Part 4 (1/2)

Rousseau was a profligate. The French aristocracy had been ma.s.sacred. The French Church had been stripped of its possessions. The French landed proprietors had been spoiled. All this had been done in the name of the rights of man. The English Reformers believed in the rights of man. These had been proved by events in France to be incompatible with law, order, religion, and morality. All who valued these must unite in their defence against the deadly opinions. Belief in the rights of man marked an Englishman like a contagious disease. Atheists, Theists, and Christians, Trinitarians and Unitarians, Churchmen and Dissenters, Reformers, Radicals, and Republicans, landowners, manufacturers, and artisans, people who believed in vested interests and people who did not, all were Jacobins, and all were swept away in one turbid flood of unreasoning invective.

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Every proposal for change was opposed by the same arguments. Every inst.i.tution, good, bad, or indifferent, became a foothold for shuddering Conservatism. Alteration became synonymous with evil; there was no good save in establishment. Even the Slave Trade was strengthened against pious Tory gentlemen like Wilberforce by the same arguments which defended the representative system against the profane Republican artisans of Lancas.h.i.+re. Thus Lord Abingdon claimed to have ”incontrovertibly proved that the proposition for the abolition of the Slave Trade is a French proposition, that it is grounded in and founded upon French principles, that it means neither more nor less than liberty and equality, that it has Tom Paine's _Rights of Man_ for its chief and best support ... that it has had in the colonies of France all the direful effects necessarily flowing from such principles, namely, those of insubordination, anarchy, confusion, murder, havock, devastation, and ruin.”[132] Nearly thirty years after the publication of Paine's book, Lord Wellesley, denouncing universal suffrage, annual elections, and voting by ballot, said that, if carried into execution, they ”would be the destruction of all regular government, the destruction of all religion, and the destruction of all private property.”[133] But the most ludicrous expression of this fear of change occurs in one of Windham's speeches against the Bill to suppress bull-baiting. The House of Commons solemnly listened to a solemn a.s.surance that the Bill was promoted by Methodists and Jacobins, and that it was directed to the destruction of the old English character by the abolition of all rural sports. ”Out of the whole number of the disaffected, he questioned if a single bull-baiter could be found, or if a single sportsman had distinguished himself in the Corresponding Society ... the antiquity of the thing was deserving of respect, for antiquity was the best preservation of the Church and State.”[134]

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

Both sides set themselves to organize machinery for the dissemination of their opinions. The Radicals used the Society for Const.i.tutional Information. The extremists established the Corresponding Society, whose branches, composed chiefly of the middle and working cla.s.ses, corresponded with similar societies in France, held meetings and published their resolutions in the newspapers, and industriously circulated copies of the _Rights of Man_. So vigorous were their operations that a Royal Proclamation was issued in May, 1792, denouncing these ”wicked and seditious writings” and correspondence with ”persons in foreign parts,” and exhorting all subjects of the Crown to discourage them.[135] In November the Tories formed an a.s.sociation for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, which declared that ”It appears from history and observation, that the inequality of rank and fortune in this happy country is more the result of every man's own exertions than of any controlling inst.i.tution of the State. Men become great who have greatly distinguished themselves by the application of talents natural or acquired; and men become rich who have persevered with industry in the application to trade and commerce, to manufactures, and other useful employments.”[136]

Such language was hardy enough in a society where public dignities were monopolized by a few families, whose inherited wealth was augmented as often by jobbery as by industry. The a.s.sociation seems to have acted as a private detective agency and sent reports and secret information to the Government. But the honours of agitation rested, as usual, with the reforming party. If their success was small, it was due less to the private efforts of their opponents than to the superior resources of the Government itself.

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It is difficult to discover how widely the new ideas had spread by the end of the century. The war with France, which lasted almost continuously from 1793 to 1815, probably drew off much of the national enthusiasm. A foreign war is always favourable to the enemies of domestic liberty, and however much their distresses may drive common men to hate their governors, they generally hate them less than the national enemy. Industrious as they were, the agitators were too closely identified with France to be popular, and it was not till the end of the war that the middle and working cla.s.ses as a whole began to lend them a favourable ear. In the meantime, they were regarded by the Government as infinitely more powerful than they really were, and for thirty years they worked in constant danger of imprisonment or transportation. They had been depressed, in common with Whigs like Fox and Grey, by the ferocity of the French mobs. But the invasion of France by the Duke of Brunswick and the complete victory of the new national Government, restored their confidence at the same time as it reawakened the terrors of the Tories. The most trifling expressions of sympathy with the French people or their principles exposed them to spies and informers and zealous loyalists.[137] On the 8th May James Ridgway and H. D. Symonds were sentenced to four years' imprisonment for publis.h.i.+ng Paine's works. On the 27th, for saying in a coffee-house, ”I am for equality; I see no reason why one man should be greater than another; I would have no king, and the const.i.tution of this country is a bad one,” Mr. Frost was struck oft the roll of attorneys and sentenced to an hour in the pillory and six months in Newgate. On the 1st October Mr. Pigott and Dr. Hudson were tried for drinking ”The French Republic” in a coffee-house. At Leicester a man called Vaughan distributed a handbill criticizing the war because it inflicted hards.h.i.+p on the poor. He was sent to prison for three months. Benjamin {122} Bull distributed the _Rights of Man_ at Bath, and was imprisoned for a year.[138] Paine himself was tried for seditious libel in 1792, and in his absence was outlawed. But the most ferocious punishments were inflicted in Scotland. In England, short of high treason, there was no legal offence possible except sedition or seditious libel, for which the punishment was a term of imprisonment. In Scotland the offenders might be transported. In September, 1793, the Rev. Thomas Fysche Palmer, Unitarian minister at Dundee, for publis.h.i.+ng an address couched in very temperate language, from which it was proved that he had struck out some more extravagant expressions, was sentenced to seven years' transportation. The Whigs in Parliament protested against this monstrous sentence. But the House, by a large majority, refused even to compel the Home Secretary to detain the convict s.h.i.+p pending its revision.[139] In the same year Thomas Muir, a gentleman of acknowledged respectability, was sentenced to fourteen years'

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

Palmer.[140] Other Reformers, chiefly members of Corresponding Societies, met at Edinburgh in December, 1792, in what they rashly called a ”National Convention.” This consisted of delegates from Societies all over the kingdom. It pa.s.sed resolutions, appointed committees, and acted as a permanent body of political delegates is accustomed to act, in order to further the cause of Parliamentary Reform. There was nothing violent in the objects, the proceedings, or the language of the Convention, which pa.s.sed a resolution in favour of government by King, Lords, and Commons without a single dissentient voice.[141] But the French Revolution had begun by the meeting of a ”Convention,” and the delegates, in addition to selecting that unfortunate t.i.tle, presented an address to the French National Convention, and habitually addressed each other, in imitation of the French, as ”citizens.” This was {123} enough for the Government. A representative body, with a French t.i.tle, in communication with the French Government, and using French forms of speech, must meditate that sort of revolution which had been contrived by the French people. It fell upon the delegates with all the ferocity of despotism in a panic. William Skirving, Maurice Margarot, and Joseph Gerald were transported for fourteen years, and Alexander Callender was outlawed. English juries were less frantic than Scottish. The members of the London Corresponding Society had done similar acts in England. But in 1794, when several of them, including Horne Tooke, were tried for high treason, all were acquitted.

The precise details of all these proceedings, and the widespread suffering which they caused, are not important for this book. It is enough to state here that there was much expression of discontent, and that the Government dealt with it in the worst possible way. The wise course was to detach the respectable agitators from the agitators who were not respectable by substantial improvements in the franchise and the distribution of seats.

But the Government were incapable of drawing distinctions, and, by confounding all sorts of discontent in their repression, alienated and embittered even those whom they had it in their power to conciliate.

Evidence of any general conspiracy to alter the existing order by violent means there is none. Nothing was ever published on behalf of the Government itself which proved anything but const.i.tutional and orderly expressions of dissatisfaction, with occasional outbreaks of reckless language and exceedingly rare instances of such acts as the purchase or manufacture of weapons.[142] There were no collections of arms, no riots, except such as were purely industrial, and no demonstrations of force. Not a single life was ever taken or attempted by the Reformers, and the only dangerous political disturbance of the {124} period was the outbreak of the Tory mob, who looted and burnt the houses of Dissenters and Radicals at Birmingham.

But the governing cla.s.s was afraid, and in its fear it struck out blindly at everything which it disliked.

The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended in 1791, and the executive received power to arrest and detain suspects without trial. At a later date, extraordinary powers were created. A meeting held near London in October, 1795, was followed by an attempt to a.s.sa.s.sinate the King. The meeting was orderly, and there was not a shadow of proof that there was any connection between the two events. But the Government took advantage of the prevailing indignation to create new crimes, and to increase the punishments for existing crimes. The Treason Act made it an offence, punishable on a second conviction with seven years' transportation, to ”incite or stir up the people to hatred or dislike of His Majesty's person or the established Government and const.i.tution of the realm,” and extended the definition of high treason. The Sedition Act prohibited the holding of meetings without the presence of a magistrate, made it an offence punishable with death for twelve persons to remain together after a magistrate had called upon them to disperse, and declared that any house, where a substantial number of persons beyond that of the resident family a.s.sembled for a common purpose, should be treated as a disorderly house, unless specially licensed. In 1799, after the mutiny in the fleet at the Nore and the great Irish Rebellion, in both of which the Society of United Irishmen had been involved, new statutes made it a criminal offence, punishable by fine and imprisonment, to belong to the Corresponding Society, or the Societies of United Irishmen and United Englishmen, or to take oaths of secrecy. No printer was to be allowed to conduct his business without obtaining a certificate from a clerk of the peace. No attempt was made to discriminate between the Corresponding Societies, whose violence was confined to their language, and the other two societies, which had undoubtedly been concerned in the mutiny and the Rebellion. Individual atrocities were ascribed to French principles. The Reform Societies preached French principles. {125} Therefore they were as guilty as the criminals themselves. In effect, all organized political agitation was suppressed.

All these measures were steadily opposed by the small body of Parliamentary Whigs who had not lost their belief in free government. Fox, Grey, and Whitbread in the Commons, and Bedford, Lansdowne,[143] Moira, and Lauderdale in the Lords, denounced every restriction upon the right of free discussion, and at huge meetings at Copenhagen House and in Palace Yard they protested against the Treason and Sedition Bills. They were not in sympathy with the extremists, who often attacked them as bitterly as the Tories themselves. There is nothing so obnoxious to violent opinions as moderation. It seems to add hypocrisy to wickedness. But to those who can see historical events in proportion the good service of this handful of statesmen is beyond question. They maintained the purely Liberal view that toleration is not to be confined to opinions of which we ourselves approve.

”All political libels,” said Fox, ”he would leave to themselves; discussions on government, so far as they did not interfere with private character, he would permit to pa.s.s entirely unrestrained.”[144] ”The best security of a Government,” said Tierney, ”is in the free complaints of a people.”[145] ”The safety of the State,” said Grey, ”could only be found in the protection of the liberties of the people.... There never was an extensive discontent without great misgovernment. The people ought to be taught to look to Parliament with a confident expectation that their complaints would be heard, and protection afforded to them. When no attention was paid to the calls of the people for relief, when their pet.i.tions were rejected, and their sufferings aggravated, was it wonderful that at last public discontents should a.s.sume a formidable aspect?”[146]

Protests sometimes became threats. Fox declared in 1795 that if the Treason and Sedition Bills were carried into law, the propriety of resistance to government would no longer be a matter of morality but of prudence only, and in this he was supported by Sheridan and Grey.

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These Whigs at least contrived to see the popular point of view, and would have suffered opinions which they would do nothing to promote. The Tories saw no point of view but their own. They hated free discussion, because they saw that it meant the end of the inst.i.tutions which they cherished.

Discussion was to them only a stage on the way to rapine and murder. It made, therefore, no difference whether discussion were honest and orderly or not. They were resolute to maintain existing establishments, and the most const.i.tutional of critics was as much a public enemy as the most ferocious of rebels. They drew no distinction between agitation and revolution. They inquired into discontents, but only into their extent and not into their causes. They applied violent remedies, not to the real disease, but to its symptoms. The patient was noisy, and they beat him for being noisy, when they ought to have cured the fever which produced his delirium. The vice of their system lay not so much in their suppression of disorder as in their neglect of reform. Order must be maintained by government, even when the breach of it is the fault of government. But it must be accompanied by redress of grievances. It is the business of a statesman to manage his people, not to compel them, and however necessary it may sometimes be for him to enforce the law, it remains the weakest, and should always be the last of his instruments. It is useless for him to maintain order unless it is accompanied by goodwill. Some men may be const.i.tutionally so disaffected that nothing can appease them. But the majority can always be satisfied by a generous treatment of their grievances. Even after the crisis of the Revolution Pitt might have made the state of England more happy than it was. But what he did not do was not so important as what he had not done. He believed in Parliamentary Reform, in Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation, in the relief of Dissenters, in Free Trade. He was in power from 1783 to the outbreak of the Revolution, and might have conciliated the middle cla.s.s and the Irish, diminished public corruption, stimulated industry, and reduced the cost of living. This would not have prevented all discontent. But it would have confined it to its essential and irreducible minimum. {127} Whether this inaction was due to his own lethargy or the incurable selfishness and stupidity of his a.s.sociates and supporters, it was undoubtedly responsible for a large part of his subsequent difficulties. He left heaps of combustible material untouched, and it was his own fault that it caught fire. In this unhappy state, lurching between bitter discontent and savage repression, English liberty struggled through the great war.

The affairs of Ireland furnished another battle-ground for contending principles during this period. The complete subjugation of that country was ended in 1782, when demonstrations of armed force wrested legislative independence from an England surrounded by foreign enemies. The Irish Parliament was left free to make such laws as it pleased for Ireland, and the deliberate destruction of Irish industries in the interest of English ceased for ever. But this independence, though won by the united efforts of all creeds and cla.s.ses, was the independence of a Protestant oligarchy. The great bulk of the Irish people escaped an external only to submit to an internal tyrant. The Irish Parliament, though patriotic in matters of commerce, was hardly any more indulgent than the English in its religious policy. Catholics were excluded from the Houses at Dublin as vigorously as from those at Westminster, and few important mitigations of their lot were obtained from their own countrymen. In 1792 Catholics were admitted to the Bar, mixed marriages were allowed, and it was made legal for a Catholic to educate his children abroad. In 1793 all public offices were thrown open to them, except seats in Parliament and the highest places in the Army, the Judicature, and the Civil Service. These changes removed the worst disabilities of the upper and middle cla.s.ses, who had now fewer disabilities than their fellows in England and Scotland, and there was thus exhibited a considerable reduction of Protestant insolence. The supremacy of Pitt in England aroused great hopes that the last stones of the edifice would soon be removed. Catholic emanc.i.p.ation would not have cured all the ills of Ireland, any more than Parliamentary Reform would have cured all the ills of England. An excessive population, {128} crowded into agriculture by the destruction of manufactures, demoralized by landowners who were too often thriftless or absentees, and deprived of education by the laws which prohibited teaching by Catholic priests or laymen, was in a condition which mere political reforms could do little to improve. What Catholic disabilities did was to poison economic discontent by the memories of racial and religious persecution. The conduct of the English Government of the day was dangerously uncertain. The hopes of the Catholics were roused in 1794 by the appointment of Lord Fitzwilliam as Lord-Lieutenant.

Fitzwilliam was notoriously in favour of the Catholic claims, even though he was not authorized to make any promises on behalf of the Government. He was too open in his professions of sympathy, and when Protestant bigotry procured his recall, the apparent treachery only aggravated the bitterness of old subjection. Catholic resentment and Protestant arrogance soon brought matters to a crisis. Neither party gained credit from the rising of 1798. The excesses of the magistrates and the troops before, during, and after the fighting were often of mediaeval atrocity, and the retaliation of the rebels cannot be justified, though it is amply explained by the character of the provocation. This fearful outbreak in the middle of the French War satisfied the English Government that only by a Union could Ireland be kept in peace. The good effects of the recent concessions had vanished in this whirlwind of savagery, and Protestant and Catholic were once more in the temper of the Middle Ages. Mutual goodwill could only be restored by a common tutelage.

There was nothing bad in itself in the plan for a legislative Union. Had it been carried through with a just regard for Irish opinion, and had it been followed by a strict attention to the grievances of the common people, the Union might have been one of the brilliant successes of the English race.

In fact it was itself effected by shameful means, and it was followed by misgovernment as fatally unsympathetic as that which had preceded it.

English rule in Ireland was less ferocious in the {129} nineteenth century than in the eighteenth. But it was no less conspicuous a failure. No const.i.tutional machinery can be better than the men who work it, and Englishmen after the Union showed themselves no less unimaginative and egoistic than their predecessors. The objects of the Union were stated by Pitt, with perfect good faith, to be the subst.i.tution of government by an impartial authority for government by a faction which was steeped in the memories of old oppression. ”An impartial Legislature standing aloof from local party connection, sufficiently removed from the influence of contending factions to be advocate or champion of neither, being so placed as to have no superst.i.tious reverence for the names and prejudices of ancient families, who have so long enjoyed the exclusive monopolies of certain public patronages and property ... this is the thing that is wanted for Ireland.”[147] That was what was wanted for Ireland. What it obtained was a Legislature as partial, as inextricably involved in local party connection, and as closely wrapped about with superst.i.tious reverence for ancient families and their patronages and property as could have been contrived. For half a century at least the government of Ireland remained what it has always been in the hands of England, government by armed force, in the interests of the landlords against the tenants, of the Protestants against the Catholics. A system which Pitt devised as a protection against the old abuses was converted into an effective engine for their maintenance. Pitt was himself partly to blame for this disastrous failure.

He probably never saw the need for economic reorganization. But he saw clearly enough the need for the ending of religious strife, which poisoned the whole temper of the people and wasted on the jealousies of sects and the hatred of government energy which would otherwise be free to run in healthy and productive channels. His weakness in not pus.h.i.+ng on with Lord Fitzwilliam made the rebellion of 1798 inevitable. Similar weakness after the Union made the const.i.tutional change useless. It was undoubtedly part of his original plan to emanc.i.p.ate the Catholics. But the King, the {130} Church, and Protestant Ireland were too strong for him. Pitt resigned. The Whigs came into office, with a Ministry which was united at least on the Catholic question. The King again had his way, and rather than hold office without fulfilling their Catholic pledges, they resigned in their turn.[148] Pitt's course was clear. He should have refused to come back without permission to do what he thought right. But he preferred the convenience of the King, and accepted office on condition that the Catholic question was left open. This was as effective as a definite refusal.

Canning persuaded the House of Commons in 1812, but Eldon in the Lords defeated his colleague's Bill, and until Eldon could be expelled there was no hope for Ireland. The friendly Tories would never unite with the Whigs to defeat the hostile Tories. Nothing was done to solve the problem, and Ireland, for a generation after the Union, was governed by coercion.

Throughout this wretched dispute the Whigs maintained the ancient doctrines of their party with regard to religious disabilities. But the problem aroused controversy about a second conception of more recent growth, the conception of nationality. Burke had tried to treat Ireland as an equal nation for commercial purposes. The Whigs of 1801 extended the idea to its extreme limits. Had the Irish Parliament the right to surrender its powers to a Parliament of the United Kingdom without receiving the approval of its own electors? Unquestionably it had the legal right. Had it also the moral right? The Whigs held that it had not. ”What right,” asked Sheridan, ”has the Irish Parliament to resolve that, instead of going back to their const.i.tuents, they shall form part of a foreign legislature?”[149] ”The Union,” said Fox, ”is not an alteration, but a destruction and annihilation of the Irish Const.i.tution. Union therefore, like revolution, cannot be justifiable but by the unequivocal {131} consent of the people.”[150] Pitt opposed this doctrine on the usual Tory ground. It led, he said, immediately ”to the system of universal right of suffrage in the people, to the doctrine that each man should have a share in the government of the country by having a choice for his representative; and then goes back to the whole system of Jacobinism.”[151]

The Union was therefore carried through the instrumentality of a legislature bribed to betray its const.i.tuents. This transaction was much worse than it appeared. The English Government which neglected the wishes of the Irish people in this matter would neglect them in all others. The Union was a supreme act of despotism, the fitting prelude to the systematic disregard of Irish opinion which followed it. ”There must,” wrote Fox a few years later, ”be a fundamental change in the system of governing Ireland, to give even a chance of future quiet there.... That there should be a part of the United Kingdom to which our laws, nominally at least, extend, and which is nevertheless in such a state as to call for martial law, etc., so repeatedly, is of itself ground for reconsidering, at least, the system by which it is governed.”[152] The Tories could not understand, even in the case of England, that it is the business of a governor to manage and not to coerce the governed, and race and religion combined to obscure still further their view of Ireland. The system remained what it had been and was, and the consequences of this fatal negligence are with us to this day.

The foreign policy of the Government gave not a few opportunities for expressions of Liberalism. The rights of nationalities were in issue in the beginning of the French War, in the treatment of Ireland, in the descent upon Copenhagen, and in the negotiations which followed the downfall {132} of Napoleon. In all these cases the Whig Opposition stated the pure Liberal doctrine. In that of the war with France, one section of them carried the doctrine to an absurd extent. In origin, the war was unquestionably a war of interference, an attempt to force upon the French people an obnoxious government, and to compel them to abandon those new and revolutionary principles which they had adopted for themselves. Pitt himself had apparently no such object, and was hurried into the war partly by the French threats of a.s.sisting other peoples to revolt, and chiefly by the irresistible pressure of the English governing cla.s.s. It is impossible to read contemporary literature, the debates in Parliament, the newspapers, the pamphlets of Burke and other acknowledged leaders of opinion, the resolutions of corporations and public meetings, and the private correspondence, without coming to the conclusion that the great bulk of influential political society was inspired by a fanatical hatred of the new opinions. Whatever pretexts may have been urged in public, and may have been in fact held by comparatively sober people like Pitt, the impelling force behind the English armies was dread of French principles. The sword of the invader could not have been feared more than the fatal contagion of his ideas. The Germans and Austrians, who invaded France in 1792 to restore the monarchy, were less concerned to hide their motives than the English Government. But there was little difference in substance between them. The Continental Sovereigns moved of their own motion. The English Ministers were carried on by their supporters.