was the notion, very common at that time and since, that the sudden emancipation of any set of human beings could only tend to bewilder them, and to prevent them from making a proper use of the freedom thus abruptly thrust upon them. "The fool in the fable," said Macaulay, when dealing with a somewhat similar question, "declared that no man ought to go into the water until he had learned to swim." Lord Grey's Ministry had apparently much the same idea about the perils of emancipation. Another part of the scheme proposed that fifteen millions should be advanced by the Government as a loan to the West Indian planters in order to help them over the diminution of income which might be expected to follow any interference with the conditions of slave labor.

The resolutions put forward by the Government were regarded as highly unsatisfactory by most of the leading abolitionists. Macaulay indeed argued with all his usual eloquence and skill in favor of the principle of gradual abolition, and it is hardly necessary to say that it was not in that speech he made use of the pithy sentence which we have already quoted. Buxton proposed an amendment to the resolution, an amendment in fact calling for immediate abolition, and the amendment was seconded by Daniel O'Connell. Buxton, however, was prevailed upon not to press his amendment on the ground that the Government were as eager for emancipation as any one could {198} be, and that Lord Grey and his colleagues were only anxious to bring forward such a measure as might at once secure the support of the majority and prevent further delay, while securing, at the same time, the ultimate and not distant settlement of the whole question. O'Connell stood firm, argued strongly against the proposed compromise, refused to accept it, and actually pressed Buxton's amendment to a division. Of course he was defeated by a large majority, but he carried a respectable minority along with him; and few now can doubt that the amendment which he pressed forward, even after its proposer had abandoned it, was right in its principle, and that the Government, if forced to it, could have carried a plan for immediate abolition with little more difficulty than was found in carrying the scheme of compromise. As the discussion went on the Government made some further concessions to the abolitionists, by reducing the time and modifying the terms of the apprenticeship system, and the abolitionists in general believed it their wisest policy to accept the modified arrangement and thus avoid any further delay. Another alteration of great importance was made by the Government in favor of the planters, and was finally accepted by the abolitionists and by the country in general. The friends of the planters made strong representations to the effect that the proffered loan would be of no use whatever to the owners of slaves whose property was so soon to pass from their hands into freedom, and that there was not the slightest chance of the planters being able to pay back to the English exchequer the amount that the Government was willing to advance. It was urged, too, with some show of reason, that the planters were not themselves responsible for the existence of slave labor, that generations of planters had grown up under the system and had made a profit by it during the days when civilization had not, anywhere, set its face against slavery, and that it was hard, therefore, to make them suffer in pocket for the recent development in the feelings of humanity. The offer of a loan was abandoned by the Government, and it was proposed instead that a gift of twenty millions sterling should {199} be tendered as compensation for the losses that the planters would be likely to undergo. This proposal, at first, met with some opposition, and by many indeed was looked upon as an extravagant freak of generosity; but some of the leading abolitionists were willing to make allowance for the condition of the planters, and most, or all, of them were prepared to make a large sacrifice for the sake of carrying some measure which promised, even by gradual advances, the final abolition of the slave system. We may condense into a very brief space the remainder of the story, and merely record the fact that the Government carried their amended measure of emancipation with its liberal grant to the West Indian planters through both Houses of Parliament, and that it obtained the royal assent.

[Sidenote: 1833—Slavery abolished in British colonies]

It may easily be imagined that poor King William must have had some mental struggles before he found himself quite in a mood to grant that assent. If the King ever had any clear and enduring opinion in his mind, it probably was the opinion, which he had often expressed already, against the abolition of slavery. He had, of course, a general objection to reform of any kind, but his objection to any reform which threatened the endurance of the slave system must have been an article of faith with him. It was the fate of King William the Fourth to live in a reign of reforms, not one of which would appear to have touched his heart or been in accordance with his personal judgment. The highest praise that history can give him is that he did not at least, as one of his predecessors had done, set his own judgment and his own inclination determinedly and irrevocably against the advice of the statesmen whom he had called in to carry on the work of administration. The King gave his assent to the amended Bill for the abolition of slavery, including the generous gift to the planters, and the measure became law on August 27, 1833. Some of the colonies had the sense and spirit to discard the apprenticeship system altogether, and to date the emancipation of their slaves from the day when the measure became an Act of Parliament. In no colony did the setting free of the negroes bring about any of the troubles and turmoils, the {200} lawless outbreaks of blacks against whites, the massacres of the innocents, which had been so long and so often pictured as the inevitable consequences of the legislation demanded by the Clarksons, the Wilberforces, the Buxtons, and the Broughams. It seems to us all now so much a matter of course for a civilized and enlightened State to decree the extinction of slavery within its limits, that we find it hard to appreciate at its true value the difficulty and the splendor of the achievement which was accomplished by the Grey Ministry. It has to be said, however, that the Ministry and the Parliament were, in this instance, only the instruments by which the great charge was wrought. The movement carried on out-of-doors, the movement set going by the leading abolitionists and supported by the people, deserves the chief honor of the victory. All the countries that make up the kingdom, England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, sent their authorized speakers to sustain the cause of freedom for the slaves. The gift, which on the recommendation of Lord Grey's Ministry was placed at the disposal of the West Indian planters, was indeed a lavish gift; but the public in general made little complaint on the score of its lavishness, and did not calculate too jealously the value of the sacrifice which the State was invited to make for the purchase of negro emancipation. Thirty years and more had to pass before the great American republic was able to free itself from the curse of slavery, and even then the late deliverance was only accomplished at the cost of a war which threatened for the season a permanent division of the States.

[Sidenote: 1833—Labor legislation]

The same year which saw the passing of the measure for the abolition of slavery in the colonies saw also the passing of an Act which interfered seriously, for the first time, with something which might almost be called a system of domestic slavery. We are speaking now of the measure which dealt with the conditions of factory labor in these countries. Factory labor, as it was known in the early days of William the Fourth, was the growth of modern civilization. England had found that her main business in life was not the conquest and the subjection of foreign races, {201} or the building or the navigating of ships, or the cultivation of land, or the growth of corn, but the manufacture of goods for her own domestic use and for export all over the world. Great manufacturing cities and towns were growing up everywhere, and, while the workers on the land were becoming fewer and fewer, the workers in the city factories were multiplying every day, so that an entirely new laboring population was coming up to claim the attention of the State. Since the old days, when the whole social organization was conducted according to the dictates of some centralized authority, there had been growing up, as one of the inevitable reactions which civilization brings with it at its successive stages, a sort of vaguely expressed doctrine that the State has no right to interfere between capital and labor, between the employer and the employed. This theory naturally grew and grew with the growth of the capital invested in manufactures and the increase in the number of employers, and it was found in later years than those at which we have now arrived, that the course of agitation that Lord Ashley may be said to have begun was opposed mainly in its progress by the capitalists and the employers of labor, many of whom were thoroughly humane men, anxious to do the very best they could for the health and the comfort of those whom they employed, but who sincerely believed that the civil law had no right to interfere with them and those who worked for them, and that the civil law could do only harm and no good by its best-intentioned interference.

The whole controversy has now been long settled, and it is a distinctly understood condition of our social system that the State has a right to interfere between employer and employed when the condition of things is such that the employed is not always able to protect himself. At the time when Lord Ashley started on his long and beneficent career there was practically no law which regulated the hours and the conditions of labor in the great factories. The whole factory system, the modern factory system as we understand it, was then quite a new part of our social organization. The factory, with its little army of workers, {202} men, women, and children, was managed according to the will and judgment of the owner, unless in the rare cases where the demand for labor far exceeded the supply. In most places the supply exceeded the demand, and the master was therefore free to make any conditions he pleased with his workers. If the master were a humane man, a just man, or even a far-seeing man, he took care that those who worked for him should be fairly treated, and should not be compelled to work under conditions dangerous to their health and destructive of their comfort. But if he were a selfish man, or a careless man, the workers were used merely as instruments of profit by him, or by those immediately under him; and it did not matter how soon they were used up, for there could always be found numbers enough who were eager to take their places, and were willing to undertake any task on any terms, for the sake of securing a bare living. Lord Ashley raised the whole question in the House of Commons, and brought forward a motion which ended in the appointment of a commission to inquire into the condition of the men, women, and children who worked in the factories. The commission was not long in collecting a vast amount of information as to the evils, moral and physical, brought about by the overworking of women and children in the factories. The general concurrence of public opinion, even among those who supported Lord Ashley's movement, did not seem to go beyond the protection of women and children. The adult male, it was considered, might perhaps safely be left to make the best terms he could for himself; but the inquiries of the commission left little doubt among unprejudiced minds that something must be done to secure women and children from the evils of overwork. Lord Ashley succeeded in forcing the whole question on the attention of Parliament, and an Act was passed in 1833 which did not indeed go nearly as far as Lord Ashley would have carried his principle, but which at least established the right of legislative interference for the protection of children and young persons of both sexes. The Act limited the work of children to eight hours a day and {203} that of young persons under eighteen to sixty-nine hours a week. This Act may be regarded as the beginning of that legislative interference which has gone on advancing beneficially from that time down to our own, and is likely still to keep on its forward movement.

[Sidenote: Lord Shaftesbury]

Lord Ashley, whom many of us can well remember as Lord Shaftesbury, may be said to have given up the whole of his life to the general purpose with which he began his public career—the object of endeavoring to mitigate the toils and sufferings of those who have to work hard in order to provide for others the comforts and the luxuries of life. His principle was that the State has always a right to interfere for the protection of those who cannot protect themselves. He was not a man of great statesmanlike ability, he was not a man of extensive or varied information, he was not a scholar, he was not an orator, he was not in the ordinary sense of the word a thinker, but he was a man who had, by a kind of philanthropic instinct, got hold of an idea which men of far greater intellect had not, up to his time, shown themselves able to grasp. The story of his life is part of the whole story of the industrial development of modern civilization. Again and again he worked with success in movement after movement, initiated mainly by himself, for the protection and the education of those who toil in our factories and in our mines. Some day no doubt Parliament may have to devise legislation which shall do for the women and children employed in field labor something like that which Lord Ashley did for the women and children employed in factories and in mines. We have seen that already efforts are made in every session of Parliament to extend the principle of the factory legislation into various industrial occupations which are common to city life. For the present, however, we have only to deal with the fact that one of the first labors accomplished by the Reformed Parliament was the establishment of that legislative principle with which Lord Ashley's name will always be associated.

Let it be added that, with the establishment of that principle, came also the introduction of two innovations in our {204} factory system which lent inestimable value to the whole measure. One of these was the appointment of a number of factory inspectors, who were authorized to see that the purposes of the Act were properly carried out by the employers, and to report to the Government as to the working of the whole system and the necessity for further improvements. The other was the arrangement by which a portion of the time of all the younger workers in the factories was set apart for educational purposes, so that children should no longer be treated as mere machines for the making of goods and the earning of wages, but should be enabled and compelled to have their faculties developed by the instruction suited to their years. This provision in the Factories Act may be regarded as the first step towards that system of national education which it took so much trouble and so many years to establish in these countries. Lord Ashley had great work still to accomplish; but even if his noble career had closed with the passing of the Factories Act in 1833, his name would always be remembered as that of a man who, more than any other, helped to turn the first Reformed Parliament to the work of emancipating the English laboring classes in cities and towns from a servitude hardly less in conflict with the best interests of humanity than that which up to the same year had prevailed on the plantations of Jamaica and Demerara. The Reformed Parliament had still much difficult work to call out its best energies and to employ its new resources, but it had begun its tasks well, and had already given the country good earnest of its splendid future.



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CHAPTER LXXV.

THE STATE CHURCH IN IRELAND.

[Sidenote: 1832—"Dark Rosaleen"]

A saying which has been ascribed to a well-known living Englishman, who has made a name for himself in letters as well as in politics, may be used as the introduction to this chapter. The saying was that no man should ever be sent as Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland who could not prove that he had thoroughly mastered the meaning of the noble Irish poem rendered by Clarence Mangan as "Dark Rosaleen." The author and statesman to whom we refer used to point the moral of his observation, sometimes, by declaring that many or most of the political colleagues for whose benefit he had spoken had never heard either of Clarence Mangan or of "Dark Rosaleen." Now, as it is barely possible that some of the readers of this volume may be in a condition of similar ignorance, it is well to mention that Clarence Mangan was an Irish poet who was dear to the generation which saw the rise of the Young Ireland movement during O'Connell's later years, and that the dark Rosaleen whom Mangan found in the earlier poet's ballad is supposed to typify his native country. The idea of the author and statesman was that no Englishman who had not studied this poem, and got at the heart of its mystery, so far as to be able to realize the deep poetic, pathetic love of the Celtic heart for the soil, the traditions, and the ways of the Celtic island, could attempt with any success to undertake the government of the country. We have now come to a period in this history when the Irish question, as it is called, came up once again, and in a new form, to try the statesmanship of English rulers. We have told the story of '98, and how the rebellion ended in complete defeat and disaster. Up to the {206} time at which we have now arrived there was no more talk of rebellion in the field, but in the sullen heart of Irish discontent there still lived all the emotions which had animated Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, and Robert Emmet.

[Sidenote: 1832—The tithe question in Ireland]

When the rebellion was put down the Government of King George the Third abolished the Irish Parliament, and then all loyal and sensible persons in Westminster assumed, of course, that there was an end of the matter. The rebellion had been put down, the principal rebels had been done to death, Grattan's troublesome and tiresome Parliament had been extinguished, Ireland had been merged into complete identification with England, and surely nothing would be heard of the Irish question any more. Yet the Irish question seemed to come up again and again, and to press for answer just as if answer enough had not been given already. There was a clamor about Catholic Emancipation, and at last the Irish Catholics had to be emancipated from complete political disqualification, and their spokesman O'Connell had been allowed to take his place in the House of Commons. Sir Robert Peel had carried Catholic Emancipation, for, although a Tory in many of his ways of thinking, he was a statesman and a man of genius; and now Lord Grey, the head of the Whig Government, had no sooner passed the Reform Bill than he found himself confronted with the Irish question in a new shape. We could hardly wonder that Sir Robert Peel or Lord Grey did not try to inform their minds as to Irish national feeling through a study of "Dark Rosaleen," for the good reason that no such poem had yet been given to the world. But neither Peel nor Grey was a type of the average Englishman of the times, and each had gradually borne in upon him, by a study of realities if not of poetic fancies, that the national sentiment of the Irishman was not to be eradicated by any Act of Parliament for his denationalization. Lord Grey, as the friend and pupil of Fox, who had always been the friend of Ireland, must have acquired, as a part of his early political training, the knowledge that Ireland's grievances were not all {207} sentimental, and that if they were to be dealt with by Acts of Parliament these Acts must take the part of relief and not of repression. It may well be questioned whether any population is disturbed for very long by mere sentimental grievances, and it may be doubted also whether the true instinct of statesmanship does not always regard the existence of what is called a sentimental grievance as the best reason for trying to find out whether there is not some practical evil at the root of the complaint. Certainly, in Lord Grey's time, the grievances were open and palpable enough to have attracted the attention of any man whose mind was not as well contented with the wisdom of his ancestors as that of King William himself.

Just at this time, as we have seen, a school of Englishmen was springing up: Englishmen whose minds were filled with new ideas, and who thoroughly understood the tendencies of the reforming age to which they belonged. The Irish tithe question had come up for settlement. The Irish tithe question was only a part of the Irish State Church question. The Irish State Church was an institution bestowed upon Ireland by her conquerors. Five-sixths, at least, of the population of Ireland belonged to the Church of Rome and were devoted to the religion of that Church. The island was nevertheless compelled to maintain the State Church, which did not even represent the religious belief of the one-sixth of the population that was not Roman Catholic. One of the privileges of the State Church was to exact tithes from all the farmers of the country for the maintenance of its clergymen. Ireland was almost altogether an agricultural country, and had but little to do with manufacturing industry, and in three out of the four provinces of Ireland the farmers, almost to a man, held to the religion of their Catholic forefathers and worshipped only at the altars of their faith. It would be seen, therefore, that the imposition of tithes for the support of the State Church ministers was not merely a sentimental grievance, but a very practical grievance as well. It was practical because it exacted the payment of a tribute which the farmer believed he ought not to be called {208} upon to pay, and it was sentimental because, while it extorted the money from the farmer's pocket, it also insulted his nationality and his faith.

[Sidenote: 1832—Difficulty in collecting the tithes]

The result was that a sort of civil war was perpetually going on in Ireland between those who strove to collect the tithes and those from whom the tithes were to be collected. The resistance was sometimes of the fiercest character; the farmers and their friends resisted the forces sent by the Government to seize the cattle of those who refused to pay, as if they were resisting an army of foreign invaders. Blood was shed freely and lavishly in these struggles, and the shedding of blood became so common that for a while it almost ceased to be a matter of public scandal. Sydney Smith declared that the collection of tithes in Ireland must have cost in all probability about one million of lives. Police, infantry, and dragoons were kept thus in constant occupation, and yet it could not possibly be contended that those who claimed the tithes were very much the better for all the blood that was shed on their behalf. For when a farmer's cattle had been seized by the police after an obstinate fight with the farmers and their friends, and when the cattle had been driven off under the escort of infantry and cavalry soldiers, the clergyman who claimed the tithes was not always any nearer to the getting of that which the law declared to be his own. The familiar proverbial saying about the ease with which a horse may be brought to the water and the difficulty there may be in getting him to drink when he has been brought there was illustrated aptly and oddly enough in the difference between seizure of the farmer's cattle and the means of raising any money on them when they had been seized. The captured cattle could not in themselves be of much use to the clergyman who claimed the tithes, and they would naturally have to be sold in order that he might get his due, and the question arose who was to bid for them. All the farmers and the peasantry of the country were on the one side, and on the other were the incumbent, a few of his friends, and the military and police. It was certain that the soldiers and the policemen would not bid for the cattle, and probably {209} could not pay for them, and the population of the district would have made the place very uncomfortable for any of the clergymen's friends who showed an anxiety to buy up the impounded beasts. In some cases when cattle were sold by public auction no bidder ventured to come forward but the farmer himself who owned the cattle, and they had to be knocked down to him at a purely nominal price because there was no possible competitor. The farmer drove home his beasts amid the exultation of the whole neighborhood, and the clergymen was as far off his tithes as ever. The passive resistance in fact was harder to deal with, as far as practical results went, than even the resistance that was active. Summon together by lawful authority a number of soldiers and police, and it is easy to shoot down a few unarmed peasants, and to dispose for the hour of popular resistance in this prompt and peremptory way. But what is to be done when the resistance takes the form of a resolute organized refusal to pay up the amounts claimed or to offer any price for the cattle seized in default of payment? There were in every district numbers of quiet Catholic parishioners who would much rather have paid their share of the tithes to the Protestant clergymen than become drawn into quarrels and local disturbances and confusion. But such men soon found that if they paid their tithes they put themselves in direct antagonism to the whole mass of their Catholic neighbors. Intimidation of the most serious kind was sometimes brought to bear upon them, and in any case there was that very powerful kind of intimidation which consists in making the offender feel that he has brought on himself the contempt and the hatred of nearly all his fellow-parishioners and his fellow-religionists. In those days it was not lawful to hold a public political meeting in Ireland, but there were anti-tithe demonstrations got up, nevertheless, over three parts of Ireland. These demonstrations took the outward form of what were called hurling matches, great rivalries of combatants, in a peculiar Irish game of ball. Each of these demonstrations was made to be, and was known to be, a practical protest against the collection of the tithes. {210} Whenever it became certain that the recusant farmer's cattle were to be seized, a great hurling match was announced to be held in the immediate vicinity, and the local magistrates, who perhaps had at their disposal only a few handfuls of police or soldiery, were not much inclined to order the seizure in the presence of such a cloud of witnesses. Nor would any Catholic parishioner who had quietly paid up his tithes without resistance have felt very comfortable if he had happened to come near the hurling field that day, and to hear the loudly expressed comments of his neighbors on his line of conduct. To make the troubles still deeper, it often happened that the claimant of the tithes was an absentee—the incumbent of many a parish in Ireland left his curate to look after his flock and his tithes alike—and the absentee was almost as much hated in Ireland as the tithe-collector.

[Sidenote: 1832—The tithe question in Parliament]

Now it must not be supposed that there were not many of the Protestant clergy in Ireland who utterly disapproved of the tithe system. One Protestant clergyman in England, from whom we have just quoted, the Rev. Sydney Smith, had denounced the system over and over again in language the most indignant and the most scornful that even his scathing humor could command. But there were numbers of Protestant clergymen in Ireland who saw and proclaimed its injustice and its futility. The Archbishop of Dublin declared that no Government could ever accomplish the collection of tithes in Ireland otherwise than at the point of the bayonet. Protestant country clergy often found that the very attempts to collect the tithes only brought increased distress and hardship upon themselves.

Many a poor Protestant clergyman saw the utter injustice of the system, and disliked and detested it almost as much as the Roman Catholics themselves could have done. There were many such men, too, who put up with miserable poverty rather than make any attempt to recover such an income by force. Great English speakers and writers were beginning to denounce the whole system. Macaulay stigmatized it as severely as Sydney Smith had done. George {211} Grote, the historian of Greece, who had then a seat in the House of Commons, had not only condemned it, but had condemned the whole State Church system of which it was only a part. In our own days the ordinary English reader finds it hard to understand how any such system could have been carried on under a civilized European Government. Such a reader will readily admit that Sydney Smith had not gone beyond the limits of sober assertion when he declared that "there is no abuse like it in all Europe, in all Asia, in all the discovered parts of Africa, and in all we have ever heard of Timbuctoo." The subject had been brought up in Parliament by some of the advanced reformers of the day, and, indeed, it was bringing itself before the notice of Parliament every week through the official reports of the disturbances which were taking place in various parts of Ireland.

The House of Lords had appointed a committee to inquire into the whole subject. The committee reported that a complete extinction of the tithe system was demanded, not only in the interests of Ireland but in the interests of the State Church itself, and suggested, as a means of getting out of the difficulty, that the tithes might be commuted for a charge upon land or by an exchange for an investment in land. This meant, in other words, that the collection of tithes should be devolved upon the landlord, leaving him to repay himself by a corresponding addition to the rent which he asked from his tenants. The House of Commons also appointed a committee to inquire into the subject, and the recommendation of that committee was in substance very much the same as the recommendation made by the committee appointed by the House of Lords.

The Government then took up the question, and in 1832 Lord Althorp announced that it was the intention of ministers to submit to the House of Commons a scheme of their own as a temporary settlement of the Irish tithe question, and out of which was to be developed, in time, a measure for the complete removal of the difficulty. A very brief description will serve to explain the nature of {212} this measure. The Government proposed to advance a certain sum of money for the relief of the tithe-owners who had not been able to recover what the law held to be their due, and in the meantime to apply themselves to the preparation of some scheme which might transfer the tithe burden from the occupiers to the owners of the land. The Government thus admitted that at the moment they did not see their way altogether out of the tithe difficulty, but promised to apply their minds to the discovery of some final and satisfactory settlement, and undertook until then to pay to incumbents the arrears of tithes, and to collect the money as well as they could from the indebted occupiers. In point of fact, Lord Althorp and his colleagues proposed to become the tithe-collectors themselves and to let any loss that might be incurred fall, for the time, upon the State and the national taxpayers. The plan was tried for a while, and we need hardly say that it proved altogether unsatisfactory. The Government had no better means of compelling the farmers to pay the tithes than those means which they had already vainly put at the disposal of the tithe-owners. The farmer who could not be coerced by the police and the military into settling his accounts with the incumbent was not likely to be any the more ready to pay up because the demand for payment was made by the Lord-Lieutenant.

[Sidenote: 1834—Henry Ward and the Irish Church]

It was becoming more and more evident every day that the whole conditions of the State Church in Ireland were responsible for the trouble of which the tithes difficulty was only an incident. Already a party was forming itself in the House of Commons composed of intellectual and far-seeing men who recognized the fact that the Irish State Church was in its very principles an anomaly and an anachronism. On May 27, 1834, a debate on the whole question of the Irish State Church and its revenues was raised in the House of Commons by Mr. Henry Ward, one of the most advanced reformers and thoughtful politicians whom the new conditions of the franchise had brought into Parliament. Henry Ward was a son of that Plumer Ward who was at one time famous as the author of a novel {213} called "Tremaine." If any memory of "Tremaine" lingers in the minds of readers who belong to the present generation, the lingering recollection is probably only due to the fact that in Disraeli's "Vivian Grey" there is an amusing scene in which the hero makes audacious use of an extemporized passage, which he professes to find in Plumer Ward's novel. Henry Ward, the son, afterwards won some distinction by his administration of the Ionian Islands while the islands were under the charge of Great Britain. In our Parliamentary history, however, he will always be remembered as the author of the first serious attempt to obtain a national recognition of the principle which, within our own times, secured its final acknowledgment by the disestablishment of the Irish Church. The resolution which was proposed merely declared that the Protestant Episcopal Establishment in Ireland exceeded the wants of the Protestant population, and that, it being the right of the State to regulate the distribution of Church property in such manner as Parliament might determine, it was the opinion of the House that the temporal possessions of the State Church in Ireland ought to be reduced. This resolution went no further in words, as it will be seen, than to ask for a reduction of the revenues of that Church on the ground that it had already more funds than were required for the full discharge of its duties among those who attended its ministrations. But then the resolution also assumed the right of the State to institute an inquiry into the application of the revenues and the needs of the surrounding population, and would necessarily carry with it the assertion of the principle that the Irish State Church existed only to minister to the wants of the Protestants of Ireland. It is clear that if once this principle were recognized by the State the whole theory of the Established Church in Ireland could no longer be maintained. That theory was that the State had a right to uphold and a duty to perform in the maintenance of a Protestant Establishment in Ireland for the purpose of converting to its doctrines that vast majority of the Irish population who could not be driven, even at the bayonet's point, to attend the {214} services conducted by a Protestant pastor. Only a few years after this time the great statesman who was afterwards to obtain from Parliament the disestablishment of the Irish Church was arguing, in his earliest published work, that the fewer the Protestants in Ireland the greater was the necessity for the State to be lavish of its money with the object of converting the outer population of Ireland to the established religion. Mr. Ward, in his speech, set himself to make it clear to the House of Commons that the collection of tithes in Ireland was, at that time, the principal cause of the disturbance and disaffection which brought so much calamity on the unhappy island, and prevented any possibility of its becoming a loyal part of the British dominions. He showed by facts and figures that the opposition to the collection of tithes was not any longer confined to the Catholic population alone, but had spread among the Protestants of dissenting denominations, and was showing itself in the North of Ireland, as well as in the provinces of the South and the West and the Midlands. He pointed to the fact that it was found necessary to maintain in Ireland, for the purpose of collecting the tithes, an army larger than that which England needed for the maintenance of her Indian Empire, and that, nevertheless, it was found impossible to collect the tithes in Ireland, and that the Government could suggest nothing better than a project for the payment of the tithes out of the pockets of the national taxpayer. Mr. Ward made it clear to the House of Commons that the revenues of the State Church in Ireland were not distributed with anything like a view to the fair and equal remuneration of its clergy. In numbers of cases the clergy of the higher ranks had enormous incomes, quite out of all proportion to any duties they were even supposed to perform, while the clergymen who actually did the work were, as a general rule, screwed down to a pitiful rate of payment which hardly kept soul and body together. Twenty pounds a year was not an uncommon stipend among the curates who did the hard work, while an annual revenue of sixty pounds was regarded as something like opulence. Where the curate received his thirty {215} or forty pounds a year or less, the incumbent usually had his two thousand a year, and in many instances much more. As we said before, the incumbent deriving a rich revenue from his office was often habitually an absentee, who left the whole of his work to be performed, as best it might be done, by the curate, half starving on a miserable pittance. Mr. Ward made out a case which must have produced some impression on any Parliamentary assembly, and could hardly fail to find attentive listeners and ready sympathy among the members of the first reformed House of Commons.

[Sidenote: 1834—George Grote]

The motion was seconded by a remarkable man in a remarkable speech. Mr. George Grote, afterwards famous as the historian of Greece, was one of the new members of Parliament. He was a man of a peculiar type, of an intellectual order which we do not usually associate with the movement of the political world, but which is, nevertheless, seldom without its representative in the House of Commons. Grote was one of the small group of men who were, at that time, described as the philosophical Radicals. He acknowledged the influence of Bentham; he was a friend and associate of the elder and the younger Mill; he was a banker by occupation, a scholar and an author by vocation; a member of Parliament from a sense of duty. Grote, no doubt, was sometimes mistaken in the political conclusions at which he arrived, but he deserved the praise which Macaulay has justly given to Burke, that he was always right in his point of view. With Grote a political measure was right or wrong only as it helped or hindered the spread of education, human happiness, and peace. He was one of the earliest and most persevering advocates of the ballot system at elections, and during his short Parliamentary career he made the ballot the subject of an annual motion. Some of us can still well remember George Grote in his much later days, and can bear testimony to the fact that, to quote the thrilling words of Schiller, he reverenced in his manhood the dreams of his youth. We can remember how steady an opponent he was of slavery, and how his sympathies went with the cause of the North during the {216} great American civil war. One can hardly suppose that Grote's style as a speaker was well suited to the ways of the House of Commons, but it is certain that whenever he spoke he always made a distinct impression on the House. Some of us who can remember John Stuart Mill addressing that same assembly at a later day, can probably form an idea of the influence exercised on the House by the man who seemed to be thinking his thoughts aloud rather than trying to win over votes or to catch encouraging applause. Grote's speech on Ward's motion brought up one view of the Irish Church which especially deserved consideration. Grote dealt with the alarms and the convictions of those who were insisting that to acknowledge any right of Parliament to interfere with the Irish State Church would be to sound in advance the doom of the English State Church as well. He pointed out that, whatever difference of opinion there might be as to the general principle of a State Establishment, the case of the two Churches, the English and the Irish, must be argued upon grounds which had nothing in common. Every argument which could be used, and must be used, for the State Church of England was an argument against the State Church in Ireland. The State Church of England was the Church to which the vast majority of the English people belonged. It ministered to their spiritual needs, it was associated with their ways, their hopes, their past, and their future. If an overwhelming majority in any country could claim the right, by virtue of their majority, to set up and maintain any institution, the Protestant population of England could claim a right to set up a State Church. But every word that could be said in support of the English State Church was a word of condemnation and of sentence on the State Church in Ireland. The Irish State Church was the Church of so small a minority that, when allowance had been made for the numbers of dissenting Protestants in Ireland, it was doubtful whether one in every twelve of the whole population could be claimed as a worshipper in the temples maintained and endowed by law. Moreover, the Irish State Church was a badge of conquest, and was {217} regarded as such by the whole Celtic population of the island. The tithe exacted from the Irish Catholic farmer was not merely a tribute exacted by the conqueror, but was also a brand of degradation on the faith and on the nationality of the Irish Celt who was called upon to meet the demand. The student of history will note with some interest that, at a day much nearer to our own, the Lord Stanley whose name we shall presently have to bring up in connection with this debate on Mr. Ward's motion made use, in the House of Lords, of an appeal which suggested the idea that he had not heard or had forgotten George Grote's speech on which we have just been making comment. Not very long before his death Lord Derby, as he had then become, was declaiming in the House of Lords against the proposal to disestablish the Irish State Church, and he warned the House that if the fabric of the Irish Church were to be touched by a destroying hand it would be in vain to hope that the destruction of the English State Church could long be averted. [Sidenote: 1834—Lord Derby] Lord Derby had always a very happy gift of quotation, and he made on this occasion a striking allusion. He reminded the House of that thrilling scene in Scott's "Guy Mannering" where the gypsy woman suddenly presents herself on the roadside to the elder, the Laird of Ellangowan and some of his friends, and, complaining of the eviction of her own people from their homesteads, bids the gentlefolk take care that their own roof-trees are not put in danger by what they had done. Lord Derby made use of this passage as a warning to the prelates and peers of England that, if they allowed the Irish State Church to be disestablished, the statelier fabric of their own Church in England might suffer by the example. It was pointed out at the time, by some of those who commented on Lord Derby's speech, that George Grote had answered this argument by unconscious anticipation, and had shown that the best security of the English State Church was the fact that it rested on a foundation totally different from that of the State Church in Ireland.

The Government were greatly embarrassed by all this {218} discussion as to the condition, the work, and the character of the Establishment in Ireland. Lord Grey, whose whole nature inclined him to move along the path of progress with slow, steady, and stately steps, began to chafe against the eagerness with which the more Radical reformers were endeavoring to hurry on the political movement. It was necessary that the Government should announce a purpose of one kind or another—should either give a general sanction to the inquiry into the claims and merits of the Irish Church, or declare themselves against any movement of reform in that direction. It was found hardly possible for the Government to ally themselves with the followers of old-fashioned Toryism, and it soon began to be rumored that Lord Grey could only keep on the reforming path at the cost of losing some of his most capable colleagues. Before long it was made publicly known that the rumors were well founded. Lord Stanley and Sir James Graham resigned their places in the Ministry. Graham afterwards held office in more than one Administration that might well be called Liberal, but Lord Stanley passed the greater part of his Parliamentary life in the ranks of uncompromising Toryism. He had begun his public career as an enthusiastic champion of Parliamentary reform, and he was the figure-head of reform again at a much later date, but on all other questions he remained a steadfast and a most eloquent advocate of genuine Tory principles. It may fittingly be mentioned here that the existence of the Radical party, recognized as such and regarded as distinct from the ordinary Liberals, began with the debates on the State Church in Ireland. The passing of the Reform Bill divided the Whigs and Tories into Liberals and Conservatives, and the discussions on the Irish Church divided those who had once been Whigs into Liberals and Radicals.