Volume X Part 2 (1/2)
As prime minister, Peel then unfolded his plans. He announced his intention to abandon the sliding scale entirely, and gradually reduce the duty on corn and other articles of necessity so that at the end of three or four years the duty would be taken off altogether. This plan did not fully satisfy the League, who argued for immediate repeal.
Indeed, there was a necessity. The poor harvests in England and the potato-rot in Ireland were producing the most fearful and painful results. A large part of the laboring population was starving. Never before had there been greater distress. On the 2d of March, 1846, the ministerial plan had to go through the ordeal of a free-trade attack.
Mr. Villiers proposed an amendment that would result in the immediate and total repeal of the corn laws. Nevertheless, the original bill pa.s.sed the Commons by a majority of ninety-eight.
It was at once carried to the House of Lords, where it encountered, as was expected, the fiercest opposition, no less than fifty-three lords taking part in the discussion. The Duke of Wellington, seeing that the corn laws were doomed, and that further opposition would only aggravate the public distress, supported the bill, as did Lord Aberdeen and other strong conservatives, and it was finally carried by a majority of forty-seven.
Before the bill for the virtual repeal of the corn laws was pa.s.sed by the House of Lords, the administration of Sir Robert Peel abruptly closed. An Irish coercion bill had been introduced by the government, not very wisely, even while the corn bill was under discussion by the Commons. The bill was of course opposed by the Irish followers of O'Connell, and by many of the Liberal party. The radical members, led by Cobden and Bright, were sure to oppose it. The protectionists, full of wrath, and seeing their opportunity to overthrow the government, joined the Liberals and the Irish members, and this coalition threw out the bill by a majority of seventy-three. The government of course resigned.
Nor was the premier loath to throw off his burdens amid calumny and reproach. He cheerfully retired to private life. He concluded the address on his resignation, after having paid a magnificent tribute to Cobden--by whose perseverance, energy, honesty of conviction, and unadorned eloquence the great corn-law reform had been thus far advanced--in these words: ”In quitting power, I shall leave a name severely blamed, I fear, by many men, who, without personal interest but only with a view of the public good, will bitterly deplore the rupture of party ties, from a belief that fidelity to party engagements and the maintenance of great parties are powerful and essential means of government. [I fear also] that I shall be blamed by others who, without personal interest, adhere to the principles of protection, which they regard as necessary to the prospects of the country; that I shall leave a name detested by all monopolists, who, from less honorable motives, claim a protection by which they largely profit. But I shall perhaps leave a name which will sometimes be p.r.o.nounced by expressions of good-will by those whose lot in this world is to labor, who in the sweat of their brow eat their daily bread; and who may remember me when they renew their strength by food at once abundant and untaxed, and which will be the better relished because no longer embittered by any feeling of injustice.” He then resumed his seat amidst the loudest applause from all sides of the House; and when he left Westminster Hall, leaning on the arm of Sir George Clark, a vast mult.i.tude filled the street, and with uncovered heads accompanied him in respectful silence to the door of his house.
Sir Robert Peel continued to attend the meetings of Parliament as an independent member, making no factious opposition, and giving his support to every measure he approved,--more as a sage than a partisan, having in view mainly the good of the country whose government he no longer led.
It was soon after Peel's retirement from office that O'Connell, too, made his last speech in the House of Commons, not as formerly in trumpet tones, but with enfeebled voice. ”I am afraid,” said the fainting athlete, ”that the House is not sufficiently aware of the extent of the misery in Ireland. I do not think that members understand the acc.u.mulated miseries under which the people are at present suffering. It has been estimated that five thousand adults and ten thousand children have already perished with famine, and that twenty-five per cent of the whole population will perish, unless the House will afford effective relief. I a.s.sure the House most solemnly that I am not exaggerating; I can establish all that I have said by many and painful proofs. And the necessary result must be typhus fever, which in fact has already broken out, and is desolating whole districts; it leaves alive only one in ten of those whom it attacks.” This appeal doubtless had its effect in demonstrating the absolute need of a repeal of the corn laws. But it is as the ”liberator” of the Roman Catholic population of Ireland in the great emanc.i.p.ation struggle,--triumphantly concluded as early as 1829,--and the incessant labors after that for the enlargement of Irish conditions, that O'Connell will be remembered.
”Honor, glory, and eternal grat.i.tude,” exclaimed Lacordaire, ”to the man who collected in his powerful hand the scattered elements of justice and deliverance, and who, pus.h.i.+ng them to their logical conclusions with a vigorous patience which thirty years could not exhaust, at last poured on his country the unhoped-for delight of liberty of conscience, and thus deserved not only the t.i.tle of Liberator of his Country but the oec.u.menical t.i.tle of Liberator of his Church.”
O'Connell, Cobden, and Sir Robert Peel,--what great names in the history of England in the agitating period between the pa.s.sage of the Reform Bill and that of the repeal of the corn laws! I could add other ill.u.s.trious names,--especially those of Brougham and Lord John Russell; but the sun of glory around the name of the first was dimmed after his lord chancellors.h.i.+p, while that of the latter was yet to blaze more brightly when he a.s.sumed the premiers.h.i.+p on the retirement of his great predecessor, with such able a.s.sistants as Lord Palmerston, Earl Grey, Macaulay, and others. These men, as Whigs, carried out more fully the liberal and economic measures which Sir Robert Peel had inaugurated amid a storm of wrath from his former supporters, reminding one of the fury and disappointment of the higher and wealthy cla.s.ses when Mr.
Gladstone--a still bolder reformer, although nursed and cradled in the tenets of monopolists--introduced his measures for the relief of Ireland.
During the administration of Sir Robert Peel there was another agitation which at one time threatened serious consequences, but as it came to nothing it has not the historical importance of the Anti-Corn-Law League. It was a fanatical uprising of the lower cla.s.ses to obtain still greater political privileges, led by extreme radicals, of whom Mr.
Feargus O'Connor was the most prominent leader, and Mr. Henry Vincent was the most popular speaker. The centre of this movement was not Manchester, but Birmingham. The operatives of Manchester wanted cheaper bread; those of Birmingham wanted an extension of the franchise: and as Lord John Russell had opposed the re-opening of the reform question, the radicals were both disappointed and infuriated. The original leaders of parliamentary reform had no sympathy with such a rabble as now clamored for extended reform. They demanded universal suffrage, annual Parliaments, vote by ballot, abolition of property qualifications, payment of members of Parliament, and the division of the country into equal electoral districts. These were the six points of the people's charter,--not absurd to the eyes of Americans, but utterly out of the question in such an aristocratic country as England, and advocated only by the working-cla.s.ses and their incendiary leaders. Discontent and misery were the chief causes of the movement, which was managed without ability. The agitation began in 1836 and continued to 1848. At first the government allowed it, so far as it was confined to meetings, speeches, and the circulation of tracts,--knowing full well that, as it made no appeal to the influential and intelligent cla.s.ses, it would soon expend itself. I was lecturing at the time in Birmingham, and the movement excited contempt rather than alarm among the people I met. I heard Vincent two or three times in his chapel,--for I believe he was educated as a dissenting minister of some sort,--but his eloquence made no impression upon me; it was clever and fluent enough, but shallow and frothy. At last he was foolishly arrested by the government, who had really nothing to fear from him, and imprisoned at Newport in Wales.
In England reforms have been effected only by appeals to reason and intelligence, and not by violence. Infuriated mobs, successful in France in overturning governments and thrones, have been easily repressed in England with comparatively little bloodshed; for power has ever been lodged in the hands of the upper and middle cla.s.ses, intolerant of threatened violence. In England, since the time of Cromwell, revolutions have been bloodless; and reforms have been gradual,--to meet pressing necessities, or to remove glaring injustice and wrongs, never to introduce an impractical equality or to realize visionary theories. And they have ever been effected through Parliament. All popular agitations have failed unless they have appealed to reason and right.
Thus the People's Charter movement, beginning about 1838, was a signal failure, because from the practical side it involved no great principles of political economy, nothing that enriches a nation; and from the side of popular rights it was premature, crude, and represented no intelligent desire on the part of the people. It was a movement nursed in discontent, and carried on with bitterness and illegal violence. It was wild, visionary, and bitter from the start, and arose at a period when the English people were in economic distress, and when all Europe was convulsed with insurrectionary uprisings, and revolutionary principles were mixed up with socialism and anarchy. The Chartist agitation continued with meetings and riots and national conventions until 1848, when the Revolution in France gave a great impulse to it.
At last some danger was apprehended from the monster meetings and inflammatory speeches of the Chartists, and government resolved to suppress the whole movement by the strong arm. The police force throughout the kingdom was strengthened, and one hundred and seventy thousand special constables were sworn in, while extensive military preparations were intrusted to the Duke of Wellington. The Chartists, overrating their strength, held a great meeting on Kensington Common, and sent a pet.i.tion of more than five millions of names to the House of Commons; but instead of half a million who were expected to a.s.semble on the Common with guns and pikes, only a few thousand dared to meet, and the pet.i.tion itself was discovered to be forged, chiefly with fict.i.tious names. It was a battle on the part of the agitators without ball cartridges, in which nothing was to be seen but smoke. Ridicule and contempt overwhelmed the leaders, and the movement collapsed.
Although the charter failed to become law, the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the people has been gradually enlarged by Parliament in true deliberate English fas.h.i.+on, as we shall see in future lectures. Perhaps the Chartist movement may have ripped up the old sod and prepared the soil for the later peaceful growth; but in itself it accomplished nothing for which it was undertaken.
The repeal of the corn laws in 1846 was followed, as was the Reform Bill of 1832, by a series of other reforms of a similar kind,--all in the direction of free-trade, which from that time has continued to be the established principle of English legislation on all the great necessities of life. Scarcely had Lord John Russell in 1846 taken the helm of state, when the duties on sugar were abolished, no discrimination being shown between sugar raised in the British colony of Jamaica and that which was raised in Cuba and other parts of the world.
The navigation laws, which prohibited the importation of goods except in British s.h.i.+ps, or s.h.i.+ps which belonged to the country where the goods were produced, were repealed or greatly modified. The whole colonial system was also revised, especially in Canada; and sanitary measures were taken to prevent disease in all the large towns of the country.
In the midst of these various reforms, which the government under Lord John Russell prosecuted with great zeal and ability, and by which a marked improvement took place in the condition of the people, Sir Robert Peel was thrown from his horse in London, June 29, 1850, and survived but a few days. His accidental death created universal lamentation, for everybody felt that a great national loss had occurred. In spite of the bitterness of the monopolists, disappointed in their gains, no death was ever more seriously and universally lamented in England. Other statesmen blazed upon their contemporaries with more brilliant original genius than Peel, but no one ever had more force of character than he, or was more respected for his candor, truthfulness, and patriotism. If he had not the divination to originate, he showed transcendent ability in appropriating and making his own the worthy conceptions of others. He was among those few statesmen who are willing to renounce the dearest opinions of youth and the prejudices of manhood when convinced of their unsoundness.
Peel was a great administrator and a great debater. His character was austere, his temperament was cold, his manners were awkward and shy; he was chary in the bestowal of pensions and rewards; and by reason of his rather unsympathetic nature he never was a favorite with artists and literary men. It was his conviction that literary men were not sufficiently practical to be intrusted with political office. Hence he refused to make Monckton Milnes an under-secretary of state. When Gladstone published his book on Church and State, being then a young man, it is said that Peel threw it contemptuously on the floor, exclaiming, ”What a pity it is that so able a man should injure his political prospects by writing such tras.h.!.+” Nor was Peel sufficiently pa.s.sionate to become a great orator like O'Connell or Mirabeau; and yet he was a great man, and the nation was ultimately grateful for the services he rendered to his country and to civilization. Had his useful and practical life been prolonged, he probably would again have taken the helm of state. He was always equal to the occasion; but no occasion was sufficiently great to give him the _eclat_ which Pitt enjoyed in the wars of Napoleon. Under the administration of Peel the country was at peace, and no such internal dangers threatened it as those which marked the pa.s.sage of the Reform Bill.
Sir Robert Peel was one of the most successful ministers that England ever had. Certainly no minister was ever more venerated than he; and even the Duke of Wellington did nothing without his advice and co-operation. In fact, he led the ministry of the duke as Canning did that of the Earl of Liverpool; and had he been less shy and reserved, he would not have pa.s.sed as so proud a man, and would have been more popular. There is no trait of character in a great man less understood than what we call pride, which often is not pride at all, but excessive shyness and reserve, based on sensitiveness and caution rather than self-exaggeration and egotism.
Few statesmen have done more than Peel to advance the material interests of the people; yet he never was a popular idol, and his history fails to kindle the enthusiasm with which we study the political career of Pitt or Canning or Disraeli or Gladstone. He was regarded as a great potentate rather than as a great genius; and he loved to make his power felt irrespective of praise or censure from literary men, to whom he was civil enough, but whose society he did not court. Politics were the element in which he lived, and politicians were his chief a.s.sociates outside the family circle, which he adorned. And yet when distinguished merit in the Church or in the field of literature was brought to his notice, he was ready to reward it.
As a proof of the growing fame of Sir Robert Peel, no less than three biographies of him have lately been issued from the Press. Such, after a lapse of forty years, indicates the lasting reputation he has won as a statesman; but as a statesman only. He filled no other sphere. He was not a lawyer like Brougham; not a novelist like Beaconsfield; not a historian like Macaulay; not an essayist and reviewer like Gladstone. He was contented to be a great parliamentary leader alone.
AUTHORITIES.
Molesworth's History of England; Miss Martineau's History of England; Justin McCarthy's Life of Sir Robert Peel; Alison's History of Europe,--all of which should be read in connection with the Lives of contemporary statesmen, especially of Cobden, Bright, and Lord John Russell. The Lives of foreign statesmen shed but little light, since the public acts of Sir Robert Peel were chiefly confined to the domestic history of England.
CAVOUR.
1810-1861.