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TEN ENGLISHMEN OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

By James Richard Joy

1902

To
My Daughter
Helen
With Her Father's Love

PREFACE

The object of this work is to set forth with as much clearness as possible the more important facts in the history of England in the nineteenth century. We have chosen to do this through the medium of biography, in the belief that the lives of a few representative men would present better opportunities for interesting and effective treatment than an historical narrative, which must have been encumbered by a mass of detail not capable of effective disposition within the limited space at our command. An introductory chapter serves to give a general view of the course of events and to show the relations of the men and movements which are afterward presented in more detail.

With but one exception our "Ten Englishmen" are men in public life, political or military. Artists, authors, preachers, and scholars were purposely left out of the account, because they are to receive prominence in other parts of the course for which this volume was written. The exception was made in the case of George Stephenson, because the revolution in transportation, due to his improvement of the locomotive engine, has had such a powerful influence upon the industrial development of the nation.

In bringing these great personages before the reader our intention has been quite as much historical as biographical. Each name is linked with some conspicuous problem in statesmanship, and the endeavor has been to set forth the work as well as the workman. It is hoped that the library notes appended to each chapter will be of assistance to the earnest student, in supplementing the meager outlines of this volume with the abundance of personal detail and wealth of dramatic incident which give life and action to history.

The appendix should not be overlooked. Its selections from authentic speeches, letters, dispatches, and other writings bring the reader into touch with the men who made England great.

One word more. Our "Ten" are not necessarily "THE Ten." They are the men whose lives lay in line with the writer's plan. If they serve to accentuate the leading features of the history we are not disposed to argue with those who would present other candidates for the honor of inclusion in the list.

James Richard Joy

Plainfield, N.J., June 4, 1902.

INTRODUCTION

ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The opening of the nineteenth century found England in the midst of a great foreign war, which for almost a generation absorbed the thought and energy of the nation, and postponed for the time the vital questions of economic and political reform which clamored for settlement.

THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON

The war began in 1793, when the French nation, having overturned its ancient throne, and revolutionized its social and political institutions, set out on a democratic crusade for "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," which involved it in a conflict with the governments of Europe. William Pitt, who had been Prime Minister of George III. since 1783, had twice banded the European states against the French republican armies; but while the English fleets remained masters of the seas, the enthusiasm of the French soldiers, and the genius of their young generals, had thus far proved too strong for the mercenary battalions of despotism. In the closing month of the year 1800, Pitt's "Second Coalition" had been shattered by the defeat of the Allies at Hohenlinden. The Peace of Amiens which shortly ensued (March, 1802, to May, 1803) was but a delusion. England greeted it with joy and hope, but soon discovered its unreality. From the renewal of hostilities, in May, 1803, until the final triumph of the allies, in 1815, the war resolved itself into a struggle between Napoleon and England. This young Corsican lieutenant had raised himself by sheer force of genius and unscrupulous ambition to absolute power. His scheme for the subjugation of Europe beat down every obstacle except the steady and unbending opposition of England. Pitt, who had withdrawn from the government because of the stupid King's refusal to honor his Minister's pledges of equal rights to the Irish Catholics, was recalled by the universal voice ot the nation to organize the resistance. Napoleon had assembled immense armaments upon the Channel coast of France for a descent on England, and had created a vast flotilla to transport the force to Kent. Great Britain trembled with excited apprehension. Three hundred thousand volunteers offered their services to the government. But, as often in the past, Britain's best defense was her wooden walls, and the sagacity, seamanship, and valor of her sailors, who out- manoeuvered the combined fleets of France and Spain, crushed their power at Trafalgar (October, 1805), and secured the Channel against the invader. Pitt's gold had called into existence a third coalition (England, Russia. Austria, and Sweden), only to see Napoleon hurl it to the ground on the field of Austerlitz (December, 1805). England's isolation seemed as complete as the Emperor's victory. Russia, Austria, and Prussia made humiliating peace with the victor, who carved his conquests into new states and kingdoms. Pitt, who, at the news of Austerlitz, had pointed to the map of Europe with the words "Roll up that map, there will be no use for it these ten years," survived the calamity scarcely a month.

Unable to meet, as yet, the English troops in battle on the land as he had met and defeated those of the Continent, and unequal to England on the seas, Napoleon devised a more insidious plan of campaign. Believing that a "nation of shop-keepers" might be attacked through its trade, he issued from the Prussian capital, in 1806, the famous Berlin Decree, which was the first note of that "Continental System," which was intended to close the ports of Europe to British goods. The British government met this boycott by its "Orders in Council," which placed a blockade upon French ports, and authorized the capture of neutral vessels endeavoring to trade with them. This inconclusive commercial warfare lasted several years, but was far from being successful in its object of ruining England. Indeed, it is said that the most stringent enforcement of the "Decrees" and "Orders" did not prevent the Napoleonic armies from wearing uniforms of English cloth and carrying English steel in their scabbards.

England first began to make head against the French conqueror when that far-sighted minister George Canning sent Sir Arthur Wellesley to Portugal to take command of the British forces in the Peninsula. Wellesley had recently returned from India, where he had achieved a brilliant reputation for thoroughness of organization, precision of manoeuver, and unvarying success, qualities which at that time were lamentably rare among British generals. In Portugal first, and later in Spain, the sterling qualities of the new commander steadily gained ground for England, driving out the French marshals, and carrying this Peninsular War to a triumphant conclusion by the invasion of France (1814). Created Duke of Wellington for his successes in the Peninsula, Wellesley held command of the allied forces on the Belgian frontier when, on the 18th of June, 1815, they met and routed the French at Waterloo. That day made Napoleon an exile, and "the Iron Duke" the idol of the English lands in which he continued to be the most conspicuous personage for nearly half a century.

THE RESETTLEMENT OF EUROPE

Waterloo brought England into new relations with the nations of Europe. The Congress of Vienna, in which the victors endeavored to restore the damage wrought by the Corsican intruder, added Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, Malta, and a few less important islands, to the growing colonial empire of Great Britain. The Holy Alliance, which had been suggested by the Czar in 1815, at the friendly meeting of the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian sovereigns at Paris, was in theory a compact between these powerful rulers—"an intimate union on the basis of morality and religion"—but it soon degenerated into an unholy league for the mutual protection of these three despotic dynasties against the dormant forces of constitutional liberty, which began to stir again in every European state as soon as the Napoleonic specter had been laid. The French Revolution had given currency to opinions which no congress of sovereigns could wholly repress, and now the policy of the "Alliance," to strangle all constitutional aspirations and rivet the chains of Bourbonism upon limbs that had once known the bliss of freedom, led to fierce intellectual revolt, and sometimes to physical violence. England had made common cause with Turk and Christian, Kaiser and King, against Napoleon, and for a time her statesmen viewed with complacency the Holy Alliance, so reassuring in its name and so pure in its professions; but when it became evident that this mighty league was to be thrown against every liberty-loving people in the Old World and the New, George Canning broke the irksome bond, and put the land of parliaments and constitutional liberty in its rightful place as the friend of freedom and the foe to the oppressor. It was the spirit if not the voice of Canning which was powerful to save Portugal from the Bourbon, to recognize the independence of the revolted American colonies of Spain, and to restrain the enemies of freedom from handing insurgent Greece back to the Turk. His predecessors had been accustomed to sink the interests and desires of England in regard for what the continental power called "the good of Europe." He was the first statesman of his generation who dared to take an independent position on "European" questions—"to write 'England,'" as he phrased it, "where it had been the custom to write 'Europe.'" The policy which he inaugurated marks a turning- point in the history of British foreign affairs.

Catholic Emancipation

George IV., who had been regent since his father's illness in 1812, reigned in his own name from 1820 to 1830, though his voice in the affairs of state was small indeed. His Ministers, Liverpool, Canning, Goderich, and Wellington, were confronted by serious problems of domestic policy which had sprung up during the long period of foreign wars and partly in direct consequence of those disturbing conditions. The one recurrent question which found definite settlement in this reign was that of Catholic emancipation. The penal laws against Roman Catholics had disgraced the English statute-books for two centuries. On the first of January, 1801, the Legislative Union of Great Britain and Ireland had gone into effect under the name of the United Kingdom. The Irish Parliament, which had met in Dublin since 1782, went out of existence, and in the place of "Home Rule" Ireland was represented in both houses of the Imperial Parliament at Westminster. Pitt had promised the numerous Catholics of Ireland that the laws which made them ineligible to represent their country in Parliament should be repealed, and had abandoned office in disgust when George III. refused to sanction his project of Catholic emancipation. In 1807 the Whig ministry espoused the same cause, and in turn resigned because of the opposition of the Crown. In Daniel O'Connell the cause at length found a spokesman whose eloquence, wit, and talent for "agitation" soon combined his Irish partisans into "The Catholic Association." Working in conjunction with the Whigs of England, O'Connell's followers formed a body which could not be neglected. Soon after Canning's untimely death the Duke of Wellington had taken office. He was a Tory, with all the prejudices of that political faith deepened by his birth and training as an Irish Protestant, but the agitation had reached such proportions that he saw in it a menace of civil war, to avoid which he was willing to abandon his most cherished opinions on the Catholic question. Accordingly, in 1829, the Iron Duke faced about and brought in the bill which, becoming a law by Whig and Canningite votes, admitted Roman Catholics to Parliament, and to civil rights only a little short of complete. But instead of removing the Irish question from politics, it was only prepared for more strenuous presentation in a new guise, for O'Connell was returned to Parliament at the head of some fifty Catholic members to agitate for Irish independence.

RAILWAYS

The perfection of the steam locomotive and the inception and marvelous development of the system of steam railway transportation marked the second quarter of the century. The name of the Stephensons, father and son, is inseparably connected with this work which has affected so deeply the economic and social life of the nation, and has contributed in a thousand indirect ways to the expansion and consolidation of the empire. It has been said that in 1825 the traveler from London to Rome went no faster than the courier of the Caesars, eighteen hundred years before. Thanks to George Stephenson's inventive genius, the traveler of today consumes scarcely more time between London and Peking.

THE REFORM OF PARLIAMENT

The reform of Parliament was the next question to come up for settlement. In 1830 representation in the House of Commons still remained upon a basis which had been established centuries before. Meantime the distribution of the voting population had been totally transformed. The most populous shires had no more seats than the least of all. There were decayed boroughs which had dwindled in population until but a handful of voters remained, yet these "rotten" boroughs retained their right to choose one or more members of Parliament, while the great modern manufacturing towns and seaports were totally unrepresented. The agitation for parliamentary reform, which rose in the middle of the eighteenth century, was directed against the sale of seats in the rotten boroughs, and the shameless bribery. As early as 1770 Lord Chatham had predicted reform or revolution. His son, the younger Pitt, had proposed remedies, but the deluge which overwhelmed the government of France in the closing years of the century stiffened English conservatism for a century against any radical political change. Meanwhile the rapid industrial expansion of the kingdom, with its unprecedented increase of population, and the sudden growth of insignificant hamlets into teeming factory towns, had emphasized the injustice of existing arrangements. Earl Grey, who had been an advocate of reform for forty years, and Lord John Russell, who had championed the cause for a decade, were united in the Whig ministry which succeeded Wellington in 1830. Supported by a tremendous popular demand which seemed to stir the nation to its depths they brought in their first bill in 1831. It prevailed in the Commons by a bare majority, but the Tory House of Lords threw it out. This action by the privileged class was a signal for an indignant outburst from the nation. The "Radicals," as the advanced Whigs were already beginning to be called, did not conceal their lack of respect for the Upper House, and used revolutionary threats against it as a relic of mediaevalism which should no longer be tolerated in a free state. But the time had passed when the peers could flout an aroused nation. When the Third Reform Bill was ready for passage, the ministers secured the King's promise to frustrate the opposition of the Lords by filling up the House with new peers created expressly to vote for reform. The threat sufficed. Wellington and the most stern and unbending Tories absented themselves from the decisive division, and allowed the Reform Bill to become a law in June, 1832.

ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS

Great things were expected of the first Parliament which was chosen on the basis of the new law. The seats gained by the disfranchisement of the small and corrupt boroughs were distributed to new constituencies in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle, and the other modern cities. The more populous counties were subdivided into districts, and the divisions received additional representation. The franchise had also been extended and based upon a moderate property qualification. The result was, that the center of political power passed from the nobility and landed gentry, with whom it had resided for centuries, and came to the farmers and shop-keepers, the so-called middle class, lying between the ancient aristocracy of birth and landed possessions and the still unenfranchised masses of mill operatives and agricultural laborers. That the new Parliament would show a new temper and be dominated by new ideas was but natural. But those who inferred from the bitterness of the struggle for reform that the nation was on the verge of an abyss into which the Lords and the Crown should shortly topple, greatly deceived themselves.

THE POOR LAWS

The reformed Parliaments devoted themselves to certain long- deferred and intensely practical reforms which were social and economic in their nature, leaving the constitution alone for the next twenty years. In these Parliaments and ministries for the next forty years the Whig party usually had the upper hand. In 1834 Parliament revolutionized the system of public relief to the needy which had existed for fifty years, to the extreme demoralization of the poorer working-classes and the frustration of really benevolent purpose. The old law had assumed that each parish owed every native a living. A sliding scale was accordingly provided by which, as the rate of wages declined, the parish should pay to the workman enough to bring his receipts up to the standard amount. Employers took advantage of this system cut wages to a minimum, the parish making up the difference. Another mischievous clause increased the pauper's dole in proportion to the number of his children, with the direct result of early and improvident marriages. To put it bluntly, children were bred for the bounty. The number of persons receiving parish aid was enormously increased. The self-respect of the poor was destroyed, and the poor-rate became a burden of millions of pounds annually upon the treasury. The act of 1834 put an end to these abuses by restricting outdoor relief to the aged and destitute, and requiring all other paupers to go to the union workhouse. Within two years the poor-rate was diminished fully one-third.

ABOLITION OF SLAVERY

In 1834 slavery was abolished throughout the British dominions. The earnest labors of the Abolitionists, Clarkson, Wilberforce, Macaulay, and others, had secured the abolition of the slave trade thirty years before (1807), but the united opposition of the colonial planters to a reform which would deprive them of the services of their chattel laborers postponed the consummation of the humanitarian measure. The reformed Parliament proved less sensitive to the planters' arguments. It destroyed the system forever, making a cash compensation to the owners.

A third question, on which Earl Grey's ministry took high moral ground, was a redress of another of the ancient wrongs of Ireland. The Church of England was by law established in that most distressful country, and the people, though mostly Roman Catholics, were under the necessity of paying tithes for the support of a church which they detested, and which indeed, in a large part of the island, had no existence except for purposes of taxation. The Irish protest, as has often been the case, took the form of violence and outrage, the so-called "Tithe War," which postponed rather than hastened the redress of their grievance. But in 1835 the ministry of Lord Melbourne relieved the peasants of this part of their many burdens.

ACCESSION OF VICTORIA

The name of Lord Melbourne has been kept green not only by the Australasian metropolis, but by the fact that it was his duty as Prime Minister to announce to the Princess Alexandrina Victoria the fact—to her so momentous—that her uncle, William IV., was dead (June 20, 1837), and that she, a girl of eighteen, was Queen of England. Victoria, as she was known thenceforward, lived to see the dawn of the twentieth century, to witness the enormous development of the British empire in population, wealth, and power, and it is perhaps not too much to say, to win all hearts among her subjects by the simplicity, purity, and strength of her character. Had she displayed the stubborn stupidity of her grandfather, George III., or the immorality of some of his sons, it is not rash to believe that the tide of radicalism might have thrown down all barriers and swept away the throne on the flood of democracy. By grace of character she was a model constitutional sovereign, and her benign reign, the longest in English annals, contributed more than the policy of any of her ministers to make the monarchy popular and permanent.

The first decade of the Victorian era witnessed three great agitations, two of which ended in fiasco and the third in a triumph which wrought tremendous changes in the kingdom. "Chartism," "Repeal," and "Free Trade" were the three topics on which the thought of multitudes was engaged.

CHARTISM

Chartism was the name applied to the agitation in favor of a statement of principles called "The People's Charter." The six points of Chartism were: (l) annual Parliaments, (2) salaries for members, (3) universal suffrage, (4) vole by ballot, (5) abolition of property qualification for membership in the House of Commons, and (6) equal electoral districts. The demand came from the workingmen, who were dissatisfied because the Reform Bill of 1832 had stopped short of their political stratum. The Chartists copied the method of agitation which O'Connell had employed in extorting Catholic emancipation. Monster meetings, mile-long petitions, copious effusions of printer's ink and oratory, and a National Charter Association were a part of the machinery. In 1848, when the prevalent hard times increased the restless discontent of the masses, the movement culminated in a vast assembly on Kennington Common. A respectful half-million were to march to Westminster and lay their demands, the six points backed by six million signatures, before the Commons. The year 1848 was one of widespread discontent, the revolution year of the century, and the authorities took pains to guard the peace of London with especial care, even Wellington being called into service to direct the military. But nine-tenths of the mob failed to put in appearance, and the monster petition turned out to be a monstrous and clumsy fraud. Nothing came of it at the moment. The return of better times took the heart out of the agitation, and the progress of orderly political development gradually incorporated three of the Chartist points in the law of the land without seriously affecting the constitution.

O'CONNELL AND REPEAL

The second popular war cry was "Repeal." In this agitation, again O'Connell's was the chief personage, and his eloquence the chief factor. It was in effect another phase of the Irish demand for Home Rule. Since the first day of the new century Ireland had been, for legislative purposes, a part of the United Kingdom. It was the act which had established this "Legislative Union" and abolished the Irish Parliament which O'Connell was determined to repeal. All that monster meetings, soul-moving oratory, secret associations, printer's ink, could do to influence the government by parliamentary manoeuver, demonstration of popular feeling, intimidation, and threats of insurrection was done. As a member of Parliament, and the dictator to his "tail" of half a hundred Irish members, the silver-tongued "Irish tribune" exerted a considerable political power so long as parties were somewhat evenly divided so as to make his support desirable. But when, in 1841, the Tories came back into office under Sir Robert Peel, backed by a strong majority, this influence declined. The arrest of O'Connell, in 1843, for treasonable utterances, discredited him with his following, which soon fell apart-the more determined section to carry Ireland's cause to the extreme of violent outbreak, the milder partisans to await a more opportune moment to press their agitation for Home Rule.

THE REPEAL OF THE CORN LAWS

The names of Sir Robert Peel and Richard Cobden are indissolubly connected with the legislation which repealed the "Corn Laws" and placed English commerce upon the basis of free trade—Cobden as the theorist and untiring agitator, whose splendid talents were unsparingly devoted to preparing public opinion for the economic revolution, and Peel as the protectionist Prime Minister, who was open-minded enough to become convinced of his error in persisting in the policy in which he had been trained. The necessity for a change of commercial policy grew out of the altered conditions in the nation. The agricultural England of the eighteenth century had in a generation been transformed into a hive of manufacturing industry. The rapid adoption of steam power and improved machinery in England on the one hand, and the paralysis of industry on the Continent during the Napoleonic wars, had wrought the change, while the commercial marine, guarded by her powerful navy, had brought the carrying trade of the world under her flag. The weakest point in the English system was the protective tariff, which lay heaviest on imports of grain—or "corn," to use the insular term. The Corn Laws were a body of legislation enacted from time to time by Parliaments which were controlled by the great land-owning interests. The land-owner, whose income was derived chiefly from rents upon agricultural lands, consistently favored a scale of tariffs which would maintain the price of cereal grains at the highest figure. At the close of the great war (1815) the nation was confronted with business disaster. "War prices" for grain fell rapidly, the markets were stocked with more manufactured goods than impoverished Europe could absorb, while the English labor market was glutted by the influx of several hundred thousand able-bodied soldiers and sailors in quest of industrial employment. As early as 1821 Mr. Huskisson, a cabinet colleague of Mr. Canning, had endeavored to lighten the burden of British manufactures by reducing the import duties upon the raw material used by the English looms. He was for getting at the root of the matter and disposing of the Corn Laws, so as to provide "free food" as well as "free raw materials," but his Tory companions believed that such legislation would vote the bread out of their own mouths. In 1838 an Anti-Corn Law Association was formed at Manchester. Under the direction of Richard Cobden, a young and successful manufacturer, who had become the most ardent of free traders, a league of similar clubs was organized throughout the country, and through it an agitation unsurpassed in the history of politics was prosecuted until its object was attained. In Parliament he became one of the most effective orators, and the chief target of his argument was Peel, the leader of the protectionists. In 1845-46 a more powerful argument than Cobden's was thrown into the scale. The failure of the Irish potato crop, the sole food supply of that unhappy island, "forced Peel's hand." In the face of two-thirds of his own party, in opposition to his own life-long political creed, he gave notice as Prime Minister that he should introduce a bill for the immediate reduction and ultimate repeal of the laws which were responsible for the high price of food. He had become a convert to free trade, and was ready to carry it into practice. The young Disraeli as the representative of the Protectionist element of his party, lashed the premier in the speech which first gave him a following in the Parliament that he was soon to control. But enough Peelites followed their leader into the camp of the free traders to carry the bill. The Corn Laws disappeared from the statute-book.

HUMANITARIAN LEGISLATION

The sudden and enormous expansion of English industry in the early part of the century brought special hardship to several classes in the community. The substitution of the factory system for cottage industry destroyed home life for thousands of families, and the pressure of poverty and the greed of manufacturers ground the poor mill operatives between the upper and nether millstones. To Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, more than to any other is due the persistent investigation and disclosure which aroused the public mind to the prevailing conditions in mine and factory where hours of labor were excessive, and where women and children were subjected to degrading tasks and brutal treatment. The Factory Law and kindred legislation since 1830 are the fruits of the beneficent and untiring labors of the Earl.

PALMERSTON AND FOREIGN RELATIONS

The era which had been marked by such political, social, and economic reforms and agitations came to a close in the middle of the century. The Whigs came into power in Parliament in 1846 for a long term. Foreign affairs supplied the most notable topics for the next twenty years. The foreign minister during much of this time was Lord Palmerston. He it was who piloted the nation without disaster through the rocks of 1848-51, when thrones were toppling in every European kingdom, and England was being appealed to for help against despot and democrat.

THE EASTERN QUESTION

The "Eastern Question" now came up. The Czar of Russia, an object of suspicion to England, because of his rivalry with her for the possession of India, endeavored to secure from the Sultan of Turkey official recognition of his government as the legitimate protector of Christians in the Ottoman empire. Such a responsibility would have afforded many opportunities for interfering in Turkish affairs. France opposed the demand, and Palmerston placed England on the side of Napoleon III., against the Czar, who had invaded Turkey in pursuance of his design to annex a large part of her European provinces, and advance his position toward Constantinople. The Crimean War which followed (1854-56) at least checked Russia for the time. It was the only European war in which England had borne arms since Waterloo. But in Asia and Africa the Queen's troops had found almost continual employment along the frontiers of the now vastly extended empire. In 1857 Persia had to be chastised for edging toward India by way of the Afghan possessions. Russia had been at the Shah's elbow. In 1856, and repeatedly until 1860, the British fleets were battering open the ports of China and extorting trade concessions. But the most memorable war in the imperial history of these years was within the borders of the empire, though in a distant land. This was the Sepoy Rebellion or Indian mutiny of 1857.

THE GREAT SEPOY MUTINY

The British possessions in India had been more than doubled in extent since the opening of the century. In 1833 the trade monopoly of the East India Company had been broken, but its civil and military servants continued to administer the government. Their ability was displayed especially in the rapidity with which they were extending British authority over the native states when the outbreak came. A conspiracy was laid among the Sepoys, the native soldiers in the regiments of "John Company." as the great corporation was called in Asia. To their private grievances was added the false report that the company intended to force them into Christianity by serving out to them cartridges which would defile them, neat's tallow for the Hindoo venerator of the sacred cow, and hog's lard for the Mohammedan hater of swine! In May, 1857, the mutiny burst into flame. The Sepoys slaughtered their officers and many other Europeans, and restored the heir of the ancient race of kings to the throne of his fathers at Delhi. Here and there, at Cawnpore and Lucknow, a few British troops defended themselves and the refugees against the hordes of bloodthirsty rebels. The "Massacre of Cawnpore" and "the Relief of Lucknow," phrases which have passed into history, suggest the fate of the two beleaguered garrisons. The rebellion was over in a twelve- month, smothered in its own blood. Close upon its suppression came the death of the East India Company, abolished by act of Parliament in 1858. Since that year the crown has ruled the Indian realm through a Secretary of State for India, residing in London, and a Viceroy holding court at Calcutta. From the defeat of the mutineers, in 1859, to his own death, in 1865, Lord Palmerston managed to save the nation from being embroiled to the fighting-point in the perpetual quarrels of Europe. Italy fought and won her liberty from the Austrian; Poland rose against the Russian; Denmark had her damaging Schleswig-Holstein War with Prussia and Austria. English sympathies were strongly enlisted in all these troubles, but Palmerston would not allow her to proceed to the point of breaking the peace. From 1861 to 1865, while the Civil War was being fought out in America, his government was prompt to recognize the belligerent status of the Confederacy, and to favor the South by allowing privateers like the "Alabama" to be built and manned in English ports. But the actual break with Mr. Lincoln's government did not come, and the old Whig statesman lived to see the South overpowered.

Through the middle reaches of the century the political power in England remained for the most part in the hands of the Whig, latterly called Liberal, ministries. The impulse for reform— political, economic, and social—had spent itself before 1850, and the older statesmen who guided the public policies had no sympathy with the demands for radical legislation, church disestablishment, universal suffrage, and what not, which came up from many parts of the nation. With the death of Palmerston, and the retirement of Russell, a new era was inaugurated, and new actors stepped to the front of the stage.

GLADSTONE AND DISRAELI

At the head of the Liberals was William Ewart Gladstone, who in his younger days had followed his master, Peel, out of the old Tory lines into the camp of the free traders, and had been Russell's chief lieutenant, and Palmerston's financial minister for the last half-dozen years. He was a man of splendid intellectual power, sterling morality, an adept at parliamentary management, a shrewd financier, and held a deep conviction that it was the part of statesmanship to embody in law what he conceived to be the proper demands of the nation. His opponent for a generation was Benjamin Disraeli, the young Jewish novelist, who had first won a following in the House of Commons by voicing the venom of the old-line protectionist Tories against the recreant Peel. Versatile, shifty, brilliant, this adventurous politician made himself indispensable to the Conservatives, and overcame by political moves which were little short of genius, the leadership of the opposition. Indeed, he may be said to have transformed Conservatism, giving it a new rallying cry, and inscribing great achievements upon its banner.

LIBERAL REFORMS

"Whenever that man gets my place we shall have strange doings," Palmerston had said toward the end of his life, alluding to the open-minded Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Gladstone, and had he remained on earth for another generation, he would indeed have seen much done by his erstwhile followers under Gladstone's direction which he would have accounted passing strange. Admitting the democratic principle that the state owed it to itself to provide every man's child with an education, Gladstone inaugurated (1870) a beneficent system of free public schools. An old popular grievance, the viva voce method of voting at parliamentary elections, was done away and the secret ballot substituted (1872), a change which struck a heavy blow at the prevalent bribery and intimidation. He corrected one of the worst abuses in the army by abolishing the purchase system, under which a junior officer was accustomed to buy his promotion by compensating his seniors, a practice which had closed the higher grades to men of small means. The extension of the suffrage to the agricultural laborers was finally reached by his Reform Bill of 1884, the last class being thus admitted to the body politic.

THE CAUSE OF IRELAND

But it was to the grievances of Ireland that Gladstone bent the readiest ear, and it was upon that reef that his political career made shipwreck at the last. In his first ministry he undertook and carried the disestablishment of the Irish Church, by which the Irish Catholics were relieved of an odious burden. His Irish Land Act of 1870 aimed to give the tenant-farmer certain valuable rights in the land which he rented. The result was rather to redouble the cry against "landlordism," with its corollary of agrarian crime. A second Land Act (1881) provided a land court for adjusting rents. Instead of quieting the disorders this indulgent legislation was the signal for a fresh outburst of crime. The Irish Land League was organized to secure the abolition of landlordism, and when the Irish leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, was imprisoned he exhorted the tenants to cease paying rent altogether until the government should grant all their demands. The Liberals were forced for the moment to use strong measures to restore order to Ireland, but the Home Rule party in Parliament, skillfully led by Mr. Parnell, continued to embarrass legislation and obstruct the ordinary functions of government. In April, 1886, Mr, Gladstone, having become Prime Minister for the third time, asked Parliament to grant home rule to Ireland through an Irish Parliament sitting at Dublin. Parnell and his following supported the measure, but the Liberal party was rent in twain. Lord Hartington, Joseph Chamberlain, John Bright, and others of less note, deserted their old chief. Enough of these "Liberal Unionists" seceded to defeat the bill. In August, 1892, the aged Liberal chieftain again carried the elections and took the seals of office for the fourth time. Home Rule was again the principal plank in his platform, and all the energies of the "Grand Old Man" were mustered to carry a new law differing somewhat from the bill of 1886. Though it passed the Commons (301 to 267) it was thrown out by the Lords by 419 to 41, and his successor, Lord Rosebery, had no mind to renew the contest.

The Gladstonian foreign policy was such as might have been expected from a leader whose motto was "Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform." It was never aggressive, and in the opinion of many, it was lacking in the assertion of British rights. Thus, in 1871, when Russia refused to be bound longer by the treaty stipulations forbidding her to maintain a war fleet on the Euxine, Mr. Gladstone did not hold her to her engagement. In England it was thought to be a sign of weakness in his government to allow the "Alabama" and "San Juan Boundary" questions to be settled by arbitrators instead of by diplomacy or a show of force. In 1881, when the Boers of the Transvaal had worsted the British at Majuba Hill, they received from Gladstone an honorable peace instead of extermination. The abandonment of the Egyptian Soudan, in 1883, which carried with it the massacre of General Gordon, at Khartoum, was perhaps the heaviest load that the Gladstonian foreign policy ever had to bear.

DISRAELI AND IMPERIALISM

Foreign affairs were the field of Disraeli's most brilliant exploits. "He had two ruling ideas," says the historian Oman, "the first was the conception of England as an imperial world- power, interested in European politics, but still more interested in the maintenance and development of her vast colonial and Indian empire. This is the notion which friends and enemies now using the word in different senses call 'imperialism.' The second ruling thought in Disraeli's mind was the conviction that the Conservative party ought to step forward as rival to the Liberal party in commanding the sympathies and allegiance of the masses." In pursuance of this second idea he took the "leap in the dark," in 1867, carrying a reform bill which was but little short of democratic in its extension of the right to vote. This was followed up by legislation favoring the English tenant-farmers, and improving the condition of workingmen in towns. Even after Disraeli's death, Lord Salisbury continued his domestic policy, instituting local government by means of county councils in 1888, making the schools free in 1891, and refunding the national debt in 1888.

It was a great day for the British empire when Disraeli's telegram to the hard-pressed Khedive of Egypt, in 1875, bought for England the controlling interest in the Suez canal, the water-gate to India. It was a bold stroke of Disraeli's also which, at the close of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, compelled the victor to take his paw from the throat of his victim and submit the treaty to a congress of the powers at Berlin, where its terms were modified and England was admitted to its benefits. The Second Afghan War (1878-80), and the Zulu War (1878-79), and the Boer War, which brought little glory to Britain, were the direct result of the Prime Minister's desire to extend the empire and strengthen its frontiers. It may have been theatrical, but it was certainly impressive to the assembled princes of India when Lord Lytton, the Viceroy, proclaimed Victoria Empress of India in Delhi, the old capital of the Moguls, on January 1, 1877. And though Disraeli (raised to the peerage as Lord Beaconsfield) was in his grave, his spirit dominated the pageantry of 1887 and 1897, when every nation and tribe and kindred and people of the Greater Britain sent representatives to London to celebrate the jubilee and diamond jubilee of the Empress-Queen, to whose aggrandizement he had contributed so effectively.

AFTER A HUNDRED YEARS

The century closes upon another England than that which was struggling against Napoleon at its dawn. Instead of the "right little tight little island," a compact and self-contained nation, it is now the head of an empire comparable in extent and population with no other since the Rome of Augustus. Canada, Federal Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa form a Greater Britain, while the subject lands and islands dot the globe. The problem which confronts the English at the end of the century is not whether they can hold their own against a foreign power as in the days of Waterloo, but whether all these British commonwealths can be made to work together in some sort of federal union, or whether the present ties are to dissolve or snap asunder and girdle the globe with independent states like the American republic, where each may be free to develop under its peculiar conditions the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. How was England situated at the opening of the nineteenth century? 2. What did the names Hohenlinden, Trafalgar, and Austerlitz mean to England? 3. Sum up briefly the career of Wellesley. 4. How did Canning's policy mark a turning-point in British foreign affairs? 5. What was the result of the Catholic agitation? 6. How did the locomotive influence England's empire? 7. How was Parliament changed by the Reform Bill? 8. What changes in the Poor Laws were at once undertaken? 9. What action regarding slavery and Irish taxation? 10. What was the Chartist agitation? 11. Describe the agitation for "repeal." 12. Why did the Corn Laws become intolerable? 13. What reforms were wrought through the influence of the Earl of Shaftesbury? 14. Through what foreign complications did England pass under Palmerston? 15. What important abuses were corrected under Gladstone's leadership? 16. Describe his dealings with the Irish question. 17. How were certain great foreign matters dealt with by his government? 18. What brilliant foreign achievements were accomplished by Disraeli? 19. What is England's problem in the twentieth century?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HISTORY OF ENGLAND DURING THE THIRTY YEARS' PEACE. By Harriet
Martineau.
HISTORY OF ENGLAND SINCE 1815. By Spencer Walpole.
THE HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. By Justin McCarthy.
ENGLAND IN THE XIXTH CENTURY. By Elizabeth Wormely Latimer.
THE GREVILLE MEMOIRS. Edited by Henry Reeve.
HISTORY OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT. By R. G. Gammage.
THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA. Edited by T. Humphrey Ward.
HISTORY OF ENGLAND. By W. N. Molesworth.

II

WELLINGTON, AND THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON

[ARTHUR WELLESLEY, Duke of Wellington, born in Ireland, 1769; died Walmer Castle, September 14, 1852; educated at Eton and at Angers; entered Seventy-third Regiment as ensign, 1787; purchased lieutenant-colonelcy of Thirty-third Regiment, 1793; served in Holland expedition, 1794-95; 1796, in India with his regiment; 1803, major-general, commands in Mahratta War, victory at Assaye; 1805,in England; 1806, member of Parliament; 1807, Secretary for Ireland; 1808, in Portugal; 1809-13, chief in command in Peninsula, clears Portugal and Spain of the French; 1814, English Ambassador at Paris; 1815, defeats Napoleon at Waterloo; 1815, commander-in-chief of allied army in France; 1818, master-general of the ordnance; 1822, represents England at Congress of Verona; 1828-30, Prime Minister; 1829, grants Catholic emancipation; 1834-35, Foreign Secretary; 1841, commander-in-chief. Buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.]

In February, 1792, William Pitt, Prime Minister of George III., unfolding his annual budget in the House of Commons, declared, "Unquestionably there never was a time in the history of this country when, from the situation of Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace, than at the present moment." Yet within a twelvemonth after this utterance, apparently sincere, France and England were plunged into a war which lasted, with but one brief intermission, until 1815. It embroiled in succession nearly every nation in Europe. In France it provided a theater for the genius of Napoleon, who after conquering in turn the best soldiers of the continent, was to meet his match in the Duke of Wellington on the field of Waterloo.

The first period of the war mainly antedates the century which we are considering. In 1793 the Convention, the revolutionary body which had taken the place of the overturned French monarchy, declared war on Holland and England. Pitt was still at the head of King George III.'s ministry, and the conduct of the war devolved upon him. Her insular position and powerful fleet rendered England safe from invasion, but her active participation in the military operations upon the continent was limited in measure and distressing in outcome. The expeditions which she landed in the Netherlands were shockingly inadequate in numbers, and led by high-born generals without knowledge, talent, or experience. It is little wonder that they accomplished nothing except to feed the French contempt for English arms.

Successive coalitions were formed by the energetic Pitt with Prussia, Austria, and other nations to check the advance of the republican armies in which, after 1795, the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte leaped into prominence. His victories disintegrated these alliances, which had been cemented with English gold. At the same time his victories so strengthened his personal hold upon the army and the nation that he was able to make himself absolute master of France.

The Peace of Amiens (March, 1802, to May, 1803) afforded the only breathing space in all these twenty-two years of warfare. Napoleon, now first consul, was soon to change that republican mask for the honest and ambitious title of emperor. The hollowness of the peace soon became evident. Under its cloak French ships were building and French armies mustering in the channel ports for the invasion of England. The character of the strife had now radically changed. At the outset, ten years before, England had joined hands with the continental monarchies to check the spread of the liberal ideas which the French republican armies were carrying on their bayonets in a species of crusade in the name of liberty. But with the accession of Bonaparte to the throne of the Bourbons, England was plunged into a struggle for existence. Napoleon himself said that peace could never prevail in Europe so long as England had the power to disturb it, and all parties in England were resolved to combat to the last the establishment of a vast and menacing military despotism beyond the Straits of Dover.

The genius of Admiral Nelson preserved the command of the narrow seas for England, and forced the Emperor to abandon his project of invasion which had aroused the English nation to unprecedented military activity. Pitt's subsidies had again set the continental armaments in motion, but Napoleon's brilliant dash into Germany brought these to naught in the battle of Austerlitz, which destroyed the Third Coalition and brought Austria to terms. It was this news that the great Prime Minister of George III. took so to heart. He survived the disaster but a few weeks. But the ministry of "All the Talents" took up his task with no thought of abandoning the struggle. The death of Fox soon broke up this administration, but those of Portland, Perceval, and Liverpool, which followed, were as dogged in their resolution to spend the last pound, and the last man, if need were, in ridding Europe of the conqueror whose existence England had now come to regard as a threat against her national independence.

As his conquests added state after state to the territory in which his word was law, Napoleon developed new tactics against England. He conceived it practicable to crush that commercial and manufacturing power by excluding her goods from the markets of Europe. This "continental system" was inaugurated in November, 1806, by the Berlin Decree which closed the ports of Europe to British vessels, and declared a paper blockade against the British Isles. This policy he forced upon nation after nation, to which his conquests extended. England retaliated by the "Orders in Council," which declared a blockade against the French ports, and authorized the seizure of neutral vessels found trading with them. By a naval raid in September, 1807, the British swooped down on Denmark and carried off the Danish fleet to keep that weapon from falling into the Emperor's hands. Two months later, in anticipation of a British descent, French armies seized Portugal and entered Spain.

Up to the entrance of the French into the Spanish Peninsula, the protracted hostilities had brought little advantage to the British arms except on the sea. It was the Peninsular War, precipitated by this fresh encroachment of Napoleon, which first gave a laurel to the English arms and prepared Wellington for Waterloo. Napoleon and the soldier who was to overthrow him were born in the same year. The babe whom the world was to know as the Duke of Wellington was christened in Dublin in May, 1769, by the name of Arthur Wesley. (In 1798 the older spelling of the family name, Wellesley, was resumed.) He was descended from English ancestors long resident in Ireland, and was himself the fourth son of the Earl of Mornington. The death of the Earl when Arthur was but twelve years old left the family in slender circumstances. Richard, the eldest son and successor to the title, had achieved high university honors, but Arthur was a slow student of everything save music and mathematics. After a brief residence at Eton he entered a higher institution at Angers, in France. His mother thought him worth nothing better than "food for powder," and at eighteen he obtained a commission as ensign in the Seventy-sixth Regiment of British Foot. Family influence and the purchase of his "steps" soon made him a lieutenant- colonel (1793) of the Thirty-third Foot. He had already been three years a member of the Irish House of Commons where, however, he did not distinguish himself.

England was now at war with France, and Colonel Arthur Wellesley's first foreign service was in 1794, when his regiment was sent to the support of the Duke of York, who was near the end of his ignominious campaign in the Low Countries. In March, 1795, he was back in England, disgusted with the incompetency of his superiors. Of the value of this experience he afterward said, "Why, I learned what one ought not to do, and that is always something." At the time, however, he was less philosophical, and after consulting with his wise elder brother as to the future possibilities of distinction in military life, he applied for a civil office under the Lord Lieutenant of England.

Instead of droning out his life in a treasury clerkship, Wellesley found a more strenuous career abroad. In the autumn of 1795 his regiment was ordered to India, where he arrived in February, 1797. A year later his already famous brother Richard, Lord Mornington, came out as Governor-general. The brothers were sincerely devoted to each other, and co-operated cordially in the important operations which followed. The English possessions in India were then limited to the coast regions, the kings and princes of the states of the interior being variously bound to the East india Company by treaty engagements. The news of the victorious progress of the French arms in Europe lost nothing by repetition in the bazaars of Hindustan, and emissaries of France were not wanting to stir the native princes against England. Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt in 1798 revealed his intention to attack England through her Indian realm. In February, 1799, the Governor-general declared war against Tippoo, Sultan of Mysore, a powerful prince, who had been plotting in the French interest. The younger Wellesley had contributed much to the efficient organization of the army which was to invade the Sultan's territory, and after the fall of Seringapatam he distinguished himself by his firm and orderly administration of the conquered domain. In 1802, the year of the Peace of Amiens, he was made a major-general. When the news of the treaty with France reached him, his opinion was emphatically expressed: "It establishes the French power over Europe, and when we shall have disarmed we shall have no security except in our own abjectness." The conquest of Mysore left only the Mahratta confederacy undominated by British authority. These states, a vast domain in western and central India, having quarreled among themselves, applied to the British for aid. General Wellesley secured the close alliance of one party, and as commander-in-chief, took the field against the others. On the 23rd of September, 1803, he found himself with seven thousand five hundred men in the presence of the Mahratta host of fifty thousand men with one hundred and twenty-eight guns. Retreat was difficult, speedy reinforcement impossible. The young major-general determined an attack immediately, and handling his little army with great skill and intrepid courage, he routed the enemy in the great victory of Assaye, which broke the Mahratta power. For his exploits he received the thanks of King and Parliament, and was dubbed a Knight of the Bath.

General Sir Arthur Wellesley returned to England in 1805, after seven years absence in India. On his way he touched at the Isle of St. Helena, and took note of its beautiful scenery and salubrious climate. Doubtless the impression then made was recalled ten years later, when it became necessary to select a safe residence for his defeated foe. To one who expressed surprise that a man of his solid achievement should receive but a subordinate post as that to which he was assigned on his return to England, General Wellesley said, "I am NIM MUK WALLAH, as we say in the East. I have eaten of the King's salt and therefore I conceive it to be my duty to serve with zeal and cheerfulness when and wherever the King or his government may think fit to employ me." This expression explains his lifelong attitude toward the crown. He considered himself its "retained servant."

It was two years before his talents were properly utilized. Meanwhile he was member of Parliament and secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The Peninsular War was his opportunity. Napoleon had sent Marshal Junot to Lisbon with an army to seize the country and force it into his continental system, the royal family retiring to Brazil as he advanced. At almost the same time, by a series of conscienceless machinations, he had compelled the King of Spain to abdicate, and had occupied Madrid and the fortresses of the northern provinces. In spite of popular risings against the French, Napoleon made his brother Joseph King of Spain. At once revolt flamed out among the common people, and the insurrection spread through both kingdoms, and was accepted in England as an invitation to come to their relief.

Pitt had foreseen amid the shadows of the defeat of Austerlitz that the Iberian Peninsula might be the final field of resistance to Napoleon, and now events had brought his successors to the same view. It was accessible by England's ocean highway, its people were high-spirited, and impatient of foreign domination, and a successful campaign there would threaten the French flank. In June, 1808, an expedition was dispatched to the aid of the Spanish and Portuguese insurrectionists, and the command was given to Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Wellesley. The night before he left London he said to the friend who interrupted his reverie, "Why, I am thinking of the French. . . . 'Tis enough to make one thoughtful. But no matter; my die is cast. They may overwhelm me, but I don't think they will out-manueuver me. . . . I suspect all the continental armies were more than half-beaten before the battle was begun. I at least will not be beaten beforehand."

The qualities which fitted this officer for the heavy work in hand were those which had been developed and tested in India. He was, first of all, a worker of surpassing industry and the closest application. Where others were brilliant, he was thorough. No commander ever left less to chance or to the inspiration of the moment. He prepared for his campaigns by subjecting his troops to the most thorough drill and by providing them properly with all the munitions of war. His troops were shaped by incessant care and pains into a perfect weapon, the use of which he perfectly understood. Further than this, his experience in India, where conditions had made him the responsible administrator of vast native states, made him the right man to conduct a campaign in the peninsula, where, between the French and the Nationalists, civil administration had fallen into great disorder, and where all sorts of extraordinary tasks devolved upon the British representative. His management of his uncertain allies, the guerrilla chiefs, and his relations with the revolutionary "juntas" called for qualities as rare as those which defeated one after another of Napoleon's marshals and finally worsted the great captain himself. Thoroughness of preparation, the ability to see things as they are, to wait patiently, decide promptly, and act with energy—these are perhaps simple military virtues, but they bring success, and they were in high degree the possession of the young Indian officer, who was now to undertake a difficult campaign in a foreign country. The event proved that with such qualities a general may compass the most difficult tasks, though he may be "cold" in temperament, and incapable of kindling in the breasts of his men that passionate personal devotion which some hold to be the true test of a great soldier.

Wellesley disembarked his expeditionary force in August, at Mondego Bay, a hundred miles north of Lisbon, which Junot held with twelve thousand men. Junot advanced to meet the English, and at Vimiero Wellesley met and defeated the first of Napoleon's marshals. Before the close of the day the arrival of a superior officer terminated Wellesley's command. He had, however, inflicted such a blow that Junot was glad to sign a convention which permitted him to evacuate the kingdom. Wellesley returned to England.

In the spring of 1809 Wellesley was back in Lisbon. He had persuaded the government that Portugal could be defended and made the base of operations which should eventually clear the entire peninsula of the French. They had intrusted the chief command to him, and now left him free for four years to press his campaigns to the Spanish capital, and thence to the Pyrenees and beyond upon the very soil of France itself.

He was watched by two French armies. Soult was at Oporto in the north, and Victor far up the Tagus Valley, between him and Madrid. By an unexpected movement, having surprised Soult and sent him headlong beyond the frontier, Wellesley crossed the border in quest of Victor. The armies clashed at Talavera, in the last days of June, in one of the most stubbornly contested engagements of the war. The English kept possession of the field, and, though Joseph Bonaparte congratulated his soldiers upon the glory of the "victory," he knew in his heart, as his greater brother told him to his face, that the battle was a French defeat.

Conditions were not yet suited for an advance into Spain, where the French were gathering in enormous force, with instructions from Napoleon to "advance upon the English, pursue them without cessation, beat them, and fling them into the sea." To insure his forces against the execution of this mandate Wellesley constructed a crescent of earthworks about Lisbon, "the lines of Torres Vedras," within which he might take refuge, and under cover of which, as a last resort, his forces might be safely re- embarked for retreat. The veteran Massena was selected by the Emperor to drive the English out of Portugal. As he advanced, in the summer of 1810, Wellesley retired before him, and just when the pursuer believed the game was his, he was confronted by the impregnable lines of Torres Vedras, whose position and strength was all unsuspected. All winter Massena hovered about the hole, but the fox was safe in his earth, and in the spring the old hound again turned his face toward Spain, with the English on his trail.

For another year the English general, who, in honor of Talavera, had been raised to the peerage as Viscount Wellington, was engaged in reducing the French garrisons, and forming into useful auxiliary troops the raw Portuguese who had risen against the invader. The capture of the fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo (January, 1812) opened the road to Spain. So important was this point that the captor was rewarded for it with an English earldom, a Spanish dukedom, and a Portuguese marquisate. In early summer Wellington's army took the offensive on Spanish soil. Marshal Marmont's army at Salamanca in the north was his first objective. The clash came on the 22nd of July. On the second day of the battle of Salamanca the English infantry crushed the weakened center of Marmont's line, the marshal was wounded, his army hurriedly retreated. On the 12th of August the English were in Madrid. The Bonaparte King fled from his capital, whose citizens, intoxicated with joy, crowded around the English general, hung on his stirrups, touched his clothes, and throwing themselves on the earth, blessed him aloud as the friend of Spain!

The work of deliverance was by no means complete. Wellington's army was small, and the support of the Spanish auxiliaries was not to be counted upon. Though the Emperor was in Russia, some of his best marshals and a powerful army were opposed to the English in Spain. It was only the most skilful management, in which caution and audacity were blended, that brought Wellington safely out of his dangerous position in Spain, and allowed him to retire to winter quarters on the Portuguese frontier. The effect of the campaign upon the Spaniards had been to give him the chief command of the national forces. England realizing that the general whose coming had been so long awaited was found at last, made Wellington a marquis, and voted him the thanks of the Lords and Commons and one hundred thousand pounds, besides sending him the reinforcements of cavalry which he needed for his broad plan of operations for the next campaign.

The winter of 1812-13, which Wellington devoted to his comprehensive preparations, saw the disastrous retreat of Napoleon from the snows of Russia. From that blow he never recovered, and thenceforward he could do little to support his eagles in the peninsula. The recall of Soult further weakened the resistance. In May, Wellington bade farewell to Portugal and recrossed the Spanish frontier, advancing on Madrid from the northwest. The King and his army retired toward France. Wellington overtook them at Vittoria (June 21) and fought them, capturing their guns, baggage, and Spanish plunder, though Joseph and the main French army escaped northward through the passes of the Pyrenees.

Soult came posthaste from Dresden to resume command. He found the army of Spain encamped on French soil, led it through the passes again, but the English could not be dislodged. In October an English general for the first time since Napoleon came to power stood on French soil at the head of an invading army. Soult, forced away from Bayonne, fell back on Toulouse, where Wellington dealt him another blow on April 14, 1814. That blow was the last. Just one week earlier Napoleon, driven back from the Rhine to Paris by the allied armies on the northeast, had abdicated the throne which had cost so much blood and treasure.

Wellington visited Paris and Madrid, and then returned to London. Five years earlier he had left England as Sir Arthur Wellesley; he came back Duke of Wellington. His own remark upon his campaigns contrasts strangely with the spirit of the Frenchman, whose best generals he had out-manoeuvered and overwhelmed. He was "a conqueror without ambition," he said. "All the world knew that I desired nothing but to beat the French out of Spain and then go home to my own country, leaving the Spaniards to manage theirs as they pleased." England lavished honors upon the hero of the Peninsular War. Parliament thanked him, granted him four hundred thousand pounds. He carried the sword of state on the occasion of the peace celebration in St. Paul's Cathedral. London banqueted him in Guildhall.

For a summer and a winter the Duke represented England at Paris and Vienna where the states of Europe were wrangling over the restoration of the continent to its antebellum condition. When Napoleon escaped from Elba and was welcomed to Paris by his former marshals, Europe turned to Wellington to deliver her from the new peril. On the 25th of March, 1815, Austria, Russia, Prussia, and Great Britain formed the Quadruple Alliance, binding themselves to maintain the treaty recently signed at Paris, and not to lay down arms until "Buonaparte should be placed absolutely beyond possibility of exciting disturbance and renewing his attempts to possess himself of the supreme power in France."

The Duke arrived at Brussels on the 4th of April to take command of the allied army. Instead of the grand armies of the Quadruple Alliance he found a composite force of some twenty-five thousand English, Dutch, Belgians, Brunswickers, and Hanoverians. The Prussians had thirty thousand men within co-operating distance. In comparison with the thoroughly disciplined army which he had developed and wielded so skilfully in the peninsula this force cut a sorry figure. The field-marshal's bitterest complaint was that his government had not even provided him with the admirable staff which five years of service had made so familiar with his methods and desires. On the very verge of the campaign he wrote, "I have an infamous army, very weak and ill equipped, and a very inexperienced staff." While the armies of Austria and Russia were advancing upon France the Emperor was setting an enormous force in the field. It was his purpose to fall upon the army on the Belgian frontier before the other allies could enter France. For the invasion of Belgium he selected one hundred and twenty-five thousand men. Prince Blucher, commanding the Prussians, now had as many men, while Wellington, his ally, commanded some ninety- three thousand, of whom barely one-third were British. Five- sixths of the British infantry had never been under fire.

Napoleon's plan was to thrust his army between Blucher and Wellington and defeat them in succession. On the evening of June 15th, news was brought to the Duke at Brussels that the enemy had passed the frontier and were engaging the Prussian outposts. He at once gave the necessary orders for the advance, and after midnight showed himself at the now famous ball of the Duchess of Richmond. At eleven the next forenoon he was at QuatreBras, where his army was engaged in beating off an attack by Marshal Ney, while Blucher was being pounded by Napoleon a few miles to the eastward at Ligny. Both the allies retreated, but instead of separating as Napoleon hoped and believed, they retired along converging lines, the English to Waterloo, the Prussians to Wavre, the positions being connected by a roadway. Through the rain of Saturday, June 17th, Wellington disposed his sixty-nine thousand men and one hundred and fifty-six guns on both sides of the Brussels highway, along which Napoleon advanced on the morrow with seventy-two thousand men and two hundred and forty cannon. The action opened near noon on the 18th, the French making a vain effort to carry the Château of Hougomont on the British right. Next an army corps was hurled at the center, only to be stopped by Wellington's cavalry with appalling loss. In the afternoon the Emperor delivered a series of cavalry attacks upon the allied center. Twelve thousand horsemen thundered up the gentle slope past the English guns, only to break against the bayonet-hedged squares of the infantry. At the end of eight hours' fighting the French center had advanced to within sixty yards of the British position, but the line still held, and Blucher's Prussians were rapidly coming up on the right flank. Marshal Grouchy having failed to prevent this fatal manoeuver, Napoleon shot his last bolt, sending Ney with the Old Guard against the British right. But "the bravest of the brave had fought his last battle," and as his ten battalions were flung back in disorder, Wellington gave the word to his whole line to advance. The rush of his reserves of horse scattered the remnants of the tired and disheartened host. The wreck of the grand army drifted back over the border, and the dispirited Emperor, having risked everything in one bold experiment and lost, hastened to Paris, and after a vain attempt to rally the nation once more about his standard, abandoned hope and sought refuge on board the "Bellerophon," British man-of-war (July 15, 1815). At nine o'clock in the evening of the memorable day of Waterloo, Blucher and Wellington met. The grizzled Prussian kissed the grave Englishman on both cheeks in the exuberance of his joy. Without the timely support of his Germans, that day might have had another ending.

Waterloo was the last act of the Napoleonic struggle. The Emperor went into exile at St. Helena to fret against his prison bars and curse his keepers. Wellington had already exhausted his country's sources of honor. All that Parliament could do was to present the fine estate of Strathfieldsaye to him and his heirs on condition of presenting a French tri-color flag to the sovereign at Windsor on each anniversary of the 18th of June.

Wellington was above all a soldier, but for the remaining thirty- six years of his lifetime his country had little employment for the sword. Yet the esteem in which he was held, not only for his military achievements, but for his honesty and common sense, made him a conspicuous figure in public affairs for most of his long life. After Waterloo he remained in France, where his moderation saved Paris from the vengeance of the continental commanders. Of the allied army of occupation which remained in France until 1818, Wellington was commander-in-chief. As head of the commission which passed upon the foreign claims for damages arising from the protracted wars, his fairness again saved France from her rapacious creditors.

His work on the continent done, Wellington returned to England to enter the public service as a member of Lord Liverpool's cabinet. In 1822 he was sent to represent Great Britain at the Congress of the Powers at Verona, where he frustrated Russia's intention of interfering in the affairs of Spain. In 1826 he was sent to Russia on a special mission from Canning to secure the consent of the new Czar to English intervention in behalf of the insurgent Greeks. On the death of the King's brother, the Duke of York, he became commander-in-chief of the army. Disagreement with Canning led him to withdraw from that premier's cabinet in April, 1827, but in the following January (1828), he himself became Prime Minister, with Robert Peel as Home Secretary. With all his Tory loyalty to the Church his administration broke its ancient monopoly. In 1828 he allowed the Test and Corporation Acts to pass, opening the way for Protestant dissenters to hold civil and military office. In 1829 he concluded that relief of the Roman Catholics of Ireland from their political disabilities could no longer be postponed. Peel had been even more reluctant than his chief—a native of Ireland—to reach this decision, but the growing power of the "Catholic Association," the popular organization which the agitator O'Connell had called into existence, compelled immediate action. The King was reluctantly brought to see the expediency of the act, which, when proposed by Pitt a generation before, had so stiffened the neck of his father, George III. Perhaps no minister whose prestige was less than that of the hero of Waterloo could have won the consent of the Hanoverian monarch, whose dynasty had been brought to England for the defense of the Protestant faith. The bill for the emancipation of the Catholics slid easily through the Commons, though the stiff old Tories who had counted Wellington as of their number voted solidly against it. Even the Lords failed to make the expected resistance, and accepted the measure by a vote of two to one despite the known preference of the court and clergy, and a bombardment of Protestant petitions. One peer had thus predicted the result to Macaulay, who was in doubt as to how the Duke would explain the bill and justify his change of front: "0, that will be simple enough. He'll say, 'My Lords! Attention! Right about face! Quick march!' and the thing will be done." King George tried to slip out of his pledges, but the Iron Duke held him fast, and the 13th of April, 1829, the act became a law. It is the chief monument of the Wellington administration.

Against the next great question, the reform of Parliament, he set himself resolutely, expressing his opposition in such unmistakable terms as to forfeit at once his office and his popularity. The London mob stoned his windows, but could not change his attitude toward legislation which he thought pernicious to the welfare of his country. He carried on his opposition when the reform bills began to come up from the Commons into the Peers' chamber. On the 18th of June, 1832, the seventeenth anniversary of Waterloo, he was pelted with stones and dirt by a yelling mob in the streets of London, and only saved from rougher handling by two old soldiers who walked at his stirrups and held back the ruffians until the police came to the rescue. The Reform Bill had already become a law, Wellington and his irreconcilable friends, perceiving the futility of further obstruction, absenting themselves from the chamber rather than vote contrary to their consciences. Even after the reformed Parliament had come into existence this arch aristocrat could see nothing but evil in the outlook. He complained that the House of Commons "had swallowed up all the power of the state," and he was not far wrong. Still his loyalty to the crown, and his determination that the government should be upheld kept him from merely factious opposition and made him a useful servant of the nation. The leader of the majority in the House of Lords, he declined to use his position to thwart the purposes of the popular House. "I do not choose," he said, in 1834, when the Poor Law Bill was up, "I do not choose to be the person to excite a quarrel between the two Houses of Parliament. The quarrel will occur in its time; and the House of Lords will probably be overwhelmed. But it shall not be owing to any action of mine." It was in this year that a singular occurrence showed his unique place in the confidence of King and nation. In November the King dismissed the Melbourne ministry and called on the Duke to form another. The latter perceived that no Tory but Peel could manage the Commons, but Peel was then traveling on the Continent. The Duke accordingly undertook to carry on the government alone until that leader's return. And for five weeks he was the cabinet, holding all the high offices—Treasury, Home, Foreign, and Colonial—himself, so as not to embarrass his successor by making appointments. The Whigs raised a great outcry against this one- man power, but the people rather admired the industry of the veteran who rose at six o'clock in the morning and went the rounds of the departments performing the routine duties with the greatest industry and fidelity and steadily refusing to use his enormous power and patronage for personal or factional rule. Sir Herbert Maxwell, the Duke's latest biographer, has attempted to describe the Duke's political creed by coining a term. He was not "an impracticable Tory," as the Reformers would name him, nor yet a mere "Tory opportunist," as sterner Tories would have it. "He was a possiblist rather than an opportunist, prepared to resist change as long as possible, but to give way rather than throw the power into the hands of those (Radicals) who, he honestly believed, would wreck the realm."

Wellington was foreign secretary in Peel's first cabinet (1834- 35), and commander-in-chief in the second (1841-46). His lifelong political theory is well exemplified by his words when notified by the Prime Minister, in November, 1845, of his intention to suspend the Corn Laws, an act most offensive to his party and social class. "My only object in public life is to support Sir Robert Peel's administration of the government for the Queen. A good government for the country is more important than Corn Laws." In much the same words the aged leader addressed the House of Lords in behalf of Peel's Corn Bill, and though bitterly opposed to the measure, they accepted his guidance and gave the bill their assent. In 1848 there were many who believed that the country was on the brink of a revolution. The Chartist agitation was culminating in the presentation of the great petition to Parliament, and half a million men were to escort it from Kennington to Westminster. Wellington was nearing his seventy- ninth birthday, but the government turned to him to organize the defense of the capital against mob violence. The old warrior- blood warmed in his veins, and he amazed the ministers by the clearness of his plans and the energy and decision with which he carried them out. Though the affair passed off without disturbance, being at all times under police control, so thorough were the Duke's preparations as to have made a successful revolution impossible.

To his latest year the Duke continued to attend the sessions of the Lords, and his opinions were listened to with respectful attention. It was fitting that his last speech there should have been in a military debate, and that in urging the value of militia organization, he should have drawn upon his experience with the raw Hanoverian levies in the Waterloo campaign. This was in the summer of 1852. On the evening of the 13th of the following September he retired in his usual condition of health. The next morning he was seized with sudden illness and did not live the day out.

Enough has been said in this brief sketch of his public career to show that the Duke of Wellington, though among the greatest of English soldiers, cannot rank high among English statesmen, although he served his country in the highest offices. If read in detail the record of his career in the Cabinet and in the House of Lords would confirm the reader in the opinion that his only sure title to greatness rests in his military career. It has often been said that, had he died in the moment of victory as did Nelson, it would have been happier for his fame. But it must not be forgotten that the years of his political action were those in which England was passing through the stages of a social and political revolution, in which the democracy was rising to power and the landed aristocracy was losing prestige and privilege. That this revolution was accomplished without such a convulsion as marked this struggle in other European kingdoms may have been due, in some degree at least, to the fact that the leader of the aristocratic Party was held in honor by the masses of the nation. Moments of exasperation there were when the bitterness of popular feeling against the obstructionists in the House of Lords vented itself upon the Duke, but the prevailing feeling toward him was one of pride in his military achievements and confidence in his honesty. As McCarthy has well said, "His victories belonged to the past. They were but tradition, even to middle-aged persons in the Duke's later years. But he was regarded still as the embodiment of the national heroism and success—a modern St. George in a tightly buttoned frock coat and white trousers!"

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. What share had England taken in the French struggle previous to 1802? 2. What did the Peace of Amiens prove to be? 3. In what ways and with what success did England struggle against Napoleon up to the Peninsular War? 4. Describe the early life of Wellesley. 5. What military experience did lie gain in India? 6. What policy did Napoleon pursue in Spain and Portugal? 7. What qualities fitted Wellesley to command the Peninsular Campaign? 8. Describe Wellington's campaigns up to 1813? 9. How was the Peninsular War finally closed? 10. Describe the struggle at Waterloo. 11. What important acts relative to church questions were enacted under Wellington's ministry? 12. What was his attitude toward the Reform Bill? 13. What curious instance of "one-man power" did he illustrate in 1834? 14. How was his character shown in his position regarding the Corn Laws? 15. How does he rank among great English leaders?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIFE OF WELLINGTON. By W. Herbert Maxwell.
HISTORY OF THE PENINSULAR WAR. By Sir William F. P. Napier.
SELECTED DESPATCHES OF THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON. Edited by S. J.
Owen.
THE CAMPAIGN OF WATERLOO. By John C. Ropes,
The best recent "Life of Wellington" is by Sir Herbert Maxwell. 2
vols. London. The great "History of the Peninsular War" is by Sir
Wm. Napier.

III

GEORGE CANNING AND EUROPEAN AFFAIRS

[GEORGE CANNING, born, London, April II, 1770; died, London, August 8, 1827; educated at Eton and Oxford; Member of Parliament, 1793; 1797, editor of Anti-Jacobin periodical; 1807- 09, Secretary for Foreign Affairs; 1809, duel with Castlereagh; 1814-16, Ambassador at Lisbon; 1817-20, President of India Board; 1822, appointed Governor-General of India; 1822-27, Minister for Foreign Affairs; 1827, Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury. Buried in Westminster Abbey.]

During the first twenty years of the nineteenth century Great Britain, though possessing the most liberal constitution of any of the powers, was the consistent ally of the absolute monarchies of Europe. Strange as the situation at first appears, it is not difficult to trace the causes which produced it.

For the explanation of most of the phenomena of European history in the first half of the century the student must turn back to the French Revolution. The social and political ideas which were at the bottom of that great upheaval were in part suggested by the success of free institutions in constitutional England, where parliamentary government had been highly developed while France lay bound by her Bourbon despots. A large body of Englishmen numbering some of the greatest names in politics and literature sympathized deeply with the earlier manifestations of the revolutionary spirit.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven"

sang Wordsworth, whose youthful enthusiasm over that dawn was soon chilled by the crimes which were committed in the name of Liberty—the slaughter of the royal pair, the reign of the guillotine, and the enthronement of reason in the place of God. The tide of opinion in England was turned by these scenes of lawless license, and when, in 1793, the revolutionary government of France offered its armed aid to all oppressed peoples, England, led by William Pitt, joined Austria and Prussia in a war to suppress the dangerous republic, and restore the Bourbon dynasty to its ancient throne. Seven successive coalitions were thus formed by English diplomacy between 1793 and 1815 to meet the changing phases of the struggle which, after 1803, had ceased to be monarchy against democracy and had become a universal war for self-preservation from Napoleon, the military genius who had made himself the dictator of revolutionary France. When the great war seemed to have come to an end, in 1814-15, and Napoleon was finally caged at St. Helena, England found herself naturally taking a principal part in re-establishing the Bourbon Louis XVIII. on the throne of France. She had stood with the other powers so long against a common foe that she continued to stand with them now in undoing, as far as might be, the work which the disturbing and renovating conqueror had wrought in the kingdoms which he had overrun. Not only were the old boundaries generally restored and the exiled monarchs brought back to replace the upstart Bonaparte kings, but the constitutional freedom which the French arms had introduced in many parts of Europe was annulled wherever possible. The Congress of Vienna, in which the allied powers formulated their policy, did its best to turn back the shadow twenty years on the dial of progress, and England either joined in the effort or stood by consenting to the death of so many newly won liberties.

When the allied sovereigns were met in Napoleon's capital after Waterloo, the Czar of Russia conceived a thought which seemed to him to be an inspiration. In the ecstasy of the hour of deliverance from the sword which had been the nightmare of the continent for a generation Alexander proposed to his fellow potentates a covenant binding them to be governed by the principles of Christian justice and charity in their dealings with their own subjects and in their mutual relations. Sincere and pious as the Czar undoubtedly was, this agreement, which was accepted by the other monarchs, excepting George IV. of England, did not produce the results which one might suppose from its name, the Holy Alliance. It was used not only to stifle the spirit of liberty in western Europe, but its baleful influence was felt in Italy, Spain, and Greece. In effect it was a trades- union in which the allied crowned-heads undertook to stifle popular liberty wherever it showed signs of life. When Alexander explained his proposal to the English commissioners at Paris they could scarcely keep a straight face at its absurdity. Yet though England refused to become a member of the Holy Alliance, she did allow herself for a period of several years to be ruled by its decisions, or at least to allow them to be enforced without a protest.

Such in brief was the chain of events which associated the foreign policy of England with that of the Holy Alliance. The brilliant statesman who broke away from this foreign policy and led England out upon a line of independent action was George Canning.

The future Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister was born in London, April II, 1770. His father was an Englishman from the north of Ireland, who had read law, but failed to get clients, and had succeeded at nothing, from pamphleteering to selling wine. He died on his babe's first birthday. The widow married an actor and essayed a stage career. What would have become of little George had he remained in his mother's company is an interesting speculation. An actor called the attention of his uncle, a London banker, to the probability that the lad was on the high road to the gallows—to which in those days more than one road led. This uncle, Stratford Canning, assumed the responsibility of the child's education, sent him to Eton and later to Oxford. At the former he distinguished himself by his witty contributions to "The Microcosm'—most famous of school-boy periodicals—and at the University where he was graduated, B.A., in 1791 he won some distinction in literature and oratory, taking the University prize with his Latin poem. At Oxford he passed through the "blissful dawn" of which Wordsworth sang, and was an enthusiastic admirer of the French Revolution of 1789 and of the British Whigs who supported it—Fox, Sheridan, and their sort. He came up to London as the tide was turning, and his own opinion was among the first to change. Pitt, the Prime Minister, had been apprised of his talent, sent for him, and had him "chosen" to the House of Commons, a simple matter in those unregenerate days, when the Tory chieftains had their pockets full of boroughs.

Pitt gave Canning a minor government office—he was not yet thirty years of age—and treated him almost as a son, the young man reciprocating the regard with a really filial devotion. He was ambitious for advancement, and discontented with his slow promotion. In 1797, in company with other choice spirits, he began the publication of The Anti-Jacobin, a weekly periodical which for nearly a year held up to merciless ridicule that section of the British public which still countenanced the ruling ideas of the French Revolution. When the King's refusal to yield on the question of Catholic emancipation (1801) compelled Pitt to resign, Canning went out of office with him. Addington, the stupid mediocrity who succeeded Pitt, provoked Canning's pen to fresh lampoons, some of them long remembered for their savage personalities.

When Pitt resumed the premiership, in 1804, to direct the new struggle with Napoleon, he again bestowed office upon Canning, and when he died, in 1806, Canning became the leader of the group of Pittites who endeavored to perpetuate his ideas. In 1807 he entered the cabinet in the important capacity of Foreign Secretary.

As Foreign Secretary under the spiritless premiership of the Duke of Portland, Canning was allowed free hand. The two years and a half during which he directed the foreign office were marked by a succession of moves which gave a new aspect to the contest with Napoleon.

Canning entered upon his duties just as the Fourth Coalition was being hammered to pieces, on the same anvil which had destroyed the others. By the Treaty of Tilsit (July, 1807), Napoleon prepared to unite the northern nations in his war on British commerce. Hearing or divining his purpose to further this project by seizing the fleet of Denmark, Canning dispatched an armed force to Copenhagen with a demand for the surrender of the Danish ships. The order was executed, and the Danish vessels were brought back to England, though at the cost of a bombardment of the Danish capital. The French Emperor's eye was fastened on the fleet of Portugal as another auxiliary, and when the Regent refused to accede to his request, Napoleon dispatched Marshal Junot to drive him from his kingdom and hold its ports and fortresses against England.

England now stood almost alone, and Napoleon hoped to complete her ruinous isolation by destroying her trade with Europe. His "Continental System," which was to make the continent commercially independent of Great Britain, was foreshadowed in his Berlin Decrees. Fresh decrees were now met by fresh Orders in Council, "shutting out from the continent all vessels which had not touched at a British port." It was Canning whose genius caught at the strategic possibilities of a war in the peninsula (Spain-Portugal) as a practical opening on the French flank for a final blow at the Napoleonic power. Napoleon's interference in the government of Spain by dethroning its monarchs and giving the crown to his brother Joseph had exasperated that proud nation and provoked the spirited people to arm against the intruder. The Portuguese were scarcely less bitter against the French conqueror. Canning perceived the possibility of gaining a foothold in these kingdoms, which were easily accessible by sea, and by utilizing the spirit and resources of the aroused nations to consolidate a power there which would threaten France itself, whose borders the great soldier had thus far kept inviolate. How ably Sir Arthur Wellesley fulfilled Mr. Canning's desire the life of Wellington has already shown.

The Peninsular Campaign was scarcely under way when Canning and Castlereagh, the War Secretary, quarreled and the former resigned from the cabinet. Yet from his place in the House the ex-minister continued manfully to uphold the general who was doing England's work in Spain. There was need of all the support his genius could contribute to this task, for parliament was slow to grasp the deep purpose of the campaign, was impatient for results, and prone to grumble at the bill of expense. Yet in the end Canning enjoyed the satisfaction of pointing to the complete verification of his hopes. He might have been Foreign Minister in the Liverpool ministry at its outset (1812) had he been willing to acquiesce in the leadership of Castlereagh in the House of Commons. This would have given him the direction of English policy in those critical years in which the Napoleonic empire was broken up and European affairs rearranged by the powers at Vienna. He lived to regret this as the greatest error of his career. He was sufficiently humbled after four years to join the government forces as president of the India board, resigning in 1820. In 1821, when on the point of going out to India, of which he had been appointed governor-general, his prospects suddenly changed. On the death of his rival, Castlereagh, Canning became Foreign Secretary and leader of the Commons. The prize which he had long schemed to secure, and had finally given up, suddenly fell into his hand. Canning's mind could not but revert to the lost opportunity of 1812. Not in a century would the Foreign Minister again have a world to set in order. He wrote to a friend, "Ten years have made a world of difference, and have made a very different sort of world to bustle in than that which I should have found in 1812. For fame it is a squeezed orange, but for public good there is something to do, and I shall try—but it must be cautiously— to do it. You know my politics well enough to know what I mean when I say that for 'Europe' I shall be desirous now and then to read 'England.'" The closing sentence was the keynote of his policy. For years it had been customary for representatives of the powers to treat all important matters as "European questions," and England had become habituated to a diplomacy which kept English interests in the background for the sake of the commonweal of Europe—Europe and the Holy Alliance being synonymous. "When Castlereagh," said Canning, "got among princes and sovereigns at Vienna, he thought he could not be too fine and complaisant."

When Canning began to represent England in her relations with foreign countries, he found the Holy Alliance in full vigor. In fact, the Czar, Kaiser, and King had just met at Laybach (1821) and issued a manifesto declaring that "useful and necessary changes in legislation and in the administration of states could only emanate from the free will and from the intelligent and well-weighed convictions of those whom God has made responsible for power. Penetrated with this eternal truth, the sovereigns have not hesitated to proclaim it with frankness and vigor. They have declared that, in respecting the rights and independence of legitimate power, they regarded as legally null and disavowed by the principles which constituted the public right of Europe, all pretended reforms operated by revolt and open hostilities." In plain terms the three monarchs, claiming to rule by divine right, reasserted their determination to interfere in the private affairs of any state to suppress movements which seemed to their majesties to be revolutionary. The powers had already acted according to this program in Piedmont and Naples, and were preparing to interfere in behalf of the Bourbons in Spain, the Spaniards in the revolted American republics, and the Turks in Greece when Canning came to power. To the Congress of Verona, where these and other questions were to be considered by the powers, Canning sent Wellington to speak for England. In accordance with his instructions the duke stood for non- intervention. Europe had no business to restore the Bourbon to the throne from which the nation had thrust him; on the same principle Greece must be allowed to fight out her own cause with the Turk; as for the Spanish-American colonies, why they were already lost to Spain, and England had recognized them as independent states. France undertook to do alone for the Spanish monarch what the Holy Alliance wished to do in the name of Europe. In this England acquiesced, but Russia's attempt to second the French in their Spanish project by military support was stopped by Canning's threat that such an act would only result in England's making the Spanish cause her own. "The admission of the jurisdiction of the Holy Alliance over Europe was a course which he deemed it vital at almost any cost to prevent," says Hill. "The time for Areopagus and the like of that," as Canning put it, "has gone by." And again, "What should we have thought of interference from foreign Europe when King John granted Magna Charta, or of an interposition in the quarrel between Charles I. and his Parliament?" To bring his colleagues around to his view, Canning showed them that the interference of the Holy Alliance in the affairs of Ireland might be justified upon the same grounds on which the argument for intervention in Spain was based. The King, never too fond of the brilliant commoner, whose presence in the ministry he considered scarcely less than a personal affront, had the temerity to criticise the policy which was so obnoxious to his fellow crowned heads. He thought that the English recognition of Spanish-American independence was as wicked as the French alliance in 1778 with the insurgent English colonists under Washington. Canning's recognition of Spanish-American independence was a sagacious stroke. It not only gave strength to his contention that peoples had a right to decide for themselves who should rule them, without consulting the despots of Europe, but its timeliness was masterly. Glorifying his own course in one of his most famous Parliamentary orations, in December, 1826, he explained why he had not joined the Spaniards in making armed resistance to the French invasion. He said: "Is the Spain of the present day, the Spain of which the statesmen of the time and William and Anne were so much afraid? Is it, indeed, the nation whose puissance was expected to shake England from her sphere? No, sir, it was quite another Spain—it was the Spain within the limits of whose empire the sun never set; it was Spain with the Indies which excited the jealousies and alarmed the imaginations of our ancestors. . . . If France conquered Spain, was it necessary in order to avoid the consequences of that occupation that we should blockade Cadiz? No, I looked another way: I sought the material of compensation in another hemisphere. Contemplating Spain such as our ancestors had known her, I resolved that, if France had Spain, it should not be Spain with the Indies. I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old!"

Greece began her struggle for independence in 1821. The heroism which her people displayed in their unequal battle with the Turks attracted the attention and sympathy of many persons all over the world, especially those who saw in the modern Greek the representative of the race which had once been the intellectual leader of Europe. The powers of the Holy Alliance, however, were inclined to regard the outbreak with coldness, seeing in it a fresh manifestation of the then growing disposition of European peoples to rise against the tyranny of their anointed kings. England held aloof from their conferences in regard to the matter, trusting to their discordant interests to break up their concert of action, since the Russian czar, as the head of the Greek faith, might be counted upon in the long run to befriend the Greeks, especially as such a step would carry the Russian influence into the Balkan Peninsula and mark a full stride toward Constantinople, then as now the goal of Russian ambition. Canning employed Wellington to negotiate an agreement at St. Petersburg for the rescue of Greece. Ultimately England, Russia, and France signed a protocol which was to establish Greece as a self-governing state, tributary to the Porte, but free in matters of commerce and religion. In 1827 the three powers demanded an armistice looking toward a treaty settlement, and threatened to use force to compel a cessation of hostilities. The Porte defied the powers, and his fleet having fired upon the allied vessels, the battle of Navarino was precipitated in October, 1827. The result was the expulsion of the Turks from the country, and the early establishment of the complete independence of the kingdom of Greece. Canning did not live to see the consummation of his hopes in Greece. His health, which had for several years been much enfeebled, gave way completely, and on August 8, 1827, he died, at the age of fifty-seven. He had then for six months held the highest office in the gift of the nation.

In February, 1827, the illness of Lord Liverpool had made it necessary to reorganize the cabinet and choose a new Prime Minister. After much hesitation the King sent for Canning. Most of his former colleagues declined to serve under him because he was a professed pro-Catholic, and they were still of the opinion that the Protestant constitution of England would be endangered if the Irish demand for Roman Catholic emancipation should be granted. Others were found to take the place of Wellington, Peel, Eldon, and the other Tory leaders, and the Canning ministry got under way, only to be abruptly halted at the grave. The remains of the Prime Minister were deposited in Westminster Abbey, where a statue by Chantry recalls his manly form and expressive countenance.

Even in so slight a sketch as the foregoing, some characteristics of the man stand forth. Canning's wit, while its mordancy cost him many friends, distinguishes him among English statesmen. The talent which had stood him in good stead as boy-editor of "The Microcosm" at Eton, and which is to be seen in the slings and arrows of "The Anti-Jacobin," he never quite lost. His pen was always ready to dash off a scrap of lampooning verse, and flashes of wit and extended passages of humor enlivened the brilliant orations by means of which he explained and defended his policies in Parliament. As an orator his speeches were of exquisite polish, and the voice, gesture, countenance and entire bodily presence of the speaker contributed to their tremendous effect. There were not wanting those who criticised his oratory as savoring more of the stage than the rostrum, but such persons were aristocratic political opponents who would not let the world forget that this man whose genius outshone them all was the son of a third-rate actress. Be it said to Canning's credit that he did not forget his mother, but made her comfort in her declining days the object of his solicitous care.

Mr. Hill, whose study of Canning has been of great assistance in the preparation of these pages, thus goes to the heart of his foreign policy: "The principle which made Canning the antagonist of the propaganda of French principles in Europe during the early part of his political life made him during his later years in an equal degree the antagonist of the principles of the Holy Alliance which it is his great glory as a statesman to have defeated. The Holy Alliance endeavored to impose upon other nations principles and a law of life not their own. As Canning objected to the Holy Alliance, so he would have objected to its present secular substitute, the Concert of Europe, which simply means the agreement of the great powers to inflict their will upon the small ones, not allowing them to develop according to their native forces and genius, but constraining them to such forms and confining them within such limits as suits the convenience of a despotic hexarchy of states, or of a majority of them. The country which is England at home should be England abroad, reserving all its freedom of action. Canning's foreign policy, which was for 'Europe' to read 'England,' and to 'get rid of Areopagus and all that,' was sound and statesmanlike and abundantly justified by its results."

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. How did England join with the rest of Europe in undoing the work of Napoleon? 2. Give the chief events in the early life of Canning. 3. Why did Canning authorize an attack on Denmark? 4. What was his relation to the Peninsular War? 5. What was his "lost opportunity" of 1812? 6. How did he set forth his plans when he became foreign secretary in 1821? 7. What interference in the affairs of Europe did the Holy Alliance attempt? 8. How did Canning defend his recognition of Spanish-American independence? 9. What part did England play in the liberation of Greece? 10. What were the personal qualities of Canning?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GEORGE CANNING. Frank H. Hill.
POETRY OF THE ANTI-JACOBIN. Edited by Charles Edmonds.

IV

STEPHENSON AND THE RAILWAY

[GEORGE STEPHENSON, born, Wylam, near Newcastle, June 9, 1781; died, August 12, 1848; driver lad in a colliery; at fourteen, assistant to his father as fireman of colliery engines; at seventeen, engineman; at eighteen, learned to read in night school; 1812, enginewright at Killingworth colliery; 1814, operated his locomotive, "My Lord"; 1822, engineer of Stockton and Darlington Railroad (opened 1825); engineer of Liverpool and Manchester Railroad (opened 1830); produced locomotive "Rocket," capable of thirty miles an hour.]

In a bare room of a laborer's tenement in the colliery village of Wylam, in Northumberland, on the 9th day of June, 1781, was born a babe to whose mind and hand England was to owe as much in future years as to any high-born minister of the crown. Indeed, one might trust the world to give a verdict in favor of George Stephenson, the founder of the steam railway as against his sovereign, King George III. himself.

The father, the "old Rob" of the village boys, was the fireman of the pumping engine at the colliery hard by. His father before him—the Stephensons were no pedigree-hunters, and traced their line no farther- -was a Scotchman who, so far as anything was remembered of him, had come into the north of England as a gentleman's servant. Robert was a favorite with the village children, to whom he gave the freedom of the fire-room, and was a boon companion of his own houseful of boys and girls, kindling their fancy by his headful of tales, and sharpening their observation of the beauties of nature by making them the companions of his walks a-field, where the birds and other living things were the objects of his peculiar interest and love.

As soon as little George was old enough to "take notice" he must have discovered the railway which ran before his father's door, and his earliest responsibilities were connected with the oversight of his younger brothers and sisters lest in their play they should fall under the wheels of the cars or the hoofs of the horses that supplied the motive power. The road was a wooden tramway along which coal cars were dragged from the mines to tidewater.

The first tramways in the northern coal-fields were made by laying a track of planking on wooden sleepers. This device was more than a century old when George Stephenson was born. In some places this had been improved by plating the planks with iron. While the Wylam lad was still a barefoot boy, cast-iron rails were being introduced in Leicestershire, a wheel having been designed with a flange to keep it on the narrow track. Thus the railway was brought to a stage which needed only the application of steam to its motive power to carry it into a new and vastly enlarged phase.

The fireman's son was set to win his share of the family bread before he was ten. He tended a widow's cows, led the plow- horses, and hoed turnips before he entered a colliery as a breaker-boy, where his task was to pick out stones and other foreign substances from the fuel. Sixpence a day was the wage. Soon at twopence more he was promoted to drive the gin-horse that, circling around a capstan, hoisted the buckets of water and coals out of the pit. At fourteen he became his father's assistant in the fire-room at Dewley Burn at a shilling a day. At fifteen he obtained a foreman's position in another colliery. At seventeen he had gone over his father's head, and had charge of a pumping engine at Water-row Pit. When his wages reached twelve shillings a week he thought he was "a made man for life," but his ignoble content was soon disturbed. Always fascinated by machinery, as he was by birds and animals, he made a pet of his engines, studying them with a singular fondness, and making himself master of their principles and their parts. This knowledge prompted him to learn more, especially to find out something about the improved engines of Boulton & Watt, of which rumors had reached the enginemen of the north. To do this he must learn to read, an art which he seems to have considered superfluous until he was eighteen. Never did student work harder than Geordie Stephenson at his new task, amazing his teachers and his mates by his progress at "the three R's." He was now brakesman of a hoisting engine, dividing his small leisure between his studies and his cobblery, for he added to his earnings by mending shoes. His income was now some ninety pounds a year. He saved his first guinea and felt himself a rich man. At twenty-one he married a farmer's house-servant and went to housekeeping in a cottage at Wellington Quay.

It would be a long story, however interesting, to follow the young mechanic through the experiences by which he won a name in all the North Country as the cleverest of "engine doctors," eking out his wages by making lasts, mending watches, and even cutting out coats and trousers for the wives of the pitmen to sew up for their husbands. His desire to provide his motherless boy Robert with better schooling than he had enjoyed sharpened his wits and added strength to his arm. Fortunately the son proved to be not only an apt scholar, but had the rare gift of being able to teach others. Whatever he learned in the good schools to which his father sent him, he imparted to his father. So boy and man progressed together in their educational partnership.

When George Stephenson became chief enginewright of the Killingworth collieries at one hundred pounds a year he thought he had reached the summit of his ambition. The duties of the position made less demand upon him for manual labor, and left him time to carry out some of his mechanical ideas. He devised new hoists and pumps for the mines, and then applied himself to the ever-present problem of cheapening the transportation of the coals between pit mouth and ship side. One of his first improvements of this sort was a gravity railway, so arranged that the loaded cars, running down to the river by their own weight, furnished the power to draw the empty cars to the summit again by cable. When George Stephenson took up the problem of perfecting a "traveling steam engine" he had the advantage of knowing what had been accomplished by other experimenters. For fifty years inventors had been turning out steam engines of considerable promise in the model stage, but of little practical performance. Indeed, about 1803, a Cornishman named Trevithick had produced a locomotive which was used for a time to transport metal and ore to the Pen-y-darran iron works in South Wales. The heavy engine so damaged the tracks that it was soon dismounted and degraded to the work of a steam pump. In 1812 a cog-wheel locomotive, invented by a Mr. Blenkinsop, began running in a colliery a few miles out of Leeds, and served very well its purpose to haul heavy trains almost as fast as a horse could walk. The next year a Derbyshire mechanic produced a "Mechanical Traveler," the legs of which were moved alternately by steam, but the bursting of its boiler on its trial trip put an end to its picturesque career of doubtful usefulness.

One Mr. Blackett, an enterprising collier of Wylam, introduced the ideas of Trevithick and Blenkinsop to the Tyneside and so brought them under the observant eye of the Killingworth enginewright, who had such a clever way of smoothing away difficulties in complicated machinery. After repeated and costly experiments, Mr. Blackett evolved a type of locomotive which, though noisy and clumsy, did better work than any of its predecessors.

After making a careful study of what had been done by others, George Stephenson came to the conclusion that he could improve upon the existing locomotive models. This was about 1813, when he was about thirty-four years old. He said to his friends that "there was no limit to the speed of such an engine, if the works could be made to stand." One of his employers, Lord Ravensworth, advanced the necessary money for constructing his first "Traveling Engine" at West Moor, the colliery blacksmith undertaking to carry out his designs. Dr. Smiles's description of this locomotive may be reproduced: "The boiler was cylindrical of wrought iron, eight feet in length and thirty-four inches in diameter, with an internal flue tube twenty inches wide passing through it. The engine had two vertical cylinders of eight inches diameter and two feet stroke let into the boiler, working the propelling gear with cross heads and connecting rods. The power of the two cylinders was combined by means of spur-wheels which communicated the motive power to the wheels supporting the engine on the rail. . . The engine thus worked upon what is termed the second motion. The chimney was of wrought iron, round which was a chamber extending back to the feed pumps, for the purpose of heating the water previous to the injection into the boiler. The engine had no springs, and was mounted on a wooden frame supported on four wheels." The engine made its trial trip July 25, 1814, on which occasion it showed a speed of four miles an hour in drawing a load of thirty tons. This engine was named "Blucher," after the distinguished Prussian field-marshal.

Blucher was almost immediately improved by its inventor. First he doubled the steam-making power of its boiler by turning the exhaust from the cylinders into the smoke-stack, thus creating a forced draught. Second he built another engine, in which the tooth-wheel driving gear gave way to a simple and direct connection between the piston and the driving wheels which rolled upon the rails. This type of locomotive, developing some six miles an hour, did its work so well in the colliery that it was retained, with very slight alterations, for more than half a century. The report of its success got abroad slowly, and Mr. Stephenson was commissioned to build a railway and a number of locomotives for a colliery in another shire. The success of this piece of engineering encouraged him in sending his son Robert, a youth of fine promise, to Edinburgh to study physical sciences in the university, where in his brief residence he took a mathematical prize.

The year 1823 marked another forward step for George Stephenson and railroads. Two years before a road had been chartered to connect the Durham coal-fields with tidewater. Stephenson heard of the project, and at once proposed to the company to make an iron railroad of the new wooden tramway and equip it with his traveling engines. His arguments and demonstrations won over the skeptical directors. They had their charter amended so as to authorize the use of steam as motive power for the transport of passengers as well as merchandise. Thus began the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the first in the world with a passenger charter. The chief engineer was George Stephenson, on a salary of five hundred pounds. At the same time, with the assistance of the railroad people, he founded the locomotive shops at Newcastle.

The new railroad, the first public line, was opened in September, 1825. As its construction progressed, its engineer had become increasingly sanguine of success. He said to his son Robert at this time: "I venture to tell you that I think you will live to see the day when railways will supersede almost all other methods of conveyance in this country—when mail coaches will go by railway, and railroads will become the great highway for the King and all his subjects. The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a workingman to travel upon a railway than to walk on foot. I know there are great and almost unsurmountable difficulties to be encountered, but what I have said will come to pass as sure as you live. I only wish I may live to see the day, though that I can scarcely hope for, as I know how slow all human progress is, and with what difficulty I have been able to get the locomotive thus far adopted, notwithstanding my more than ten years' successful experiment at Killingworth."

The first train over the road was such an one as had never been seen before. George Stephenson was at the lever when the engine pulled out with a string of eight cars behind it. One regular passenger coach—the first ever built—held the directors, and twenty-one improvised passenger "wagons" carried some six hundred daring individuals. Coal and flour filled the other cars. The journey was safely accomplished at a speed which is said at times to have reached the hitherto unheard of rate of twelve miles an hour. The road, with its three Stephenson locomotives and many horses, was successful from the first, and its dividends were among the chief inducements which led to the next and more important advance in railroad construction, the Liverpool and Manchester line.

Manchester was the great manufacturing center of the industrial England, which the inventions of Arkwright and Watt had called into existence. Its port was Liverpool. The natural means of communication between the two cities was quite inadequate to the changed conditions. In 1821 surveys were made for a tramway, and before the Stockton road was completed Stephenson had been selected as chief engineer of the new and more ambitious enterprise. Yet his assertion that trains could be moved between the two cities at twenty miles an hour raised serious doubts in many minds as to his sanity. A writer in the "Quarterly Review" thought that even though a few foolhardy persons might trust themselves to a vehicle moving at such speed—twice that of the swiftest stagecoaches—Parliament for the general welfare should limit the speed of all railways to eight or nine miles an hour, as the greatest that could be ventured on with safety.

It was while the grant of a charter to this Liverpool and Manchester Railway was being discussed in a committee of the House of Commons that the shrewd North Country engineer first faced the trained Parliamentary lawyers. He had been cautioned to keep his figures for speed within the most moderate limits so as not to prejudice the company's case, but his belief in his own invention mastered his restraint, though as he afterward said, he did his best "to keep the engine down to ten miles an hour." In fact, his daring prediction of twelve miles per hour struck the learned counsel with horror. They objected that horses would fly in terror from such a monster. He replied that horses had been known to shy at wheelbarrows. They tried to make him admit that the wheels would slip on the smooth rails, but he knew that they would bite without teeth. One of the committee said, "Suppose that a cow were to stray upon the line and get in the way of the engine; would not that be a very awkward circumstance?" To which the countryman had a ready reply, "Very awkward—for the cow!" The opposition, which was largely animated by the existing canal interest, ventured some views which the experience of the next five years was to make most ridiculous. They declared that the plan to carry the rails over the surveyed route across Chat Moss, a wide morass, was impossible; and furthermore, that no locomotive could make headway against the high winds which at times prevailed in that region. Experts were brought to testify that "no engineer in his senses would go through Chat Moss if he wanted to make a railroad from Liverpool to Manchester." "In my judgment," said one of them, "a railroad cannot be made over Chat Moss without going to the bottom." The committee decided against the bill, but at the next session Parliament granted the company the power to construct the road, the question whether or not locomotives should be used upon it being left in abeyance. George Stephenson was chosen to be chief engineer, at one thousand pounds a year.

Chat Moss was conquered by an ingenious device which practically floated the road-bed upon its spongy surface. Tunnels were driven through the hills, deep cuttings were made wherever needed, a ravine was crossed by a viaduct of brick and stone, and more than threescore bridges were thrown across the streams. All the plans for this complicated work passed under the eye, and many of them took their first form in the mind of the chief, whose skill as a mechanic was for the time sunk in his genius for civil engineering. By dint of the most strenuous application, and by the dominance of a spirit of perseverance which no discouragement or obstacle could daunt, Stephenson brought the road to triumphant completion. The next thing was to convince the directors that the steam locomotive was the proper equipment for a public railway. As a beginning, he persuaded the company to place one of his engines upon its construction trains. The experts who were employed to investigate the many proposed applications of power decided, however, that the most feasible equipment was a series of twenty-one stationary engines located at intervals along the right of way and hauling the cars stage after stage by means of a rope wound upon a drum-the principle of the cable railway which afterwards had its day in our streets. Still Stephenson would give the directors no peace. Finally, in order to settle the question of the practical utility of the traveling engine, the company offered a prize of five hundred pounds for the best locomotive engine, to be awarded after a competitive test upon certain conditions, the most notable of which were:

"2. The engine of six tons weight must be able to draw after it, day by day, twenty tons weight at ten miles an hour with a pressure of steam on the boiler not exceeding fifty pounds to the square inch."

"4. The engine and boiler must be supported on springs and rest on six wheels, the height of the whole not exceeding fifteen feet to the top of the chimney."

"7. The engine must be delivered complete and ready for trial at the Liverpool end of the railway not later than the 1st of October, 1829."

"8. The price of the engine must not exceed five hundred and fifty pounds."

George Stephenson and his son Robert threw all their resources into the production of the locomotive which was to carry their colors in the contest. The "Rocket" engine, which was built in their Newcastle shop, was fitted with a tubular boiler six feet long and three feet four inches in diameter. The fire-box was two feet wide and three feet high. On each side of the boiler at its rear end was an oblique cylinder, the piston-rods being connected with the outside of the two driving wheels, which were in front. The two rear wheels were about one-half the diameter of the drivers. The tender, also fourwheeled, was a simple affair, the water being carried in a large cask.

After a successful trial trip, the "Rocket," which weighed but four and a half tons, was sent by wagon across England to Carlisle, and thence to Liverpool. It was one of four steam engines entered in the competition which attracted wide attention. Among the entries was the "Novelty," the production of that talented Swede, John Ericsson, who afterwards, in America, built the iron-clad "Monitor." The "Novelty" showed fine bursts of speed, but failed in point of endurance. The "Perseverance" and "Sanspareil" developed radical defects, but the "Rocket," driven by George Stephenson's own hand was prepared for every turn of the competition, and surpassed all in power, speed, and general serviceability. To its makers the prize was unhesitatingly awarded, whereupon the hardy engineer amazed every beholder by letting out the last link and dashing past the grandstand at the rate of more than thirty miles an hour. The forced draft, which had made the Killingworth freight engines so successful, coupled with the tubular boiler, formed a combination which won the battle for the locomotive once for all, and made the name of George Stephenson a household word.

A year later, on the 15th of September, 1830, the Manchester and Liverpool Railway was formally opened. The Duke of Wellington— the first citizen of the realm—was present with Sir Robert Peel and other distinguished personages, together with a vast throng of sightseers, enthusiastic spectators of the consummation of George Stephenson's dreams. Though marred by a fatal accident, the occasion proved the entire practicability of the railway as a means of transportation. The multitudes who rode in its cars on that memorable day were but a foretaste of the patronage which the line was to receive. Although the intention of its projectors was to limit its traffic chiefly to freight, the road from the first found its offices besieged by persons eager to ride. Thus passenger traffic became established as its leading source of revenue, and thus were the capitalists encouraged to prosecute the extension of the railway system to points where the outlook for freight business was much less than between Liverpool and Manchester. Though these roads were fiercely opposed by the landowners, the canal-men, and turnpike proprietors, they were pressed forward in every direction. Robert Stephenson shared with his father the responsibility of engineering some of the principal lines, though the two men had the grim satisfaction of seeing the experts who had ridiculed the initial project now eagerly bidding for the opportunity of conducting surveys for the new lines.

A mania for building railroads seized the world. The Stephensons were in demand not only throughout Great Britain, but even on the Continent. They had already made a market for their engines abroad, when, in 1835, they were summoned by the King of Belgium to assist in laying out a system of railways for that kingdom. For his services here the engineer was knighted by the King and banqueted at the royal table. Honored at home and abroad; happy in the general adoption of the ideas to which he had clung through opposition and adversity; proud of the son Robert, for whose education he had worked like a slave, and whom he now saw hailed as one of the great engineers of the world; fortunate in business; respected and beloved by men of every class, George Stephenson spent the closing years of his life in affluence and ease. He had earned his peace, for he had fought and won the battle of the locomotive, and so, by improving the means of communication, had advanced the interests of trade, and promoted the welfare of England and of mankind. George Stephenson died in 1848. His son Robert outlived him but eleven years, and was buried in Westminster Abbey as one of the great men of the century. The boldness of his engineering projects, the skill and daring with which he flung his railway bridges and viaducts across rivers, valleys, and straits, had caught and held the imagination of the world. Together the two men wrote the name of Stephenson large and lasting in the record of nineteenth-century England.

Had the nineteenth century nothing else to show save the improvement in transportation, its fame would be secure. Within a dozen years after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, Great Britain was covered with railways or railway surveys, establishing all the trunk-lines which now exist. The thirty and a half miles of the original line grew by leaps and bounds to a system of nearly two thousand miles, the property of a single company, whose property is valued at five hundred million dollars. Twenty-five years after the day of the "Rocket's" victory eight thousand miles of railway were in operation in the United Kingdom. Another twenty-five years brought the total up to eighteen thousand miles, which had cost for construction nearly four billion dollars. At the same time (1883) the number of locomotives was 14,469, of cars, 490,661. Before Manchester and Liverpool were connected by railway thirty stage-coaches sufficed for the passenger traffic. The railway carried seven hundred thousand passengers between the two cities in its first year and one-half. Fifty years later the passengers on all the English lines numbered six hundred million, of whom eighty-five per cent traveled third-class. The freight traffic in the same year was two hundred and twenty-six million tons. Robert Stephenson lived to see one per cent of the entire population of the United Kingdom employed on the railways. In 1884 the number of such employees was 367,793. These few figures are sufficient to suggest the magnitude of the economic changes which took place in England, and indeed throughout the civilized world, as the direct result of the talent, industry, and perseverance of George Stephenson, the Northumbrian plowboy.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. Describe the early life of George Stephenson. 2. What attempts at locomotives had been made prior to his time? 3. What success of Stephenson's led to the Stockton-Darlington railway? 4. How did the " Quarterly" comment on the proposed Liverpool line? 5. What was the view of the Parliamentary committee? 6. Describe Stephenson's work on the Liverpool & Manchester line. 7. What competitors had the "Rocket"? 8. Describe the later work of the two Stephensons. 9. Contrast Stephenson's England with that of to-day.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIFE OF STEPHENSON. Samuel Smiles. ("Lives of the Engineers.")

V

RUSSELL AND PARLIAMENTARY REFORM

[JOHN RUSSELL, Earl Russell, born, London, August 18, 1792; died,
Pembroke Lodge, Richmond Park, May 28,1878; educated at
Westminster School and Edinburgh University; Member of
Parliament, 1813; favored Catholic emancipation; 1830-34,
paymaster general; 1831, introduced the first Reform Bill; 1832,
carried the third Reform Bill; 1835-39, Home Secretary; 1839-41,
Colonial Secretary; 1846-52, Prime Minister; 1852-53, Foreign
Secretary; 1854-55, President of the Council; 1855, Colonial
Secretary; 1859-65, Foreign Secretary; 1865-66, Prime Minister.]

The Parliament of England is one of the most ancient of political institutions. Constitutional historians find its germs in the council of the wise men—"The Witenagemot"—which was summoned to give advice to the early Anglo-Saxon kings. In the thirteenth century Simon de Montfort had added to the assembly of the nobles certain representatives of the counties, cities, and boroughs. The monarchs found this gathering of the estates of the nation a useful instrument of taxation and the Parliament in turn acquired certain legislative rights. In time the nobles or peers began to sit by themselves, leaving the chosen representatives to meet in a House of Commons. The story of the increasing influence of Parliament is in great part the history of the English nation. Before the close of the seventeenth century the power of Parliament had become the leading force in the state. Yet much remained to be done in the nineteenth century to bring this supreme governing body into living touch with the heart of the nation.

The conservative habit of the English had left the constitution of the House of Commons untouched for so many years that it had lost all but the semblance of a representative body. No uniform qualification for the voter existed. In one locality the franchise was closely restricted, in others every man, however poor, might exercise the right to vote. There were all manner of variations in these "fancy franchises," which had been conferred by special charters at long separated intervals. Neither was there any existing relation between population and representation. Strange as the statement will appear to American readers, accustomed to the reapportionment of congressional representation after every federal census, it is a fact that there had been no radical change in the boundaries of election districts in England for centuries. The population had meanwhile undergone enormous changes. Not only had it increased manifold, but the rise of modern industry had occasioned a redistribution of the people. London had become a swarming hive. Liverpool docks and warehouses were surrounded by a crowded city. Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and other places scarcely known to the England of Tudor and Stuart, were centers of busy industrial life, attracting to themselves multitudes of the inhabitants of the countryside. The counties, large and small, continued to have equal representation in Parliament, though some of them were many times more populous than others. In the boroughs the inequalities were most flagrant. Where a goodly village had been in Tudor times there might now be nothing visible but the crumbling tower of the parish church, yet the place still retained its right to representation in the House of Commons. Such decayed or "rotten" boroughs existed in considerable numbers. Their few voters were controlled by the land-owning nobility. McCarthy says, "The case of Old Sarum is famous. It returned members to Parliament in the days of Edward III., and from that period down to the time of the Reform Bill. But the town of Old Sarum gradually disappeared. Owing to the rise of New Sarum (Salisbury) and to other causes the population gradually deserted it. The town became practically effaced from existence; its remains far less palpable or visible than those of any Baalbec or Palmyra. Yet it continued to be represented in Parliament. It was at one time bought by Lord Chatham's grandfather, Governor Pitt. It was coolly observed at the time that "Mr. Pitt's posterity now have an hereditary seat in the House of Commons as owners of Old Sarum," just as any earl had a seat in the House of Lords by virtue of his hereditary peerage. When the Reform Bill was passed the member of Parliament for the borough of Ludgershall was himself the only voter in the borough and had chosen himself to Parliament on his own nomination. Another place with two members had only seven qualified voters. McCarthy is quite within the truth when he asserts that two-thirds of the House of Commons was made up of the nominees of the peers and great landlords "who owned their boroughs and members just as they owned their parks and their cattle." Thus the power of the landed aristocracy, which was the House of Lords, lacked but little of being the House of Commons as well. The mass of the nation, which was now rapidly gaining in education and wealth, had no way of making its influence felt in Parliament except by the power of public opinion, to which the periodical and pamphlet press was beginning to give expression.

The condition of the representation, the rotten boroughs, as those in decay were called, and the pocket boroughs, a name applied to those which were the property of individuals, opened the way for shameless corruption. Where the electorate was small and the secret ballot unknown bribery had free rein. Seats were openly bought and sold. As early as 1770 the elder Pitt (Lord Chatham) had placed his finger upon this ailing spot in the English body politic, and had said, "Before the end of this century, either the Parliament will reform itself from within, or be reformed with a vengeance from without." His prediction was falsified by the reactionary effect of the French Revolution, which not only made the English aristocracy cautious about readjusting political arrangements, but kept the minds and hands of Englishmen so fully occupied with foreign affairs as to divert attention from their own domestic troubles. At the close of the long struggle with Napoleon the question came rapidly to the front. Financial distress and industrial depression made the populace restless and discontented. The glowing principles which had inspired the French Revolution in its early days with its watchwords of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," gained a deep lodgment in the popular mind. The dissatisfaction vented itself in attacks upon a political system which denied the right of representation to so large a proportion of the wealth-producing population.

The government at first turned a deaf ear to these appeals, then tried to suppress the agitation which swept through the great manufacturing towns. It was one of these bungling attempts to silence free speech in Manchester on August 16, 1819, which led to the trampling and sabring of many innocent persons by cavalrymen, the "Peterloo massacre," which the populace long cherished as a bloody score against, their aristocratic oppressors. For ten years more the democratic press continued to agitate even more bitterly for reform, and a lonely "radical" member of Parliament would bring forward his motions only to have them contemptuously thrust aside. In 1830, however, a ministry came into power which allowed nothing to stand in the way until the long awaited bill had become a law. The condition which contributed to its success, the incidents of the tremendous parliamentary struggle, and the men who carried it through, are all worthy of the most careful attention of the student of human affairs.

The death of George IV. (June 26, 1830) made way for his brother, William IV., and made necessary a general parliamentary election. The summer had seen a liberal revolution in Paris. The Bourbons had been thrust out and Louis Philippe had been accepted as the citizen-king of the French, governing under a liberal constitution. This revolution, and simultaneous movements throughout western Europe, touched an answering chord in the breasts of Englishmen, and the Tories found themselves in a minority when the new Parliament assembled in November. The Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, the last man from whom the popular cause could expect to receive any concessions. At the opening of the session the premier took occasion to declare his disbelief "that the state of representation could be improved or be rendered more satisfactory to the country at large than at the present moment." "I am fully convinced," he said, "that the country possesses a legislature which answers all the good purposes of legislation, and this to a greater degree than any legislature has answered in any other country whatever." He flatly declared his determined opposition to any measure of reform. Within a fortnight his government met its Waterloo and he resigned.

Earl Gray, the Whig premier who succeeded Wellington, came into office fully resolved to pass a Reform Bill. The responsibility of drafting the measure was intrusted to a young Whig commoner, Lord John Russell, a younger son of the Duke of Bedford, and a scion of one of the great Whig houses. Lord John Russell had entered Parliament in 1813, at the age of twenty-one, for one of the family boroughs. He was now in his thirty-seventh year, and his parliamentary career, if not brilliant for oratory, had at least been marked by intelligent devotion to high ideals. In 1819, before the echoes of Peterloo had died away, he had asked Parliament to disfranchise all boroughs of proved corruption, and transfer their representation to more deserving constituencies. A little later he proved to the House the corruption existing at Gram-pound, and secured the disfranchisement of that borough and the transfer of its voting rights to the great county of York. This was but a small step, but it opened the way to tremendous changes. He was determined, he said, to strip "the dead bones of a former state of England" of their political influence and give it to the "living energy of England of the nineteenth century, with its steam engines and its factories, its cotton and woolen cloths, its cutlery and its coal mines, its wealth and its intelligence." Session after session he returned to this text only to be as often defeated by the Tories. He was more successful in 1828 when he carried the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, relics of a bygone age when it was thought necessary to the safety of the nation to exclude from military or civil office all persons who did not take the communion in accordance with the ritual of the Established Church. "Lord John," as he came to be called in the course of his half-century of parliamentary life, would have advanced from the relief of Protestant dissenters to the emancipation of the Catholics, had not the Tories, in their dread of civil war in Ireland, forestalled him, and made the measure their own (April, 1829).

The first Reform Bill, which had been drafted by Russell, and worked over by Lord Durham and other ministers, was presented to the Commons on March 1, 1831. Its provisions had been kept profoundly secret, and the house was thronged to hear them explained in the low and measured tones of Lord John Russell. The nation was as eager as the immediate auditory to know how far the government would go in granting the popular demand. Touching upon some of the existing anomalies the speaker imagined a foreigner visiting England; having been impressed with British wealth, civilization, and renown, "Would not such a foreigner," he queried, "be much astonished if he were taken to a green mound and informed that it sent two members to the British Parliament? . . . . or if he walked into a park without the vestige of a dwelling and was told that it, too, sent two members to the British Parliament? But if he was surprised at this, how much more would he be astonished if he were carried into the north of England, where he would see large, flourishing towns, full of trade, activity, and intelligence, vast magazines of wealth and manufactures, and were told that these places sent no representatives to Parliament!"

By the provisions of the bill sixty boroughs with less than two thousand members were to lose both members, and forty-seven boroughs were to be reduced to a single member. Of the seats thus vacated eight were to be given to London, thirty-four to large towns, fifty-five to English counties, five to Scotland, three to Ireland, one to Wales. The franchise was to be extended to inhabitants of houses taxed at ten pounds a year, and to leaseholders and copyholders of counties. The changes added about half a million to the number of voters in the United Kingdom.

The country followed the progress of the debate with intense interest night after night. The bill passed to its second reading by a majority of one in the fullest house on record and the country gave itself up to illuminations and other expressions of joy. But the bill got no farther. The majority was too close for the comfort of the ministers, and having been defeated on a matter of detail, they confidently appealed to the country. The King dissolved Parliament, and writs were issued for a general election. It was at this juncture, when London was illuminating to show its satisfaction over the prospect for a reform victory, that the darkened windows of the Duke of Wellington's town house were stoned by the populace. The rallying cries of the Whigs were "The bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the bill," and "Reform, Aye or No?" Popular agitation by associations, newspapers, speech-making, monster meetings, etc., reached an unprecedented height, and the force of public opinion was shown at the polls. In spite of pocket boroughs, family influence, and flagrant corruption, the reformers came back to Parliament with their majority increased to fully one hundred. Of the eighty-two members for the counties where the popular feeling had its freest expression, only six were opposed to Lord Russell's scheme of reform.

Lord Russell's second Reform Bill was introduced on June 24th. The minority, hopeless of success in a stand-up fight, resorted to the obstructive tactics now known as "filibustering." After wasting three months in tedious obstruction the Commons passed the bill by a majority of one hundred and nine, and Lord Grey laid it before the House of Lords in the most impressive speech of his career. He endeavored to persuade the aristocrats before him that only by such concessions could the Constitution of England be saved. Already there were wide-spread evidences of popular discontent in the "nightly alarms, burnings, and popular disturbances." The rotten boroughs could no longer be tolerated with safety to the state. "This gangrene upon our representative system bade defiance to all remedies but that of excision." Deaf to his arguments, and blind to everything but their own privilege and immediate interest, the peers pronounced against the bill.

The rejection of the second Reform Bill by the House of Lords brought England to the brink of revolution. As it was, the newspapers were full of signs that the patience of the nation was exhausted. Mobs and incendiary fires were reported in many districts, and the abolition of the House of Lords found strenuous advocates. It was at one of the numerous indignation meetings that Sydney Smith hit off the attempt of the Lords to stay the progress of reform by comparing it with Mrs. Partington's attempt to check the high tide at Sidmouth with a mop. "The Atlantic was roused. Mrs. Partington's spirit was up. But I need not tell you that the contest was unequal. The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington. Gentlemen, be at your ease; be quiet and steady; you will beat Mrs. Partington!"

As soon as the Parliament reassembled in December, Lord John Russell offered the third Reform Bill. It was identical in principle with the others, though the number of the affected boroughs had been slightly altered. It passed its successive stages by ample majorities and was in due order presented to the House of Lords. The ministers were prepared to play their last card. They found the peers determined to mutilate the proposition in disregard of the popular demand, now louder than ever, for "The bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the bill." Earl Grey and his chancellor, Lord Brougham, thereupon requested King William to overcome the opposition by sanctioning the creation of new peers sufficient to insure a majority for the act. But the King held back. The ministers offered their resignations, and the King commissioned the Iron Duke to form a government. But no Tory government could stand a day in the face of the hosts of reform in the Commons and in the nation, as Wellington had reluctantly to confess. The monarch had to yield, and so doing, helped establish the principle more firmly than ever before that the chief power in the English Constitution is lodged in the House of Commons, acting through its ministers. In this case it was Commons against King and Lords, and the Commons had their way. To save themselves from an inundation of new peerages the Lords whose hostility to the bill was irreconcilable absented themselves from Westminster when the vote was taken—"skulked in clubs and country houses" as Lord Russell sharply phrased it. The Duke of Wellington's words will show the temper with which the hide-bound Tories received the act. "Reform, my Lords, has triumphed. The barriers of the Constitution are broken down, the waters of destruction have burst the gates of the temple, and the tempest begins to howl. Who can say where its course should stop? Who can stay its speed? For my own part I sincerely hope that my predictions may not be fulfilled, and that my country may not be ruined."

The immediate effect of the reform was to admit the tradesmen and tenant-farmers, the sturdy English middle class, to a share in the government. Thirty-five years later, after Lord Russell had made three or four futile endeavors to carry still further the principle of reform, his opponents, the Conservatives, led by Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli, passed the Reform Bills of 1867-68, greatly reducing the property qualification of voters, and rectifying inequalities in borough representation. Under this act most of the mechanic and artisan class gained the right to vote. Finally, in 1884, Mr. Gladstone carried the reform another stage, conferring the franchise upon two millions of poor men, including the class of agricultural laborers.

His contribution to the success of reform identified Lord John Russell with the cause of liberty, and made him a leading man. It is not within the scope of this sketch to follow him through the shifting scenes of the honorable career in politics and statesmanship which now opened out before him, and which continued until, when at nearly four-score, the party leadership passed from him to his able associate, William Ewart Gladstone. Among the notable measures in which he had a leading hand was the Municipal Reform Act of 1835, which put the government of cities in the hands of the taxpayers and did away with the effete and corrupt corporations which had exercised it. His "Edinburgh letter," in 1845, hastened Peel's conversion to free trade. He was ever concerned in religion and education. After the overthrow of Peel's government, in 1846, he was raised to the premiership. He held the position until 1852, and again, from October, 1865, to June, 1866. His retirement in the latter year removed from British politics a conspicuous figure. It was a figure which had filled a large place in the affairs of the world, and for the most part filled it well, though never again in his career was it his lot to become such a popular hero as he was during the early battles for reform. Russell's death, in 1878, brought up the varied panorama of his life. McCarthy, in reviewing it, touches upon some of its points of interest. "He had a seat in the administration at his disposal when another young man might have been glad of a seat in an opera box. He must have been brought into more or less intimate association with all the men and women worth knowing in Europe since the early part of the century. He was a pupil of Dugald Stewart at Edinburgh, and he sat as a youth at the feet of Fox. He had accompanied Wellington in some of his peninsular campaigns; he measured swords with Canning and Peel successively through years of parliamentary warfare. He knew Metternich and Talleyrand. He had met the widow of Charles Stuart, the young chevalier, in Florence; and had conversed with Napoleon in Elba. He knew Cavour and Bismarck. He was now an ally of Daniel O'Connell, and now of Cobden and Bright. He was the close friend of Thomas Moore; he knew Byron. Lord John Russell had tastes for literature, for art, for philosophy, for history, for politics, and his aestheticism had the advantage that it made him seek the society and appreciate the worth of men of genius and letters. Thus he never remained a mere politician like Pitt or Palmerston."

No one will now claim that Earl Russell—he was raised to the peerage with this title—is to be ranked with the few greatest of English statesmen, but that he served his country devotedly, honorably, and courageously will not be denied. His contemporary, Lord Shaftesbury, noted his death in his own journal with this just comment: "To have begun with disapprobation, to have fought through many difficulties, to have announced and acted on principles new to the day in which he lived, to have filled many important offices, to have made many speeches and written many books, and in his whole course to have done much with credit and nothing with dishonor, and so to have sustained and advanced his reputation to the very end, is a mighty commendation." And the Queen, in a letter to his widow, wrote: "You will believe that I truly regret an old friend of forty years' standing, and whose personal kindness in trying and anxious times I shall ever remember. 'Lord John,' as I knew him best, was one of my first and most distinguished ministers, and his departure recalls many eventful times."

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. In what ways did Parliament fail to be "representative" at the opening of the nineteenth century? 2. What circumstances favored agitation of this condition? 3. What was the "Peterloo Massacre"? 4. Who was Lord Russell, and what his early relation to the reform movement? 5. What was the Test and Corporation Act, and when repealed? 6. Describe the first Reform Bill, and its effect upon the House of Commons? 7. How was the second bill treated by the Commons and by the Lords? 8. What circumstances attended the passage of the third bill? 9. How was the principle of reform extended in later years? 10. What peculiar privileges did Lord John Russell enjoy? 11. How is his character shown in the use which he made of them?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIFE OF EARL RUSSELL. S. J. Reid.
RECOLLECTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS. Lord John Russell.
THE EPOCH OF REFORM. Justin McCarthy.
HISTORY OF THE REFORM BILL. W. N. Molesworth.

VI

COBDEN AND FREE TRADE

[RICHARD COBDEN, born, 1804, at Dunford, near Midhurst, Sussex; died, London, 1865; after grammar school education, entered mercantile house in London, soon becoming a traveling salesman; about 1830 became founder of a cotton-printing concern at Manchester; traveled in Europe and America; wrote pamphlets on commercial and economic questions; 1838, became an ardent supporter of the Anti-Corn Law League; 1841, Member of Parliament for Stockport; advocate of free trade in the House of Commons; received popular testimonial of £79,000 in recognition of his services to the free trade cause; 1847-57, Member of Parliament for West Riding of York; advocate of arbitration and diminished expense for military purposes; 1849, Member of Parliament for Rochdale; 1860, negotiated commercial treaty with France.]

The Reform Bill of 1832 invaded the privileges of the landed aristocracy by destroying in some measure their control of the House of Commons through the pocket boroughs. Sixteen years later a second blow was struck at this class through the repeal of the Corn Laws.

The Corn Laws aimed to secure to English agriculturists a monopoly of the home market for grain. The wars with Napoleon, which paralyzed continental industries, stimulated those of England to abnormal prosperity. Food advanced in price, but labor was in great demand and well paid. The prospect of approaching peace in Europe, in 1813, precipitated hard times in Great Britain. The price of wheat fell and manufactures declined. The land-owning classes, then supreme in Parliament, enacted the Corn Law of 1815 for their own protection. By its provisions the importation of grain from foreign countries was practically prohibited until the price in England reached eighty shillings per quarter. Ten members of the House of Lords protested against the measure on the grounds that all restraint of trade was improper; that the restraint of trade in food was especially iniquitous; that the law would not steady or cheapen prices; and that "such a measure levied a tax on the consumer in order to give a bounty to the grower of corn,"—principles which have a modern sound.

England was at that time living under a system of high protective tariffs upon imported articles of manufacture as well as of food. But in 1823-25 Mr. Huskisson succeeded in having most of the tariffs upon raw materials reduced to a fraction of the former figures, with the result that production was enormously stimulated and valuable foreign markets were opened to English commodities. His only modification of the Corn Law (in 1822) was to reduce by ten shillings the figure at which importations might begin. Later he and Canning made some progress with a "sliding scale" bill, a principle which the Duke of Wellington enacted into law in 1828. This interesting device provided that when the price in the home market reached sixty-four shillings the quarter the duty should be 23s 8d. As the price rose the duty fell. When wheat was 69s, the duty was 16s 8d, and when the price reached 73s, foreign corn might come in on payment of one shilling per quarter.

As has been shown in a foregoing chapter, the past half-century had witnessed a great transformation in the industrial complexion of England—from a nation chiefly agricultural it had become the center of the world's manufactures. Tens of thousands of families had removed from the farms to the cities, "following the work" in the mills and factories, and hundreds of thousands of pounds had been invested in a great diversity of industrial enterprises. The manufacturer and the mill-hand were alike interested in low prices for food. The manufacturer also saw in the high tariff on grain a barrier against the free exchange of commodities. As his output increased it became necessary for him to enlarge his market, but when he attempted to sell his goods to America and Russia the law interposed to block the bargain by excluding those grain-producing countries from selling their superfluous food- stocks in England. Apparently here was a clash between the interests of manufacturer and agriculturist.

In 1836 a few thoughtful men in London, who were opposed to any restraint of trade, formed an Anti-Corn Law Association. But the metropolis was stony soil for such a plant. In 1838 a similar association was organized in Manchester, one of the new industrial cities dominated by modern ideas, crowded with factories, and populous with laboring men and women, a fit center for such an agitation as was to precede the downfall of the tax on food. In Manchester, too, in the person of a calico-printer named Richard Cobden, the agitation found its mainspring and its clear and persuasive voice.

Richard Cobden sprang from a long line of plain Sussex yeomen. His father was a farmer who became bankrupt in 1813, and the lad Richard, one of twelve children, was sent by a well-meaning relative to a Yorkshire boarding-school—a sort of Dotheboys Hall. From such a rough school he passed into the rougher one of life, becoming the lad of all work in the London warehouse of the same kinsman, later a clerk, and at twenty-one a traveling salesman, or "drummer," a position for which his untiring energy and engaging sociability were high qualifications. A great reader, he was also a superior converser and a "mixer" as the present-day phrase goes, adapting himself to his company with unusual facility. John Morley records that all his friends agree that "they have never known a man in whom this trait of a sound and rational desire to know and to learn was so strong and so inexhaustible." "To know the affairs of the world was the master- passion of his life," and the knowledge which he gained and assimilated not merely in his early contact with men in his business, but in the wider journeys of observation to which he treated himself in later years, contributed much to the enrichment of his speeches and writings.

At the age of twenty-four, with two other young men, whose capital like his own was little more than energy, probity, and business knowledge, he founded a firm in London for the sale of Manchester cotton prints on commission. Soon the firm was printing its own goods in Lancashire, and Mr. Cobden, prospering greatly from the first, took up his residence in Manchester, to watch over that end of the business. Though as full of affairs as any man in that hive of industry, Cobden found time to store his mind by reading and by reflection upon the knowledge gained by intercourse with his fellowmen. He visited France, Switzerland, and in 1835, America, where he foresaw a growing market for his wares, and where, as he wrote, he fondly hoped "would be realized some of those dreams of human exaltation if not of perfection" with which he loved to console himself. In 1836-37 he visited the Mediterranean countries, and on his return was an unsuccessful candidate for a seat in the House of Commons.

In May, 1838, Richard Cobden wrote to his brother concerning the political outlook in the nation, the Chartist agitation, the Radical demands, and the general disorganization which existed among the opponents of Tory government. The letter includes these significant words: "I think the scattered elements may yet be rallied round the question of the Corn Laws. It appears to me that a moral, and even a religious, spirit may be infused into that topic, and if agitated in the same manner that the question of slavery has been, it will be irresistible."

The purposes of the Manchester Anti-Corn Law Association are thus stated by Morley: "To obtain by all legal and constitutional means, such as the formation of local associations, the delivery of lectures, the distribution of tracts, and the presentation of petitions to Parliament, the total and immediate repeal of the Corn and Provision Laws." Mr. Cobden became a member of the executive committee, and his mind, voice, and pen were active in the service of the society until its object was attained. In response to his appeal for a campaign fund ("Let us invest part of our property in order to save the rest from confiscation") six thousand pounds poured into the treasury within a month. The local societies, which sprang up like wildfire in the manufacturing towns, were affiliated with that at Manchester, which soon became the headquarters of a far-reaching league.

The leaguers carried political agitation to a point of thoroughness beyond anything which had yet been reached by O'Connell or the abolitionists. They issued a newspaper organ which enunciated its principles and denounced the enemies of free trade. Vast editions of tracts and leaflets were scattered broadcast throughout the land, and a staff of carefully instructed speakers was maintained to itinerate through the rural districts and preach the gospel of free corn in tavern, market- place, and town hall.

In Parliament the battle must be won, and the league soon began its work of capturing seats in the House of Commons. Cobden himself was chosen, in 1841, as member for Stockport. Almost immediately he exercised his gift as a speaker, securing at once the attention of his colleagues by his style of oratory, which, with little formal eloquence or rhetorical elaboration, was powerfully persuasive, enriched by many happy illustrations drawn from life, and infused with a pure and lofty spirit. Whatever the topic under discussion, he was always able to show its relation to the obnoxious tariff, and to point out that the only sure remedy for the prevalent national ills was by way of the repeal of "the tax on bread." At first the young calico-printer—he was but thirty-seven—who embodied the opposition to the Corn Laws, was looked upon as an intruder by the young aristocrats of the House. They made fun of his classical allusions, and magnified his lack of education, attempting to laugh down his logic. But Cobden was not long in proving his ability to take care of himself on the floor of the House. It was no mere politician who caught the ear of the country with words like these: "When I go down to the manufacturing districts, I know that I shall be returning to a gloomy scene. I know that starvation is stalking through the land, and that men are perishing for the want of the merest necessaries of life. When I witness this, and recollect that there is a law which especially provides for keeping our population in absolute want, I cannot help attributing murder to the legislature of this country; and wherever I stand, whether here or out-of-doors, I will denounce that system of legislative murder."

Out-of-doors Mr. Cobden had the strong support of the most eloquent Englishman of his generation, John Bright. The two men had been drawn together early by a common interest in the welfare of the manufacturing classes, and especially in popular education. In September, 1841, Cobden visited his friend in his house, and found him plunged in sadness by the death of his young wife. After words of condolence, he said, with great earnestness, "John, there are thousands of houses in England at this moment where wives, mothers, and children are dying of hunger. Now when the first paroxysm of your grief is passed, I would advise you to come with me and we will never rest until the Corn Law is repealed."

"For seven years," Mr. Bright afterward said, "the discussion on that one question—whether it was good for a man to have half a loaf or a whole loaf—for seven years the discussion was maintained, I will not say with doubtful result, for the result was never doubtful and never could be in such a cause; but for five years or more (1841-46), we devoted ourselves without stint; every working hour almost was given up to the discussion and to the movement in connection with this question."

Mr. Morley's description of the two orators and their mission is memorable: "The public imagination was struck by the figures of the pair who had given themselves up to a great public cause. The picture of two plain men leaving their homes and their business and going over the length and breadth of the land to convert the nation, had about it something apostolic; it presented something so far removed from the stereotyped ways of political activity, that this circumstance alone, apart from the object for which they were pleading, touched and affected people, and gave a certain dramatic interest to the long pilgrimages of the two men who had only become orators because they had something to say which they were intent on bringing their hearers to believe, and which happened to be true, wise, and just…..In Cobden, as in Bright, we feel that there was nothing personal or small, and that what they cared for so vehemently were great causes. …. Mr. Bright had all the resources of passion alive within his breast. He was carried along by vehement political anger, and deeper than that there glowed a wrath as stern as that of an ancient prophet. To cling to a mischievous error seemed to him to savor of moral depravity and corruption of heart. What he saw was the selfishness of the aristocracy and the landlords and he was too deeply moved by the hatred of this to care to deal very patiently with the bad reasoning which their own self-interest inclined his adversaries to mistake for good. His invective was not the expression of mere irritation, but a profound and menacing passion. Hence he dominated his audiences from a height, while his companion rather drew them along after him as friends and equals. Cobden was by no means incapable of passion, of violent feeling, or of vehement expression. His fighting qualities were in their own way as formidable as Mr. Bright's….. Still it was not passion to which we must look for the secret of his oratorical success. In one word, it was persuasiveness. Cobden made his way to men's hearts by the union which they saw in him of simplicity, earnestness, and conviction, with a singular facility of exposition. This facility consisted in a remarkable power of apt and homely illustration, and a curious ingenuity in framing the argument that happened to be wanted…..In such an appeal to popular sentiment and popular passion as the contemporary agitation of O'Connell for repeal, he could have played no leading part. Where knowledge and logic were the proper instruments, Cobden was a master." Nor did his efficiency cease when the audience dispersed. In council chamber and work-room his alert and inventive mind and persuasive conversational eloquence had free scope. His hopeful enthusiasm, his clever devices for stimulating the jaded interest of the masses, and his unfailing good humor made him the chief engineer of the highly complex machinery of the league.

His enthusiasm led to the formation of associations in all the centers of industry; it redoubled the efforts and efficiency of the lecturers who carried the doctrines of the league into the agricultural counties—the enemy's country; it replenished the treasury of the league with thousands of pounds by subscriptions and by grand bazaars, one of which netted ten thousand pounds; it gave life and variety to the newspaper organ of the agitation; and in Parliament it met the government by a constant fire of questions, a bombardment of solid fact, and a harassing recurrence to the necessity of total and immediate repeal as the only salve for the economic sores of the kingdom.

His parliamentary opponents attacked him fiercely. They accused him of hypocrisy in carrying on an agitation professedly for the general good, but really intended to help the cotton manufacturers at the expense of the landowners and agriculturists. They laid at Cobden's door the miseries of the mill-hands of Manchester, crying "Physician, heal thyself." So strongly intrenched was "monopoly" in the House of Commons that it was slow work for the Anti-Corn Law League with its weapons of peaceful agitation to drive it out. Year after year the orators traveled through the three kingdoms, addressing thousands, tracts were distributed by the ton, and enormous sums of money were subscribed (the amount for 1844 being nearly a hundred thousand pounds). In order that the popular opinion thus carefully cultivated might be brought effectively to bear at the next parliamentary election, the league took care that every qualified free trader was registered on the polling lists. At Cobden's suggestion large numbers of workingmen qualified by becoming freeholders.

The eloquence of Bright, the cogent reasoning of Cobden, and the long campaign of education were steadily doing their work. The number of professed free traders in Parliament was still small, but the thoughtful leaders of the great parties, the men who studied the sentiment of the country, and watched the signs of the times, and weighed well the masses of evidence which the league continually brought forward-these men were being converted to the Manchester idea. What Cobden said in a popular assembly in the summer of 1845 was truer than even he may have believed. "What," he asked, "if you could get at the minds of the people would you find them thinking as to the repeal of the Corn Laws? I know it as well as if I were in their hearts. It is this: they are all afraid that this Corn Law cannot be maintained—no, not a rag of it—during a period of scarcity prices, of a famine season, such as we had in '39, '40, and '41. They know it. They are prepared when such a time comes to abolish the Corn Laws…..They are going to repeal it—mark my words—at a season of distress. That distress may come; aye, three weeks of showery weather, when the wheat is in bloom or ripening, would repeal these Corn Laws." He had already shown the precarious condition of the Irish people, whose only food was the potato, and whom the high price of grain kept on the edge of famine. The autumnal rains of 1845 precipitated the crisis, and fulfilled Cobden's prediction. The failure of the potato harvest plunged Ireland into dire distress for food. The league in crowded meetings denounced the tax on bread while men starved. The government of Sir Robert Peel hesitated as to the proper course. To suspend the food tariff might prove a concession to free trade which could never be regained. While Peel's cabinet hung back Lord John Russell, the leader of the Whigs, issued (November 22) his famous Edinburgh letter to his constituents, declaring that the time had come for the repeal of the baneful legislation. Peel was of the same mind, but some of his Tory colleagues resisted. None were more stubborn than Wellington, whose action at this juncture led Cobden to say, "Let me remind him that, notwithstanding all his victories in the field, he never yet entered into a contest with Englishmen in which he was not beaten." The effort of the Whigs to form a ministry having failed, Peel resumed the premiership which he had resigned. Parliament assembled on January 26, 1846, and the Prime Minister's speech foreshadowed his conversion to the policy of Cobden. The next day he explained his program. The Corn Laws were to be totally repealed by gradual reductions of the duty extending over a period of three years. Despite the mockery of Disraeli and the protectionists the bill passed the Commons by a great majority, and bowing to superior power, the Duke of Wellington helped it to pass the House. On June 26th Cobden carried the news to his wife: "Hurrah! Hurrah! The corn bill is law, and now my work is done!"

Cobden's utter consecration of himself for eight years to the Anti-Corn Law agitation had cost him severely. The constant travel, exposure, and hardship of speaking in the open air had seriously impaired his health. His business had been neglected until he had been only saved from bankruptcy by the generosity of friends. The league into which he had poured his best thought and effort honored him by a popular subscription amounting to nearly eighty thousand pounds as a testimonial to his public-spirited devotion. He might have entered the government, but preferred otherwise. During the twenty years of life which remained to him he was the advocate of numerous reforms. Ever a lover of peace, he was a strong champion of the principle of international arbitration, and of the reduction of armaments. The most conspicuous achievement of his later years was his successful negotiation of more liberal commercial treaties between France and England, a service for which he received the thanks of both governments. During the American Civil War his sympathies were strongly enlisted for the North against the cause of the slave- holders, and his speeches helped to restrain the hostile feeling of the aristocracy. Though sometimes exposing himself to ridicule and obloquy by running counter to the popular current, Mr. Cobden's honesty and sincerity were such that his opponents must admit his purity of motive and nobility of soul. His death, in 1865, was recognized as a national loss.

No eulogium pronounced over his grave by Bright, the companion of his labors and triumphs, or by Disraeli and Gladstone, great converts to his economic doctrines, is so memorable as the brief passage in which Sir Robert Peel, in the last hours of his premiership, gave to the free-trade agitator the credit for the great reform: "In reference to our proposing these measures," he said, "I have no wish to rob any person of the credit which is justly due to him for them. But I may say that neither the gentlemen sitting on the benches opposite, nor myself, nor the gentlemen sitting round me—are the parties who are strictly entitled to the merit…..Sir, the name which ought to be, and which will be, associated with the success of these measures is the name of a man who, acting, I believe from pure and disinterested motives, has advocated their cause with untiring energy, and by appeals to reason, expressed by an eloquence the more to be admired because it was unaffected and unadorned, the name which ought to be, and will be, associated with the success of these measures is the name of Richard Cobden. Without scruple, sir, I attribute the success of these measures to him."

The commercial policy which England inaugurated, in 1846, under the lead of Richard Cobden, continued in force throughout the century. Under its workings the commercial supremacy of England in the markets of the world has been achieved.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. What conditions brought about the Corn Laws? 2. What was the object of the "sliding scale"? 3. How did the Corn Laws work against both mill-hand and manufacturer? 4. Give an account of the early life of Richard Cobden. 5. Describe the organization of the Anti-Corn Law Association. 6. What impression did Cobden make in the House of Commons? 7. How was John Bright enlisted in the agitation? 8. Compare the oratorical qualities of the two men. 9. In what varied ways did Cobden's enthusiasm make itself felt? 10. What events fulfilled Cobden's prediction and brought about the repeal of the Corn Laws? 11. What were the chief events of the last twenty years of Cobden's life? 12. What tribute did Sir Robert Peel pay to him?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIFE OF RICHARD COBDEN. John Morley.
HISTORY OF THE ANTI-CORN LAW LEAGUE. Prentice.
CORN LAW RHYMES. Ebenezer Elliott.

VII

PEEL AND ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS

[ROBERT PEEL, born February 5, 1788, near Bury, Lancashire; died, London, July 2, 1850; educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford, B.A., 1808 (double first); Member of Parliament, 1809; 1811, Under-Secretary for the Colonies; 1812-18, Secretary for Ireland; 1817, Member of Parliament for Oxford University; 1819, advocated return to specie payment; 1820, married Julia, daughter of General Sir John Floyd; 1822-27, Home Secretary, Leader of House of Commons; 1826, proposed reform of Criminal Law; 1828, Home Secretary and Leader of the House; 1829, proposed Catholic emancipation; 1834-35, Prime Minister; 1841-46, Prime Minister; 1842, carried Income Tax; 1846, repealed the Corn Laws; 1846-50, without office.]

When the Reform Bill of 1832 was passed, the Duke of Wellington bluntly declared his conviction that the result would be the speedy overthrow of the British Constitution. More sagacious observers than the great field-marshal were of the opinion that a radical change must ensue, and that the Tory party, long the prop of Church and Throne, having lost control of legislation in the House of Commons through the abolition of the close and rotten boroughs, could never regain the seat of power by electing a majority of members. That these forebodings and prophecies did not come true was largely due to the consummate political skill of Sir Robert Peel.

In reviewing a life so rich in public activity as Peel's it is impossible to point to any one important question as his particular contribution to the history of his time. There was scarcely a single great parliamentary battle in which he did not bear a hand on one side or the other. Indeed, hostile criticism has censured him for having in not a few instances carried to ultimate success the very measures of which, when first proposed, he had been the stoutest enemy. This is true of the Resumption of Specie Payments, the Catholic Emancipation Acts, and most notably of all the repeal of the Corn Laws. The characteristics which resulted so strangely may be accounted for in part at least by some knowledge of the early life of the great parliamentary leader.

The Peels were weavers and printers of calicoes. The father of the Prime Minister was one of the wealthiest manufacturers in his generation, a thorough-going Tory, and an ardent admirer of Mr. Pitt. He was sent to Parliament in 1790, and his support of the government by his vote there, and by his contribution of fifty thousand pounds to the war fund, won for him, in 1800, a baronetcy. There had been Robert Peels before his day, but now for the first time there was a Sir Robert.

Sir Robert's most loving care was lavished upon the training of his eldest son and namesake, who from the day of his birth, February 5, 1788, the patriotic father had prayerfully consecrated to the service of his country. Many stories are told of the pains which the great calico-printer bestowed on the lad's training for a public career. We see the little lad standing on a table to declaim or recite to his parental mentor, and read of the rigor of cross-examination to which this lad of twelve was subjected after hearing a sermon or public address. A current anecdote represents the doting father as saying, " Bob, you dog, if you're not prime minister, I'll disinherit you." At Harrow, as a schoolboy he reflected credit upon his father's training, and at Christ Church, Oxford, he achieved the unusual honor of a double first class (classics and mathematics). When he left the university at the age of twenty-one his father provided him with a seat in Parliament, and so, with every favoring circumstance of youth, health, education, friends, and wealth, he began his eventful career in the House of Commons which was to be the scene of his best labors until the day of his death.

Old Sir Robert and his son sat on the same side of the House, but the alert and active mind of the young man could not accept untested his father's political creed of hide-bound Toryism. The first question upon which the son and father parted company was on the subject of the resumption of specie payments, which had been discontinued in 1797 under the financial stress of the war with France. In 1811 the two Peels voted together against a resolution looking toward resumption, but the younger man's mind was fascinated with the economic aspects of the problem, and half a dozen years later, when the subject again pressed for settlement, he brought forward the act which placed England on a gold basis. The father openly bewailed the son's misguided course, but Peel's act became the law (1819).

Before he was thirty, the younger Robert Peel had gained a valuable experience in administrative work by a term of six years (1812-1818) as Chief Secretary for Ireland. Here, as in the preparation of his studies at Oxford and of his speeches for the House of Commons, he was painstaking, methodical, thorough, and energetic. In fact he applied to the public business the same sterling qualities which had made his father and grandfather successful merchants and manufacturers. His most notable reform in Ireland, which was then in a sad condition of disorder, was the replacement of military rule by a well-organized civil force of police, acting under the orders of the magistrates. He favored a more liberal scheme of popular education for the unhappy island, but his Tory prejudices stood in the way of relieving the Catholics of their disabilities. Because of his avowed opposition to this demand, and his bitter hostility to O'Connell, the champion of the cause, Mr. Peel—"Orange" Peel, as the Catholic Irish nicknamed him—had the satisfaction of being returned to Parliament in 1817 for the University of Oxford, perhaps the most ultra-Tory constituency in the three kingdoms.

In January, 1822, Peel entered the cabinet of Lord Liverpool as Home Secretary. From the first he showed that his mind was not impenetrable to the legal reforms which earnest men had long been advocating, but to which the Tories had turned a deaf ear. The reform of the criminal law, which still carried the harsh statutes of an unquiet age, had been ably championed by Romilly, Mackintosh, and others, but it was Peel's way first to oppose, then to admit the principle of the reform, and finally to enact it into enduring law. On his initiative, in 1823, "nearly one hundred felonies were removed from the list of capital crimes, and judges were empowered to withhold the death penalty in all cases except murder, when the culprit appeared deserving of mercy." Other acts originating with him consolidated and unified the vast and complex body of criminal statutes so as to simplify procedure, and facilitate the ends of justice. Some conception of his services in this particular may be gained from the fact that "he secured the repeal of two hundred and seventy-eight acts relating to the criminal law, embodying their useful provisions in eight acts."

On Catholic emancipation Peel's process of conversion was slower. He steadily fought the proposals for relief in the House of Commons as long as Lord Liverpool lived, and when Canning succeeded to the premiership (1827), he resigned rather than serve under a pro-Catholic chief. When the Tories came back to power under Wellington, in 1828, Peel resumed the Home Secretaryship, with the leadership of the House of Commons, a position for which he possessed incomparable qualifications. His second administration of the home department was distinguished by a series of radical improvements in the criminal laws. One law for the punishment of offenses against the person took the place of fifty-seven existing acts. In 1829 he replaced the ridiculous London watch with the police force which has served as a model for many other large cities. Many who speak familiarly of the blue-coated guardians of the peace as "Bobbies" and "Peelers" would be surprised to know that these sobriquets constitute a popular tribute to the name of Robert Peel, the creator of the model force.

These legal and administrative reforms, beneficent as they were, were not great party questions like the two others which the Wellington government had to face, and gained so little credit in the facing. The Whigs, under John Russell, urged the demand for the relief of Protestant dissenters from their political disabilities by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Peel argued against the change, but it was carried, nevertheless, and the Tories accepted the measure with the best grace they could summon. Their resistance to Catholic emancipation cost them more dearly. O'Connell, master of all the arts of agitation, fanned the excitement in Ireland into flame. His Catholic Association made itself heard, and felt, and feared. In June, 1828, a member of the government standing for election for County Clare was soundly defeated by O'Connell himself, a man whom the anti- Catholic laws disqualified from sitting in Parliament. The government knew not which way to turn, and O'Connell, perceiving his advantage, lashed his followers to the verge of an insurrection. This was the question on which George III. had broken with William Pitt a generation before, and now it was only by the most vehement arguments, and even by threats of resignation, that the ministers could obtain his son's consent to the inevitable. In a speech of four hours' duration Peel explained the measures to the House of Commons, confessing that the necessity under which he acted "was the severest blow it had ever been his lot to experience." The speech was an admission of defeat, and an elaboration of the measures by which the government, in the hour of concession, proposed to limit the "dangerous power of the Roman Catholics." The bill became a law, and the Irish Catholic members began to sit in Parliament—with some of the disturbing consequences which no one foresaw better than Peel himself.

The Wellington ministry barely survived the strain of carrying Catholic emancipation. The year 1830 found Sir Robert Peel—the elder baronet having died—the leader of the opposition. In this character he led his party against the Reform Bills of 1831-32. Their weak points were mercilessly laid bare, and the excellences and past glories of the existing system were effectively displayed. But nothing at that day could stop the progress of reform, as the King and peers soon learned.

The defeat of the Tories in the first general election under the Reform Act was overwhelming. They mustered less than one-fourth of the House of Commons. It seemed to most cool political observers that the Whigs who now assumed office could not be displaced for a decade at least. The spirit of change was alive in all the nations of western Europe, and in England there seemed to be small need of a political party whose steady resistance to innovation was relieved only by the exceptions in which the party had espoused reform in extremity to save its own existence. Wellington and the rigid Tories of his stripe saw no hope for their party, and little enough for England in the way along which she was plunging. Peel, however, was supremely suited to the times. Bound to the party of Church and Crown by the traditions of his father, he nevertheless was endowed with a mind which was not quite dominated by prejudice. The study of facts, the examination of conflicting claims, the weighing of argument, had their full effect upon him, and he had the courage of his convictions. At this juncture, when so much was shifting which had anchored England to the past, Sir Robert Peel, with his clear-eyed vision, his trained judgment, his honesty, and his moderation, formed a rallying point for those Tories who had no other leader, and attracted to him moderate and enlightened men of whatever party who feared the unbalanced radicalism of the day, and who were bent on preserving or conserving the best elements which remained of the ancient Constitution of England. From such accretions grew up a party which gradually dropped the name of Tory and adopted that of Conservative. One of Peel's biographers, writing of this period as Peel's opportunity, says: "Since Conservatism, like Liberalism, is an imperishable instinct in human nature, every society must contain a Conservative party, and such a party speedily develops, even amid the wildest storm of revolution. The Reform Act of 1832 had made room for a Conservative party suited to the age. The Tories had been weak because their strength was confined to the landed interest. Possessed by a panic-dread of change, bred by the events of the French Revolution, they had refused to admit any new interests to a share of power. In their despite the Reform Act had transferred the control of politics from the aristocracy to the middle class. But the English middle class was naturally Conservative. It was orderly, it was rich, it was sensitive to social influence, it was devout and serious in a stiff, unbending way. Some reforms certainly it required; an effective administration for the great towns where it lived and traded; the amendment of a poor law which shocked all its economic maxims; the abolition of negro slavery which revolted its religion; the abolition of laws which, pressing hardly upon non-conformists, revolted its sense of justice. It had not yet declared for free trade, although it might be expected to do so. The ameliorations which the middle class at this time desired, Peel was ready to approve, and these ameliorations once granted, the middle class would tend to be Conservative. But theirs would not be the conservatism of squires and rectors. They would incline to a conservatism of their own, and they would want a leader of their own to formulate it and to organize them. They would want a statesman who was bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh; a good man of business, cautious, but open to practical suggestions, one who would satisfy their ideal of industry and economy; one who would always be grave and decorous, never puzzle them with epigrams or alarm them with rhetoric; in short, such a great man as they could conceive. Such Sir Robert Peel was. There never breathed a politician more truly congenial to them. He represented their virtues and their failings; he shared their talents and their prejudices; he was always growing in their confidence; and when he died lamented by all his fellow-citizens, he was most deeply lamented by them."

With such tact and such mastery of the political situation did Peel conduct himself in the years of opposition—now mildly criticising the government's policy, now joining forces with it, and now tearing its policies to pieces—that he constantly grew in the national esteem, and began to be looked upon as the inevitable successor of the Whigs. His turn came sooner than any one expected, in December, 1834. It was too soon, in fact, for the first Peel ministry could maintain itself but a few months, failing to secure a majority of Parliament. Yet in this brief lease of power Peel gave evidence of his fitness to govern. He undertook the reform of the ecclesiastical courts, gratified the Dissenters by proposing to remove the regulations which required all marriages to be celebrated according to the rites of the Established Church. He even addressed himself to the delicate question of settling the temporalities of the Established Church in Ireland, where the collection of church tithes was accompanied with much disorder and distress, arising from the fact that the vast majority of the tithe-payers were hostile to the Protestant bishops and clergy whom they were taxed to support. The opposition, led by John Russell, took advantage of the prejudices surrounding this subject and forced a succession of adverse votes, in consequence of which the Peel ministry abandoned office in April, 1835, after one hundred days of power—a period sometimes considered the most brilliant in Peel's whole career.

For six years Sir Robert Peel remained in opposition, conducting himself so sagaciously as to gather about him all disaffected elements of the disintegrating majority. Peel saw to it that whatever popular measures of reform were carried by the Melbourne ministry should be credited largely to Conservative support. Wellington still survived as a great national figure, but his political influence was gone, and there was no one in the Whig or Liberal camp who could dispute Peel's position as the leading public man of England. Of his course at this time he said himself (1838): "My object is that by steadily attending to our duty, by censuring the government on all occasions when they deserve it, enforcing our principles by aiding them to carry those measures which we think right, even though by so doing we may be rescuing the government, we may establish new claims upon the approbation of the country."

The majority of the House of Commons was made up of incongruous elements, whose interests were at variance on many questions. Peel actually came to the rescue of the ministers not once, but so many times as to give bitterness to the taunt hurled at them by a Radical orator: "Why! the right honorable member for Tamworth (Peel) governs England. The honorable and learned member for Dublin (O'Connell) governs England. The Whigs govern nothing but Downing Street. The right honorable member for Tamworth is contented with power without place or patronage, and the Whigs are contented with place and patronage without power!"

Hard times came on and the nation faced an annual deficit. Distress was widespread among the people, nourishing the Chartist agitation on the one hand, and giving point to the arguments of the Anti-Corn Law orators on the other. There was pressing need for a wise and energetic Prime Minister, and hope of such qualities in Lord Melbourne had long since failed. The general elections of 1841 showed a clear majority for the Conservatives, and in August Sir Robert Peel came back to power, backed by a consolidated party and trusted by the nation.

The most pressing problems were financial. Peel proposed a modification of the Corn Law duties, at the same time defending the system of protection, not in the interests of the agriculturist class, but to make England independent of foreign countries for its food supplies. His proposals were enacted into law. His first budget attempted to turn the customary deficit into a surplus by means of an income tax of seven pence in the pound on incomes of one hundred and fifty pounds and upward. His revision of the tariff on imports introduced important changes looking toward increased freedom of trade, especially in the raw materials of manufacture. The times improved; revenue exceeded expenditure; consols were quoted at only a fraction below par, and two hundred and fifty million pounds of the national debt was converted from three and one-half per cent into a loan paying three and one-fourth per cent for ten years and three per cent thereafter. By another far-reaching measure—the Bank Charter Act—Peel placed salutary restrictions upon the issue of paper money, and increased his reputation as a master of financial legislation.

From year to year, as the surplus revenue increased, the government employed it to cut down the duties upon imports. From wool, cotton, and glass, and many minor items they were entirely removed, and there were reductions throughout the schedules. The grants in aid of education were trebled in the face of bitter protest from his own party. Education in Ireland was aided by grants to the Catholic College at Maynooth and by the establishment of other "Queen's colleges" in affiliation with the university at Dublin.

In one way and another Ireland played a great part in the history of this administration. In 1843 the agitation of O'Connell, for the repeal of the union of Ireland with England, culminated in immense and angry meetings which threatened the public peace. The government then took the matter in hand, "proclaimed" the gatherings and arrested O'Connell. It was the failure of the potato crop of 1845, and the consequent Irish famine which forced Peel to abandon the last stronghold of protection and recommend the total and absolute repeal forever of all duties on all articles of subsistence. The history of the repeal of the Corn Laws, in 1846, has already been given. On the day on which the bill passed to its third reading in the House of Lords, all the enemies of the government, led by Tory protectionists who considered themselves betrayed by their own Prime Minister combined to overthrow him. On a bill for the protection of life in Ireland Peel was defeated by seventy-three votes. Four days later, on relinquishing his place at the head of the government he pronounced his memorable valedictory. He should leave a name, he said, severely censured by many who deeply regretted the severance of party ties, censured also by all sincere protectionists. "I shall leave a name execrated by every monopolist who, from less honorable motives, clamors for protection because it conduces to his own individual benefit. But it may be that I shall leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of good will in the abodes of those whose lot it is to labor and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by a sense of injustice."

Peel never returned to office. His conversion to free trade had split his party, and the Whigs, under John Russell, succeeded to the direction of affairs. He remained in the House of Commons, and with such personal following as yet remained to him, supported the administration. The protectionists were rallied and led by George Bentinck and Benjamin Disraeli, whose star waxed as Peel's began to wane. Death put a sudden end to his activity. He was thrown from his horse while riding up Constitution Hill in London, and died on the second of July, 1850. In accordance with his expressed wish, his family declined the honors of a public funeral, and he was buried without ostentation in the family tomb at Drayton Bassett. His statue, voted by the House of Commons, was placed in Westminster Abbey.

The Duke of Wellington, in his simple way, said of his late associate: "I never knew a man in whose truth and justice I had a more lively confidence, or in whom I saw a more invariable desire to promote the public service. In the whole course of my communication with him I never knew an instance in which he did not show the strongest attachment to truth; and I never saw in the whole course of my life the smallest reason for suspecting that he stated anything which he did not firmly believe to be the fact." Remarkable testimony this, concerning a great politician. From Disraeli, who would perhaps be less drawn to this qualification of a statesman, comes this word of praise, with many of detraction: "Nature had combined in Sir Robert Peel many admirable parts. In him a physical frame incapable of fatigue was united with an understanding equally vigorous and flexible. He was gifted with the faculty of method in the highest degree, and with great powers of application, which were sustained by a prodigious memory, while he could communicate his acquisitions with clear and fluent elocution. Such a man under any circumstances and in any sphere of life would probably have become remarkable. Ordained from his youth to be busied with the affairs of a great empire, such a man, after long years of observation, practice, and perpetual discipline, would have become what Sir Robert Peel was in the latter portion of his life—a transcendent administrator of public business and a matchless master of debate in a popular assembly."

The masterly debater never rose to heights of eloquence. His thorough and practical mind enabled him to study, sift, and give form and substance to the broad political and economic conceptions of more idealistic men. Inheriting the narrow political creed of his father, he can scarcely be blamed if his mind came slowly to advanced positions. Rather shall he not be commended who, with such prepossessions and prejudices, and with such party co-workers, keeps his mind open to conviction? "The resumption of cash payments, the amendment of the criminal law, the institution of the Irish constabulary and the London police, Catholic emancipation and the emancipation of trade, and a host of reforms only less beneficial than these make up a record of useful labor which has seldom been surpassed."

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. What unusual preparation had Peel for his public career? 2. Upon what political question did he and his father separate? 3. Describe his relations to Ireland as Chief Secretary. 4. What services did he render to criminal law? 5. What police reform is due to him? 6. What two famous party questions did he resist, but finally of necessity accept? 7. Why was Peel especially fitted to lead the new Conservative party, formed after 1832? 8. What fitness to govern did Peel show in his first ministry? 9. How did he serve his country as a member of the opposition? 10. How did he meet the financial needs of England in his second ministry? 11. How did his enemies finally overthrow him? 12. Why is Peel's life, in view of his inheritance, especially worthy of honor?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SIR ROBERT PEEL. J. R. Thursfield.
SIR ROBERT PEEL. Justin McCarthy.
BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES. Walter Bagehot.

VIII

SHAFTESBURY AND PHILANTHROPY

[ANTONY ASHLEY COOPER, Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, born April 28, 1801; died October 1, 1885; educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford (first-class in classics, 1822); Member of Parliament 1826; bore a leading hand in legislation for improving condition of laboring classes; President of Ragged School Union, etc.; succeeded to the earldom on the death of his father, in 1851.]

The industrial expansion of England in the nineteenth century was not a blessing unalloyed. It built great cities and created enormous wealth, and gave employment at advanced wages to a vastly increased population. But it brought with it changes in the social condition of the laboring classes which were productive of severe hardship.

The England of the olden time had been an agricultural country whose laborers, though poorly paid, either worked under mild conditions in the fields, or followed their trades in their cottages and workshops. The introduction of the steam engine brought with it a demand for fuel which forced thousands of men, women, and children to delve in the mines, and the use of machines and the adoption of the factory system shut up other thousands of both sexes, and all ages, to labor for excessive hours in crowded cities under unsanitary conditions. At the present time the system of legislation regarding the employment of women and minors, and the regulation of unsanitary conditions of labor is so thorough that it is difficult to conceive that it has all been of recent growth. When the enemies of the abuses in mine and factory first raised their voices in the British Parliament, they were even told that such things were not proper subjects of legislation. In the opening years of the century the elder Robert Peel had attacked one of the foulest of industrial abuses—the "apprentice system." Under this system the pauper children of London and the south of England were rented out to the tender mercies of the avaricious cotton manufacturers of the north. From the age of seven they were compelled to work in the mills at long hours, under unhealthful conditions, and without opportunity of education or proper recreation. When not at work they were huddled in comfortless barracks little better than slave-pens. No wonder they grew up to be hopeless and brutalized, if they were so unfortunate as to survive the arduous period of their industrial bondage—for it was no less than that. Peel's act of 1802, and other remedial legislation which supplemented it, did away with the worst features of this white slavery, but the general condition of the women and children in the English factories and mines continued to be such as to move deeply the sympathies of the humane.

In the year 1833 the little group of humanitarian leaders who had succeeded in turning the attention of the nation to the disgraceful condition of child labor, were striving to get a hearing in the House of Commons for their "short time" proposal— a law framed by Michael Thomas Sadler, for the purpose of limiting the hours of child labor in textile factories to ten hours a day. Sadler had lost his seat in Parliament, and a new spokesman was needed for the cause. The committee ventured to ask Lord Ashley to take charge of the bill, and his acceptance enlisted in the humanitarian movement a young man who was destined to be its champion for half a century.

Antony Ashley Cooper, then sitting in the House of Commons under the name of Lord Ashley, and after 1851 known to the world as the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, was one of the most remarkable Englishmen of the century. This new-found champion of the working-classes was born in London, April 28, 1801. His father was the sixth Earl of Shaftesbury, and his mother was a daughter of the third Earl of Marlborough. The father's preoccupation in public life and his mother's social duties left the early home training of the lad to a pious domestic, an earnest Christian, whose precepts and example did more than anything else to give bent to his life. In later years the Earl freely owned his mother's housekeeper to be the best friend he had ever had. He did little to distinguish himself as a schoolboy at Harrow, but Oxford appealed to him, and he applied himself to classical studies at the university with a zeal which won for him a degree with the first honors.

Parliament was the natural place for a peer's son in those days of pocket boroughs, and into the House of Commons he went as Lord Ashley at the age of twenty-five. In his diary he recorded his devout purpose to use his position "for the success of religion and true happiness," and on taking the oaths he "breathed a slight prayer for assistance in thoughts and deeds." A man of profound introspection, intense religious feeling, and sincere purpose to be of service to his kind, had some difficulty in adjusting himself to the selfish politics of the House. The first subject upon which he found voice was the reform of the laws for the care of lunatic paupers, a class whose pitiable state might have moved the most stolid heart. To this merciful project he addressed himself with a zeal and persistency which were to characterize his later efforts for other downtrodden classes.

When the labor leaders turned to him, in 1833, to champion their cause, he took the question into consideration over night, obtained his wife's cordial approval, consulted his Bible, resorted to prayer, and the next day gave himself unreservedly to the cause. His friends of the aristocratic families shunned him, his parents discountenanced his design and closed their doors against him for many years, but, said he, in dedication of himself to the work, "I believe it is my duty to God and to the poor, and I trust He will support me."

The manufacturers sought to side-track the Ten-Hours Bill by proposing that nothing should be done until a committee of Parliament should make thorough inquiry into the alleged conditions in the mills. But the very commission which they asked for could not go against the evidence of their own eyes in the factory towns, swarming with ignorant, ragged child-operatives, prematurely old. The commission reported: (1) that the work hours of children and adults were the same; (2) that such labor was resulting in the permanent physical and intellectual deterioration of the young; (3) that these maltreated children were not free agents, but hired out by parents or guardians; and finally, "that a case was made out for the interference of the legislature on behalf of the children employed in factories."

In place of the radical measure of Lord Ashley the government carried a substitute, the Factory Law of 1833. "Night work was prohibited to persons under eight even in cotton, wool, worsted, hemp, flax, tow, and linen spinneries and weaving mills; children from nine to thirteen were not allowed to work more than forty- eight hours a week, and young persons thirteen to eighteen were restricted to sixty-eight hours a week. In silk factories children might be admitted under nine, and children under thirteen were to be allowed ten hours a day. Provision was made for a certain amount of school attendance, and factory inspectors were provided to inquire into violations of the statute." At the time Ashley and his friends bewailed the passage of the Factory Act as a defeat, though the former eventually admitted that "it contained some humane and highly useful provisions, and established for the first time the great principle that labor and education should be combined."

Defeat, if that be a defeat, which forces your foe to adopt your own principles in order to win, only proved Lord Ashley's superior fitness for the leadership of the cause. Instead of abandoning the contest he began to prepare for a fresh assault by collecting information touching every part of the question. He visited the workrooms and lodgings of the operatives in every part of the land, examining at first hand their condition, and studying the problem in all its bearings with the same persistency and intellectual force which had won him his "first- class" at the university. Nothing which could subserve his cause escaped his searching inquiry, and when he arose to address Parliament his mastery of his subject was so complete as to baffle the skill of the few who durst ask him questions.

As the Anti-Corn Law gained ground the labor reformers met with a new form of opposition. Lord Ashley was taunted with inconsistency in seeking the welfare of the factory workers, while neglecting to remedy the no less servile condition of the agricultural laborers. Manufacturers as high-minded as Cobden and Bright did not scruple to say—as doubtless they believed—that the outcry against the manufacturers sprang from the desire of the landowners to harass the opponents of "the tax on bread." John Bright answered Lord Ashley's arguments for the ten hours' clause in the bill of 1844 in a speech as vindictive as it was eloquent. Though Ashley was again defeated, at this time the new Factory Act, which was passed, carried farther the principles of the original law. In 1845 his calico print-works measure brought relief to thousands of weary little hands, and in 1847 the long- worked-for and earnestly prayed-for Ten-Hours Bill became a law. Lord Ashley had resigned his seat in Parliament, but had not relaxed his efforts in behalf of the bill which he had borne on his heart for fourteen years. When the news came that the bill, after going through the Commons with flying colors, had passed the critical stage in the Upper House, Lord Ashley's feelings found vent in this entry in his journal: "I am humbled that my heart is not bursting with thankfulness to Almighty God—that I can find breath and sense to express my joy. What reward shall we give unto the Lord for all the benefits he hath conferred upon us? God, in his mercy, prosper the work and grant that these operatives may receive the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the Lord! Praised be the Lord! Praised be the Lord in Christ Jesus!" The operatives received the news with tumultuous joy, for the act brought substantial relief to fully three hundred and sixty thousand persons, more than two-thirds of all the operatives then employed in the textile industries of the kingdom.

The manufacturers who attributed Ashley's professions of friendship for their employees to his class hatred of their masters little knew the man. His sympathies were engaged in behalf of the poor and weak in every calling, and the mill-hands were only the first whose cause he championed. The manufacturers had sometimes sought to divert attention from their own shortcomings by pointing to the greater hardship of the colliery workers, and in 1840 Lord Ashley took up this subject by moving for a parliamentary commission to inquire into the employment of the children of the poorer classes in mines and collieries. The first report of this commission, issued in 1842, is one of the most appalling of public documents. Sworn testimony was presented to show that much of the underground labor was performed by children under thirteen years of age, and that little boys and girls were set to work in the dark and noisome tunnels at the age of five. First as "trappers" these child laborers opened and shut the trap-doors in the passages of the mine. The stronger children, boys and girls alike, dragged and pushed the little coal wagons along the narrow passages—the roofs too low for them to stand upright, often so low as to compel them to creep on all- fours in the black slime of the floors. Some with laden baskets on their backs climbed many times a day up steep ascents. Some stood ankle-deep in water from morning till night in the depths of the pit, wearing out their little lives at the hand- pumps.

"The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,
The young birds are chirping in the nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows,
The young flowers are blowing toward the west.
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free."

So sang Elizabeth Barrett of the sorrows of the children of the mines and mills in those dismal days, and it must be said for the great heart of England that its beat was still true. The coal- owners made the pitiful plea in extenuation of all the misery and indecency of the mines that without the labor of women and children the collieries must shut down, not only for lack of profit, but for the cogent reason that the flexible vertebra of childhood were especially adapted to the constrained positions required in the tunnels, and that there could be no good colliers unless as children they became inured to the privations and hardships of the life. The government tried to keep the report out of the hands of the indignant public, but "by a most providential mistake," as Lord Ashley believed, it got into circulation, to the horror and disgust of all right-minded persons. The press joined in the cry for remedial legislation. Ashley's speech in support of his Mines and Collieries Bill made an unusual impression in the House of Commons. Even Cobden, who had been ready to sneer at the "philanthropists" who opposed the repeal of the tax on bread, came over to the orator's side at the conclusion of his two hours' plea, and wringing his hand heartily, declared, "I don't think I have ever been put into such a frame of mind in all my life." From this time he no longer entertained doubts of Ashley's sincerity. The Queen and Prince Albert added their personal support. The government threw obstacles in the way of the bill, and the peers mutilated it, but Ashley's persistency carried it at last. Henceforth women and girls and boys under ten were excluded from underground work, and a system of mine inspection was established to secure the observance of the law. Such a triumph for morality and humanity was worth more to England than many battles won by force of arms.

There has been no retreat from the positions to which Lord Ashley carried the legislative protection of the working-classes. From time to time the Factory Laws were extended to cover the special demands of other industries, until the state had literally taken under its protection the whole class of children and young persons employed in manufacturing industries. It has done this in the name of the moral and physical health of the community. The general laws governing factories and workshops now cover a very wide scope. It is required that the building must be kept clean and sanitary; that dangerous machinery must be boxed and fenced; the hours of labor and meal-time for women and children are fixed, and children under ten may not be employed; certain holidays and half-holidays must be allowed to all "protected" persons; child-workers must go to school a certain proportion of the week; medical certificates of fitness for employment are required in the case of children; and notice of accidents causing loss of life or bodily injury must be sent to the government inspector. Many co-operated to bring about these results, but the chief advocate of all the beneficent reforms which have reinvigorated the English working-classes, saved the women from slavish toil and given them opportunity to make homes for their families, rescued the children from benumbing toil, and given them time for healthful recreation and mental improvement, is, by the common award of all, this simple-hearted Christian, Antony Ashley Cooper.

On the fly-leaf of a book in his library the Earl of Shaftesbury noted in pencil some of the obstacles which beset his progress when seeking the good of the distressed children: "I had to break every political connection, to encounter a most formidable array of capitalists, mill-owners, doctrinaires, and men who by natural impulse hate all 'humanity mongers' (tell it riot in Gath!) among the Radicals, the Irishmen, and a few sincere Whigs and Conservatives…..Peel was hostile…..Fielden and Brotherton were the only 'practical' men who supported me, and to practical prophecies of overthrow of trade, of ruin to the operatives themselves, I could only oppose 'humanity' and general principles. The newspapers were on the whole friendly. Out of Parliament there was in society every form of 'good-natured' and compassionate contempt…..In few instances did any mill-owner appear on a platform with me; in still fewer the ministers of any religious denomination—so cowed were they (or in themselves so indifferent) by the overwhelming influence of the cotton-lords."

Among his opponents Shaftesbury reckoned Peel, who continually sought to silence him by giving him government offices; Bright, whose malignant opposition has already been noticed; Cobden, though latterly a convert; O'Connell, Brougham, and even Gladstone, "the only member who voted to delay the bill which delivered women and children from the mines and pits."

It is foreign to the purpose of this sketch to pursue the later labors of Lord Shaftesbury; his zeal for education; his warm espousal of the cause of ragged schools for the instruction of the waifs of the London streets; his successful agitation in favor of the pitiable chimney-sweeps; in short, his support of every cause which appealed to his sympathy for the neglected classes, or which promised to benefit humanity physically, morally, intellectually, or spiritually. He was the president of scores of organizations devoted to Christian and philanthropic work, and until the close of his long and useful life, his voice and influence could always be counted on to assist such worthy causes. As his end approached his only regret was "I cannot bear to leave the world with all the misery in it." The Dean of Westminster's suggestion that the Abbey should be his last resting-place, he brushed aside in favor of the parish church of St. Giles, where his boyhood had been passed. He died on the 1st of October, 1885, at Folkestone, where he had been taken for the invigorating sea breezes. Perhaps the old Abbey Church of Westminster never saw a funeral where so many classes of English society gathered to pay respect to a dead earl. Costermongers, climbing-boys, boot-blacks, cripples, flower-girls sat with royalty, bishops, peers, and commoners in sincere mourning for a nobleman who was indeed a noble man.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. What social changes accompanied the industrial expansion of England? 2. What was the "apprentice system"? 3. Under what influences did Lord Ashley pass his childhood and youth? 4. How was the Factory Law of 1833 secured, and what did it require? 5. How did Lord Ashley prepare for a new Factory Act? 6. What opposition did he meet from the Anti-Corn Law workers? 7. How was the passage of the "Ten-Hours Bill" in 1847 received? 8. What conditions were revealed by the report on mines and collieries? 9. Describe the events which led to the passage of Ashley's bill? 10. What factory laws have since been enacted? 11. What various kinds of opposition did Shaftesbury meet in his efforts for reform? 12. To what other needy causes did he devote the remaining years of his life?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIFE AND WORK OF LORD SHAFTESBURY. Edwin Hodder.
HISTORY OF THE FACTORY MOVEMENT. Alfred.

IX

LORD PALMERSTON AND FOREIGN RELATIONS

[HENRY JOHN TEMPLE, Viscount Palmerston, born October 20, 1784, near Romsey, Hampshire; died October 18, 1865, Brocket Hall; succeeded to the title and the Irish peerage in 1802; educated at Harrow and Cambridge; Member of Parliament, 1807; at once made a Junior Lord of the Admiralty; 1809-1828, Secretary at War; about 1830 joined Whig party; 1830-41,1846-51, Secretary for Foreign Affairs; 1852-55, Home Secretary; 1855-58, 1859-65, Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury. Buried in Westminster Abbey.]

The Peace is the accepted name for the condition which succeeded in England the generation which had been spent in the wars with France and the first Napoleon. For forty years after the Battle of Waterloo (1815), this condition was unruffled by actual hostilities between England and any European power, unless that "untoward event" the Battle of Navarino (1827) and the bombardment of Antwerp (1832) should be so considered. Petty wars with the native princes of India and on the Afghan frontier occurred from time to time, it is true, and the infamous Opium War was waged against China (1839-42), but until the Crimean Campaigns (1853-56) and the Indian Mutiny (1857) the war spirit of the nation was never stirred to its depths. Continental Europe during these years passed through many convulsions. Bloody revolutions shook many states, and Prussia, Austria, Denmark, Turkey, and Italy were involved in wars. The hand that piloted England among the rocks of the tortuous channel of foreign politics for nearly a generation was that of Lord Palmerston, for nearly twenty years Foreign Secretary and twice Prime Minister of the Queen's government.

Henry John Temple was the descendant of an historic English family, and was born on the Temple estates at Broadlands in Hampshire, October 20, 1784. He was, therefore, four years older than Sir Robert Peel, whom he long survived, and twelve years the senior of his sometime colleague, Lord John Russell. From Harrow, where he was reckoned the jolliest boy in the school, and the pluckiest fighter, he was sent to Edinburgh in charge of Dugald Stewart, one of the great Scottish teachers of the time, and thence, after three years under exceptional educative influences, to Cambridge. His father's death had given him the title of Viscount Palmerston in the Irish peerage, and before receiving his degree, his ambition led him to offer himself to the university as its candidate for the House of Commons. Though rejected there, a pocket borough was provided for him, and in 1807, at the age of twenty-three, he took his seat as a member for Newtown, a borough in which he had never set foot. An office was soon found for him in the Perceval government as Secretary at War, a post which was charged with the supervision and control of military expenditure and accounts—no small responsibility at this juncture. During his score of years in this capacity the young Palmerston gave evidence of superior abilities as a bureau chief, while on the floor of the House his speeches marked him as a stanch asserter of the power of England, and a dangerous man to trifle with—so quick and powerful was his gift of repartee. During the brief ministries of Canning and Goderich he received flattering offers of advancement, leaving the cabinet in May, 1828, with Canning's followers, who opposed the government of Wellington.

The young aristocrat who had impressed some of his school-fellows as having no ambitions higher than to be a courtier, had forsaken "pigtail Toryism," as he called it, and was developing along liberal lines. He had been a consistent advocate of Catholic emancipation, an admirer of Canning's broad views, and hospitable to moderate propositions for the reform of Parliament. When Lord Grey's government was formed, in 1830, he naturally accepted office under it, becoming what he had long wished to be, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Except for a few months he was the spokesman of England in the world's councils until the downfall of the Whigs, in 1841.

For the duties of his office Palmerston had many qualifications. His long training in public business; his familiarity not only with the languages of western Europe, but with foreign public men, and the national customs and peculiar modes of thought and feeling; his social faculty which gave him ready access to the minds of others; and his unfailing confidence in his country and in himself, brought him well off from a hundred diplomatic battles. As time went on the nation recognized in him some of its own most striking characteristics, and his popularity at last transcended party lines. In Lord Palmerston "John Bull" recognized himself.

Of the governing principles of his foreign policy Palmerston's own statement, made in 1848, is as good as can be given. It was not based upon any permanent alliance with other states, but provided for such freedom of action as should secure the "balance of power" in Europe, lest any single state should become a menace, like France in the Napoleonic era. Palmerston's statement was, "As long as England sympathizes with right and justice she will never find herself alone. She is sure to find some other state of sufficient power, influence, and weight to support and aid her in the course she may think fit to pursue. Therefore I say that it is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is marked out as the perpetual ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow. And if I might be allowed to express in one sentence the principle which I think ought to guide an English minister, I would adopt the expression of Canning, and say that with every British ministry the interests of England ought to be the shibboleth of policy."

The achievement of Belgian independence was the first and almost greatest success of the new Foreign Secretary. When the powers at Vienna, in 1815, were rearranging the map of Europe they had joined Belgium with Holland as the kingdom of the Netherlands, with the idea of forestalling any further advance of France in that quarter. The union was unnatural. Race, language, and religion were opposed to it, and in 1830, the Belgians revolted. A congress of the powers met in London to labor for a peaceful solution. Between the claims of Holland and the aggressive policy of France, a rupture was with difficulty avoided. But eventually, by tact and firmness, Palmerston had his way, and Belgium became an independent state, without precipitating a general European war.

The formation of the Quadruple Alliance was the next incident in this vigorous foreign policy. Portugal and Spain were plunged in civil wars, the pretenders, Don Miguel and Don Carlos, attempting to wrest the scepter from the hands of the constitutional queens. Austria, preparing to interfere in behalf of despotism, was met, in 1834, by the announcement that a treaty of alliance had been signed by the four powers— England, France, Spain, and Portugal. Though it remained in force but a short time it served its purpose.

The Eastern Question next took on threatening form. Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, rose against the Turkish Sultan, and his son, Ibrahim, invaded Syria and threatened Constantinople itself. The Turkish empire seemed about to break in two, France supporting the Pasha, and so gaining a foothold in Egypt, and Russia befriending the Porte, and advancing her frontier to the Bosphorus. Such a consummation would have interposed two hostile powers between England and her Indian empire. In July, 1840, Palmerston completed the Quadrilateral Alliance, by which England, Russia, Austria, and Prussia agreed to restore peace in the Porte's dominions. This bold stroke, backed by England's warlike attitude, and Palmerston's characteristic threat that "Mehemet Ali will just be chucked into the Nile" took the spirit out of the French government. Mehemet Ali was left to make the best terms he could with the Quadrilateral, and the crisis was at an end. This was in July, 1841. The next month the Whig ministry fell, and Sir Robert Peel returned to power. Palmerston went out of office with flying colors. "He had created Belgium, saved Portugal and Spain from Absolutism, rescued Turkey from Russia, and the highway to India from France." It is true that the picture had another side, and that the very brilliancy of his moves, the cleverness with which he played the game of diplomacy, and his recklessness of the interests of foreign courts left feelings of bitterness and defeat in the hearts of many European and American statesmen. His enemies called him a bully, and denounced his methods as "high handed," but his countrymen were satisfied.

From 1841 to 1846, as a member of the opposition, the ex- Minister exercised his functions as a critic of the spiritless foreign policy of Lord Aberdeen, for which he could find no better name than "antiquated imbecility." Upon Peel's overthrow, after the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846), he resumed the foreign portfolio in the Cabinet of Lord John Russell.

At once the question of the "Spanish marriages" became acute. King Louis Philippe of France, and his Minister, Guizot, had been plotting to marry the child-queen, Isabella of Spain, to her worthless cousin, Don Francisco, and her sister, the Infanta, to the Duc de Montpensier, Louis Philippe's brother, with results most promising to the King and to France, but most distasteful to England, as Palmerston was prompt to declare, "Such an objection on our part may seem uncourteous and may be displeasing, but the friendships of states and governments must be founded on natural interests and not upon personal likings." Yet despite these protests, the marriages were celebrated. France seemed to have outwitted Palmerston for once. But vengeance was not long delayed. The "Citizen King" had few friends among the monarchical states of the Continent, and in forfeiting the friendship of England he kicked away one of the props of his own throne. Within two years came the Revolution of 1848, which cost him his crown.

Eighteen hundred and forty-eight was a year of revolutions. Throughout western Europe the popular aspirations were struggling for expression. Constitutional government was clamorously demanded, and the despotism which had ground the Italian states under the heel of Hapsburg and Bourbon was for the moment shaken. Through her outspoken Foreign Secretary England let her liberal sympathies be known, but even Palmerston was careful to keep within the bounds of peaceful protest, avoiding all provocation to war.

In April, 1847, at Athens, the house of Don Pacifico, a Portuguese Jew born on British soil at Gibraltar, was destroyed by a mob of Jew-baiters. As a British citizen he put in a claim for damages and asked the foreign office to collect it. Palmerston had other scores to settle with Greece, and when his demands met with slow response, he sent a British fleet to the Piraeus to lay hands on Greek shipping. Greece appealed to France and Russia for protection. The trouble grew to such proportions that the British Parliament took it up. The Lords censured the government for its harsh and unjust treatment of a friendly state. In the Commons a vote of confidence in the foreign policy was moved, and on this question Lord Palmerston delivered the greatest speech of his life. It was an exposition and defense of his entire official career, and no argument could break the force with Englishmen of the triumphant sentence in which it culminated. "I fearlessly challenge the verdict which this House, as representing a political, a commercial, a constitutional country, is to give on the question before it; whether the principles on which the foreign policy of this country has been conducted, and the sense of duty which has led us to think ourselves bound to afford protection to our fellow- subjects abroad, are proper and fitting guides for those who are charged with the government of England, and whether as the Roman in the days of old held himself free from indignity when he could say 'Civis Romanus sum,' so also a British subject, in whatever land he be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England shall protect him against injustice and wrong!"

This "Civis Romanus" speech raised the orator to the highest pitch of popular regard. But the premier had found him a very troublesome colleague on account of his confirmed practice of committing the government on important matters without consulting with his chief. He was warned by the Queen's personal memorandum that this habit must cease, but an unpardonable case occurred in 1851. Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, president of the French republic, executed his coup d'etat and overthrew the constitutional government. Without consulting Queen or Premier, and contrary to their express desire, Palmerston, in conversation with the French ambassador, approved the bold stroke of the Prince-President. For this indiscretion Lord Russell summarily dismissed him.

When Lord Palmerston again took a portfolio, it was to be Home Secretary in the coalition cabinet of Lord Aberdeen (1852-55). He had become the warm friend and admirer of Lord Shaftesbury, whose mother-in-law, Lady Cowper, was now Lady Palmerston, the most gracious and skilful helpmeet that any statesman could wish to have. His inclination and his position enabled him to put through much legislation suggested by the philanthropic peer for the welfare of the working- classes. His knowledge of foreign affairs was at the service of the government, and came into active play when the Czar's claim to a protectorate over all Greek Christians in the Turkish empire brought the Eastern Question again to a fever heat, in 1853. The Czar Nicholas had said in a conversation with the British Minister concerning the political weakness of Turkey, "We have on our hands a sick man- -a very sick man; it will be a great mistake if one of these days he should slip away from us before the necessary arrangements have been made." His idea of "arrangements" was that Turkey in Europe should fall under Russian protection, leaving England free to control her direct route to India by way of Cyprus and Egypt. English diplomacy encouraged the Sultan to reject the Russian claim to the uttermost. The result was war. Turkey first declared it against the Russians, who had already invaded her Danubian principalities. Palmerston held that it was the duty of Europe to preserve the balance of power by preventing Russia from aggrandizing herself at the expense of Turkey, and when the Czar refused to withdraw from the principalities England joined with France in declaring the war, which, from the scene of its chief operations against Russia, has since been called the Crimean. Forty years had passed since Waterloo and war was an exciting novelty for British youth. England plunged into it with enthusiasm, but the feeble and incompetent prosecution of the campaign against Sebastopol, with the mismanagement of commissary and hospitals, evoked a storm of opposition, before which the Aberdeen ministry collapsed. Lord Palmerston was the natural choice of Queen and nation to succeed him. He became Prime Minister in February, 1855, and though past his seventieth year, his energy put a new face on the military situation, and his diplomacy gained a substantial advantage over Russia in the Treaty of Paris (March, 1856), which closed the inglorious conflict, and postponed for twenty years her advance toward the Bosphorus. The Queen, who had many reasons to dislike the personality of her chief minister, honored him with the Garter, in recognition of his services to the state.

Palmerston's government held together until early in 1858, handling with vigor the various problems of Eastern policy which grew out of the Crimean War, waging the brief expeditionary wars with China and Persia, and dealing with characteristic decision and pluck with the great Sepoy Mutiny in India, in 1857. To Palmerston belongs the credit of selecting the right person in Sir Colin Campbell to restore the British power in the revolted provinces, and his ready optimism helped to nerve the nation in this year of trial. John Bull felt a new pride in "Old Pam" when, in his Mansion House speech, in this time of national foreboding, he served notice on any foreign nation whom it might concern that "it would not be a safe game to play to take advantage of that which is erroneously imagined to be the moment of our weakness."

Palmerston's willingness to alter the English conspiracy laws for the sake of the Emperor of the French, whose life had been attempted by the assassin Orsini, cost him his official head in February, 1858. The second Derby administration which ensued lasted but fifteen months, giving way, in June of the following year, to Palmerston's second and last government, with a brilliant array of advisers; Earl Russell as Foreign Secretary, and Mr. William Ewart Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The lifelong determination to spare nothing which might be required for the defense of his country was still strong within him, as is shown by his strenuous advocacy of increased armaments, better coast defenses, and more and more powerful ships. "He never ceased for a single moment to keep before the nation the great lesson that empires are kept as they are gained, by courage and self-reliance."

The Civil War in America afforded one of the latest opportunities for the display of his characteristics in dealing with foreign affairs. The sentiment of the ruling class in England, the class to which Lord Palmerston was allied by birth, interest, and lifelong political association, openly showed its sympathy with the Southern side. Moreover, the English cotton-mills were shut down for lack of the raw staple, and English merchants looked longingly at the blockaded markets of the Confederacy. The Prime Minister, true to his guiding principle, made "the interests of England" the watchword of his policy. He was prompt to recognize the "belligerent rights" of the revolted states against an angry protest from the Union side; he was strenuous in his demand for apology and restitution in the case of the Confederate envoys whom Captain Wilkes, U.S.N., seized on board the British steamer "Trent"; and he taxed the endurance of Mr. Lincoln's government to the uttermost by allowing the "Alabama" and other Confederate commerce-destroyers to be built and outfitted in British ports. Not even the heavy bill of damages which his country had to pay at Geneva for this breach of neutrality has softened the bitterness of feeling which his action at that time engendered in the United States. If Lord Palmerston was the embodiment of "John Bull," he here exhibited the national character at its worst.

The "evergreen" premier, vigorous almost to the last, died at Brocket in October, 1865. He had outlived many of the traits which had laid him open to attack and criticism in his younger days, and had gained in weight and dignity. The knowledge of what he had done for England, how he had stood for her interests in the Commons, and won victories for her in foreign courts, and had penetrated and frustrated the designs of her enemies, gave him a splendid position in the esteem of English patriots. They even looked kindly upon his foibles, his foppish attire, his fondness for the turf, and his frivolous gayety, which shone undaunted when the national gloom was blackest. When he died there was a general belief that England had lost a son who had spared nothing in laboring for her aggrandizement, and he went to his last resting-place in Westminster Abbey as one who had earned a place among her most useful servants.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. Describe the early career of Palmerston. 2. How was he especially qualified for the position of Secretary of Foreign Affairs? 3. What was the chief principle of his foreign policy? 4. How was the independence of Belgium brought about? 5. What was the work of the Quadruple Alliance? 6. How did Palmerston deal with the Egyptian revolt and why? 7. What was England's attitude toward the "Spanish Marriage"? 8. Describe the "Civis Romanus" speech and the reasons for it. 9. Why was Lord Palmerston dismissed from the Cabinet? 10. What conditions brought on the Crimean War and what was England's share in it? 11. What was Palmerston's attitude in the American Civil War? 12. How did England regard the premier in the last years of his life?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIFE OF VISCOUNT PALMERSTON. Lord Dolling and Bulwer.
VISCOUNT PALMERSTON. L. C. Sanders.
HENRY HAVELOCK. (English Men of Action Series.)
THE INDIAN MUTINY. G. B. Malleson.
THE WAR IN THE CRIMEA. Gen. Sir Edward Hamley.

X

GLADSTONE AND THE IRISH QUESTION

[WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE, born, Liverpool, December 29, 1809; died, Hawarden, Flintshire, Wales, May 19, 1898; educated at Eton and Christ Church College, Oxford University (double first- class, 1831); Member of Parliament for Newark as a Tory, 1832 46; wrote, 1838, "The State in its Relations with the Church"; held minor financial offices in Peel administration; 1843-45, President of Board of Trade; 1847-65, Member of Parliament for Oxford University; 1852, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Aberdeen; 1858, Commissioner to the Ionian Islands; 1859, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Palmerston; 1865, defeated as candidate for Oxford but returned for South Lancashire as a Liberal; leader of House of Commons; proposes radical Reform Bill; 1868, Member of Parliament for Greenwich; 1868-74, Premier (I.); Disestablishes Irish Church; carries National Educational Law, Ballot Law, Irish Land Act; abolishes purchase in the army; resigns Liberal leadership in 1875, and publishes works on ecclesiastical controversy; 1876, attacks Disraeli's Eastern policy in letters on Bulgarian atrocities; 1880, Member of Parliament for Midlothian; 1880-85, Premier (II.); Irish Coercion Acts; new Land Acts; Arrears of Rent Act; Franchise and Redistribution Acts; 1886, Premier (III.); First Home Rule Bill Fails; 1892-94, Premier (IV.); 1893, Second Home Rule Bill carried through the Commons, thrown out by the Lords; retires from public life March, 1894; buried in Westminster Abbey.]

From the first day of the nineteenth century to the last the statesmen of England have had one standing problem to face. It might come up under various forms and disguises, and it might seem to demand various remedies, but in some shape or other the woes of Ireland have always furnished the test of practical statesmanship, and have often been the rock on which proud administrations have met with disaster.

By nature Ireland would seem formed for peace and plenty. Happily located with the protecting bulwark of Great Britain between their emerald isle and foreign foes, blessed with a mild and equable climate, and inhabiting an island of singular fertility, the Irish would seem to have been marked for fortune's favors. Yet such has been the misgovernment of the English that the Irish have seen their paternal acres pass into the hands of aliens and absentees, their religion made a brand of shame and outlawry, their Parliament corrupted and done away, their industries crippled and bound down, and themselves reduced to wretched poverty.

At the outset of the century the Act of Union went into effect, abolishing the Irish Parliament and admitting Irish (Protestant) Lords and Commons to the Parliament at Westminster. Pitt believed that the change would strengthen the empire and help Ireland as well, but it was brought to pass by means of lavish bribery, and sorely against the wish of the Irish patriots. Furthermore, the determination of Pitt to commend the act to Ireland by removing the political disabilities which barred Catholics from membership in Parliament was thwarted by the stiff-necked George III., who had got it into his head that such a concession would do violence to the Protestantism of his coronation oath. Pitt resigned in disgust, and Catholic emancipation had to await until England had finished Napoleon's European business and could turn her hand to the troubles nearer home. It was finally carried, in 1829, by Wellington and Peel, the reform being fairly forced upon them by the tremendous agitation in its behalf by the eloquent Daniel O'Connell and his comrades of the Catholic Association. To save the nation from civil war the government yielded with scant grace, and O'Connell and his "tail" of Irish Catholics came into Parliament to form a new and perplexing element in all subsequent political calculations.

From his vantage-ground as a member of Parliament O'Connell led a fresh agitation for the "Repeal," meaning the repeal of the Act of Union which had destroyed the Dublin Parliament. His oratory, which in its power over vast multitudes of his emotional countrymen has never been surpassed, made him the idol of his party. To boisterous congregations of tens of thousands he declaimed his bitter harangues on Saxon injustice to the Celt. But when the people had been brought to fever heat the agitation failed because the orator proved to be a voice and nothing more. He yielded meekly to the proclamation of the government forbidding further meetings, and his followers forsook him when they saw that he would not cross the Rubicon and take arms after words had failed. The society called "Young Ireland," formed about 1840, took up the agitation for Irish nationality, and carried it to greater lengths than O'Connell had dared. Its fiery young leaders, Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and Mitchel, preached sedition with voice and newspaper press, and in 1848, only by the vigorous exertion of physical force was open rebellion averted. The principal men of the Young Ireland party were seized and condemned to death for high treason, though they ultimately got off with transportation to Australia, whence most of them eventually found their way to America, whither thousands of their countrymen had emigrated since the famine year of 1846.

The famine marks a turning-point in the history of the relations of England and Ireland. As has been narrated in another place, it was the dearth of food in Ireland which forced the government of Sir Robert Peel to do what the Cobdenites had been demanding for ten years, and repeal the Corn Laws. Probably the distressful plight of the Irish peasant had never been brought so strongly to the attention of Englishmen as by the reports which now reached England from the agents of the relief committees who visited every part of the island ascertaining conditions and distributing food. From this time a considerable number among the English Liberals carried the sad state of Ireland upon their heart and conscience. Another result of the famine which was to exercise enduring influence upon Irish politics was the emigration to America. The hundreds of thousands who came to the free republic at this time soon made it the asylum of Irish patriots, the hot-bed of anti-English conspiracies, and the source of a swelling stream of revenue for the Irish nationalist treasury.

It was in America that the next alarm was sounded after two unquiet decades. A widely ramified secret society, the Fenian Brotherhood, sprang up among the Irish exiles and emigrants in the United States about 1857, its members swearing "to free and regenerate Ireland from the yoke of England." The movement spread to Ireland, and Fenian lodges were organized even on British soil. The close of the American Civil War set loose many Irish veterans who eagerly enlisted in the cause of "the Irish Republic." The reports of vast enlistments and contributions in America alarmed the British government. In February, 1866, the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended in Ireland, and scores of suspects were thrown into jail. In May an armed band of Irish- American Fenians crossed the Niagara River to invade Canada. The attempt failed miserably, as did the plans for a general rising in Ireland. But a succession of surprises, jail deliveries, gunpowder plots, and the like, kept the English government in a flutter for several years, and gave the name of Fenian a place in the somber side of the century's history. The most notable result of the Fenian outbreak, beyond its obvious one of embittering the feeling between the governing nation and the subject race, was that it aroused one man—and he the greatest statesman of his time—to the need of providing some far- reaching and sufficient remedy for the disease which showed such virulence. "We know," says McCarthy, the historian of the epoch, "that even the worst excesses of the movement impressed the mind of Mr. Gladstone with a conviction that the hour was appropriate for doing something to remove the causes of the discontent that made Ireland restless…..While many public instructors lost themselves in vain shriekings over the wickedness of Fenianism, and the incurable perversity of the Irish people, one statesman was already convinced that the very shock of the Fenian agitation would arouse public attention to the recognition of substantial grievance, and to the admission that the business of statesmanship was to seek out the remedy and provide redress."