A Short History of English Liberalism

A SHORT HISTORY OF
ENGLISH LIBERALISM

BY

W. LYON BLEASE

No rational man ever did govern himself by abstractions and universals.... A statesman differs from a professor in an university; the latter has only the general view of society.... A statesman, never losing sight of principles, is to be guided by circumstances; and, judging contrary to the exigencies of the moment, he may ruin his country for ever.

Burke, "On the Petition of the Unitarians."

T. FISHER UNWIN
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE
LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20

TO
"THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN"

First Published in 1913

(All rights reserved.)

CONTENTS

A Short History of English Liberalism

CHAPTER I

LIBERALISM AND TORYISM

This book attempts to trace the varying but persistent course of Liberalism in British politics during the last hundred and fifty years. It is not so much a history of events as a reading of them in the light of a particular political philosophy. In the strict sense a history of Liberalism should cover much more than politics. The same habit of mind is to be discovered everywhere else in the history of thought, most conspicuously in religious history, but not less certainly in the history of science and of art. The general victory in these innumerable conflicts of opinion has been to Liberalism, and the movement of the race, during the period with which the writer is concerned, is precisely measured by the degree in which the Liberal spirit has succeeded in modifying the establishments of the preceding age. The object of this book is to investigate the course of that process of modification in politics.

By Liberalism I mean, not a policy, but a habit of mind. It is the disposition of the man who looks upon each of his fellows as of equal worth with himself. He does not assume that all men and women are of equal capacity, or equally entitled to offices and privileges. But he is always inclined to leave and to give them equal opportunity with himself for self-expression and for self-development. He assumes, as the basis of his activity, that he has no right to interfere with any other person's attempts

to employ his natural powers in what he conceives to be the best way. He is unwilling to impose his judgment upon that of others, or to force them to live their lives according to his ideas rather than their own. They are never to be used by him for his own ends, but for theirs. Each is to be left to himself, to work out his own salvation. The Liberal habit of mind has its positive as well as its negative side. Just as it leads its possessor to refrain from interfering with the development of others, so it leads him to take active steps to remove the artificial barriers which impede that development. Natural obstacles will remain, though even these may be diminished. But the artificial conditions, which prevent or hinder growth, are perpetually obnoxious to the Liberal. Upon class distinctions in society, privileges of sex, rank, wealth, and creed, he wages unceasing war. They are, in his eye, weights and impediments. To one of two individuals, not distinguishable in natural capacity, they give an advantage which is denied to the other. It is the object of the Liberal, not to deprive any individual of such opportunities as are required for the exercise of his natural powers, but to prevent the excessive appropriation of such opportunities by members of the privileged class. The differences between the practical aims and methods of Liberals at different times are very wide. But the mental habit has always been the same. "The passion for improving mankind, in its ultimate object, does not vary. But the immediate object of reformers and the forms of persuasion by which they seek to advance them, vary much in different generations. To a hasty observer they might even seem contradictory, and to justify the notion that nothing better than a desire for change, selfish or perverse, is at the bottom of all reforming movements. Only those who will think a little longer about it can discern the same old cause of social good against class interests, for which, under altered names, Liberals are fighting now as they were fifty years ago."[^[1]] The constitutional Liberalism of Fox, the economical Liberalism of Cobden, and the new collectivist Liberalism of Mr. Lloyd

George exhibit great differences in comparison. But the three men are alike in their desire to set free the individual from existing social bonds, and to procure him liberty of growth.

The justification for this individual freedom is not that the man is left to his own selfish motives, to develop himself for his own advantage. It is that it is only in this way that he can realize that his own best advantage is only secured by consulting that of his fellows. "The foundation of liberty is the idea of growth ... it is of course possible to reduce a man to order and prevent him from being a nuisance to his neighbours by arbitrary control and harsh punishment.... It is also possible, though it takes a much higher skill, to teach the same man to discipline himself, and this is to foster the development of will, of personality, of self-control, or whatever we please to call that central harmonizing power which makes us capable of directing our own lives. Liberalism is the belief that society can safely be founded on this self-directing power of personality."[^[2]] This Liberalism has nothing to do with anarchy. Coercion may be consistently applied wherever individual liberty is employed for the public injury, and the imprisonment of burglars and the regulation of factories by law are only two aspects of the same thing. But Liberalism restricts freedom only to extend freedom. Where the individual uses his own liberty to restrict that of others he may be coerced. But in spite of the modifications to which all such political principles must be subject, the general rule holds good. The ideal Liberal State is that in which every individual is equally free to work out his own life.

The practical difficulty of working out the relations between the individual and the society in which he is placed is of course very great, and it will probably always be impossible to maintain a perfect equilibrium. No doubt we shall always suffer from one or other of the two unsatisfying conditions—the sacrifice of the individual to what the majority thinks to be the right of the whole society, and the sacrifice of the

society to the undue emancipation of the individual. But the necessary imperfection of the result is no argument against this or any other political system of thought. Politics are no more than a means of getting things done, and when we have found a society of perfect human beings, we can fairly complain that their affairs are not perfectly managed. So far as he can, the Liberal aims at securing this balance of social and individual good, remembering that the good of society can only be measured by the good of all its members, and not by the good only of some dominant rank, creed, or class. "Rights are relative to the well-being of society, but the converse proposition is equally true, that the well-being of society may be measured by the degree in which their moral rights are secured to its component members.... The moral right of an individual is simply a condition of the full development of his personality as a moral being. Equally, the moral right of any community is the condition of the maintenance of its common life, and since that society is best, happiest, and most progressive which enables its members to make the utmost of themselves, there is no necessary conflict between them. The maintenance of rights is the condition of human progress.... To reconcile the rule of right with the principle of the public welfare is the supreme end of social theory."[^[3]]

In practical politics the work of modern Liberalism has been to alter the conditions of society so that this freedom of growth may be secured for each member of it. The old conception of society was a conception of classes. Human beings were graded and standardized. Certain privileges were reserved for certain groups. Society looked, for its estimate of a man, not to his natural powers, not to what he might make of himself, but to his brand or mark. If within a certain degree, he had a free choice of his mode of life; if without it, he found his condition prescribed, sometimes so rigorously that he could hardly ever improve it. Liberalism has endeavoured to go deeper into the man, to get beneath the outward complexion,

to find out his intrinsic worth, and to give him that place in the social estimate which his natural powers deserve. Arbitrary distinctions are abhorrent to it. It is incapable of thinking in terms of class. Every class is, in its eyes, only an aggregate of individuals, and to exalt one class above another is to appreciate some individuals at the expense of others, to place marks of comparative social worth upon the members of different groups which do not correspond to the relative values of their natural qualities. Against a privileged race, rank, creed, or sex Liberalism must fight continually. By the artificial elevation of one above another, it is made to count for more in society, its members are aggrandized and those of its rivals are depreciated; and while the first are encouraged to abuse, the second are hampered and fettered in their growth. The Liberal asserts that no man, because he happens to be of a particular sect, or to be born of a particular family, or to possess a particular form of property, or to hold particular opinions, shall be invested by Society with privileges which give him an advantage in social intercourse over his fellows. He does not assert that all human beings are equal in capacity, but he demands that their natural inequalities shall not be aggravated by artificial conditions. For what he is worth, each shall be free to realize his highest capacity.

The Liberal conception of equality as between individuals is extended to the case of Churches, of nations, and of sexes. These classes are indeed not regarded by the Liberal as classes, but simply as associations, for limited purposes, of individuals, who are, in all essential respects, separate and distinct. To confer a privilege upon one Church or nation or sex is simply to confer a privilege upon the individuals who compose it, and whether the privilege is the monopoly of political power or the sole right to take part in a public ceremony, it does in greater or less degree affect the relative social values of the members of the two groups, and places the members of the inferior at the disposition of those of the superior. To give the Established Church the sole right to take part in the coronation of the King is a violation

of Liberal principle of the same kind, though not of the same degree, as to exclude Dissenters or Catholics from Parliament, and if men were content to exclude women only from the legal profession, they would be arrogating to themselves a superior value no less clearly than when they refuse to them the right to control their own government.

The same general habit of mind is applied to foreign policy. The acknowledgment of the equal worth of individuals within the nation becomes the acknowledgment of the equal worth of nations among themselves. "Nationalism has stood for liberty, not only in the sense that it has resisted tyrannous encroachment, but also in the sense that it has maintained the right of a community to work out its own salvation in its own way. A nation has an individuality, and the doctrine that individuality is an element in well-being is rightly applied to it. The world advances by the free, vigorous growth of divergent types, and is stunted when all the fresh bursting shoots are planed off close to the heavy, solid stem."[^[4]] The interference of one with another, attempts to prescribe the limits or the cause of development, are as obnoxious in international as in intra-national relations. It was in fact in connection with this idea of nationality that the words "Liberal" and "Liberalism" came into use. The first English Liberals were those statesmen who followed Canning in his championship of Greece and the South American Republics, and some of them were very far from being Liberals within the borders of their own State.[^[5]]

This extension of Liberalism from individuals to nations is easy as a mental process, but very far from easy as a matter of practical politics. Nationality is not difficult to define in general terms. It is sometimes infinitely difficult to decide in a particular case whether the general definition applies. John Stuart Mill has perhaps given as much precision to the Liberal conception of nationality as it can bear. "A portion of mankind may be said

to constitute a nation if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and others. This feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes. Sometimes it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language and community of religion greatly contribute to it. Geographical limits are one of the causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political antecedents, the possession of a national history and consequent community of recollections, collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past."[^[6]] Nationality is not a thing of sharp outline, any more than any other political conception, and community of interest, the management of common concerns over a long period of time, has triumphed over differences so potent as those of race and creed. Such has been the fortune of Switzerland, of Canada, and of white South Africa, and it is the hope of Liberalism that such will also be the fortune of Ireland. Without attempting to draw hard lines between communities, the Liberal sees in them distinctions of worth and capacity such as he sees in individuals, and he would give the same freedom of self-development to a nation as to a human being.

The idea that nations are to be bound by moral rules as much as individuals is only another application of the general rule that one man is to be treated as equally entitled with every other to the development of his own faculties. The same rule is extended to nations as to single persons. No one people has the right to interfere with the free development of another, until it is clearly and unmistakably proved that that free development will be generally injurious. Once this principle is accepted, it becomes impossible, as in the case of single persons, for one nation to decline to recognize moral rules in its dealings with others. Morality is nothing but the subjection of individual wills to the common will, as expressed in defined rules. Immorality is only the arrogance of the individual will, refusing to submit itself to general rules, while it endeavours to enforce general rules upon

others. The Liberal State is that which recognizes the universal application of its own principles of conduct, declines to thrust its own ideas upon unwilling associates, and works in harmony with other races instead of in opposition to them.

It is not suggested here that it is any part of the Liberal doctrine to seek peace at any price, or to turn the other cheek to the smiter. A vital condition of the existence of morality is that moral persons shall be ready at all times to defend it. To suffer wanton aggression is as fatal to a nation as to an individual. It is a mere encouragement to the general infringement of rights which means the dissolution of international morality. Liberal patriotism exists, though it is of a different kind from that patriotism which is so conspicuous a feature of our modern Imperialism. Imperialist patriotism is often a vulgar assertion of selfish power. Liberal patriotism is a means of diminishing national selfishness. Just as the Liberal believes that the best life within the nation is produced by the growth of free individuality, so he believes that the best life in the race at large is produced by the growth of free nationality. "If there is one condition precedent to effective internationalism or to the establishment of any reliable relations between States, it is the existence of strong, secure, well-developed, and responsible nations. Internationalism can never be subserved by the suppression or forcible absorption of nations; for these practices react disastrously upon the springs of internationalism, on the one hand setting nations on their armed defence and stifling the amicable approaches between them, on the other debilitating the larger nations through excessive corpulence and indigestion. The hope of a coming internationalism enjoins above all else the maintenance and natural growth of independent nationalities, for without such there could be no gradual evolution of internationalism, but only a series of unsuccessful attempts at a chaotic and unstable cosmopolitanism. As individualism is essential to any sane form of national socialism, so nationalism is essential to internationalism."[^[7]]

By far the most difficult of all the tasks which Liberalism has to perform is in its conduct of foreign policy. Even in domestic affairs it is often not easy to calculate the effects of particular proposals, how far they can be pressed towards the ideal, in what temper they will be received by the people, with what smoothness they will operate when they have been expressed in an Act of Parliament. It is a matter of accommodating ourselves to somewhat intractable material, and of managing, persuading, and guiding human beings whose motives we cannot directly control. But the facts are at least fairly within reach. The Liberal statesman has as much opportunity as anybody can have of knowing the mental habit and disposition of those whom his legislation will affect. He is acquainted with their history. He is guided by previous successes or failures. In the last resort, he knows that the great bulk of the people concerned will respect the law even if they dislike it, and will express their dissent no more dangerously than by turning him out of office. In foreign affairs his difficulties are infinitely greater, and the consequences of failure may be disastrous. He is dealing, not with subjects, but with independent persons, who, except in a few points settled by agreement, observe no common law with himself. Their objects are obscure, and may only temporarily coincide with his own. They may have private arrangements among themselves of which he knows little or nothing, and if they cheat him in their own interest he has no remedy except one which is so violent as to be worse almost than any disease. Finally, even if his knowledge of the facts were more accurate, and his confidence in his associates more complete, he would still be baffled by the hostility to Liberal ideas which animates some, if not all, of the foreign diplomatists.

These are obstacles to direct action which it would be folly not to take into consideration, and in the case of the present Foreign Secretary they seem to have proved insuperable. But in some directions it is obvious that the Liberal statesman can pursue his course without fear. Where no powerful opponent or associate is concerned, he is as free as within his own country, and he is bound to act on purely Liberal principles. He must act always

according to moral rules, even in dealing with weak peoples. He is bound to do nothing which would help to maintain a vicious system or government. He is bound not to interfere in the domestic affairs of another nation, save where the fundamental liberties of his own countrymen are in danger. It is equally his duty to refrain from arrogance towards distracted China and towards united Germany. It is not his business to lecture the Russian Government for its vile domestic policy or the Spanish Government for the atrocious murder of Ferrer. But it is no more his business to strengthen these Governments, either by his alliance or otherwise, in thus acting towards their subjects. It is no doubt the duty of Liberals who are private persons to protest against cruelty and oppression, wherever it may be found. Public opinion counts for something, even in a foreign country, and if we cannot prevent evil abroad, we can at least keep alive the hatred of it in our own country. The Englishman who is indifferent to the sufferings of Finland is in danger of becoming insensitive to his own. But whatever may be the duty of private persons, official representations to a foreign State are always useless, and often exaggerate the evils to which they refer. In the face of foreign dictation, domestic tyranny becomes a patriotic duty. Whatever a Liberal Foreign Secretary may think, he must not dictate to any established Government. But his duty on the other side is equally clear, and he must do nothing to strengthen such a Government against its subjects. Palmerston's expressed approval of Napoleon III's coup d'état and Sir Edward Grey's more indirect support of the present Russian tyranny are equally illiberal. If a Government which violates every Liberal principle in its domestic policy is not to be treated as an enemy, it is no more to be treated as a friend. It is entitled to the honourable observance of all agreements for the joint management of joint concerns, and to perfect freedom in its own domestic administration. It is not entitled to anything which will enhance its power. To assist it directly or indirectly is to participate in its wrongdoing, and no Liberal can safely do that without impairing his own character.

These are elementary rules which the Liberal must observe in all cases where his conduct is to be determined by nothing out of his own control. In other cases he can often do very little, and is compelled to acquiesce in conduct of which he would never himself be guilty. Here it is his duty to do as much as he can, to avoid the offensive imposition of his own ideas upon his fellows, to avoid arrangements which dispose of the fortunes of weak peoples irrespective of their wishes, to work in concert, not with one Power or group of Powers, but with all who are interested, and, in case of difficulty, to throw his weight into the scale with those whose aims most resemble his own. Generally, it is his duty to substitute the expression of moral rules by arbitration for the brutal assertion of national egoism in war. But there is no general presumption against war. It is always an evil. But it may be the least of possible evils. War for the independence of his own nation requires no justification. War for the independence of another nation or for the defence of some rule of international morality is to be judged by its expediency. "It seems to be impossible to state the principle of non-intervention in rational and statesmanlike terms, if it is under all circumstances, and without qualification or limit, to preclude an armed protest against intervention by other foreign Powers. There may happen to be good reasons why we should on a given occasion passively watch a foreign Government interfering by violence in the affairs of another country. Our own Government may have its hands full; or it may have no military means of intervening to good purpose; or its intervention might in the long run do more harm than good to the object of its solicitude. But there can be no general prohibitory rule. When a military despot interferes to crush the men of another country while struggling for their national rights, no principle can make it wrong for a free nation to interfere by force against him. It can only be a question of expediency and prudence."[^[8]] In other words, the importance of the moral rule involved must be weighed with the chances

of success, the cost of war, the waste of life and wealth, and the sufferings of the poorer classes, which are the inevitable consequences of war. In the face of a universal enemy like Napoleon a war on behalf of Spain and Portugal was just. The Crimean War and the Boer Wars were unjust. Wars on behalf of Poles or Finns against Russia or Hungarians against Austrians would have been just, but not expedient, because no maritime power could have waged them with any chance of permanent success. It is a matter of calculation, and there are few wars, other than wars for the independence of their own country, which Liberals would not hold to cost more in blood and treasure than the principle for which they were undertaken.

It is obvious that this reasoning is entirely inconsistent with the theory of the balance of power. That theory, unhappily revived in recent years, requires not merely the subordination of morality to expediency in particular cases, but the complete abandonment of morality as a condition of international politics. Its essence is not international agreement and the rule of right, but international hostility and the rule of force. It sets the States into two groups, one of which must always act against the other. England's policy is no longer decided by herself, but by herself in consultation with allies, whose character and objects may be purely selfish. If one of her associates is guilty of immoral aggression against one of the opposing group, or asserts some right which ought only to be conferred upon her by international agreement, she is dragged into a quarrel in defence of wrong against right, and not only violates moral rules in the particular case, but weakens her own ability to observe them in every other. Her honour and her interest alike are placed in the hands of others. She accepts a bill in blank, which the holder may fill in with any amount he pleases. In cases of extreme necessity this may be inevitable. When all are threatened by an enemy of the type of Napoleon, England cannot dissociate herself from the rest on account of their want of scruple. But as a settled and habitual policy the maintenance of the balance of power must be abhorrent to every

man who is not ready to put his conscience into the keeping of others.

An examination of the opposing mode of thought will make clearer the essential nature of Liberalism. This opposite may fairly be called Toryism, if that term is used, like the other, to describe a persisting habit of mind and not a policy, which varies from generation to generation. Conservatism and Unionism are not satisfactory equivalents. The latter, especially, expresses only opposition to a particular project of Liberalism, and is itself, like its object, of a temporary nature. Conservatism on the other hand, though a permanent force, is not essentially opposed to Liberalism. It is indeed often allied with Toryism, and so long as Liberalism continues to do positive and reconstructive work the strength of Toryism must generally lie in this negative and preserving instinct. When the two opponents exchange their usual parts, the Conservative mass swings over to the Liberal side. It is to Conservatism, as well as to Liberalism, that Free Trade owes its present security. In the face of active retrogression, the true Conservative, without becoming a Liberal, ranges himself with Liberals. But this sort of temporary alliance is rare. Until very recent years Liberalism has been the active and changing force, and has accordingly always found Conservatism its enemy.

A very good illustration of this working agreement between the positive dislike of individual emancipation and the negative reluctance to modify an institution which prevents it was furnished a short time ago by the Dean of Canterbury. The Convocation of the Diocese was considering whether the wife's pledge to obey her husband should be struck out of the marriage service. To the Liberal, this pledge, purporting to invest the subjection of the female sex to the male with a divine sanction, is one of the most obnoxious of all the fetters upon the freedom of women. Regarding the woman as of equal worth with the man, he has no doubt that this institution must be modified in her interest. On the occasion in question, the proposal for her

relief was successfully opposed by the Dean. He said that when they were asked to say that the views of the Apostles regarding the position of the two sexes were wrong, that was a somewhat alarming and distressing principle to introduce into their deliberations. They were bound, not only by the ancient traditions of their Church, but by their vows, to submit their judgment absolutely to the statements of the Apostles on matters of that kind.[^[9]] This is a clear case of Conservatism defending Toryism. The subjection of the wife enjoined by the marriage service dates from a period long preceding even that of apostolic barbarism, when women were regarded as absolutely at the disposition of their male associates. In origin it was a crude assertion of the male ego at the expense of the female. The modern Church makes no such naked requisition, and defends the selfish establishment, not because it is selfish, but because it is an establishment.

This is the usual method of Conservatism. The position was fixed by the remote ancestors of the present garrison, and they are content to defend it even though they would never have themselves taken it up. But pure Toryism lives to-day, and reproduces the thoughts, the arguments, and often the very words, of the Toryism of a century ago. Opponents of Disestablishment repeat the language of the supporters of the Test Act. Opponents of Woman Suffrage, even those who call themselves Liberals, argue as Eldon and Peel argued against Parliamentary Reform. Ulster preserves the atmosphere of the struggle for Catholic Emancipation. Mr. Lloyd George, like Mr. Joseph Chamberlain thirty years ago, excites the same fury as was produced by Tom Paine's Rights of Man. The same principles contend on different stages, and through the mouths of different actors. Though the cries of the unending warfare change, the parties are always the same. Liberty is like the books of the Roman Sybil. As each instalment is wrested from the grasp of the monopolists, the remainder becomes at once as precious as was previously the whole: loss of one privilege never prepares them for the surrender of another. The admission of Dissenters

to public office involved no adoption of the general principle that all sects should be treated equally by the State. The abandonment of rotten boroughs was no acknowledgment that every individual subject to government had the right to control government. The innumerable concessions made by Toryism to Irish nationality have involved no general recognition. The old arguments have been shattered and dissipated in more than one contest. But when the forces of Liberalism advance against the next line of defence, the ancient retainers of monopoly are dragged from the hospitals and galvanized into new activity, to be routed again after a struggle almost as bitter and as long as the first. Toryism is beaten. It is never converted.

This Toryism is the habit of mind which refuses to concede to others that right of free expression which it requires for itself. It is the egoistic mind which regards all others as at its disposition. Its opinions are of superior worth, and others must give way. As the Liberal temper is extended, so is the Tory. The ego includes the Church, the occupation, the nation, and the sex of the individual. It thinks of human beings in classes, as distinguished from itself. They are Dissenters, or "people who do not agree with my religious opinions"; tenants, or "people who pay money to me or my class for the privilege of working or living on our land"; foreigners, or "people who happen to be born in countries other than my own"; wives, widows, and spinsters, or "persons who are, or have been, or will be connected with my sex." The Tory habitually thinks of his fellow-creatures not according to their individuality, but according to their class, the face value which, regardless of their intrinsic worth, either entitles or disentitles them to his favour. They either belong to his own class or they do not. The real worth of each is not the standard by which he forms his judgment of them. Every act and utterance, every request and protest of another person is referred to the artificial connection, or distinction, instead of being judged for itself. The prime condition is that the other should keep in his place. By the Liberal the other is considered as an isolated object, an end in

himself, to be treated without regard to any artificial association between them. The accidental is distinguished from the essential, and the creed, nationality, occupation, or sex is not allowed to interrupt the clear view of the human being who is enclosed in it. The Tory deals with his object as invested with a status. The Liberal deals with the man in himself.

These different points of view determine the different attitudes of the two parties to political problems as they arise. The pure Tory is of course as rare as the pure Liberal, and neither of the two groups, which are at any particular time described as Liberal and Tory, corresponds exactly with the habit of mind associated with its name.[^[10]] Self-styled Tories are occasionally strongly Liberal in particular cases. Windham, who thought that the abolition of bull-baiting was a dangerous revolution, voted against the Slave Trade. Peel, the greatest man whom the old Tory party ever produced, was Liberal in finance, in legislation about crime and factories, and in foreign policy. In the same way, men who are Liberal in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred show

themselves to be Tory in the last. Robert Lowe, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the great Liberal Ministry of 1868, had as fierce a contempt for the working classes as Lord Salisbury himself. The question of Woman Suffrage, appearing unexpectedly on the surface of politics in 1906, has divided both parties, though in different proportions. The true Liberal supports the demand for enfranchisement. The true Tory opposes it. But the agitation has discovered some of the most bitter of sexual egoists on the Radical benches of the House of Commons, and champions of the individual's right to control her own government even among the Cecils.[^[11]] The division between the members of the schools is thus not sharply defined. But the schools always exist, and it is in the perpetual conflict between them that the progress of the nation takes place.

Every political problem involves a conflict between an existing institution and the interest of individuals. The two parties thus approach it from different sides. The Tory looks down from the institution to the man, the Liberal up from the man to the institution. To the Liberal, the State and all other institutions within it are things of flesh and blood, they are so many expressions of human society, associations of human beings for their own human purposes. To the Tory, the institution is a machine, its efficient working is everything, and it is the duty of the individual to subordinate himself to that object whether his own interest is served by it or not. The Liberal says, "The State is made for man, and not man for the State." The Tory reverses the dogma, and even when he pursues the good of individuals, he pursues it rather in order to make them better soldiers or workers, that is to say, better servants of the State, than to make them better in themselves. Democratic government to the Liberal is an essential condition of the free growth of the individual soul. To the Tory, if he believes in it at all, it is a piece of efficient political machinery. "What use can the State make of this man?" asks the Tory. "What

use can this man make of himself?" asks the Liberal. The Tory theory is expressed in terms of duties, the Liberal in terms of rights. The disposing mind is at the back of the one, the encouraging mind at the back of the other. The Tory finds the good of the individual in the strength of the State. The Liberal finds the strength of the State in the good of the individual. Where the one seeks to maintain and use, the other seeks to ease, to alter, and to readjust, binding himself to no particular scheme of political or economic construction, but ready to apply to each case of individual hardship, as it arises, such devices as he can invent.

Practical Toryism, the theory as it has been expressed in actual politics, has been until recent years the Toryism of a governing class. But no class has a monopoly of it. The same habit of mind exists everywhere. There is nothing so universal as the aristocratic temper, which disposes of the fortunes of others according to its own sense of what is fitting. The Tory statesman of a hundred and fifty years ago was a landowner, a Churchman, and a man of wealth. But his view of life would have been much the same if he had been a tinker, an atheist, and in daily expectation of the workhouse. He might, in pursuit of his own class interest, have rebelled against the Toryism of the governing class, without abating any of his own. To such persons as came within his disposition he would display the same zeal for the assertion of his own ego at the expense of theirs, as that which he resented in his own superiors. Even the poorest man has generally a wife, and even the meanest of Englishmen can always speak contemptuously of foreigners. Toryism is a habit of mind, which is often modified by circumstances, but can and does exist in men and women of all classes, irrespective of wealth, creed, or occupation.

It is true that this Tory doctrine is not always crudely stated. The formula is more often that of identification than that of disposition. If the inferior class is so placed that the superior class may dispose of it, it suffers no hardship, because the interest of both is the same. The people are identified with the State,

the workmen are identified with the employer, the wife is identified with the husband. Make the State strong, and you make the people happy. Give the employer higher profits, and the workmen get higher wages out of those profits. Give the husband security and freedom, and the wife will partake of them both. But whatever the form of argument may be, the result is the same. There is an inevitable tendency in human nature to deteriorate in the enjoyment of absolute power. Some governing classes may use the strength of the State to make the people happy. Some employers may cheerfully share their increased gains with their workpeople. Some husbands may concede to their wives that complete freedom of occupation, expression of opinion, and control of property which they themselves possess. But history and contemporary experience alike afford innumerable examples of governing classes oppressing or keeping down their subjects, of employers giving higher wages only in response to strong or even violent pressure from their workmen, and of husbands depriving their wives of independence of thought and action, and even of the control of their own bodies. There is no security for the individual in the generosity of superiors. It is only when all are recognized by the State as having equal worth in their relations with each other that individual liberty can be enjoyed by all.

The essential differences between Liberalism and Toryism are revealed in their disputes about the larger political topics. The franchise never fails to draw clear expressions of character from both sides. To the Liberal, the right of a man to control his own government is only one of the many rights which go to make up his right to control his own life. His freedom of life cannot be complete if, without his consent, his earnings may be diminished by taxation, his business ruined by a commercial treaty, the education of his children prescribed by legislation, and his whole fortune impaired by a declaration of war. There can be no real freedom of growth without control of government. But the argument for enfranchisement is based on more than the

direct consequences of it. That the man who is taxed against his will enjoys only an imperfect freedom is obvious. What is not so readily perceived is that he is indirectly affected in a much more serious way. It is axiomatic that a governing class will, sooner or later, abuse its absolute power. Landowners use the tariff to increase their rents, and so impose burdens upon the poor. The middle class prohibits the combination of workmen in trade disputes, or resists the regulation of factories by law. Working-men exclude working-women from trades which they wish to preserve for their own sex. Men erect a system of marriage law which places the wife in the power of the husband. All this is written in history, and cannot be disputed. But the unseen consequences of disfranchisement are not so often realized. There is constant action and reaction between political institutions and social estimates. If disfranchisement springs from depreciation, it also encourages it. To confine the control of government to one class is to appreciate that class at the expense of others, and to encourage its members to abuse their disfranchised associates whenever they are brought into contact with them. So long as the big business of politics is reserved for them, so long are they compelled to believe that the monopoly is the reward of their superior worth. Their ego is exalted, and that of their subjects is depressed. Private insolence is the inevitable consequence of public privilege. Government by landlords means interference with the political and religious opinions of tenants. Government by Protestants means the exclusion of Catholics from offices of dignity and profit. Government by masters means bad conditions of labour and fettered powers of combination among workmen. Government by men means the exclusion of women from professions and the maintenance of a double standard of morality. It is not suggested here that disfranchisement does more than affect tendencies. The political thinker who values his reputation will always write in terms of tendencies rather than in terms of states. But disfranchisement at least tends to produce, if it does not actually produce, the consequences of social depreciation. In some countries, or in

some states of society, these may be less dangerous than the consequences of general enfranchisement. But they always exist.

An admirable statement of this part of the case for enfranchisement has been recently made by an opponent of Woman Suffrage. "If you enfranchise women," he said, "you cannot deprive them of the powers and privileges which accompany it. If they are to share men's political duties they must enjoy his rights, they must be eligible for the Bar, the Bench, for the Civil Service, and for election to Parliament. Once in Parliament you cannot brand them as a class or sex apart, to be deprived of any of the high offices open to men. If they are not to attain these offices, it cannot be by the avowal of sex, but by an admission of incapacity."[^[12]] This is absolute Toryism. Disfranchisement is a convenient means of depreciating women in private life, and the main bulwark of the male ego. It disables every woman in advance, and deprives her of private rights without the trouble of testing her capacity. Her political disability marks her with a brand wherever she goes, and the person who disposes of her politics, disposes also, in proportion to his own selfishness, of her occupation, of her marital rights, and of her honour. Mr. Harcourt is content to exclude her from Parliament and the legal profession. Baser men display the same male egoism in depriving her of education, in enfeebling her body and mind by excessive child-bearing, and in taking advantage of her poverty to use her as a prostitute for the gratification of their vilest passions. This confession by an opponent of Woman Suffrage illustrates the temper of Toryism in all controversies about the franchise. Acknowledge the right to control government, and you acknowledge the right to control life. So long as it lies in the power of one class to impose taxes, to regulate the hours of labour, to admit and to exclude from occupations, and generally to control the political organization of society, so long will its members be tempted to dispose of the members of the subject class in every part of life. When the equality of both classes in the State is admitted, the admission of their equal worth in all their private

relations inevitably follows. There is no essential difference between public and private rights.

But the reaction of political status upon the individual has another aspect no less important than this. Participation in the organized life of the community is a necessary part of that education which modern opinion requires for every human being. There are now living very few of those frantic Tories who believe that it is harmful to develop the minds of the poor, and every civilized State regards public education as one of its ordinary duties. But once the right of individuals to a good education is admitted, the extent of the right can hardly be limited to the provision of elementary or secondary schools. There is no education to be compared with the experience of organized life. Trade Unionism and Co-operation, political associations outside Parliament, the management of charities, all these are valuable not only for their immediate results, but for the way in which they train the people concerned. Incomparably the best school of the kind is politics. Nothing so broadens the mind and so disciplines the temper as being engaged, even in a humble capacity, in the management of political affairs. But the connection between the individual and the State must be direct, if it is to produce its full benefit. The vague and irresponsible interest of the disfranchised is a poor substitute for the definite obligation to apply one's own strength to the machine itself, which is the privilege of the enfranchised. The extension of the suffrage to all individuals in the State is thus an essential part of the Liberal faith, not only because it prevents direct and indirect abuse, but because it is a means of education without which few individuals can ever develop their natural powers to the full. "We, who were reformers from the beginning, always said that the enfranchisement of the people was an end in itself. We said, and we were much derided for saying so, that citizenship only gives that self-respect which is the true basis of respect of others, and without which there is no lasting social order or real morality."[^[13]] "If the individual is

to have a higher feeling of public duty, he must take part in the work of the State.... That active interest in the service of the State, which makes patriotism in the better sense, can hardly arise while the individual's relation to the State is that of a passive recipient of protection in the exercise of his rights of person and property."[^[14]] It is this conception of the exercise of the franchise which leads to the apparent paradox that the people are never fit for the suffrage until they possess it. In practice these logical difficulties have little weight. It is true that the only real test of political capacity is politics. But it is no hard task to detect in a person's management of other affairs how he is likely to conduct himself as a voter. Plain good sense is the only essential quality. It is got by living, not by learning, and where conditions of life are reasonably good, political capacity will not be wanting. The franchise completes, it does not make, education. It may thus be fairly extended to all ordinary persons as part of the Liberal method of equipping the individual for the fullest life of which he is capable.

Influenced by these considerations, the Liberal asserts that the franchise is a right which exists in the individual subject. To the Tory, accustomed to the idea of disposition, the subject is under and not above the State. Where the Liberal emphasizes the responsibility of the State to the subject, and requires that every act of its ministers shall be done in the interest of the subject, the Tory emphasizes the duty of the subject to submit to the State, and by a process of argument which is as illogical as it is politically vicious, leaves it to the State to decide even to what persons it shall be responsible. Thus Sir Robert Inglis, opposing in 1853 a Bill for permitting Jews to sit in Parliament, contended "that power was a trust which the State might delegate to those whom it thought fit to exercise it—the exercise of the suffrage, for example—but it was the inherent right of no man. If it were, then indeed had they destroyed the value of the principle by all the restrictions imposed with respect to property,

to age, and to sex."[^[15]] The allusion to sex was prophetic. More than half a century later, Professor Dicey uses precisely the same argument against the enfranchisement of women. "The rights of an individual with regard to matters which primarily concern the State are public or political rights, or, in other words, duties or functions to be exercised by the possessor not in accordance with his own wish or interest, but primarily at least with a view to the interest of the State, and therefore may be limited or extended in any way which conduces to the welfare of the community."[^[16]]

The confusion of thought in both these passages is the same. What is the State? Who are the community? How is the State to know what conduces to the welfare of the community? Both these Tory thinkers reason as if the State were some concrete thing, some piece of machinery, existing out of and independent of the society of human beings, managing their affairs, allotting them their rights, and associating with itself in their government such of them as it was pleased to select. Their argument is based upon this fundamental absurdity. The State has in fact no existence apart from human beings; it is not external to society, but a growth out of it, and its own form and constitution are determined in all cases by the creatures whom the Tory theorists treat as subjected to its absolute discretion. The Liberal declares that human beings exist before the State, and control it, that their opinion determines in what way the State, like the Church, the industrial system, and the home, shall be constructed, that opinion varies in different countries and in different ages, and will at one time and in one place acquiesce in despotism and at another time and in another place require adult suffrage, but that always, first and last, the subjects are masters of the State.

What is actually at the back of the Tory mind, when it reasons in this fashion, is that the State, as conceived by them, is not external to all society, but only to a part of it. In other words,

when it says "the State," it means "the governing class for the time being." It is always thinking of a privileged class disposing of the fortunes of another class. To Sir Robert Inglis "the State" meant "men of twenty-one years of age, who are landowners and Christians." To Windham, fifty years before, it meant "men of twenty-one years of age, who are landowners and Churchmen." To Professor Dicey, fifty years later, it meant "men of twenty-one years of age." The class varies, and its boundaries extend. But it is always of a class of some dimensions that the Tory thinks when he speaks of "the State." In effect he argues that the general body of men and women have no right to control their own government, except when the class into whose hands government has fallen sees fit to give it them. By the same process of reasoning the most bloody despot who ever usurped a throne could exclude aristocracy itself, and keep the control of government in the hands of the meanest of his parasites. This conflict between the individual right of the subject and the absolute discretion of the governing class has been repeated at every proposal to extend the franchise in Great Britain. The work of Liberalism has been, and is still, to extend the limits of the governing class, and to make State and subjects, government and governed, co-extensive.

The same characteristic difference between the desire to adapt an institution to the encouragement of individual growth and the desire to compel individual growth to the efficient working of an institution peeps out, even where the practical proposals of the two parties appear to be identical. A Liberal supports State education because it puts the poor man into fuller possession of himself. A Tory supports it because an ignorant poor man is likely to be turbulent and to make attacks upon the institution of property. A Liberal supports a Mental Deficiency Bill because it protects feeble-minded persons against their neighbours and against themselves. A Tory supports it because it discourages the breeding of types which he regards as useless to the State. While the general attitude of Toryism to the economic reforms of modern Liberalism has been hostile, a small

section of the Tory party has shown itself ready enough to support, and even to originate schemes which interfere with economic freedom and the rights of property. But the motives of the Liberal and the Tory social reformers are not the same. The one aims at private happiness, the other at public utility. "We would endeavour," said Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, "to secure to every man the best conditions of living, and so far as can be done by laws and customs, to secure him also an equal chance with others of a useful and happy life."[^[17]] "The essence of our policy," says Lord Willoughby de Broke, "is to give each individual the elements that will afford him an opportunity of at least living a free and a decorous existence, and the opportunity to raise himself or herself to the highest point of moral and material efficiency."[^[18]] The emphasis on happiness in the one passage and on efficiency in the other shows precisely the difference in the objects of the two men. The first is personal, the second instrumental. The Liberal conception of the State makes the development of the individual an end in itself. The Tory conception makes it a means of public advantage, of obtaining workers for national industries and soldiers for national armies, and it is accompanied by proposals for conscription, protection, and the maintenance of popular education at a low level, which are redolent of restriction and subordination. A Tory journalist puts the matter more precisely: "If Unionism is to recover the confidence of the masses it must recognize their claim to a fuller and a happier life. Only in this way can it serve the great causes which it has at heart. We stand for the Empire. An Imperial people cannot be built up in squalor and poverty, when every thought is absorbed by the provision of the daily bread. We cannot get a hearing for Imperial causes until we have brought happiness into the homes of the people."[^[19]] The Tory makes its inhabitants happy for the sake of the Empire. The Liberal has no use for the Empire unless it makes its inhabitants happy.

Modern Toryism is identified with Imperialism, and, except for the relics of old controversies between sects, most of the antagonism of Liberal and Tory centres to-day about the Empire. The most definite opposition is to be observed in original conceptions. To the Tory, the Empire seems to be something in itself; he is impressed with its size, its wealth, its population; the mere existence of such a huge fabric, efficiently maintained, under the national flag, satisfies him. The Liberal is more concerned with what the Empire represents, with its maintenance of individual liberty, with its development of the subject peoples which it contains, with its encouragement to exploitation, with its implied antagonism to foreign peoples, with its increase of the cost of armaments, and with its effect upon the temper of domestic government. He is not, as a practical statesman, concerned to evacuate any part of this vast inheritance. "The situation of man is the preceptor of his duty." But he looks with suspicion upon any attempt to increase it, he encourages every transfer of control to local authorities, he insists that where races of an inferior civilization are incorporated their affairs shall be managed in their interest and not in that of the conquering race, and he views with constant apprehension the inclusion of such races because he knows that their despotic government must threaten the existence of his own free institutions. If the Empire is justified at all, it is justified by the ideals which it expresses, and by nothing else.

The better Imperial idea was thus described a few years ago by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain: "We, in our Colonial policy, as fast as we acquire new territory and develop it, develop it as trustees of civilization for the commerce of the world. We offer in all these markets over which our flag floats the same opportunities, the same open field, to foreigners that we offer to our own subjects, and upon the same terms. In that policy we stand alone, because all other nations, as fast as they acquire new territory—acting, as I believe, most mistakenly in their own interests, and, above all, in the interests of the countries that they administer—all other nations seek at once to secure the

monopoly for their own products by preferential and other methods."[^[20]] These are noble and generous words. The conception of a rich and powerful race extending the blessings of order, good government, and industrial enterprise into the backward parts of the earth for the universal benefit of all mankind is a magnificent conception. But if it ever was Imperialism it is not the Imperialism of to-day. In less than ten years the speaker denied himself. The trustees of civilization became national egoists, subordinating all others to their own ascendancy. The free and open market was made a national monopoly, and British subjects arrogated to themselves all the exclusive privileges which had been "most mistakenly" reserved to themselves by other nations. The deterioration of generosity has seldom been so swift and so complete. In 1912 Mr. Chamberlain's successor in the leadership of Protectionist Imperialism makes the exclusion of the foreigner the very essence of Empire. "Co-operation in war was a vital necessity; but there could never be real co-operation in war unless there first had been co-operation in peace. It was for that reason that Unionists had advocated, and intended to advocate, the policy of Imperial preference. All the Dominions had urged the Mother Country to adopt in trade—and in everything else—that principle which would enable one portion of the Empire to treat all other portions of the Empire on better terms than were given to the rest of the world." The whole basis of the Empire is thus made to be hostility towards foreign peoples, and instead of war being a hateful necessity, undertaken to preserve the ideals for which the Empire stands, it becomes itself the first object of the Empire, to which all its other possibilities must be sacrificed.

The Empire, as conceived by modern Imperialists, is in fact the negation of Liberalism. Domestic liberty, local independence, economic freedom, the development of inferior races, all must be sacrificed to the idea of an isolated and mechanically efficient unity. "The Unionist policy is a policy of union and strength. The Unionists say: As we are faced by great dangers,

let us hold to the tried and proved national organization which was devised to meet such dangers in the past. And they say also: Let us have peace between the classes, for division in that way is even more dangerous than the division of the United Kingdom into its separate tribes or parishes.... We must keep united or we will be destroyed. But the Unionists go farther, and they say: We must be united not only as a United Kingdom but as a British Empire. Old England by herself may not have the strength to face the enormous forces now being arrayed against her. In the same way the Dominions by themselves have not the strength to maintain their freedom against possible attacks. Let us therefore combine, and then we shall be like the bundle of faggots, impossible to break. Now this policy of Imperial union cannot be achieved by sentiment alone. Sentiment is an excellent thing; but as part of the Empire is Dutch and part French, and as even British colonists tend to forget the Mother Country and look upon their own new country as the centre and the boundary of their patriotism, we need the perpetual unifier of material interest. Where a man's treasure is, there shall his heart be also." Therefore we must tax imported foodstuffs in order to give a preference to the Colonies. If we do not, "What are we to offer to Canada in the way of a material interest strong enough to make her foreign policy identical with ours?"[^[21]]

This is the subordination of everything to organization. Ireland is to be governed against its will, the poorer classes are to be kept down by force or by indulgence, the industrial and commercial freedom of the Colonies and the Mother Country is to be fettered by artificial bonds of trade, in order that

Germany may be kept in her place. The illustration of the bundle of faggots will serve for the Liberal as well as for the Tory. What the Liberal wants is not a bundle of dead wood, but a group of living and growing trees about a parent stem, each planted freely in the soil and drawing from it its own sustenance.

The Tory conception of the Empire is in fact very like the old Roman Empire, and ominous comparisons are often drawn between the two.[^[22]] The Roman Empire was a similar gigantic organization, which subordinated all other ideas to that of strength and unity against external peoples. What will preserve the British Empire from the fate of the Roman is what the Romans omitted, the encouragement of local independence, the sacrifice of mere mechanical efficiency to that infinite diversity of individual civilizations which keeps nations alive. The recent Canadian attempt to make a treaty of reciprocity with the United States produced some excellent examples of the viciousness of Imperialism. The Liberal Ministry allowed the British Ambassador in the States to place his services at the disposal of the Canadian Government. They assumed that it was not their business to dictate to the Canadians what commercial arrangements they should or should not make with foreign peoples, and they treated a Canadian Government which had been in office for seventeen years as properly representative of the Canadian people. The Tory Imperialists attacked them for assisting the Canadian Ministry in its negotiations. Their demand, in effect, was that the British Government should have at least tacitly disapproved of this assertion of Canadian independence. For the moment the Canadian people have refused to enter into the treaty. Ten years hence they may have changed their minds, and we shall then have a direct conflict between Imperialism and Canadian Nationalism. The Liberals would allow the Canadians to manage their own affairs as they think best. The Tories, even though they would refrain from force, would at least try to bribe

them into an artificial union, which they would not enter of their own free will.

The deterioration of Imperialism really dates from the South African War. This was the first expression of Imperial unity. But what was that unity worth, which was employed for the shameful purpose of destroying the local independence which it existed only to maintain? The whole justification of the Empire was that it enabled communities of different characters to grow freely within it, and the war destroyed what war should never have been undertaken except to preserve. The difference of opinion about that grave event marked the characteristic difference between Liberal and Tory. The life of the individual parts is everything to the Liberal, and their organization is only tolerable in so far as it protects and encourages that life. It is not to him, as it is to the Tory, a thing in itself, a permanent segregation of his race from the rest of humanity, a monopoly and a preserve, to be maintained as a weight in the balance of international power. Nor has he any doubt that the loosely knit federation, which he prefers, will prove in the end stronger against Foreign enemies than the drilled and disciplined union which the Tories want. The Roman Empire collapsed because of this unnatural perfection of strength. The native vigour and independence of its parts were sacrificed to centralization. By enslaving the minds of her dependents to the Imperial idea, Rome threw herself open to less organized but more individualistic enemies. By leaving the inhabitants of her Dominions to develop themselves according to their own ideas, and not by managing them as potential weapons against the foreigner, Great Britain has brought herself to her present strength. A conscript army may be maintained for an indefinite period by constantly renewing the recruits. Nations cannot be renewed, and a conscript Empire must inevitably perish of its own rigidity.

Imperialists often speak of the Empire as if it consisted entirely of self-governing dominions of white men. In fact, by far the greater part of it is governed despotically, and consists of countries where white men cannot make permanent settlements. This

part of the Empire the Liberal regards from two points of view. The less civilized or less powerful races which inhabit them are as individual to him as are the Canadians or the Germans, and are no more to be used by him for his own interest. "A superior race is bound to observe the highest current morality of the time in all its dealings with the subject race."[^[23]] Order, justice, capital, the development of natural resources, and education, with an honest spirit in the Government, may help rather than retard the growth of the local life. But with the benefits of civilization is too often introduced the temper of exploitation. Confiscation, massacre, slavery, open or disguised, and the abuse of native women, have been common enough in the building of the Empire, and the conduct of men like Cole of Nairobi and Lewis of Rhodesia shows that the same habit of mind is far from rare at this day.[^[24]] The modern history of South Africa contains more than one disreputable passage of this kind, and if the development of territories like Uganda and Batsutoland has been more disinterested, it is only because they offered less easy prizes to the rapacity of trading companies and financiers. The primary motive of all our appropriations of territory has of course been our desire to increase our own wealth, and in most quarters we have been more anxious to force the native population into labour for our profit than to improve their condition or character. The plea that our Empire is justified because it elevates inferior races is a piece of cant which has been grafted on to a purely materialistic system. How little separates us even now from the old slavery may be seen in the following passage from a Tory newspaper: "In all essential qualities of racial progress, in self-control, perseverance, reasoning power, and so forth, the negro races are far behind the white.... The negro is given new racial ambitions by the acquisition of civil and in some cases of political rights.... The white South

African ... may be forced to reconsider his whole native policy.... Education is a frightful source of mischief.... Industrial education, the painful teaching of toil in civilization, must precede the higher development."[^[25]] In plain English, we may have to disfranchise the coloured voters of Cape Colony, shut up their schools and churches, and reduce them to slavery. In just such language did the West Indian planters reason in the days of Wilberforce, from the fact of inferiority, through the deprivation of the means of improvement, to the ultimate destruction of character in "industrial education." It is in problems of this sort that the Liberal sees the evil side of Empire. It is more important to him that the black races of Cape Colony should not be deprived of the franchise than that South Africa should be able to assist Great Britain in time of war. If the country can only be included in the Empire at the cost of this deliberate degradation of the native peoples, it is better in his eyes that it should become independent. When the Empire ceases to encourage the growth of all peoples within it, the justification of it has ceased to exist.[^[26]]

The badness of this government of less efficient races lies not only in its possible, and almost inevitable, exploitation of those races themselves, but in its reaction upon the people of Great Britain. There are very few men who can occupy themselves even with the honest and disinterested management of the affairs of a subject people without suffering some deterioration of their love of liberty. However benevolent despotism may be, it is always despotism. The essence of such government as that of India is to dispose of the fortunes of a people according to our own opinion of what is best for them, and not according to theirs. When it is bad, it is tyranny. When it is good, as it nearly always is, it is indulgence. It is never responsibility. It never

seriously contemplates the time when the subject shall control his own affairs, or shall even be associated on equal terms with the foreign conqueror. Those who grow accustomed to this absolute power can never work comfortably with free institutions, and the whole of the governing race tends to become infected with the disposing habit. The business of government becomes more than the spirit of it, the mechanical successes of administration are applauded, while the stultification of the general mind is overlooked. Efficiency is exaggerated at the expense of freedom, criticism of the Ministry is treated as insolence, and the right of every intelligent man to interest himself in the affairs of his own country is subordinated to the convenience of officials.[^[27]] The official always looks up and not down for approval and censure, and he cannot depress the eye of his mind when he returns home from one of our foreign dependencies. The Imperialist revival of the last thirty years has thus coincided, not only with the neglect of domestic affairs, but with the active suppression of domestic freedom. The foremost champions of the House of Lords in 1909 were a retired Viceroy of India and a man who, after a successful career in Egypt, had been the mouthpiece of British insolence in South Africa. The best name in the list of the opponents of Woman Suffrage is that of the greatest despot that Egypt has ever known. "Is it not just possible," asked Cobden in 1860, "that we may become corrupted at home by the reaction of arbitrary political maxims in the East upon our domestic politics, just as Greece and Rome were demoralized by their contact with Asia?"[^[28]] No Liberal who has watched the joint progress of

Imperial expansion and domestic reaction, which has taken place since Cobden's death, can answer that searching question in the negative.

The foregoing examination will be sufficient to indicate the scope and the method of the following chapters. They attempt to describe the political growth of the country, from a time when power was confined to a small disposing class, to the present day, when we have reached a well-defined stage on our advance towards complete equality of values. They also deal with the varying fortunes of Liberal ideas in foreign policy. The process seems to the writer to resemble the change from the old Ptolemaic to the new Copernican system of Astronomy. The old astronomers believed that the Earth was the centre of the Universe, and that the planets revolved about it. The new astronomers discovered that the Earth was not the centre, and that the other planets, though they had certain relations with and attractions for the earth, actually were, in the main, independent of it, and revolved, like it, about a common centre in orbits of their own. Similarly Toryism imagined that the unprivileged sex, classes, and creeds existed for no other purpose than fulfilling those duties which related to itself, and for enjoying those rights which proceeded from itself. It has been compelled to recognize that other individuals, however united with the dominant class for certain limited purposes, have their independent interests, orbits, and personalities. The writer cannot pretend to be indifferent, as between Liberalism and Toryism. But the last chapter will be sufficient proof that he is not over-full of the spirit of mere party.

CHAPTER II

POLITICAL CONDITIONS IN THE REIGN OF GEORGE III

Modern English politics may be fairly said to begin about the accession of George III. The conflict of Liberalism and Toryism can no doubt be traced farther back. But though the same principles may have been at stake during the Civil War, or even in the time of the Lollards, the general movement was slow, and the connection with modern politics less definite. About the middle of the eighteenth century society began to group itself more permanently, and a train of events was started which can be traced continuously to our own time. Movement also became more rapid, and the appearance of the social fabric has been more changed in the last hundred and fifty years than it was in the preceding fifteen hundred. It is possible, therefore, to get a substantially accurate explanation of modern politics by a survey of the recent period alone. So many causes have been crowded into those few years that the weight of the others is almost negligible. The history of Liberalism is, for practical purposes, the history of Liberalism since 1760. This chapter will therefore examine the political condition of England about that date.

The political structure changed little between 1760 and 1820. At the end of that period, as at its beginning, power was in the hands of a class which monopolized every privilege of race, sex, creed, and rank, and disposed, at its discretion, of the fortunes of all inferior persons. Ireland and the Colonies were subordinated to Great Britain, women to men, Catholics and Dissenters to Churchmen, manufacturers, traders, and workmen to landowners.

The classification of humanity, for political purposes, was complete. The machinery of the State was controlled by a governing class, bound to listen to the complaints of its subjects, but not submitted to their authority. The temper of this class as a whole, though it was nominally divided into Tories and Whigs, was essentially Tory. The two sections disputed between themselves, and some of the Whigs expressed Liberal opinions on particular subjects. But the general mental habit of both parties was that of Toryism. It was not until after the Reform Act of 1832 that even the germ of a Liberal party made its appearance in English politics, and it was not until after the Reform Act of 1867 that such a party held office. The history of Liberalism in the early period of its growth is the history of its slow and painful progress through people who did not consciously accept it.

The general Tory view of political society was most forcibly expressed after the French Revolution. The proclamation of the equality of individuals which that implied was met by very clear and explicit denials. It is obvious that Toryism was thus strung to its highest pitch, and that it may have been less aggressive in temper before the violence of the Revolution inflamed it. But though it was exaggerated by the Revolution, it was not essentially altered, and the language of the Tories of 1820 may fairly be taken to illustrate the mental habit of Tories of 1760. The root principle of government was that it should be controlled by the wealthy owners of land. There was some free voting in towns. But most borough seats could be bought, and many were in the absolute disposition of the nearest landowner. The owners of freeholds worth forty shillings a year voted in county elections, and were comparatively independent. But no voter, however sturdy and self-reliant, had a real voice in politics. The landed gentry took politics for their business, and if the voter could draw attention to what he conceived to be a grievance, the landowner decided whether any remedy should be applied. "The country gentlemen," said Lord North, "are the best and most respectable objects of the confidence of the people."[^[29]] Wilberforce described

the same class as "the very nerves and ligatures of the body politic."[^[30]] The manufacturing class and traders were looked upon with a curious and comical jealousy. The great growth of these classes at the end of the century meant a new form of wealth and a new form of political power, and Sir William Jones probably spoke the feelings of most of his class when he opposed a motion for the Reform of Parliament in 1793. He said "it had ever been his opinion, since he began his political career, that the country had too much of a commercial turn, and that its commerce would soon become more than a match for its virtues. The petitioners proposed a measure that evidently tended to throw weight into a scale which preponderated too much already. He asserted that boroughs, bought and controlled by men of property, formed the only balance to the commercial influence, which was increasing by too rapid strides, and which ought to be checked."[^[31]] So Robert Jenkinson, afterwards Earl of Liverpool, "thought the landed interest, which was the stamina of the country, ought to have the preponderant weight, the manufacturing and commercial interest the next place, and then those whom he styled 'the professional people.'" He therefore opposed attempts to reform Parliament, because "the counties and many of the populous boroughs were required for the return of country gentlemen. The commercial towns secured the election of certain persons in that line, and the close boroughs for the election of the professional people."[^[32]] He thus divided society into nicely graded classes, and constructed the whole political system with a view to securing that each class should express just the value which he attached to it. Corrupt town constituencies were to be preserved in the constitution in order that the landed gentry might preserve their monopoly of politics against the men of commerce. But a more striking, because a more innocent, revelation of the arrogance of the dominant class is contained in Lord John Russell's record of his discovery of intelligence among employers of labour. Russell was a Whig, and lived long enough to become a Liberal. In 1810,

when he was a young man, he made a pilgrimage through England, and solemnly made this entry in his diary. "The first of the few remarks still to be made is the singular quantity of talent we found amongst the manufacturers. There was not one master manufacturer of Manchester or Leeds ... that might not be set apart as a man of sense, and hardly any that, besides being theoretically and practically masters of their own business, were not men of general reading and information."[^[33]] What are we to think of social estimates, when a young nobleman makes a note of signs of intelligence among captains of industry in the conscientious spirit in which his modern successors record traces of civilization among Papuans or the inhabitants of the Congo? The public privileges of the two classes corresponded with these private estimates of their relative importance. Political offices as a matter of course were reserved for the landed proprietors. A trader was sometimes made a knight or a baronet, but never a peer.[^[34]] The best appointments in the Army and Navy and what is now called the Civil Service were distributed in the same way. A Member of Parliament must have a definite income derived from land.[^[35]] A similar qualification was required in Justices of the Peace. No one could kill game who was not a landowner, or a person holding a licence as gamekeeper from a landowner. If a man died in debt, his plate, furniture, and stock in trade might be seized by his creditors, but his land could not. In every way land was invested with peculiar rights. There were in fact only three ways in which a man might rise to political importance without being a landowner. A few naval officers of high rank had risen from mean beginnings. Servants of the East India Company sometimes acquired vast fortunes in India, and forced their way into domestic politics by sheer weight of wealth. A lawyer of

the humblest birth might fight his way up to the Woolsack, and become a peer of the realm. But as a rule the ordinary avenues were open only to the landowning class.

The wage-earning common people were more contemptible than the merchants and manufacturers. On no account were they to be admitted into the political ring. "Send the people to the loom and the anvil," said Lord Westmoreland, and there let them earn bread, instead of wasting time at seditious meetings.[^[36]] "I do not know," said Bishop Horsley, "what the mass of the people in any country have to do with the laws but to obey them."[^[37]] "It requires no proof," said the Lord Justice Clerk from the bench, "to show that the British Constitution is the best that ever was since the creation of the world, and it is not possible to make it better.... A government in every country should be just like a corporation; and in this country it is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to be represented; as for the rabble who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation upon them?"[^[38]] So Pitt "did not consider those to be the best friends of the people who were always goading them to bring forward petitions, and encouraging the agitation and discussion of political affairs."[^[39]] Castlereagh, the last great leader of the Tory reaction, "always maintained that in a representative government the preponderance of property and high station was more conducive to order and general prosperity than that of mob orators or needy adventurers.... He was no friend to a system which was to be directed by men who had no other influence than what they could acquire by pandering to the low interests and lower passions of a misguided rabble."[^[40]] The most consistent of all the Tories was Windham, a country gentleman of considerable learning and practical good sense, and the intimate friend of Pitt. He began his political

career as a Whig, but turned Tory after the outbreak of the Revolution, and died without a shred of Whiggery left to him, except a qualified dislike of the Slave Trade. He seldom lost an opportunity of depreciating the common people, and of excluding them from politics. "He could not see the harm there was of preventing all endeavours to explain to a poor, illiterate fellow, whose extent of powers was but barely adequate to the task of procuring food for his own subsistence, points which had divided the opinions of the ablest writers."[^[41]] Referring to the case of Bloomfield, a labourer, who wrote a poem called "The Farmer's Boy," he said that "he had doubts how far it was proper to encourage ideas of literary profit or renown in those who had been bred to a useful trade."[^[42]] Speaking against a Bill for the suppression of bull-baiting, he said that the petition from Stamford against the Bill came from "a body of sober, loyal men, who attended to their several vocations, and never meddled with politics."[^[43]] When Whitbread introduced a Bill to provide a public school in every parish, Windham opposed it. "The increase of this sort of introduction to knowledge would only tend to make the people study politics, and lay them open to the arts of designing men."[^[44]] The publication of the proceedings in Parliament was to be suppressed for similar reasons. "The people at large were entitled to justice—they were entitled to every favour that could be shown to them consistently with their own safety, on which depended their own happiness—they were entitled to every advantage they could possibly be capable of enjoying, as much as the proudest person in the state; but they had not education to enable them to judge of political affairs.... He confessed he never saw any man of a low condition with a newspaper in his hand, and who read any of it, without comparing him to a man who was swallowing poison under the hope of

improving his health."[^[45]] Though Windham did not succeed in persuading the House to exclude the reporters, the basis of his case was generally accepted by the Tory party. Plunket described the working classes in the same style as Windham. "He was willing to allow to them the enjoyment of every constitutional privilege which they were entitled to possess; he never could consider that nice discussions on the very frame of the constitution, on the most essential changes in the institutions and fundamental laws of the country, were calculated for minds of such intelligence and cultivation."

Politics, in a word, were bad for the lower classes. "These men, the nature of whose employment and whose education disallowed them to be statesmen, might, however, learn enough to become turbulent and discontented subjects."[^[46]] Government was not to be according to the will of the people, who were incapable of directing that will rightly. "If, to our misfortune," said Canning, "we had found a popular assembly existing under the direct control of the people, forced to obey its will, and liable to be dismissed by its authority,... it would have been the duty of wise legislators to diminish its overbearing freedom, and to substitute in its place a deliberative freedom."[^[47]] Even public meetings were only to take place under the sanction of the superior class. "Far was it from him," said Castlereagh, in introducing his Six Acts, "to call on the House to do anything that would operate against the ancient and sacred right of the people to petition, under the protection and with the sanction of the magistrates, or the other constituted authorities of the land.... But meetings not called under such authorities, convened by men without character, rank, or fortune, were in all probability called for improper objects, and therefore were a fit subject for the animadversion of the law, and it was but reasonable that they should assemble under circumstances that gave a sort of prima

facie security against outrage."[^[48]] There was a general presumption that a popular meeting was a seditious meeting, and if any such meeting was held at all, its respectability must be guaranteed by members of the upper classes. These opinions, aggravated as they were by the excesses of the French Revolution, may be taken as fairly representative of Toryism during the whole of the reign of George III.

The natural consequence of this general depreciation of the poorer people was that they were injured in other ways than mere disfranchisement. The whole scheme of society was so constructed as to prevent them from ever rising above the station in which they were placed. No facilities were provided for their education by the State, in spite of the obvious inadequacy of private enterprise. A Scottish Act of 1696 had compelled landowners to provide schools in every parish of Scotland. But in England the neglect was gross and widespread. A Select Committee reported in 1818 that not more than 570,000 children were publicly educated. As the number of children of school age was about 2,000,000, this meant that only one child in four received any sort of education. As the teaching was often hopelessly inefficient, the case was much worse even than the figures themselves showed; and as affairs had considerably improved during the twenty years before the Committee began its inquiry, it would probably be fair to assume that in 1788, immediately before the outbreak of the Revolution, only one poor child in ten received any substantial mental training. Lancaster the Quaker began to found schools in 1801, and the British and Foreign and National Societies commenced operations a few years later. No systematic teaching of the poor had been previously attempted except by private benevolence. But it must not be supposed that even charity was always disinterested. Lurking behind many of these projects was the belief in education as a precaution against disorder. Wilberforce spoke of popular education in language which showed that he believed in it not merely because it helped the poorer people to develop their natural capacities. Referring to

the political disturbances of 1819, he asked, "If a proper notion of the sacredness of property had been given to the people, would they have passed such resolutions as those by which they had disgraced themselves at Barnsley?"[^[49]] The governing class thus used education partly, at any rate, as a measure of police. Ignorant poverty meant danger to wealth.

The poorer people, being kept in such a state of intellectual degradation, were naturally criminal to a far greater degree than at the present day, and the criminal law punished their offences with such savagery that juries often acquitted guilty persons rather than expose them to the consequences of an adverse verdict. In 1819 there were still on the Statute Book two hundred felonies punishable with death. When it was proposed to substitute transportation for life for the death penalty in the case of stealing goods worth five shillings from a shop, Lord Ellenborough, the Lord Chief Justice, protested in the House of Lords in the name of himself and all his colleagues on the bench.[^[50]] Conspicuous in ferocity were the Game Laws. In 1816 it was made a crime punishable with transportation for seven years for any person to be found at night in possession of a net or a snare.[^[51]] Spring-guns and man-traps might be set by any landowner about his premises. The public prisons were dens of vice and breeding-places of disease. Women were flogged in public till 1817, and in private till 1819, and transportation meant prostitution for nine women out of ten, if not on the voyage, at any rate after they reached the colony.[^[52]]

While the general state of the common people was so low, some of them had religious consolations. Those of them who belonged to the Church of England were elevated above Dissenters and Catholics, as country gentlemen were elevated above themselves. The same habit of mind persisted in religion as in politics. A particular Church, connected with the ruling class, and staffed by

its members and dependents, was termed the Church of the nation. Others existed only on sufferance. The conditions of their existence were prescribed by the members of the dominant sect. Free-thinkers were punished for blasphemous libel. Dissenting Christians, whether Protestant or Catholic, were excluded in different degrees from public life. Persecution of an active sort was at this date very rare, and Dissenters, at any rate, enjoyed a qualified legal immunity. The Test and Corporation Acts, passed in the reign of Charles II, were still in force, and bound practically every public officer to take the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. As a Liberal Churchman of the time put it, "The Saviour of the world instituted the Eucharist in commemoration of His death—an event so tremendous that afflicted Nature hid herself in darkness; but the British Legislature has made it a qualification for gauging beer-barrels and soap-boilers' tubs, for writing Custom-House dockets and debentures, and for seizing smuggled tea."[^[53]] But breaches of these Acts were regularly committed, and were regularly covered by the passing of an annual Act of Indemnity. The Catholics were in much worse case. A whole code of penal laws had been contrived against them in the reign of William III, and in Ireland, where three-fourths of the people were Catholics, the code had been a fearful engine of oppression. Catholics were by these laws excluded, not only from Parliament and public offices, but from the Army and Navy and the legal profession. A Catholic could not have a priest as his private chaplain. He could not send his children to be educated abroad. He could not inherit land. He could not own horses above a certain value. The exclusions were still absolute in 1760. The grosser interferences with private liberty were, like the Acts against Dissenters, not commonly enforced, though so late as 1793 a zealous Scottish Protestant claimed his right to tender a Protestant oath to a Catholic landowner, and, on his refusal, to take possession of his estate.[^[54]] But such enjoyments as were possessed by the members of these inferior Churches, including the deliberate

mitigations of the existing law, were concessions from their superiors. All was a matter of permission and connivance, and not of right. It was the benevolence of masters which they had to acknowledge, and not the association of equals. "It is idle to hope," said Castlereagh in 1801, "that Dissenters of any description can ever be so zealously attached subjects as those who are of the established religion; but the question is, what system, without hazarding the powers of the State itself, is best calculated, if not warmly to attach, at least to disarm the hostility of those classes in the community who cannot be got rid of, and must be governed?" Pitt, eleven years earlier, displayed less insolence, but was as firmly opposed to any idea of equality between sects. "The Dissenters had a right to enjoy their liberty and property; to entertain their own speculative opinions, and to educate their offspring in such religious principles as they approve. But the indispensable necessity of a certain permanent church establishment, for the good of the state, required that toleration should not be extended to an equality.... He had no idea of such levelling principles as those which warranted to all citizens an equality of rights."[^[55]] This is the essence of Toryism, to grant to others such indulgences as we think fit, and to retain the consciousness of our own superior worth and power, even while we refrain from abusing them.

Within the borders of Great Britain the Tory philosophy was expressed most crudely and practised most universally in the relations of men and women. Women were made only for those purposes which they could fulfil in connection with men. They must be trained only in those qualities which men required in them, irrespective of their own varying capacities and dispositions. They must not engage in any occupation where they might compete with men. Their political conditions were prescribed by men. Even the moral rules which regulated their private conduct were settled by men, who degraded the wretched prostitute while they permitted themselves the indulgence which produced her downfall. When a woman married a man her real

property passed to him for his life and her personal property absolutely, and the subordination of her judgment to his, enjoined upon her by the marriage service, was secured by this deprivation of her economic independence. "The profession of ladies," said Mrs. Hannah More, "to which the bent of their instruction should be turned, is that of daughters, wives, mothers, and mistresses of families."[^[56]] "Men," said Mrs. Barbauld, "have various departments in life; women have but one.... It is, to be a wife, a mother, a mistress of a family."[^[57]] Association with a man being the beginning and end of a woman's course of life, her whole mind was to be trained, not according to her capacities, but according to what a man would want of her. Almost every contemporary treatise on the education of women emphasizes the necessity of suppressing the woman's intellect in the presence of the man's. "If you have any learning," said Dr. Gregory in a very popular work, "keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts and a cultivated understanding."[^[58]] "Young ladies," said Mrs. Barbauld, "ought only to have such a general tincture of knowledge as to make them agreeable companions to a man of sense,"[^[59]] and she persuaded Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu to abandon her scheme of endowing a women's college. Toryism has never elsewhere been so remorseless in warping nature to its own prejudices, and no slave was ever more carefully trained to intellectual feebleness and triviality, or more carefully educated in submission and docility towards his master, than was the ordinary young English lady of the end of the eighteenth century.[^[60]]

If this was the general atmosphere of feminine education, it is not difficult to understand the ferocious contempt which was poured upon Mary Wollstonecraft, who suggested that women should even take part in affairs of State. Even Fox, who came nearer to

pure Liberalism than almost any of his contemporaries, spoke with derision of Woman Suffrage.[^[61]] After the great war with France, demonstrations of the working classes in favour of Reform were frequently attended by women. This drew from Castlereagh a coarse and brutal condemnation. Speaking in favour of his Six Acts, which were intended for the suppression of these popular demonstrations, he said: "There was one point on which he should propose no law; it was the part which women had borne in the late transactions, for he trusted that it would be sufficient to restrain them from similar conduct in future, to let them know that when the French republicans were carrying on their bloody orgies, they could find no female to join them except by ransacking the bagnios and public brothels. He was happy that no female had attended any public meeting in the metropolis. Such a drama would, he trusted, be put an end to by the innate decorum and the innate sense of modesty which the women in this country possessed, and which would purge the country of this disgrace."[^[62]] Castlereagh was an honest and chivalrous man according to the standards of his time. But which showed the greater appreciation of the real worth of woman, and the greater respect for her real interest, the workman who permitted her to take an active part in political affairs, or the nobleman who hinted that if she so much as showed herself at a public meeting, she was no better than a whore?

Eighteenth-century Toryism was less definitely extended beyond the boundaries of Great Britain than is its modern equivalent. The conception of a nation as a unit in human society had little weight in politics until after the French Revolution. Before that great event the mass of a people was regarded more as an appendage to the titular head of the State than as an aggregate of human beings with claims to control their lives without foreign interference. It was only when nations came to be regarded as collections of individual men and women, whose individual security and happiness were the first objects of their government, and no longer as mere lumps of weight in the

balance of power, that the independence of a nation became an important thing in itself. The revolt of the American Colonies, which fired the train of modern Liberalism, was an assertion not only of individual rights as against government, but of the rights of one homogeneous and self-contained community against another. But Toryism had a more ancient and a more thorough experience in Ireland. A clearer example of the egoistic use of one nation by another could hardly be found in history. From the day when the first English raiders descended upon the Irish coast down to the day when George III ascended the throne the paramount object of the English Government in Ireland had been the maintenance of English and not of Irish interests. It was no longer a case of subjugation and forcible repression. But it was still a case of conscious and deliberate employment of the territory and resources of a conquered people for the benefit of the conquerors. The Irish were left the semblance of freedom, but they were so hedged round with limitations and qualifications that they would have resented slavery no more bitterly. The strength of their limbs served only to aggravate the fretting of their chains. They had a Parliament which could legislate only as the English Parliament allowed. They could engage in industry, but only in such industries as the English Government, ever jealous for the English manufacturer, permitted. They could make goods for export, but the English Government kept the most lucrative branches of foreign and colonial trade for its own people, and practically confined the Irish to supplying such goods as it required for its own domestic consumption. Englishmen owned land in Ireland, and spent the rents in England. English clergy owned cures in Ireland, and did their duties by deputy. The whole system was absentee, and the fate of Ireland was always decided abroad.

But the worst of the grievances of the Irish were the penal laws against Catholics, by which racial and religious Toryism combined to deprive of property and exclude from public life, not a sect, but almost an entire people. Of all the instruments of foreign tyranny, religious disabilities are the most hateful, and

if economic abuses did more to impoverish the Irish, the penal laws did most to poison their temper. The Irishman's enemy pursued him into his most private heart, and as the wound was deepest, so the resentment was most fierce. The laws were not enforced so mercilessly as they had been fifty years before. But they remained on the Statute Book, and kept alive the memories of the more active persecutions of the past. The whole nation was thus aggrieved. The Protestants suffered no less than the Catholics from the legislative and commercial grievances, and if the religious disabilities tended to sunder the dominant caste from the rest of the people, both sects tended to forget their mutual hostility in their hatred of the common enemy. Towards the end of the century a few English statesmen foresaw the inevitable explosion, and urged that the recognition of Irish nationality was the only way to establish good Irish government. Not even an Irish Parliament could work if it was closed to the vast majority of the people. "The Catholics," said Fox, "are no longer a party. The parties now to be dreaded in Ireland are, on the one hand, a few people holding places of great emolument, and supporting corruption and abuses; and, on the other, the Irish nation.... I no longer apprehend any danger to Ireland from disputes between the Catholics and the Protestants; what I apprehend is the alienation of the whole Irish people from the English Government."[^[63]] "God never intended one country to govern another," said Shelburne, "but that each country should govern itself."[^[64]] "In a mighty empire," said Dr. Laurence, "which enjoyed the blessing of a free constitution pervading the whole, where two independent Parliaments existed, that which was the more illustrious and exalted in character, in authority, and in jurisdiction, he should have expected, would have felt it to be its peculiar duty to cultivate, protect, and foster in the other, whatever could be there discovered of the true parliamentary spirit. And what was that spirit? A zealous attachment of each and all to their proper constitution, a conscious sense of their own

dignity, a reverence for themselves, a vehement and a jealous love of independence."[^[65]]

These Whigs, speaking after the French Revolution had shaken old political systems to their foundations, expressed the Liberal theory of the Empire, that local control of local affairs is not only the best preventive of English egoism, but also the best cure for local feuds. But in 1760, thirty years before the Revolution, few Englishmen of either party could be persuaded, in dealing with Ireland, to consult anybody's interest but their own. In 1778 Bills were introduced to abolish most of the restrictions upon Irish trade with England and the Colonies. So vehement was the opposition aroused by these proposals that we are assured by a contemporary authority that "a foreign invasion could scarcely have created a greater alarm." Petitions poured in from every quarter except the City of London. Even the errors of the English manufacturers displayed their bitter and unreasoning jealousy. An old Statute had permitted the importation of Irish sailcloth. This Statute was overlooked, and one of the new Bills proposed, in effect, to enact what was already law. But this was opposed as fiercely as the rest, and the most disastrous consequences were predicted from a practice which had been in operation for half a century. The efforts of Burke and the other champions of Ireland were powerless in this whirl of selfishness. Most of the proposed reforms were abandoned, and his disinterested conduct cost Burke his seat for Bristol.[^[66]] No other events of the time so clearly showed how the great majority of Englishmen regarded Ireland.

Such was the general scheme of Toryism, an elaborate system of distinctions. A small class of male, rich, Church of England landowners controlled and regulated the whole of political society. This class monopolized public honours and dignities of every kind, and in each of their separate spheres of aristocracy smaller personages lorded it over those without the pale. Some were invested with all the privileges at once, others might content themselves with one or two. Everywhere some one was

exalted and some one depressed, irrespective of their natural capacities and their intrinsic worth. It is not suggested here that active tyranny was at all common. The Catholics were not persecuted as they had been in the reign of William III. Dissenters were generally indulged. The education of women, bad as it was, was substantially better than in the time of the later Stuarts. The working classes enjoyed a much higher degree of comfort and security than was to be theirs for a century to come. But the atmosphere of Toryism remained. The test of a political system is not how it operates in a state of equilibrium, but how it shows itself in the face of changes. Condescension and indulgence are no less the marks of tyranny than persecution and confiscation, and its essential nature is revealed when the inferior asks to be permitted to think and act for himself. When economic and psychological changes began to break down the old acquiescence in arbitrary disposition, Toryism became active, positive, and subjugating.

Formally contrasted with the political party which was called Tory, was the political party which was called Whig. In many respects the contrast was no more than formal. The fundamental assumptions of the two parties about the comparative worth of classes were the same, though the Whigs relied more than the Tories upon commercial places like the City of London. In theory there was substantial difference between the two conceptions of the State. The Tories preferred strong government, and inclined towards the Crown, as its titular head. The theory of Hobbes thus expressed the Tory mind: "The Covenant of the State is made in such a manner as if every man should say to every man, 'I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner.' This done, the multitude so united is called a Commonwealth."[^[67]] In this view association in political society is association in surrender. The essence of it is subordination. The Whigs, on the other hand, inclined towards Locke. "Men

being by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the power of another without his own consent. The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community."[^[68]] The essence of this association was delegation and not surrender. The subject conferred power without abandoning his right to control the use of it. The theory of Locke was afterwards incorporated by Rousseau and the other French thinkers into their revolutionary philosophy, and at the end of the eighteenth century its effect was tremendous. It contains the germ of complete Liberalism, But in England it was long embedded in a mass of circumstances which prevented it from attaining to full growth. The people who held it were aristocrats and landowners, and they converted the potentiality of Liberalism into the fact of Whiggery. Whiggery, in short, was nothing but Liberalism qualified by interest.

To this extent Whigs and Tories were distinguished. The Whigs, in the line of old controversies, inclined to Parliament as against the Crown. Society, according to Locke, was based upon a sort of contract. Each member, subject to the corresponding rights of his neighbours, was entitled to enjoy such property as he acquired without interference by others. For the common good, certain general rules are contrived by agreement, and the State is entrusted with all powers necessary for protecting the common interest of the whole as well as the separate interests of the individual members. As the State affects all, so it must act with the consent of all, and a representative Parliament is the only means of expressing that consent. This argument puts the supreme control of the State in the hands of Parliament. If the Tories had any definite theory of this nature, it was more that of Hobbes, who suggested that the State was imposed upon Society for the purpose of maintaining order among mutually hostile individuals. The two schools of thought were

thus led to emphasize, in the one case, the need for Parliamentary control, and in the other, the need for a strong executive Government. But this theoretic distinction, though it contained the seeds of many practical divergences, did not correspond, in the year 1760, to any great difference of character. The Whigs as a body were aristocratic, they were Protestant, they were Church of England, they were territorial, they were male. The sole point in which they were substantially more Liberal than the Tories was the toleration of opinion. They inherited from Locke a much more real belief that a man had a right to think as he pleased, and to express his opinions as he pleased. They were more willing that other people should differ from themselves. They had no doubt of their own superiority, but they did not abuse their inferiors. They remained themselves orthodox, but they declined to persecute.

This general toleration must not be rated at too high a value. Religion was a cold and lifeless thing among the governing class, and the Wesleyan movement, which began about this time to breathe a new moral spirit into the common people, was treated by the bulk of fashionable society with extreme contempt. Toleration sprang more often from indifference than from generosity, and when the French Revolution broke out most of the Whig aristocracy deserted to the Established Church as one of the strongholds of reaction. Religion then became valuable to property. So long as it meant little, they gave it liberty. When restriction became useful to the magistrate, liberty was forgotten. It was only a small section of the Whigs that, at any particular date between 1760 and 1820, could be found steadily and conscientiously practising Liberal ideas even in religion. In the early part of that period Liberalism existed only among the body headed by Lord Rockingham, of whom Edmund Burke was the brains and the tongue. Burke thus attacked the Catholic disabilities: "To exclude whole classes of men entirely from this part of government cannot be considered as absolute slavery. It only implies a lower and degraded state of citizenship; such is (with more or less strictness) the condition of all countries in

which an hereditary nobility possess the exclusive rule." He admits that "this may be no bad form of government," but declares that in the Irish case the indirect hardships produced by the Protestant ascendancy are more even than the indirect. "They are rivalled, to say the least of the matter, in every laborious and lucrative cause of life; while every franchise, every honour, every trust, every place down to the very lowest and least confidential (besides whole professions) is reserved for the master cast.... If they who compose the privileged body have not an interest, they must but too frequently have motives of pride, passion, petulance, peevish jealousy, a tyrannic suspicion, to urge them to treat the excluded people with contempt and rigour." This is pure Liberalism, perceiving that the whole man is depreciated by his political disabilities.[^[69]] So Fox said of the Catholic claims: "Though they require only qualification for corporations, Parliament, and offices under Government, the object is of great magnitude to them. It is founded on the great principle of requiring to be placed on a footing of equality with their fellow-subjects."[^[70]] This insight was rare, and it was confined almost entirely to matters of religion. Discussion of political and proprietary institutions was as hateful to the ordinary Whig after the Revolution as to any Tory, and even Burke always drew the line at Unitarians. This Church had been excluded from the Toleration Act of William III, and in 1792, the year in which Burke wrote his Letter to Langrishe, Fox introduced a Bill to put them in the same position as other Dissenters. Some of the Unitarians, especially Priestley of Birmingham, had written and spoken in favour of the Revolution, and a Unitarian society had celebrated the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Burke's support of the Catholics may have been partly due to his reverence for the antiquity of their creed, which was, if anything, more venerable and more august than his own.

The Unitarians were revolutionaries in religion and in politics alike, and were opposed to the Established Church. "Let them disband as a faction," said Burke, "and let them act as individuals; and when I see them with no other views than to enjoy their own conscience in peace, I for one shall most cheerfully vote for their relief." Fox was beaten by two to one, and the Unitarians were not relieved until the end of the French War.

With the exception of this Rockingham section, and the small section which at a later date took the Liberal view of the French Revolution, there were no Whigs who showed a real tendency towards Liberalism. They suffered, for the most part, no uneasiness at aristocratic monopolies, and had no illusions about the equal worth of all human beings and their right to equal opportunities. They believed in a governing class as firmly as the Tories, and but for their religious freedom and their dislike of prosecutions for seditious libels the Rockingham Whigs were not much better than the rest. Government must always remain in the hands of aristocracy. There must be an element of representation in order to prevent an abuse of the governed by men endowed with absolute power. But representation must be of classes and interests, and not of persons; and it must always be qualified by property. "Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a State that does not represent its ability as well as its property. But as ability is a vigorous and active principle, and as property is sluggish, inert, and timid, it can never be safe from the invasions of ability unless it be out of all proportion in the representation."[^[71]] The franchise must be confined to men of substance, and so long as there was a fair representation of all classes, except those who had no property, it was of little importance that whole centres of population had no representatives at all, while some depopulated districts had almost as many representatives as electors. The individual voter did not count. He voted as representing an interest. One manufacturing town would be able to protect the industries of all. One seaport

would maintain the interest of all. It was a sufficient check on a Government that there was one channel of communication through which its subjects might make their complaints audible.

The elector thus appointed had no power to suggest or to originate. He could only check and prevent. So Burke, in his speech on a Bill for Shortening the Duration of Parliaments, said: "Faithful watchmen we ought to be over the rights and privileges of the people. But our duty, if we are qualified for it as we ought, is to give them information, and not to receive it from them; we are not to go to school to them to learn the principles of law and government. In doing so we should not dutifully serve, but we should basely and scandalously betray the people, who are not capable of this service by nature, nor in any instance called to it by the constitution.... They can well see whether we are tools of a court or their honest servants ... but of the particular merits of a measure I have other standards." Philip Francis was no less explicit: "In the lowest situations of life the people know, as well as we do, that wherever personal industry is encouraged, and property is protected, there must be inequalities of possession, and consequently distinction of ranks. Then come the form and the order, by which the substance is at once defined and preserved. Distribution and limitation prevent confusion, and government by orders is the natural result of property protected by Freedom."[^[72]] In plain English, the Whigs regarded man not as a political, but as a proprietary animal. The object of the State was to protect man as the owner of property. Man as a living creature was not its concern. If he could acquire property he came within its consideration. If he could not, it would not help him; he must fend for himself. He had a right to its protection against interference, but he must expect no positive help. Equal worth, equal rights, and equal opportunities were principles of which the Whigs knew as little as the Tories themselves.

Between 1760 and 1820 there were only two prominent Whigs who approached complete Liberalism. Others occasionally used

language which led in the same direction. Lord Moira was not far away in 1796, when he opposed a Bill for suppressing public meetings. "He could not believe that the Almighty made any part of mankind merely to work and eat like beasts. He had endowed man with reasoning faculties, and given him leave to use them." Whitbread was as near when he introduced a Bill to enable justices to fix a minimum wage instead of leaving workmen to charity and the Poor Law. "Charity afflicted the mind of a good man, because it took away his independence—a consideration as valuable to the labourer as to the man of high rank."[^[73]] But the Whig leaders whose settled habits of mind were most Liberal were Shelburne and Charles James Fox. Shelburne's Liberalism was deep and philosophic, that of Fox impetuous and practical. But both, though they were never friendly with each other, had substantially the same sympathies in all controversies of their time. Shelburne seems to have had no social prejudices. He was an intimate friend of Bentham the Utilitarian, of Priestley the Unitarian, of Price the Dissenting parson-economist, and of Horne Tooke the Radical. He even appointed a Dissenting minister as tutor to his son. In politics he held opinions which were astonishingly in advance of those of his contemporaries. He was a Free Trader. He favoured the election of local authorities, the abolition of alehouses, the encouragement of workmen's clubs and friendly societies, annual national holidays, cheap county courts, the conversion of prisons into reformatory institutions, and national compulsory education.[^[74]] This practical Liberalism was inspired by original Liberal theory. The old feudalism and government by territorial aristocracy must go, and the middle and working classes must take its place. After the fall of the Bastille he said: "The nonsense of feudality can never be revived.... The Bastille cannot be rebuilt. The administration of justice

and feudality cannot again go together.... The rest ... may be very safely left to public opinion and to the light of the times. Public opinion once set free acts like the sea never ceasingly, controlling imperceptibly and irresistibly both laws and ministers of laws, reducing and advancing everything to its own level."[^[75]] In drawing up a series of reflections on society he laid down "one fundamental principle, never to be departed from, to put yourself in the power of no man."

"Constitutional liberty consists in the right of exercising freely every faculty of mind or body, which can be exercised without preventing another man from doing the like.... No man can be trusted with power over another.... No gratitude can withstand power. Every man from the monarch down to the peasant is sure to abuse it."[^[76]] The territorial theory he despised. "It would have been happy if the right of primogeniture was destroyed altogether or never had existed."[^[77]] He said that the middle and working classes were sure to govern England in the long run, and not only published an English edition of Condorcet's Life of Turgot, in order to spread sound economic ideas among them, but even proposed to found a non-party and Free Trade newspaper to be called The Neutralist.[^[78]] He welcomed the rise of the new industrial democracy. "Towns," he said, "will be always found the most open to conviction, and among them the tradesmen and middling class of men. Next to them are the manufacturers [i.e., the workmen], after which, but at a great distance, comes the mercantile interest, for in fact they belong to no country, their wealth is movable, and they seek to gain by all, which they are in the habit of doing at the expense of every principle; but last of all come the country gentlemen and farmers, for the former have had both their fortunes and their understandings at a stand ... and the farmers, who, uneducated and centered in their never-ceasing pursuit of gain, are incapable of comprehending anything beyond it."[^[79]] This frank acceptance of the new order at home and abroad, and this wise confidence in the good sense of the

classes who were coming into power contrast very forcibly with the frantic denunciations of Jacobinism in which Burke taught most of his contemporaries to indulge. Shelburne was generally suspected and disliked by his associates, and the only explanation seems to be his undisguised indifference to the conventions of the old order.

Fox was as Liberal in his own way as Shelburne, and if his Liberalism was less wise, it was much more lively. Even his vices seem not to have impaired what was a rare and beautiful nature. He never took sides coldly. As a mere debater he excelled. He was a perfect master of words, and no English orator has ever surpassed him in readiness, in force, in the arrangement of a case, in simplicity and directness of statement. But his finest quality was his warmth of heart. He was a very spendthrift of sympathy, and every speech of his on behalf of the Americans against England, of the Indians against Warren Hastings, of Revolutionary France against her foreign invaders, of the Irish Catholics against their Protestant oppressors, or of the English common people against their reactionary Government, had a reality which was absent from the more splendid utterances of men like Sheridan. Even Burke, who was allied with Fox in such fierce contests as those about America, Warren Hastings, and Catholic disabilities, never felt a cause as Fox felt it. Fox had that very rare and admirable faculty of inserting himself into the very heart of the oppressed and of resenting their wrongs as if they had been his own. Even in his greatest moments, when he denounced the treatment of the Americans or of the Hindoos, Burke was external to the object of his sympathy. He was a sort of divine arbiter, condemning wickedness because it violated an eternal principle. Fox was never more than human, and if he was always less majestic than Burke, his sensitiveness was far more acute. "The defeats of great armies of invaders," he said, "always gave me the greatest satisfaction in reading history, from Xerxes' time downwards."[^[80]] A man who can feel the ardour of a patriot in a struggle more than two thousand years old may

be a bad philosopher, but he is the best possible champion of struggling colonies, of oppressed nationalities, and of peoples whose governors deprive them of the rights of liberty and discussion. His defence of democratic institutions shows how Fox got into the heart of Liberalism. "We are compelled to own that it gives a power of which no other form of government is capable. Why? Because it incorporates every man with the State, because it arouses everything that belongs to the soul as well as to the body of man; because it makes every individual feel that he is fighting for himself, and not for another; that it is his own cause, his own safety, his own concern, his own dignity on the face of the earth, and his own interest on the identical soil which he has to maintain."[^[81]] It was this capacity for seeking human beings rather than forms which made Fox such a champion of liberty during the great war with France. He never thought out his principles, and his instinct for their application was not always unerring. There are some early instances of factious opposition, which do him no credit. But he stood the great test of the French Revolution, and if others provide posterity with more of the philosophy of Liberalism than he, no other ever preached it more honestly or more courageously in his day.

With these exceptions the Whig party of the end of the eighteenth century contained few believers in Liberalism. The parties were indeed less sharply divided at the accession of George III than they are at the present time. Groups of statesmen, like the Rockingham Whigs, were united on general principles of government. Districts, like the City of London and Westminster, showed a general inclination towards democratic institutions. But party ties were largely personal, and George III deliberately set himself to break down divisions of opinion by bribery and intimidation, and to consolidate a majority of the Commons in a union which had nothing in common but its subserviency to the Crown. The labels of Whig and Tory could not then be applied so surely as those of Liberal and

Conservative to-day. Liberal opinions are therefore to be found only in a state of partial distribution. The Rockingham Whigs were Liberal in maintaining the supremacy of Parliament over the Crown, in claiming the rights of free election and free discussion for the electors, in advocating the abolition of religious disabilities, and especially in defending the American colonists against arbitrary government from England. But even they had no belief in a wide franchise, and some of them, who lived into the French Revolution, even became violently reactionary. Liberalism was thus a matter of patchwork at the best, and it would be difficult to find any considerable party of men who were united in a substantially Liberal political creed until 1868, when Gladstone's first Government came into power. The general tone of government up to the outbreak of the Revolution was Tory, tempered in some quarters by Liberal views of special subjects. After the Revolution, though the general aspect was more definitely Tory, a real Liberal appearance was assumed by a small section of the Whig party, and the growth of modern Liberalism actually began.

CHAPTER III

THE FIRST MOVEMENT TOWARDS LIBERALISM

Three great events, or series of events, combined to produce the process of individual emancipation, which is the subject of this book. The first was the economic transformation, called the Industrial Revolution, which began about 1760 and ended about 1830. The second was the American Rebellion, which ended in the recognition of the independence of the United States in 1783. The third was the French Revolution, in part at least a consequence of the American Rebellion, which ended in the establishment of a Republic in 1793.[^[82]] The first operated to change the conditions of life of the English people. The second and third operated to communicate to them ideas for which their new conditions of life had made them ready. Revolutions are never the product of circumstances alone, or of speculation alone. They are begotten by speculation acting upon circumstances. New ideas falling upon a people who have no reason to seek change bring forth little fruit. New ideas falling upon a people who have cause for discontent may bring forth fruit a hundredfold. England, at the end of the eighteenth century, was a society in a state of rapid economic

change, which produced a disposition in the mass of the community to alter institutions adapted for more stable conditions. From America and from France came the preaching of the right of the individual to control his own life, which precisely suited the case of those whom swift alterations of the economic structure exposed to injury.

For the purposes of this work it is not necessary to examine the industrial changes in detail. They had four leading features: the discovery of new processes of manufacture, the invention of machinery, the application of power, and the improvement of communications. The application of coal, instead of wood, to the smelting of iron, and the introduction of powerful machinery in the cotton and woollen industries, enormously increased the production of goods, and with that the demand for workpeople and the size of towns. In 1761 Brindley and the Duke of Bridgewater began constructing canals, which enabled goods to be carried about the country in greater bulk and with more speed than was ever possible with packhorses and carts. James Watt obtained his first patent for the steam-engine in 1769, and by the end of the century it was established in almost every industry of importance. All these changes combined to increase to an enormous extent the quantity of manufactured articles. But they did much more. They altered the distribution of population, and they altered the whole system upon which industry was based. Two things were of vital importance for the working of the new inventions. The iron industry had formerly been situated in the South of England, where the forests of Sussex provided ample fuel. The coal-beds lay in South Wales and the North of England, and the iron mines lay conveniently beside them. The iron industry accordingly disappeared entirely from Sussex, and was re-established in the other districts. The coal and iron industries determined the situation of the industries which required steam power and machinery. The cotton industry found another of its necessities in the climate of Lancashire. The woollen industry was transferred from Norfolk, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, and

Devonshire to the West Riding of Yorkshire. These geographical redistributions of industry, in the course of half a century, shifted the bulk of the population to the Midlands and the North.

The change was not merely geographical. Machinery required additional capital expenditure, and steam power must be used on a large scale if it was to be profitable. For the old manufacturer, a workman managing tools or a hand machine in his own cottage, was substituted the new manufacturer, a capitalist employing large numbers of artisans in his factory, managing his large machines, which were operated by his steam power. The old system was a system of small and scattered master workmen, producing and selling their own goods. The new system was a system of closely aggregated wage-earners, producing goods for a common employer, who provided the machinery, the power, and the superintendence, and sold the product of their labour for his own profit. This feature of the Industrial Revolution was as important as its redistribution of industry. It meant a considerable loss of independence among the working class, and it meant the birth of an entirely new class, the employers of labour, whose wealth and importance were destined to rival and eventually to surpass that of the landed gentry.

The most obvious consequence of these economic changes was the conversion of the rustic cottager into the town-dwelling artisan, and the growth of the towns presented difficulties and created grievances of which previous generations had had little experience. The towns were designed at hazard, with little adaptation to the needs of the present, and with no view to the needs of the future. They were hastily planned and hastily built. The problem of the slum, previously recognized only in London and a few seaports and country towns, was now to be found in every little factory town which sprang up in the potteries, the textile districts, and the coal and iron districts. Narrow streets, dark courts, houses built back to back, inadequate sanitary appliances, deficient water-supply, bad drainage, every evil thing which to-day stares at the sad eyes of progress, was planted at a thousand spots where before there had at least

been open country and fresh air. Factory and housing legislation were unknown. Men toiled twelve or fourteen hours a day in bad air, in excessive heat or cold, and with insufficient light. Women, who had been accustomed to weave, and spin, and bake, and brew in their own cottage homes, followed their industries into the factories. Some of them toiled underground in coalpits. A child of six might be worked for fourteen hours a day in a mine, as a chimney sweep, at a potter's oven, or in a cotton mill. Pauper children were farmed out to employers under conditions which were no better than slavery. Wages, in the absence of any real combination among the workpeople, were at the discretion of the employers, and naturally fell to the lowest possible level. Some trades were better than others, and some employers were better than others. But the evidence collected by different Parliamentary Committees between 1800 and 1840 is overwhelming proof of general, if not universal, degradation. The managing class seems to have believed that leisure was dangerous, even for little children, and the poor were made slaves, lest they should become dissolute.

The conditions of life and labour, bad as they were, were often made worse by the precarious nature of employment. At the present day, invention seldom inflicts great shocks upon labour. Improvements are constant but gradual. In the hurry of the Industrial Revolution, invention proceeded at an accelerating pace, and the introduction of some new appliance into a single industry might reduce the demand for labour by a quarter, or a half, or even three-quarters, and almost depopulate a town at a single blow. Some trades were more fortunate than others in this respect, but almost all suffered. All alike were injured by the constant wars in which the country was involved. These wasted capital, increased the taxation of the necessaries of life, and, by disturbing foreign trade, made profits speculative, and so made it difficult for the most benevolent manufacturer to establish his business upon the basis of high and steady wages for his workfolk. The country was never actually invaded, so that industry was never ruined, as it was ruined in Germany and other parts of

Europe. Even Napoleon clothed his troops in Yorkshire woollens when he set out to conquer Russia. But the production of wealth, which so increased in spite of war, was chiefly for the benefit of the employing and investing classes. The share of the working class was undoubtedly much less in proportion than their share under the old system. But their lot was made harder still by high prices, and especially by the high price of corn. The growth of population had, by the end of the eighteenth century, made it impossible for the country to supply all the wheat required for domestic consumption. The war checked imports, bad harvests reduced the home supply, and a vicious protective tariff completed the work of natural causes. Between 1785 and 1794 the average price of a quarter of wheat was about 50s. Between 1795 and 1801 it was about 87s., and at a later date it rose to a still greater height. The industrial population was thus distressed by bad conditions of life, fluctuations of employment, long hours, low wages, and high prices. When we recollect that this society was composed very largely of ignorant men, we are not surprised to find many of them disaffected and even turbulent. The man who knows, or thinks that he knows a remedy for his misery is often dangerous. But he is never so dangerous as the man who knows nothing of causes and effects, has never pondered over a question of economics, and, as he has never sought an explanation for the present, can have little idea of how he can most wisely direct the future. The progress of the Industrial Revolution was thus accompanied by suffering and discontent among the labouring population.

These economic changes led directly to psychological changes, and the new thinking was not merely the expression of unreasoning discomfort. An entirely new class appeared in society. The employers of labour were added to the other elements of the middle class, the merchants and shipowners, the barristers and doctors, and the better sort of clergy and attorneys. The new class, larger and more wealthy than any of the others, was dominated by no traditions, either for good or evil, and it depended for its existence and growth upon qualities of enterprise and adaptability, which territorial wealth neither required from

nor fostered in its owners. The rise of the capitalist employers meant a great increase in the Liberal spirit, and their influence eventually broke down the Toryism of the old landed interest. The manufacturers were perhaps more Liberal than they knew, and their unconscious influence on political habits of mind was as great as their deliberate expression of new ideas. The whole atmosphere in which they lived was fatal to Conservatism, and new ideas moved more rapidly among them than among those who were surrounded by the stereotyped forms and persisting influences of a feudal land system. Manufacture, by its constantly changing processes, accustoms those who engage in it to the idea of continual adaptation and improvement. Its organizers are never afraid of change in itself, and they always refer established things to standards of utility. They are intolerant of any thing which appears to subject convenience to forms. The early capitalists were therefore little disposed to set much store by the distinctions of sects and orders. They were wealthy, and were naturally not inspired by zeal for the wider distribution of wealth. They were employers of labour, and were naturally not anxious to strengthen labour in its demand for higher wages and better conditions. But they were ready to accept, not manhood suffrage, but the reform of rotten boroughs; not the disestablishment of the Church, but the removal of the disabilities of Dissenters and Catholics; not social reform, but the abolition of the protective tariff; not State education, but the mitigation of the ferocities of the criminal law; not the appropriation of the unearned increment of land, but the destruction of the antiquated ceremonies which made its transfer difficult and expensive. The general effect of the rise of this class was to strengthen Liberalism, not so much by a direct assault upon Toryism as by overbearing Conservatism. One positive piece of Liberal work is due to them. Their whole industrial system was built up in free and open competition. They hated the interference of the State, and it was they who, in a subsequent generation, abolished Protection. But at the time with which this chapter is concerned, their chief value lay in that they had none of the aristocratic Tory's antipathy

to new ideas as such. They had no love of political monopolies which were not their own.

The effect of the Industrial Revolution upon the minds of the working class was infinitely more acute. The employers had no aversion to change. The employed had every reason to seek for it. While they became, as dwellers in towns, more exposed to the infection of new ideas, they encountered new hardships, which made them more sensitive. Political doctrines, which hardly stirred the mind of a cottager, dividing his time between manufacturing and tilling a small plot of ground in open country, sounded loudly in the ears of an artisan, quickened by contact with machinery and constant intercourse with his fellows in the factory or in the street, cramped by living in a sunless court in a crowded town, earning a bare subsistence by exhausting labour, or thrown out of work by the introduction of a new machine or the bankruptcy of his employer. Even in the absence of systematic education, there is a kind of intellectual development which is inevitable in industrial society. Friendly societies, Trade Unions, crowded workshops, closely packed dwellings, all tend to stimulate the exchange of ideas, and however clumsy the industrial organization of the period may have been, it inevitably produced a new quickness of thinking. The character of that thinking was determined by the conditions of life.

Political disability may have nothing, it cannot have much, to do directly with economic distresses. But no people in a state of bodily misery was ever yet persuaded by the most logical argument that the one is not connected indissolubly with the other. They are wretched. They cannot control their circumstances. Does it not follow that if they could control their own circumstances they would cease to be wretched? Economic discontent invariably produces political discontent, and that whether the sufferer has a voice in his government or not. It is always to the advantage of society that he should have such a voice. If he has a vote he may overturn a Government. But he will not overturn all government. He may expel a party. He will not subvert the State. Whether a trade depression will produce a

revolution or only a General Election depends on whether the bulk of the working people are enfranchised or not. In the one case the party system provides discontent with an alternative. In the other there is no hope of constitutional change. Probably only the excitement of the war with France saved England from violent internal disturbances at the end of the eighteenth century. The sense of national power is a good anodyne for personal misery, as governing classes have always been aware. But if there was no great disaster, there was grave unrest. All circumstances combined to make the preaching of new social principles popular and their application to the existing state of society fierce.

It was not merely a vague and general suffering which stimulated political discussion among the working classes at this time. They had definite grievances, which were obviously produced by their disfranchisement and could only be removed by their admission to political power. When the Industrial Revolution began, there was still on the Statute Book the Act of Elizabeth, which allowed the magistrates to fix wages in proportion to the prevailing local price of corn. It is doubtful whether this method of establishing a minimum wage based on the standard of bare subsistence could have been used successfully in the new conditions. Country gentlemen might have been able to make an accurate guess at a fair wage when industry was stable and competition not acute. They would certainly be incompetent in the age of machinery, of violent fluctuations of trade, and of intense competition between employers. The only people who can ever fix minimum wages are the employers and workmen themselves, acting through representatives. But the Act offered at least the opportunity of experiment, and any attempt to preserve a decent standard of life among the workpeople would have been better than the alternative of leaving the standard to the discretion of the employer, who would naturally be disposed to make it low. The agricultural labourers made several attempts to get their wages fixed in this way.[^[83]] For

various reasons the Act was not enforced, and in 1795 the magistrates began to adopt the alternative of granting poor relief regulated by the price of corn. This was the fatal Speenhamland policy, which, by securing a subsistence to all labourers, irrespective of their work, degraded their character by making up wages to the subsistence level, whatever their amount, induced employers to reduce wages for pauper labourers and independent labourers alike, and, by enormously increasing the burden of rates, seriously injured the whole agricultural industry.

A similar experience befell many of the artisans, especially the cotton weavers. In 1795 Whitbread introduced a Bill, which proposed to apply the principles of the Elizabethan Act to the workers in towns. It was read a second time without opposition, but got no farther. Thirteen years later a second Bill was defeated by the Economists and laissez faire. It was honestly believed by theorists and by the few practical politicians who, like Pitt, were beginning to study political economy, that wages could only be fixed by bargaining between employers and employed, and depended upon the extent of the wages fund, the amount left after the employers had paid the rent of their land, the interest on their capital, and their own profits. This fund was always assumed to be fixed. Any attempt to increase it meant a reduction of profits, and a reduction of profits meant a less inducement to employers to establish industries, and consequently a reduction of employment. To some extent the argument was sound. During the rapid transition from hand labour to machinery, it might have been worth an employer's while to employ large numbers of men at low wages rather than a small number of men with expensive machinery. A slight increase of the average wage might have turned the balance in favour of the machinery. But the argument as a whole ignored two facts. The first was that the inducement offered to the employers was excessive, and that they might still have established as many factories, even if their profits had been somewhat less. The second was that an increase in wages

would have been followed by increased efficiency and an increased production of wealth, leaving larger sums to be given to employers and employed alike. These considerations did not weigh with the early economists. Wages were left to what was called free bargaining, in which the comparatively wealthy employer got the better of his comparatively poor workmen.

This refusal of redress by legislation was the more exasperating because it was accompanied by a prohibition of redress by combination. Parliament would neither help the workmen nor allow them to help themselves. Attempts to organize Trade Unions were discouraged or actively suppressed. In 1799 and 1800 two Combination Acts were passed, which made illegal all contracts between workmen for obtaining an advance in wages, for reducing hours of employment, for preventing employers from employing any particular workman, or for controlling any person in the management of his business. Breach of the Acts was made a criminal offence, punishable by fine and imprisonment.[^[84]] Combinations of employers were nominally prohibited in precisely the same way, but in the political circumstances of the time the law was enforced only against the men. Trade Unions, in fact, continued to exist, and in many trades they succeeded in arranging wages with the masters. So long as the relations of employers and employed were friendly, the Acts were left alone. But when a strike began they were brought into operation, and the workpeople were forcibly reminded of the consequences of political impotence. Large numbers of them were thus reduced to the same state as the agricultural labourers, and lived on scanty wages, eked out by charity and the Poor Law.

The Industrial Revolution thus gradually transformed society, and created what were substantially two new classes of people, of which the first was by nature averse to Conservatism, and the second was by circumstances made restless and eager for change. The successive events of the American Rebellion and the French Revolution fell upon this changing society like flame upon

stubble. But a few years before the dispute with the Colonies came to a head, there took place a sort of preliminary demonstration of the principles which that controversy forced into prominence. Speculation had brought a small body of Englishmen to definite support of manhood suffrage, annual Parliaments, and the substitution of pledged delegates for representatives with freedom of action. These principles were simply the logical extreme of Liberalism. If every man is to be regarded as equal with every other, then every man must have a vote. If every man ought to have a vote, he must be allowed to exercise it as soon as he becomes entitled to it, and therefore Parliament must be dissolved every year in order to permit the new voters to express their wishes. If every man ought to have a vote, he must be allowed to vote not merely on general principles of policy, but on details, and his representative must be instructed to vote for or against without using his own discretion. This abstract reasoning had not affected any large proportion of the population. The Duke of Richmond was the most distinguished of these speculators; John Cartwright, a naval officer, who afterwards became a major in the militia, was the most voluminous of their writers; their most effective workers were men like the clerical Horne Tooke and Wyvil; and their largest following was in the county of Yorkshire. As a political force they counted for nothing at all. But the affair of Wilkes and the Middlesex election brought the whole subject of representative government vividly into the public eye, and the political philosophers found their doctrines for a short time popular.

Between 1768 and 1770 there was a distinct tendency in politics towards the reform of Parliament, the reduction of the number of rotten boroughs, and the restriction of the influence of the Crown. This was produced by bad harvests and industrial depression. The expulsion of John Wilkes from the House of Commons in 1770 brought this discontent to a head, and provoked not only dangerous riots in London, but also violent discussion of political principles. Wilkes was a disreputable person, though not more disreputable than some men who enjoyed

the confidence of the Crown and Parliament. He was obnoxious to the Government of the day, and after twice beating the Tory candidate for Middlesex, was twice expelled from the House. The Government and the House thus asserted their right to refuse to accept the chosen representative of the electors, and, in effect, to dictate to them what representative they should choose. It did not require any pedantic process of reasoning to show that this was the negation of representative government, even of the qualified representative government of that time. The right of election is nothing unless it is the right to elect whom the electors please. Within the metropolitan area the House of Commons was fiercely attacked, and there was more than one conflict between the Courts of Law and the Executive. The main question was whether the House of Commons was to be a private assembly of gentlemen, managing public affairs as irresponsibly as they managed their own estates, or whether it was to be a public assembly, chosen by the community and responsible to it. "What were the relations between the House of Commons and the constituencies? Could the House dictate to the constituencies whom they should elect? If it could, did it not follow that members were neither representatives nor delegates, but an absolute oligarchy?" From this the public proceeded to inquire not only whether the House was right in expelling an elected member, but by what title those who voted in favour of expulsion held their own seats. The scandals of the existing system were obvious. Even at that day, before the growth of the great towns, the distribution of seats bore no relation to the figures of the population. The county of Cornwall returned as many members as the whole of Scotland. London, Westminster, and Middlesex, the most densely populated part of the kingdom, returned only eight members, while Cornwall returned forty-four. Out of 513 English and Welsh members, 254 were returned by only 11,500 voters, and six constituencies had less than four voters each. Bribery and corruption was thus made an easy task. Boroughs were bought and sold like landed estates, and Lord Chesterfield complained in

1767 that the Indian adventurers had so raised prices that mere inherited wealth could not compete with them.[^[85]] The expenses of elections were enormous, and in some cases reached £30,000 or £40,000.[^[86]] Inside the House, members, who had thus acquired their seats either by nomination or by purchase, had nothing to fear from their constituents, and many of them could be bought by the Crown with little difficulty. In 1770 no less than 192 of them held offices under the Crown, and were directly under its influence.[^[87]] A House of this sort could only be endured without complaint while it acted in harmony with public opinion. So long as politics were no more than a business for gentlemen, it mattered little how gentlemen acquired their interest in it, or how they employed their interest when they had got it. But the disputes about Wilkes made people think that politics concerned the electors as well as the legislators, and when the voters of Middlesex found that the gentlemen in the House refused to accept their representative, they, and other voters like them, began to inquire fiercely into the whole system.

Wilkes actually made use of some of the logical Liberal or Radical terms of speech for his own purposes. In No. 19 of the North Briton, he wrote of the right of the people "to resume the power they have delegated, and to punish their servants who have abused it," and he invited his constituents to give him their "instructions." Whether Wilkes honestly held the Radical faith or not, he preached it with great popularity and success, and he stood for much more than he was. He was unquestionably a scoundrel. But he was expelled from the House because he was a demagogue. Persecution converted him from a blackguard into a standard of battle, and "Wilkes and Liberty" became the cry of all who valued free government. Liberty has always owed as much to the folly and extravagance of its enemies as to the wisdom and devotion of its friends.

The contest ended in the victory of Wilkes and the electors of

Middlesex, and the popular ardour was quickly cooled. But two permanent marks were left upon English politics. The first was of infinite importance, as indicating a breach in the aristocratic monopoly of public affairs. The public meeting became a regular means of expressing opinion and of influencing Parliament. In August, 1769, a meeting was held in Westminster Hall at which seven thousand people were said to be present.[^[88]] Many meetings were also held of the freehold voters of the different counties, who were at this time almost the only independent voters in the country. These passed resolutions, sent instructions to their members, and approved petitions.[^[89]] The second permanent change effected by the Wilkes controversy was the establishment of the Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights. This was founded in 1769 to assist Wilkes, the prime mover being Horne Tooke, the Vicar of Brentford.[^[90]] The fundamental principles of this Society were Radical, and it proposed to test every candidate for Parliament by inviting him to pledge himself to equal distribution of seats, annual Parliaments, and the exclusion of placemen from the Commons, and to take an oath against bribery. The Society was soon superseded by the Constitutional Society, which maintained the same principles, and from this time political associations outside Parliament have remained a permanent feature of English life.

When the immediate controversy had subsided, the course of domestic politics remained uneventful for a few years. The King and Lord North were slowly buying up the House of Commons, and establishing a practical despotism which proved far more dangerous to the public than the more obvious tyranny of the Stuarts. The Rockingham Whigs looked with jealous eyes upon this revival of their ancient enemy, the power of the Crown. Even as it stood, Parliament was better than Monarchy. Parliament acted according to law, the Crown at its discretion or caprice. Parliament was responsible in some

measure to the people it governed, the Crown was not responsible at all. Parliament was an instrument which could be wielded, however clumsily, by the nation; the Crown was an active and independent agent, which could only be expelled for misbehaviour, after the mischief had been done. If the Crown were allowed to overcome the resistance of Parliament, the last check on its power would be gone. This small body of Whigs therefore laboured, though with little success, to maintain the purity and independence of the Commons by the exclusion of placemen and the reduction of sinecures. The American War brought the whole question of government to an issue, and the struggle, which had seemed to end in the English Revolution of 1688, was fought out again across the Atlantic. The dispute between England and the Colonies was simply whether the Colonies were to be governed despotically or in accordance with their own wishes. The stamp duty and the tea duty, which figured so largely in the quarrel, imposed no real burden on the Americans, and would not, by themselves, have caused any difficulty. Even the elaborate commercial restrictions, which used the Colonies for the interest of the Mother Country in the same way as they used Ireland, had produced little ill-feeling. What really happened in the first fifteen years of George III's reign was that a community of civilized men, united by their common geographical situation and common interest, and sundered from an older civilization by some thousands of miles of ocean, became resolved no longer to be governed in accordance with the ideas of that older civilization. The Americans, in a word, had acquired a nationality of their own. While the French held Canada, the danger of invasion from the North kept the colonists eager for the British connection. The expulsion of the French in 1763 left the colonists free from external menace, and without this pressure towards union, the essential differences of the two societies made themselves felt. The dispute about taxation would undoubtedly be settled by all modern lawyers in favour of England. Parliament had the legal right to impose taxes on the Americans, nor was there anything

morally wrong in asking them to contribute to the cost of their own defence. But the proposal to tax was only evidence of a persisting habit of disposition. The Americans were not interested in the affairs of Europe. They preferred to manage their own business. The English Government made the fatal error of first irritating them by arbitrary interference, and then alienating them by force. In 1783 George III acknowledged the independence of the United States of America.

The war produced a direct conflict between Liberalism and Toryism. Did the Colonies exist for the benefit of the Mother Country or for their own? Had or had not one section of the Anglo-Saxon race the right to compel another section? Was a homogeneous society two thousand miles away to be governed by an English Government in a way of which it disapproved? Subsequent generations have settled the Empire upon Liberal principles, and have decided to treat a colony of white men as an independent nationality. The Tories of the American Rebellion decided otherwise, with disastrous results. But in losing the American Colonies, England escaped a greater disaster. It was a choice between losing the Colonies and losing domestic liberty. Never was the relation between foreign and domestic policy more vividly displayed. Never was it more clearly demonstrated that a political philosophy is one and indivisible. The Tories could only conquer in America by principles which would enable them to conquer in England also. This was always present to the minds of the Whigs, who had no doubt that in fighting for the Americans they were fighting their old enemy of the Revolution. Liberalism and Conservatism were in this case identified. The Whigs, in maintaining the principle of representative government, were defending an established institution. The Tories, in endeavouring to destroy local self-government by principles which struck at the root of domestic self-government, were revolutionaries rushing headlong into reaction. "I deny," said one of their champions, "that there is any such thing as Representation at all in our Constitution, but that the Commons are taken out of

the people, as the democratic part of the Government, not elected as representatives of the people, but commissioned by them in like manner as the Lords are commissioned or appointed by the Crown. If the Commons were the representatives of the people, the people might control them, and the instructions of the electors would be binding upon the members."[^[91]] The Whig doctrine, opposed to this negation of Parliament, was stated most forcibly by Burke, in his Address to the King. In this manifesto he said: "To leave any real freedom to Parliament, freedom must be left to the Colonies. A military government is the only substitute for civil liberty. That the establishment of such a power in America will utterly ruin our finances (though its certain effect) is the smallest part of our concern. It will become an apt, powerful, and certain engine for the destruction of our freedom here. Great bodies of armed men, trained to a contempt of popular assemblies representative of an English people; kept up for the purpose of exacting impositions without their consent and maintained by that exaction; instruments in subverting, without any process of law, great ancient establishments and respected forms of government; set free from, and therefore above, the ordinary English tribunals where they serve,—these men cannot so transform themselves, merely by crossing the sea, as to behold with love and reverence, and submit with profound obedience to the very same things in Great Britain which in America they had been taught to despise, and had been accustomed to awe and humble.... We deprecate the effect of the doctrines which must support and countenance the government over conquered Englishmen."[^[92]]

The matter was indeed worse than a mere corruption of the army. The people who used the army would be as much demoralized as the army itself, and every Tory civilian would be converted into an active enemy of his own freedom. Burke, whose speeches on this subject are a treasure-house of political wisdom, saw straight into the heart of the matter. "There are many whose whole scheme of freedom is made up of pride, perverseness, and insolence. They feel themselves in a state of thraldom, they imagine that their souls are cooped and cabined in unless they have some man, or some body of men, dependent on their mercy. This desire of having some one below them descends to those who are the very lowest of all, and a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling Church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that the peer, whose footman's instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain from a jail. This disposition is the true source of the passion which many men in very humble life have taken to the American war. Our subjects in America; our colonies; our dependants."[^[93]] It was not argument, but a habit of mind, which Burke encountered. Even without a victory in America, the corruption of the Tory mind was bad enough. It was precisely in the temper of the American War that Tory statesmen, after the French Revolution, afflicted their own countrymen. But from the utter loss of the temper of independence England was saved by the loss of the Colonies. The power of the Crown seemed to be strong even after the war. But a train of events in the mind had been started which could not be stopped, and in feet, when George III abandoned his hold over the Americans, he abandoned also his hold over the English.

This victory was decisive, and it is difficult to see in what other quarter it could ever have been won. There was no country in Europe where such a definite assertion of the right of

a people to control their government was likely to be made. Even France, where a few years later the assertion came with ten times greater vigour, owed much to the American rising. The French Government, which allied itself with the Americans to injure its old enemy England, by that very act destroyed itself. The final result of its exertions was precisely the opposite of what it intended, and what, at first sight, it achieved. Apparently, it humiliated England and elevated itself. Actually, it saved England and destroyed itself. Its subjects were exposed in America to the fatal contagion of liberty. They brought it back to their own country, and in ten years the French Government had perished, and the whole of Europe was infected.

It cannot safely be asserted that the Revolution in Europe would have been so successful but for the American Rebellion. The general ignorance and apathy of the poorer classes, and the general acceptance of established things which prevailed among the others, were weights which few Europeans would have tried to lift, or could have lifted if they had tried. In the American Colonies were gathered people of a different complexion. The Rebellion was not that purely noble and disinterested thing which lovers of liberty would have wished it to be. But the people concerned were such as made certain their maintenance of a noble principle, even from bad motives. The stocks from which they sprang were among the most vigorous of the English race. The lives which most of them lived made them hard and self-reliant. The distance which they lived from the Mother Country weakened the influences of tradition. Their institutions were in some districts reminiscent of the English. But in general it would be fair to say that they had no aristocracy and no privileged Church, land was free to all, the women were trained to vigour and independence no less than the men. Except in a few of the older settlements every circumstance tended to foster individuality, and left a man free to raise himself by his own exertions to positions of dignity and power. As Tom Paine put it in the Second Part of his Rights of Man, "So deeply rooted were all the Governments of the old world, and so effectually

had the tyranny and the antiquity of habit established itself over the mind, that no beginning could be made in Asia, Africa, or Europe, to reform the political condition of man. Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think." The significance of this great event could hardly be exaggerated. One of the oldest and most powerful monarchies had been humiliated by a people who proclaimed, as the foundation of their new State, the equality of all individuals within it. The presence of the United States was a perpetual reminder to the discontented and the suffering among the older peoples that successful revolt was possible, and that constitutions might stand fast which did not confer privileges upon any class in the community. It would be absurd to pretend that the American people have not often fallen short of their own ideals. But the ideals were at least established. It was no small thing that a State should have come into being whose founders proclaimed in their Declaration of Independence that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." There are not less than five historical or logical errors in that sonorous passage. But it acted on the old world like the voice of God among the dry bones.

Opinion in England seems to have been generally favourable to the war. Opposition was most marked among the commercial classes, whose trade was seriously injured by the loss of the colonial market and the destruction of shipping. Such as it was, it encouraged the organization of public opinion outside Parliament, which had been previously practised in the affair of Wilkes. The attack was properly directed against the Crown. The City of London led the way in December, 1779, by resolving "that the various measures which have brought the landed and

mercantile interest of this country into its present reduced and deplorable situation could not have been pursued to their actual extremity, had it not been for the abuse of the present increased, enormous, and undue influence of the Crown." There followed a meeting of the freeholders of Yorkshire. This assembly protested against the multiplication of sinecures and pensions "from whence the Crown had acquired a great and unconstitutional influence, which, if not checked, might soon prove fatal to the liberties of this country," and a committee was appointed to prepare a plan for an association to promote economic reform and restore the freedom of Parliament. Great excitement was caused at this meeting by the indiscreet remarks of a gentleman called Smelt, who had been one of the tutors of the Prince of Wales. He appears to have argued that the King's influence was too little rather than too great, and the indignation produced by his remarks shows how widely independent opinion dissented from the servility of Parliament.[^[94]] Similar meetings were held in nearly thirty different counties and boroughs, and in most of them committees of correspondence were appointed. Deputies from some of these committees met in London in March, under the chairmanship of Wyvil, the Yorkshire clergyman. The deputies published a memorial which described the state of government as "a despotic system," declared that "the whole capacity of popular freedom had been struck at," and referred in plain terms to the "venal majority" in the House of Commons. The memorial demanded that one hundred new members should be sent to Westminster to represent the counties.[^[95]]

This external pressure produced some effect even upon Parliament, corrupt though it was. In April the House of Commons resolved by a majority of eighteen "that the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished." Resolutions in favour of economical reforms were passed without divisions, and Burke introduced a Bill for reducing expenditure

by about £200,000 a year and for abolishing some of the worst of the sinecures. But the tide soon ceased to flow in Parliament. The Gordon Riots in June, 1780, gave the Tories a very useful weapon against popular agitation. The Duke of Richmond actually introduced a Bill for manhood suffrage and annual Parliaments on the very day when the Protestant mob began the work of plunder and arson. But any attempt at political reform was at this time hopeless. There was no unanimity among the reformers. The Duke of Richmond was a logical Radical. Fox supported annual Parliaments and opposed manhood suffrage. Burke, who was active in proposals to suppress corruption, would not accept even triennial Parliaments, and though he had no objection to slight changes in the distribution of seats, hated equally all drastic changes in the franchise and in the composition of the House of Commons. A dissolution of Parliament and an election, at which the King spent nearly £50,000 in buying votes, strengthened the Tory Government, and even Burke's plans for economical reforms were generally defeated.

The campaign in the country persisted, and in May, 1782, William Pitt revived the question of political reform in the House of Commons. There can be no doubt that Pitt was then and for some time afterwards in favour of considerable changes, and but for the accident of the French Revolution, he would probably have abolished many of the rotten boroughs and extended the franchise by the end of the eighteenth century. His speech of 1782 was hardly less vigorous in its denunciations of royal and aristocratic influence than were the speeches of Fox in the House and those of the country meetings outside it. But he was at this time only a new member, with none of that mastery of the assembly which he afterwards acquired. His motion for a Special Committee was beaten by 161 votes to 141, and fifty years elapsed before the cause received such powerful support again. Pitt did indeed introduce a Bill in 1785 which provided for the purchase of a certain number of rotten boroughs and the transfer of their members to the counties and London, and for the establishment of a permanent compensation fund which should be

applied to similar objects in future years, as the population passed to the unrepresented industrial towns of the North. But in this scheme he acted without his colleagues. By 248 votes to 174 the House refused him leave to introduce the Bill, and he never made a second attempt. Five years later the French Revolution made him a determined opponent of the cause which he had once supported.

So far as Parliament was concerned, the Liberal movement for political reform made no headway. In other channels the Liberal tide moved quietly but steadily. In 1778 relief was obtained by the Roman Catholics from some of their worst disabilities. In that year Sir George Savile's Bill abolishing the penalties upon priests and Jesuits who were found teaching in schools, and the infamous rule which dispossessed a Papist owner of real property in favour of the next Protestant heir, was passed in both Houses without opposition. But even this slight measure of justice aroused great hostility in the country, and two years later the Gordon Riots showed that the persecuting zeal of Protestantism was not yet dead. The Dissenters were the next to move, but in their case Conservatism was too powerful. In 1787, dissatisfied with the annual Acts of Indemnity, which preserved the stigma of inferiority while relieving them of its legal penalties, the Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists attempted to procure the repeal of the Test Act and the Corporation Act. Their case was presented in the House of Commons by a Churchman named Beaufoy in 1787 and again in 1789. North opposed him on the grounds that abolition would endanger the Established Church, which was an essential part of the British Constitution. Fox took the true Liberal view, declared that no Church should be Established which was not the Church of the majority of the people, and went so far as to say that "if the majority of the people of England should ever be for the abolition of the Established Church, in such a case the abolition ought immediately to follow." Pitt was no bigot, but consulted the Archbishop of Canterbury. A meeting of the

Bishops decided against abolition by ten votes to two.[^[96]] Pitt, therefore spoke against the motion, which was defeated.[^[97]] But the cause was not hopeless. The voting in 1787 was 178 against 100. In 1789 it was 122 against 102. But in 1792, when a similar motion was made by Fox, the conditions were altered. The French Revolution had broken out. The property of the French Church had been confiscated. Dr. Priestley, the most copious of the Dissenting writers, had expressed his desire to disestablish the English Church. Dr. Price, the most popular of the Dissenting preachers, had praised the acts of the French revolutionaries. All the fears of reaction rallied to support the Establishment, and the motion was beaten by 296 votes to 105. It was not brought forward again for nearly forty years.

The right of free discussion, so essential to the maintenance of political and religious liberty, gained some additional protection in 1791, when Fox's Libel Act was passed. Prior to that date juries had been confined in libel cases to answering two questions: was the document published? and what did its words mean? The judge then decided whether the meaning put upon the words by the jury constituted a libel or not. This system gave a great advantage to the Government in all cases of seditious or blasphemous libel, and prosecutions of printers and journalists were very common. The judge was a lawyer, and probably Tory in his opinions. He was connected with Government, with the propertied classes, and with the Established Church. Any attack on existing political, proprietary, or religious institutions was therefore tested by a man who was probably prejudiced in favour of all three, and might actually have defended in the House of Lords the policy which had been attacked by the prisoner at the bar. Judges like Lord Mansfield and Lord Camden had shown themselves, during the Wilkes controversy, to be honourable and upright. But the danger existed, and even if the judge's power was not consciously abused, it was always

liable to be affected by class prejudice.[^[98]] Fox's Libel Act gave to the jury the right to decide whether a publication was libellous or not. After the outbreak of the French Revolution, when the middle classes showed themselves as bigoted as the upper, even trial by jury was but a poor protection to an avowed Republican or atheist. But the new principle was safer than the old, and it was something even to have asserted that a man's political opinions should be judged by his fellow-subjects, and not by a member of the governing class. The Act implied, in the minds of those who voted for it, a reversal of the old conception of State and subject. So long as the supremacy of the State was assumed, criticism of government was inevitably regarded as improper. It was, in effect, the servant rebuking the master. On the other hand, when the right of the subject to control the State becomes the basis of political reasoning, criticism of government is no more than the master rebuking the servant. The passing of Fox's Libel Act is a proof that political minds were in a state of transition, and suggests, no less than Pitt's proposals for reform, that but for the French Revolution political estimates might have been revised, and political institutions readjusted, at a much earlier date than they were.

One other transaction of this period is of importance in the history of Liberalism. In 1785 the House of Commons resolved that Warren Hastings should be impeached for his conduct of affairs in India. Hastings had been Governor-General under the East India Company, whose territory and influence had been enormously increased since the victories of Clive and the expulsion of the French twenty years before. The prime mover in the impeachment was Burke, who devoted to the preparation of the charges and the conduct of the trial enormous industry, and an eloquence so tremendous that to this day no man can read his speeches without shaking with horror and indignation.

The Company had been guilty of every vice which the disposing mind displays when it is brought into contact with weaker peoples. It had developed the art of exploitation to perfection. Its agents were in the country to make money for their shareholders, and in pursuing the interest of their shareholders they did not forget their own. The natives were exposed to a double confiscation, and every consideration of good government was not seldom subordinated to this universal rapacity. The agents bribed and forged, they abused judicial process, they broke treaties and sold their allies, they made war upon those peoples whom it was convenient to treat as their enemies, and when they wanted an excuse for a campaign of their own they hired out British soldiers to a native destroyer, and entrusted to him the work of massacre and pillage which they were unwilling to undertake themselves. The inhabitants of India were not at that time acquainted with the classics. Had they been, they might more than once have quoted with grim justice against the British those words which the Latin historian put into the mouth of one of their own ancestors: "Slaughter and plunder are in their vocabulary synonymous with Empire, and when they have made a desert they call it peace."[^[99]]

Hastings was in fact incomparably better than his predecessors, and after the trial had dragged on for more than seven years he was acquitted by the Lords. But the proceedings had established the great principle that morality is to be observed by white races in dealing with black, and that even though forms of government may be different, the objects of government are the same in all parts of the world, the happiness of the governed and not the enrichment of the governor. The impeachment cost Burke fourteen years of unremitting labour. But though he failed in his immediate object, and though the improvement in the methods of Indian government was slow, the permanent effects of his work remained. Burke's speeches were often overcharged, and if

Hastings had been as bad as Burke believed him to be, he would have been supernaturally bad. But indignation on behalf of an alien race is not so common that we can afford to spare even its excess. A later generation of Englishmen, reading some of the sorry pages in the history of our modern Empire, may regret the absence from us of Burke's imagination, sympathy, and inexhaustible wrath. Acts of Parliament passed in 1772 and 1784 gave the Crown political control over the East India Company, and the complete transfer of the Company's rights in 1858 established the government of India upon a political and no longer upon a commercial basis. Blemishes there are still, but there are few systems of government in the world which are less influenced by the desire to promote the selfish ends of the governors. The transformation of English opinion with regard to India began with Burke.

On the eve of the French Revolution there seemed to be a very good prospect of reforms in the English Constitution. The Catholics had made an actual advance. The Dissenters had every reason to be hopeful. The Tory leader himself had shown sympathy with free election and the enfranchisement of the new industrial districts. But the fate of English liberties lay in the hands of the French Government. If Turgot and the French reformers had had their way, the Revolution might have been averted, or at least mitigated. The triumph of the French privileged classes made reform impossible, and made it certain that revolution would be violent and universal. In May, 1776, Louis XVI, impelled by faction and his bad wife, dismissed the one statesman who could have made absolute monarchy tolerable to the French people. By the end of 1793 he and the Queen had perished on the scaffold, the nobility were dead or in exile, and a French Republic was proclaiming with even greater emphasis than the American the doctrines of individuality and natural right. The shock to established things was terrific. This was not a matter of a handful of colonists in a remote part of the world. It was a whole nation, and that

in the heart of Europe, which had not only risen against monarchy but had destroyed it, and with it aristocracy and the Church. Every institution upon which political society was based had vanished in the flood, and the French people, not content with establishing new principles at home, were calling upon the common people abroad to do the like, and were announcing their intention of carrying help wherever it was required. It is difficult to imagine in these days with what feelings those who believed in class distinctions and privileges and the aristocratic monopoly of government witnessed the triumph of an assembly which issued this Declaration of Rights.

"I. Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public utility.

"II. The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

"III. The nation is essentially the source of all sovereignty; nor can any individual or any body of men be entitled to any authority which is not expressly derived from it."

The Declaration affords as ample material for criticism on logical and historical grounds as the American Declaration of Independence. But its plain meaning was the same: that the subordination of the individual to the institution was at an end, and that everything in politics was to be tested in future by its effect upon human beings, irrespective of their rank, wealth, creed, or occupation, or sex. In a word, it was the source of modern Liberalism.

In England the Revolution was at first regarded with general approbation, or at least indifferent curiosity. To Whigs like Fox and Mackintosh, as well as to Radicals like Price and Cartwright, it was a matter of exultation to see the end of absolute monarchy in France. Even a Tory might view with equanimity the summoning of a French Assembly which bore some resemblance to the English. Even a lawyer might rejoice at the fall of the Bastille, the symbol of arbitrary government,

and the negation of the English rule of law. But as the Revolution swept beyond the constitutional forms, when the mob broke loose in Paris, when the King's head was cut off, when the heads of men and women who were noble in character as well as rank were carried through the streets on pikes, when the property of the Church was confiscated, and when members of the old nobility of the most splendid nation in Europe exhibited their destitution in every town of England, the bulk of the English people hurried into reaction. If anything beyond the mere excesses of the Revolution was required to turn a timid friend into a frantic enemy, it was the Assembly's proclamation of its intention to help all other peoples to follow its example. There is no people which hates political bloodshed more than the English. There is no people which more stubbornly resents foreign interference in its domestic affairs. Both these national characteristics were offended by the Revolution, and their offence was the opportunity of Toryism. Burke's Reflections on the Late Revolution in France was published in 1791, and gave voice to the national dislike of violent political changes. The book, with its deep reading of human nature, its insistence on the continuity of national growth, and its contempt for those who thought to alter a political society by reasoning in the abstract, was the wisest book which the Revolution produced on either side. But it was full of errors of fact, and it made no allowances for the horrible suffering which the old system had imposed upon the common people of France. If it expressed the opinions of a wise Conservatism, it was also made the textbook of selfishness and monopoly. Every person who owned property or privilege was roused by it into hatred of any change which threatened to extend the political rights of the majority. The governing class marshalled itself to defend its own. From the moment when Burke published his book to the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, hardly a single Liberal measure was passed into law. The fate of the Dissenters has already been described. Parliamentary Reform fared no better. In 1792, 1793, and 1795 Charles Grey, afterwards Earl Grey, brought the subject

before the House of Commons. In 1782 Pitt had been beaten by 161 votes to 141. In 1793 Grey was beaten by 282 to 41, and in 1793 by 258 to 63. The Dissenters were not admitted to public offices till 1828. The Catholics had to wait till 1829. Parliament was not reformed till 1832. Nor was the Tory spirit displayed simply in neglect. It was active and vicious. During the long interval between the beginning of the Revolution and the triumph of the Whigs in 1831, the Press was gagged, political associations were broken up, combinations of workmen were prohibited, the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, public meetings were forbidden or violently dispersed, and large numbers of worthy and respectable men were transported or kept in prison, in many cases without trial. Free institutions endured, but they ceased to operate. Liberty was kept, but in chains.

The man who determined the course of this reaction was William Pitt, and though much of its evil must be ascribed to the state of general opinion, his personal responsibility was very great. He seems to have assumed that failure would follow every attempt at change, and though he was in favour of the Reform of Parliament, of Catholic Emancipation, of Free Trade, and of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and was not hostile to the removal of the disabilities of Dissenters, he abated every one of his principles without seriously attempting to put them into practice. He was one of the greatest politicians and one of the worst statesmen England has ever had. He managed Parliament with astonishing success, and hardly ever used it for a good purpose. His failure to reform the House of Commons increased discontent and made government more difficult. His failure to emancipate the Catholics before the Union with Ireland was the final and decisive cause of the Rebellion of 1798, and his failure to emancipate them after the Union was the chief reason why that measure did nothing to improve the condition of Ireland or its relations with England. His failure to abolish the Slave Trade, when even Tories like Windham were against it, prolonged for twenty years a system of human misery and

degradation such as had never been known in any civilized part of the world. His system of finance burdened the country with an unnecessary load of debt. His failure to adjust the customs tariff to the new conditions of a population which was no longer self-sufficing increased distress and discontent with it. His chief enterprise, the war with France, was begun in folly and conducted with incompetence, and it was not until after his death that it was efficiently conducted to a successful issue. The one thing which he did was to maintain a strong central government in the United Kingdom. But to this maintenance of government he sacrificed almost everything for which government exists. "The Pilot who weathered the storm" flung all the cargo out of the ship, and steered her from the high seas into dangerous shallows, from some of which she has not yet escaped.

CHAPTER IV

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND ENGLISH OPINION

The Revolution affected English society in two directly opposite ways. It is unquestionable that its violence drove the majority into hostility not only to Revolution, but to Reform. But many men and women welcomed the triumph of its principles with an enthusiasm which was almost as extravagant as the opposition of the rest. Those who had preached equality in the days of Wilkes and the American War were encouraged to greater zeal, and the bigness of the new shock awakened interest in masses of people who had previously been apathetic. The Industrial Revolution had by this time produced much of the social alteration of which some account has already been given, and the artisans of the North offered a fertile soil for doctrines which had previously fallen on barren ground. Political speculation now for the first time attracted the serious attention of the governing class. The new thinkers themselves belonged to all ranks, though very few of them were to be found among the aristocracy. They all preached, with more or less ardour, and with a more or less crude application of logic to political conditions, the doctrine that every man had an equal moral right with every other to control his own life. For practical purposes the speculation of these primitive Liberals did not extend beyond male limits. But some, of whom Mary Wollstonecraft was the most conspicuous,[^[100]] even made the same claim for every woman. When only one woman in ten thousand had any substantial intellectual training, it was natural enough that men should give little

thought to their political rights. Until women were sufficiently educated to ask for equality in the State, it was impossible that men should think seriously of granting it. But the French Revolution, though its direct effect on the political condition of women was insignificant, started, in their case as in that of men, a train of events which has borne fruit in more modern times. The emancipation of women from the control of men, which is the most profound of all the social changes of the last fifty years, has been produced by precisely the same changes in social ideas as those which have abolished the political distinctions among sects and classes of men. It is only another part of the process of the emancipation of the individual which is called Liberalism.

The most obvious feature of this early Liberal movement is its neglect of economic questions, and its concentration upon the mere machinery of government. The science of political economy was indeed only in its infancy, and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, had little effect upon practical politicians of any school until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Political argument was therefore conducted in these early stages very largely upon a theoretical basis, and Tories, Whigs, and Radicals contended as mightily about the abstractions of natural rights and sovereignty as the early Churches about the difference between Homoousion and Homoiousion. Almost the only practical grievances alleged against the old system were expensive wars and the maintenance of sinecures. The early Reformers, though the doctrine of laissez faire was not formulated until half a century later, in fact believed it. They were in economics what the Whigs were in politics. They hated the interference of the executive, and they would probably have looked upon attempts to alter economic conditions as meddling, which would restrict the liberty of the citizen and increase the already dangerous influence of the Crown.

This indifference, or rather hostility, to economic reforms was shared by all parties alike. Practically everybody agreed that it was a bad thing for Government to interfere with trade, though few went so far as to condemn the system of Protection.

Arthur Young disliked Government interference as an economist. "All restrictive forcible measures in domestic policy are bad."[^[101]] Burke declared that his opinion was against "an overdoing of any sort of administration, and more especially against this most momentous of all meddling on the part of authority, the meddling with the subsistence of the people."[^[102]] Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations said that "According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to ... I. The duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; II. The duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and III. The duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain, because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society."[^[103]] This was the general opinion of the manufacturers, and in 1806 it was embodied in a Parliamentary Report on industrial conditions: "The right of every man to employ the capital he inherits or has acquired according to his own discretion without molestation or obstruction, so long as he does not infringe on the rights or property of others, is one of those privileges which the free and happy constitution of this country has long accustomed every Briton to consider as his birthright."[^[104]] The aristocracy and the commercial classes alike distrusted an interference which restricted their personal freedom.

The Radicals, who professed to be, and were much more alive to the distresses of the labourers and artisans, were hardly less emphatic. "All government," said Dr. Price, "even within a State, becomes tyrannical as far as it is a needless and wanton exercise of power, or is carried farther than is absolutely necessary to preserve the peace or to secure the safety of the State. This

is what an excellent writer calls 'governing too much.'"[^[105]] "Government," said Godwin, "can have no more than two legitimate purposes, the suppression of injustice against individuals within the community and defence against external invasion."[^[106]] Most of the Radicals were in fact of the middle class, and few of them saw things from the workman's point of view. However far they went, they were careful to maintain the rights of property. "The phrase 'domineering rich' is exceptionable," said Major Cartwright, "as it may, by cavillers, be construed into an attempt to excite the poor to invade the property of the rich. It is not by an invasion of such property that the condition of the poor is to be amended, but by such equal laws as would have a natural tendency to prevent injustice, and to benefit every class of the community."[^[107]] A free Parliament would allow every man an equal chance of obtaining wealth. Neither Cartwright nor any of his associates seems to have considered that, while wealth was accumulated in the hands of a small class, equality, even of opportunity, was impossible without some measure of State interference. What was needed by the working class was the removal of taxes upon food and raw materials, a helpful instead of a degrading Poor Law, the right to combine against their employers, and factory legislation. But the speculators were more concerned to reduce the interference of aristocratic government with the liberty of the middle class than to increase the interference of any sort of government with the working class, and they failed to see that the workmen's grievances were not the same as their own. A man who was wellnigh pressed to death with heavy weights was to be relieved by an improvement in the ventilation of the torture-chamber.

The Radicals[^[108]] thus, in common with the Tories and the Whigs, ignored economic problems, or assumed that they were

incapable of solving them by political action. But their opinions, so far as they went, were Liberal opinions. They made the individual the unit of political society, and denounced all artificial barriers between ranks and classes. In his younger days Cartwright held principles which led directly to Republicanism. In his pamphlet Take Your Choice, which was published in 1776, at the height of the American dispute, he said: "How much soever any individual may be qualified for, or deserve any elevation, he hath no right to it till it be conferred upon him by his fellows.... It is liberty, and not dominion, which is held by divine right."[^[109]] The suffrage must be extended to all adult men. "Personality is the sole foundation of the right of being represented; ... property has, in reality, nothing to do in the case.... It is a very fit object of the attention of his representative in Parliament, but it contributes nothing to his right of having that representation."[^[110]] "We might as well make the possession of forty shillings per annum the proof of a man's being rational, as of his being free."[^[111]]

But Cartwright, though a perfect specimen of the logical politician, and reasoning on principles as purely Republican as those of Paine himself, was a member of the middle class, and enjoyed, during a great part of his life, a substantial income. He openly opposed the followers of Paine, and at a meeting of the Society of the Friends of the People, which he helped to found in 1792, he carried a resolution in favour of King, Lords, and Commons.[^[112]] This Society contained not only Radicals like Cartwright, but Whig Reformers like Grey and the Duke of Bedford. Eventually, the logicians were squeezed out, and the Society became a Whig organization, the least vigorous of all those which worked for reform outside of Parliament. The best of its members were practical politicians, who concentrated on active and notorious abuses like rotten boroughs and the disfranchisement of large towns.[^[113]] Grey worked in

Parliament very steadily, and other representatives of the Society spoke manfully on occasion in both Houses. But as a whole it seems to have done little to arouse the feeling of the country, and it was as vigorous in its condemnation of its more active associates as in its attack upon the common enemy. Its principles were essentially Whig, and not Liberal. "We profess," wrote Lord John Russell, the chairman of the London Society in 1794, "not to entertain a wish 'that the great plan of public benefit which Mr. Paine has so powerfully recommended will speedily be carried into effect,' nor to amuse our fellow-citizens with the magnificent promise of obtaining for them 'the rights of the people in their full extent'—the indefinite language of delusion."[^[114]] So even Fox, though he said that "government originated not only for, but from the people," and "the people were the legitimate sovereign in every community," yet declared himself "a steady and decided enemy to general and universal representation."[^[115]] Sir Francis Burdett and one or two other Members of Parliament took the purely Radical view. But so late as 1818, when, after nearly twenty years of heated agitation, Burdett moved resolutions in favour of manhood suffrage, annual Parliaments, and equal electoral districts, Brougham said on behalf of the official Whig Opposition: "As for universal suffrage, or the doctrine which severed the elective franchise altogether from property, he begged leave to observe that he never had at any time held it as less than the utter destruction of the Constitution."[^[116]] The Whig Reformers were thus distinguished from the Radicals, and as they spoke contemptuously of the extremists, so they were in their turn attacked as lukewarm and time-serving. Even Fox himself did not escape censure, though he was always careful to abstain from recrimination.[^[117]] The real value of the Whigs was that they opposed themselves steadily to all attempts to suspend the ordinary law, to stifle public discussion, and to

govern the country by the arbitrary power of the executive. In this cause Bedford and Grey and Fox were heartily at one, and the various Bills for suspending the Habeas Corpus Act, suppressing or restricting public meetings, and dissolving political associations were always opposed by a compact body of members of both Houses.[^[118]] The few Whigs, who kept their heads in the face of Revolutionary France, aimed at the old Whig objects, the supremacy of Parliament over the executive, and the maintenance of the rule of ordinary law.

When the Society of the Friends of the People had fallen into the hands of the Whigs, Cartwright and Radicals like the Duke of Richmond, Dr. Price, and Horne Tooke found a new outlet for their logical energies in the Society for Constitutional Information, which had been founded in 1780. The members of this Society were infinitely less experienced in practical affairs than men like Grey, and some of their publications show a most pedantic and ludicrous precision of reasoning from abstract principles. Like all abstract politicians, they despised those who were content to advance in opinion by easy stages. "How," asked Cartwright, "shall we speak of the imbecile efforts of our professors of moderate reform—so much in the nature of moderate honesty!—politicians whose abortive conceptions and Sisyphean labours never can command the respect of Parliament, Prince, or People? Can nothing cure these step-by-step Reformists of their insanity?"[^[119]] Their own doctrine was compressed on one occasion into the following remarkable resolutions:

"1. Representation—'the happiest discovery of human wisdom'—is the vital principle of the English Constitution, inasmuch as it is that alone which, in a State too extensive for personal legislation, constitutes Political Liberty.

"2. Political Liberty being a common right, Representation co-extensive with direct Taxation ought, with all practicable equality, to be fairly and honestly distributed throughout the community; the facility of which cannot be denied.

"3. The constitutional duration of a Parliament cannot exceed one year."

The question of the ballot was on this occasion left open, and a prize, consisting of the thanks of the Society, was offered for the best essay on its advantages. The justification of the third proposition is a comical instance of the way in which these theorizing politicians were carried away from practical affairs.

"The truth of the third proposition in the Constitution or this Union is made evident by the following, among other considerations:

"1. An Englishman, at twenty-one years of age, enters on his inheritance, whatever it may be. 2. A greater inheritance descends to every one of us from Right and the Laws than from our Parents; on which maxim Sir Edward Coke (in his second Institute) remarks, 'Right is the best birthright the subject hath; for thereby his goods, land, wife, children, his body, life, honour, and estimation are protected from wrong.' 3. To no other 'Right' than that of a People either personally or representatively making their own Laws, whereby they may be 'protected from Wrong,' can this remark of Sir Edward Coke possibly apply. 4. When Election is withholden for seven years, then all who came of age since the preceding election are kept out of their Inheritance and best Birthright. 5. Even supposing the Representation of our Country were in other respects quite perfect, yet septennial Parliaments would still deprive the whole Nation of its political Liberty for six parts in seven of human life; and triennial Parliaments must have a like effect for two years in every three; whence it follows, that Parliaments of any duration exceeding One Year instead of a protection from, would be an infliction of 'wrong'; contrary to the Constitution, against Right, and destruction of Liberty."

This pedantry would destroy itself: by the application of the same principles it could be proved that a General Election was necessary once a month, or once a week, or once a day. But the real objection is that which these a priori Reformers constantly overlooked, the fact that a Constitution is after all only

a machine contrived for certain practical ends of government, that it must be arranged upon a basis of convenience, and that infinitely greater hardship could be inflicted upon the country by interrupting trade for one month in every twelve and spending a million pounds in unproductive ways, than by forcing a small portion of the population to abstain from voting even until it was as much as twenty-eight years old.

These doctrines being based upon pure logic, and not upon practical convenience, were naturally made applicable to all peoples without distinction. "All being pure and genuine," said Cartwright, "the result will be, a strict unity of form universally applicable; and exhibiting its subject, political liberty, as evidently a common right and inheritance of every people or nation; for to talk of English liberty, and French or Spanish or Italian liberty, as different in nature is contrary to reason."[^[120]] It is easy to understand why men like Fox and Grey, accustomed to grapple with the affairs of men who were swayed by prejudice, tradition, interest, by everything but reason, were contemptuous of political theories of this sort. No one who has been engaged in active politics can fail to understand that men are infinitely variable, and that what suits one race will not suit another. There was really only one problem to consider. Given a society with a known history, composed of human beings of a known character, and distributed among known conditions, what form of government was best suited to their case? Origin, character, social and economic distribution, and past history, are all different in different peoples, and political institutions will inevitably differ also. The Radicals were far enough away from real life. But with all their incapacity for politics, they performed the great service of preaching the political importance of individuality.

More influential than they were Tom Paine and his followers. These had fewer men of experience in their ranks, they had less respect for existing institutions, and they were as bitterly contemptuous of pioneers like Cartwright as the pioneers in their turn were contemptuous of the Whigs in Parliament.

Cartwright clung to King, Lords, and Commons, the Established Church, and administration by men of property and rank. Paine was a Republican, a theist, and a social reformer. The one had influence among the aristocracy, the gentry, the manufacturers, and the forty-shilling freeholders. The other was popular with the artisans and tradesmen. But in general habit of mind the two men were very similar. The differences were differences of class. Both belonged to the same species. They were equally destitute of the historic sense, and equally incapable of understanding that institutions must grow and change with society, and cannot be praised or condemned according as, at any particular moment, they do or do not correspond with the needs of the people who work them. Both pushed theory to logical conclusions, irrespective of the course of events in the past or the practical difficulties of the present. Of the two, Paine had more political capacity. He had more genuine understanding of the character of his audience, and his influence was infinitely more widespread than that of any of the older men. Burke's French Revolution drew a volley of books and pamphlets from his opponents. The Vindiciæ Gallicæ of Sir James Mackintosh was the best of these. But Mackintosh, no less that Dr. Price, Mrs. Macaulay, and Mary Wollstonecraft, was outwritten and outsold by Paine. Of the French Revolution 19,000 copies were sold in twelve months. In the same period Paine sold more than 40,000 copies of the First Part of the Rights of Man.[^[121]]

This famous book is marked by many of the vices of extreme opinions. Its reading of events in France, in some of which Paine had taken part, was far more accurate than that of Burke's treatise. Paine avoided the mistake of taking the Revolution to be a mere outbreak of capricious violence, and gave due weight to the intellectual revolution which had preceded it, and to the economic distress which aggravated it. But though he knew France better than Burke, he had not Burke's grasp of the idea of growth, of the necessity of development rather than of reconstruction in politics, and he could not understand that an institution, which

was now useless or detrimental, might, in an older system, have been necessary to the existence of society. Such phrases as Burke's "chain and continuity of the commonwealth" had no meaning for him. Everything was to be cut off and begun afresh. "Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations which preceded it."[^[122]] "When we survey the wretched condition of man, and the monarchical and hereditary systems of government, dragged from his home by one power, or driven by another, and impoverished by taxes more than by enemies, it becomes evident that those systems are bad, and that a general revolution in the principle and construction of governments is necessary."[^[123]] Paine is here not unlike the surgeon in Mr. Shaw's play, for ever eager to plunge his knife into the vitals of the patient, without knowing either the history of the disease or the chances of its cure. How much wiser is Burke's "I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases. A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it, but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman." Paine's prophecies were as extravagant as his reading of history was inaccurate. "I do not believe," he said, "that monarchy and aristocracy will continue seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries in Europe."[^[124]] After one hundred and twenty years Portugal alone has attempted to follow the example of France, and it was eighty years before even France expelled its last despot.

The truth lay midway between the two extremes. Burke was right in theory and wrong in facts. Paine was right in facts and wrong in theory. Paine was deceived by the events of his own time. He had personally assisted at the making of two new

constitutions, and he exaggerated the ease with which others might be made like them. This violent plucking out of ancient loyalties seemed normal, when in fact it was altogether abnormal. In America, separated from the old world and its old habits, the process had been comparatively easy. In France, as subsequent events proved, it was of enormous difficulty. Men who habitually build their houses on the sites of abated earthquakes are not in a day to be twisted out of their habit of submitting to illogical things like kings and nobles and Churches. Nor is it often servility or credulity which produces that submission. In the vast majority of cases it is only that they accept that to which they have been accustomed, and require some outrageous provocation to make them change. This was incredible to Paine. What was unreasonable was fraudulent, and what was fraudulent to-day had always been fraudulent. "It is impossible that such Governments as have hitherto existed in the world would have commenced by any other means than a total violation of every principle, sacred and moral. The obscurity in which the origin of all the present Governments is buried implies the iniquity and disgrace with which they began."[^[125]] The obscurity seems a little less dense to us, and the King and the Church appear as necessary in their proper order to the consolidation of society and its advance out of barbarism. To Paine the early king was only the head of a band of robbers, and the early Church was contrived only to maintain him in power by investing him with superstitious terrors. He assailed monarchy and aristocracy with a variety of scornful epithets: "Nobility means No-ability." "Titles are but nicknames." "France has outgrown the baby-cloaths of Count and Duke, and has breeched itself in manhood." "The difference between a republican and a courtier with a respect to monarchy is that the one opposes monarchy, believing it to be something, and the other laughs at it, knowing it to be nothing." "As to who is king in England or elsewhere, or whether there is any king at all, or whether the people choose a Cherokee chief, or a Hessian hussar, for a king, it is not a matter

that I trouble myself about." "The House of Brunswick, one of the petty tribes of Germany." "The splendour of a throne ... is made up of a band of parasites living in luxurious indolence out of the public taxes." "Monarchy is the master-fraud, which shelters all others." A torrent of these gibes and sneers at things which to the ordinary man and woman of comfortable surroundings were hardly less than sacred, roused against Paine all that horror and aversion which in our own day has been inspired by Mr. Lloyd George.

But the most disturbing part of Paine's book was not its epithets, but its doctrine. Before him Radicals had argued more or less directly from the assumption of natural rights that every man is invested at his birth with rights against his neighbours, and that political constitutions must be based upon these rights. The theory of natural rights came from Rousseau, and the French Revolution claimed to be a practical consequence of it. Paine brought it over from France in its crude simplicity, and preached it more forcibly and more effectively than it had ever been preached before. It was based on a false historical assumption. Every account of the creation agreed that men are all born equal, of the same degree, and endowed with equal natural rights. These, natural rights were the foundation of all his civil rights. "Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others. Civil rights are those which appertain to man in right of his being a member of society. Every civil right has for its foundation some natural right fore-existing in the individual, but to the enjoyment of which his individual power is not, in all cases, sufficiently competent. Of this kind are all those which relate to security and protection." The basis of liberty is contained in the first three articles of the Declaration of Rights of the French National Assembly, the whole of which Paine quotes in full and declares to be "of more value to the world than all the laws and statutes that have yet

been promulgated." The first of these articles, if true, destroys every one of the distinctions of class and creed which were dear to eighteenth-century England. "Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public utility." It followed from this premise that no one class had any right to impose laws upon the rest of the community without their consent. The nation must be the source of sovereignty, and no individual or body of men could be entitled to any authority which was not expressly derived from it. Monarchy, aristocracy, the Established Church, the territorial system, and primogeniture, everything which gave artificial advantages to one man over his neighbour, must be swept away. Given the first assumption that all men are born equal, the rest follows as a matter of course.

It is as easy to refute the doctrine as to state it. It is not historically true that men are or ever have been born equal. It is not logically true that a man is born with any rights or can ever acquire any except with the consent of his associates. The historical basis must appear absurd to any one who is acquainted with the theory of evolution and the early history of family and tribal organization. The logical basis must appear equally absurd to any one who is acquainted with the nature of a right. It is impossible to conceive of such a thing as an abstract right apart from definite human relationships. A right cannot exist in the air. It cannot even attach to an isolated individual. A right is always a right against some other, and postulates the association of its possessor with at least one other human being. How can we with any propriety speak of the rights of Robinson Crusoe before the arrival of Friday? The powers of Crusoe were at first limited solely by physical considerations. When he took Friday under his protection he acquired certain rights as against Friday, and at the same time Friday acquired certain rights as against him. But this is only to say that the natural power of each to do as he pleased, hitherto limited only by natural forces, was thereafter limited also by certain rules of conduct, recognized by both for observance so long as their

mutual relations continued. The extent of those limits could only be defined by their agreement. These are all the rights which any man can ever possess, even in the most complex society. A right is nothing more or less than a defined natural power. It may vary in the degree of its definition. It may be enforced by all the authority of the whole community, and be called a legal right. It may be enforced only by the pressure of the opinion of the community or of a class, and be called a moral right. In neither case is it a thing of spontaneous generation. It arises always out of the relations of human beings with each other, and may always be tempered and qualified by the nature of their relations.

Paine's mistake lay simply in using the word "natural" instead of the word "moral." To assert that a man has a natural right to control his own government is to assert what is demonstrably false. To assert that a man has a moral right to control his own government is to assert simply that in the writer's opinion a man ought to be allowed to control his own government, and the dispute is simply about a particular problem of ethics. Substitute the one word for the other in the passage above quoted, and what is now a false statement of fact becomes a reasonable, if not an unanswerable, argument. The quarrel between Paine and Burke, so far as it was a practical quarrel and not merely a quarrel about terms, was a quarrel about the precise manner in which certain common ethical principles should be enforced. Government is merely the organization of human beings for certain common purposes, and the structure is to be adapted solely to the execution of those purposes. If a particular scheme means the abuse of one section of the community by another, one of the ends of government, the protection of all the human beings concerned, is not achieved, and the scheme, if possible, should be altered. Once we come to the conclusion, upon ethical principles, that every human being ought to have an equal chance with every other of developing himself, it follows, not as a logical deduction, but simply as a matter of practical convenience, that one class ought not to be entrusted with the control of

others. A constitution in itself has no merit. Its only value is as a piece of working machinery, and it is to be tested not by the degree of its conformity to abstract principles, but by its practical effects.

Burke himself, in fact, destroyed his whole argument against "natural rights," not as a proposition of logic, but as a basis of political action. He admitted that men had certain "real" rights: "to justice," "to the fruits of their industry and to the means of making their industry fruitful," "to the acquisitions of their parents, to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring, to instruction in life, and to consolation in death." But what is the difference between these "real" rights of Burke and the "natural" rights of Paine? How are these rights created and maintained, but by public opinion and current ideas of morality? And if these, why not others? "It is a thing," said Burke, "to be settled by convention." Tom Paine meant nothing else. But when Burke said, "As to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the State, that I must deny to be amongst the direct, original rights of man in civil society," Paine might have asked in what respect rights to justice and to the fruits of industry differed from rights to control government. If the rules of justice are defined by Government so that it becomes difficult, tedious, and expensive, how is the poor man to exercise his right to justice? If Government taxes the raw material of his industry, is not his right to the fruits of it being impaired? In his Present Discontents Burke had described clearly enough the consequences of absolute power, the corruption of the governor and the oppression of the governed. If government remains in the hands of a class, it will inevitably be conducted in the interests of that class, and the rules of justice and the regulation of industry will be contrived according to its interests and not according to those of the general community. In other words, the rights of the rest of society, however real, direct, and original, are always liable to be diminished or destroyed by the caprice of their governors.

Burke's admissions lead as inevitably to universal suffrage as the false assumptions of Paine.

It must not be assumed that Paine was a mere theorizer. So far as the interests of the mass of the people were concerned, he was the most practical of reformers. Tories and reactionary Whigs appealed to "the glorious Revolution of 1688."[^[126]] Cartwright and the Radicals deduced liberty from abstract hypotheses without considering to what practical uses liberty was to be put. Paine came boldly forward with definite proposals for social reforms, and it was this practical application of his principles which made him to be detested where Cartwright was only despised. It was bad enough to assail aristocracy. Words could hardly express the feelings with which comfortable people listened to his attacks upon property. These would seem moderate to a generation which has grown accustomed to Socialism, as a creed if not as an institution, and his proposals were little more drastic than those of the present Liberal Government. He advocated graduated death duties, old-age pensions, maternity grants, the right to work, and international agreement for the limitation of armaments.[^[127]] It is true that the language of his proposals was anything but reckless. He was far from being an advocate of violent methods. "It is always better to obey a bad law, making use at the same time of every argument to show its errors and procure its repeal, than forcibly to violate it; because the precedent of breaking a bad law might weaken the force, and lead to a discretionary violation of those which are good."[^[128]] "The right of property being secured and inviolable, no one ought to be deprived of it, except in cases of evident public necessity, legally ascertained, and on condition of a previous just indemnity."[^[129]] This is the language of temperance. But the owners of property have little capacity for reflection when their interests are attacked. They are seldom concerned to examine the justice

of any infringement of their privileges, and they find it difficult to distinguish between taxation and spoliation, between appeals to natural justice and the negation of law. Paine's adversaries did not believe in natural rights. But they believed in what were far worse. They believed in natural wrongs. It was monstrous to suggest that all men were entitled to equal opportunities. But it was quite reasonable that the vast majority should be kept in a situation where they could not be confident even of a bare subsistence. The good cause, if not the logical reasoning, was Paine's. The right to property is, like all his "natural" rights, or the "real" rights of Burke, a moral right, and its extent is to be determined upon the same principles as every other. Violent disturbances of it are bad, as violent disturbances of every right are bad, not because they are disturbances, but because they are violent. There is nothing more essentially vicious in a criticism of property in land or machinery than in a criticism of property in a negro. As Burke said, "It is a thing to be settled by convention."

Paine's suggestions for social reform were of little immediate importance, and it was a hundred years before the first of them, a graduated death duty, was passed into law. His value in his own day lay, not in his practical proposals, but in his insistence upon the equal value of individuals in the State. What the Whigs had practised partially and obscurely Paine preached universally and with precision. His Rights of Man was the principal textbook of the new school of politicians, who, by basing their politics upon individuality instead of class, eventually transformed the English theory of government. The Reformers found government the profession of a few families of landed proprietors, at the best prevented from active abuse by an imperfect system of representation of classes. They made it a thing of trust and responsibility, for which every man must prove his competence by his readiness to act directly for the benefit of those whom he governed. They found it an incident in the lives of men of leisure. They made it an expression of the life of men of all ranks alike. Omitting the false historical

assumption, there is nothing substantially untrue in Paine's contrast of the old spirit with the new. "Government on the old system was an assumption of power, for the aggrandizement of itself; on the new, a delegation of power for the common benefit of society."[^[130]]

These new principles did not appear on the surface of politics until forty years later, and not a single institution was in the interval altered in the direction of Liberalism. The Whig Opposition broke into pieces, and the majority joined the Tories.[^[131]] The Church of England found itself for once allied with the Wesleyans, whose Christianity was as much repelled by Paine's Age of Reason as its own aristocratic temper was repelled by his Rights of Man. The governing class was driven into a paroxysm of fear and rage by Paine's triple assault on aristocracy, property, and orthodox religion, and every Conservative instinct was roused in its defence. Every Reformer, moderate and extreme, was involved together in one denunciation. Their opinions admittedly came from France, and every atrocity which had taken place in France was due to those opinions. Voltaire was an atheist. Rousseau was a profligate. The French aristocracy had been massacred. The French Church had been stripped of its possessions. The French landed proprietors had been spoiled. All this had been done in the name of the rights of man. The English Reformers believed in the rights of man. These had been proved by events in France to be incompatible with law, order, religion, and morality. All who valued these must unite in their defence against the deadly opinions. Belief in the rights of man marked an Englishman like a contagious disease. Atheists, Theists, and Christians, Trinitarians and Unitarians, Churchmen and Dissenters, Reformers, Radicals, and Republicans, landowners, manufacturers, and artisans, people who believed in vested interests and people who did not, all were Jacobins, and all were swept away in one turbid flood of unreasoning invective.

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

The controversy was not allowed to remain a mere matter

of words. Both sides set themselves to organize machinery for the dissemination of their opinions. The Radicals used the Society for Constitutional Information. The extremists established the Corresponding Society, whose branches, composed chiefly of the middle and working classes, corresponded with similar societies in France, held meetings and published their resolutions in the newspapers, and industriously circulated copies of the Rights of Man. So vigorous were their operations that a Royal Proclamation was issued in May, 1792, denouncing these "wicked and seditious writings" and correspondence with "persons in foreign parts," and exhorting all subjects of the Crown to discourage them.[^[135]] In November the Tories formed an Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, which declared that "It appears from history and observation, that the inequality of rank and fortune in this happy country is more the result of every man's own exertions than of any controlling institution of the State. Men become great who have greatly distinguished themselves by the application of talents natural or acquired; and men become rich who have persevered with industry in the application to trade and commerce, to manufactures, and other useful employments."[^[136]] Such language was hardy enough in a society where public dignities were monopolized by a few families, whose inherited wealth was augmented as often by jobbery as by industry. The Association seems to have acted as a private detective agency and sent reports and secret information to the Government. But the honours of agitation rested, as usual, with the reforming party. If their success was small, it was due less to the private efforts of their opponents than to the superior resources of the Government itself.

It is difficult to discover how widely the new ideas had spread by the end of the century. The war with France, which lasted almost continuously from 1793 to 1815, probably drew off much of the national enthusiasm. A foreign war is always favourable to the enemies of domestic liberty, and however much their distresses may drive common men to hate their governors, they generally hate them less than the national enemy. Industrious as they were, the agitators were too closely identified with France to be popular, and it was not till the end of the war that the middle and working classes as a whole began to lend them a favourable ear. In the meantime, they were regarded by the Government as infinitely more powerful than they really were, and for thirty years they worked in constant danger of imprisonment or transportation. They had been depressed, in common with Whigs like Fox and Grey, by the ferocity of the French mobs. But the invasion of France by the Duke of Brunswick and the complete victory of the new national Government, restored their confidence at the same time as it reawakened the terrors of the Tories. The most trifling expressions of sympathy with the French people or their principles exposed them to spies and informers and zealous loyalists.[^[137]] On the 8th May James Ridgway and H. D. Symonds were sentenced to four years' imprisonment for publishing Paine's works. On the 27th, for saying in a coffee-house, "I am for equality; I see no reason why one man should be greater than another; I would have no king, and the constitution of this country is a bad one," Mr. Frost was struck oft the roll of attorneys and sentenced to an hour in the pillory and six months in Newgate. On the 1st October Mr. Pigott and Dr. Hudson were tried for drinking "The French Republic" in a coffee-house. At Leicester a man called Vaughan distributed a handbill criticizing the war because it inflicted hardship on the poor. He was sent to prison for three months. Benjamin

Bull distributed the Rights of Man at Bath, and was imprisoned for a year.[^[138]] Paine himself was tried for seditious libel in 1792, and in his absence was outlawed. But the most ferocious punishments were inflicted in Scotland. In England, short of high treason, there was no legal offence possible except sedition or seditious libel, for which the punishment was a term of imprisonment. In Scotland the offenders might be transported. In September, 1793, the Rev. Thomas Fysche Palmer, Unitarian minister at Dundee, for publishing an address couched in very temperate language, from which it was proved that he had struck out some more extravagant expressions, was sentenced to seven years' transportation. The Whigs in Parliament protested against this monstrous sentence. But the House, by a large majority, refused even to compel the Home Secretary to detain the convict ship pending its revision.[^[139]] In the same year Thomas Muir, a gentleman of acknowledged respectability, was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation for an offence of as trivial a kind as that of Mr. Palmer.[^[140]] Other Reformers, chiefly members of Corresponding Societies, met at Edinburgh in December, 1792, in what they rashly called a "National Convention." This consisted of delegates from Societies all over the kingdom. It passed resolutions, appointed committees, and acted as a permanent body of political delegates is accustomed to act, in order to further the cause of Parliamentary Reform. There was nothing violent in the objects, the proceedings, or the language of the Convention, which passed a resolution in favour of government by King, Lords, and Commons without a single dissentient voice.[^[141]] But the French Revolution had begun by the meeting of a "Convention," and the delegates, in addition to selecting that unfortunate title, presented an address to the French National Convention, and habitually addressed each other, in imitation of the French, as "citizens." This was

enough for the Government. A representative body, with a French title, in communication with the French Government, and using French forms of speech, must meditate that sort of revolution which had been contrived by the French people. It fell upon the delegates with all the ferocity of despotism in a panic. William Skirving, Maurice Margarot, and Joseph Gerald were transported for fourteen years, and Alexander Callender was outlawed. English juries were less frantic than Scottish. The members of the London Corresponding Society had done similar acts in England. But in 1794, when several of them, including Horne Tooke, were tried for high treason, all were acquitted.

The precise details of all these proceedings, and the widespread suffering which they caused, are not important for this book. It is enough to state here that there was much expression of discontent, and that the Government dealt with it in the worst possible way. The wise course was to detach the respectable agitators from the agitators who were not respectable by substantial improvements in the franchise and the distribution of seats. But the Government were incapable of drawing distinctions, and, by confounding all sorts of discontent in their repression, alienated and embittered even those whom they had it in their power to conciliate. Evidence of any general conspiracy to alter the existing order by violent means there is none. Nothing was ever published on behalf of the Government itself which proved anything but constitutional and orderly expressions of dissatisfaction, with occasional outbreaks of reckless language and exceedingly rare instances of such acts as the purchase or manufacture of weapons.[^[142]] There were no collections of arms, no riots, except such as were purely industrial, and no demonstrations of force. Not a single life was ever taken or attempted by the Reformers, and the only dangerous political disturbance of the

period was the outbreak of the Tory mob, who looted and burnt the houses of Dissenters and Radicals at Birmingham. But the governing class was afraid, and in its fear it struck out blindly at everything which it disliked.

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

Therefore they were as guilty as the criminals themselves. In effect, all organized political agitation was suppressed.

All these measures were steadily opposed by the small body of Parliamentary Whigs who had not lost their belief in free government. Fox, Grey, and Whitbread in the Commons, and Bedford, Lansdowne,[^[143]] Moira, and Lauderdale in the Lords, denounced every restriction upon the right of free discussion, and at huge meetings at Copenhagen House and in Palace Yard they protested against the Treason and Sedition Bills. They were not in sympathy with the extremists, who often attacked them as bitterly as the Tories themselves. There is nothing so obnoxious to violent opinions as moderation. It seems to add hypocrisy to wickedness. But to those who can see historical events in proportion the good service of this handful of statesmen is beyond question. They maintained the purely Liberal view that toleration is not to be confined to opinions of which we ourselves approve. "All political libels," said Fox, "he would leave to themselves; discussions on government, so far as they did not interfere with private character, he would permit to pass entirely unrestrained."[^[144]] "The best security of a Government," said Tierney, "is in the free complaints of a people."[^[145]] "The safety of the State," said Grey, "could only be found in the protection of the liberties of the people.... There never was an extensive discontent without great misgovernment. The people ought to be taught to look to Parliament with a confident expectation that their complaints would be heard, and protection afforded to them. When no attention was paid to the calls of the people for relief, when their petitions were rejected, and their sufferings aggravated, was it wonderful that at last public discontents should assume a formidable aspect?"[^[146]] Protests sometimes became threats. Fox declared in 1795 that if the Treason and Sedition Bills were carried into law, the propriety of resistance to government would no longer be a matter of morality but of prudence only, and in this he was supported by Sheridan and Grey.

These Whigs at least contrived to see the popular point of view, and would have suffered opinions which they would do nothing to promote. The Tories saw no point of view but their own. They hated free discussion, because they saw that it meant the end of the institutions which they cherished. Discussion was to them only a stage on the way to rapine and murder. It made, therefore, no difference whether discussion were honest and orderly or not. They were resolute to maintain existing establishments, and the most constitutional of critics was as much a public enemy as the most ferocious of rebels. They drew no distinction between agitation and revolution. They inquired into discontents, but only into their extent and not into their causes. They applied violent remedies, not to the real disease, but to its symptoms. The patient was noisy, and they beat him for being noisy, when they ought to have cured the fever which produced his delirium. The vice of their system lay not so much in their suppression of disorder as in their neglect of reform. Order must be maintained by government, even when the breach of it is the fault of government. But it must be accompanied by redress of grievances. It is the business of a statesman to manage his people, not to compel them, and however necessary it may sometimes be for him to enforce the law, it remains the weakest, and should always be the last of his instruments. It is useless for him to maintain order unless it is accompanied by goodwill. Some men may be constitutionally so disaffected that nothing can appease them. But the majority can always be satisfied by a generous treatment of their grievances. Even after the crisis of the Revolution Pitt might have made the state of England more happy than it was. But what he did not do was not so important as what he had not done. He believed in Parliamentary Reform, in Catholic Emancipation, in the relief of Dissenters, in Free Trade. He was in power from 1783 to the outbreak of the Revolution, and might have conciliated the middle class and the Irish, diminished public corruption, stimulated industry, and reduced the cost of living. This would not have prevented all discontent. But it would have confined it to its essential and irreducible minimum.

Whether this inaction was due to his own lethargy or the incurable selfishness and stupidity of his associates and supporters, it was undoubtedly responsible for a large part of his subsequent difficulties. He left heaps of combustible material untouched, and it was his own fault that it caught fire. In this unhappy state, lurching between bitter discontent and savage repression, English liberty struggled through the great war.

The affairs of Ireland furnished another battle-ground for contending principles during this period. The complete subjugation of that country was ended in 1782, when demonstrations of armed force wrested legislative independence from an England surrounded by foreign enemies. The Irish Parliament was left free to make such laws as it pleased for Ireland, and the deliberate destruction of Irish industries in the interest of English ceased for ever. But this independence, though won by the united efforts of all creeds and classes, was the independence of a Protestant oligarchy. The great bulk of the Irish people escaped an external only to submit to an internal tyrant. The Irish Parliament, though patriotic in matters of commerce, was hardly any more indulgent than the English in its religious policy. Catholics were excluded from the Houses at Dublin as vigorously as from those at Westminster, and few important mitigations of their lot were obtained from their own countrymen. In 1792 Catholics were admitted to the Bar, mixed marriages were allowed, and it was made legal for a Catholic to educate his children abroad. In 1793 all public offices were thrown open to them, except seats in Parliament and the highest places in the Army, the Judicature, and the Civil Service. These changes removed the worst disabilities of the upper and middle classes, who had now fewer disabilities than their fellows in England and Scotland, and there was thus exhibited a considerable reduction of Protestant insolence. The supremacy of Pitt in England aroused great hopes that the last stones of the edifice would soon be removed. Catholic emancipation would not have cured all the ills of Ireland, any more than Parliamentary Reform would have cured all the ills of England. An excessive population,

crowded into agriculture by the destruction of manufactures, demoralized by landowners who were too often thriftless or absentees, and deprived of education by the laws which prohibited teaching by Catholic priests or laymen, was in a condition which mere political reforms could do little to improve. What Catholic disabilities did was to poison economic discontent by the memories of racial and religious persecution. The conduct of the English Government of the day was dangerously uncertain. The hopes of the Catholics were roused in 1794 by the appointment of Lord Fitzwilliam as Lord-Lieutenant. Fitzwilliam was notoriously in favour of the Catholic claims, even though he was not authorized to make any promises on behalf of the Government. He was too open in his professions of sympathy, and when Protestant bigotry procured his recall, the apparent treachery only aggravated the bitterness of old subjection. Catholic resentment and Protestant arrogance soon brought matters to a crisis. Neither party gained credit from the rising of 1798. The excesses of the magistrates and the troops before, during, and after the fighting were often of mediæval atrocity, and the retaliation of the rebels cannot be justified, though it is amply explained by the character of the provocation. This fearful outbreak in the middle of the French War satisfied the English Government that only by a Union could Ireland be kept in peace. The good effects of the recent concessions had vanished in this whirlwind of savagery, and Protestant and Catholic were once more in the temper of the Middle Ages. Mutual goodwill could only be restored by a common tutelage.

There was nothing bad in itself in the plan for a legislative Union. Had it been carried through with a just regard for Irish opinion, and had it been followed by a strict attention to the grievances of the common people, the Union might have been one of the brilliant successes of the English race. In fact it was itself effected by shameful means, and it was followed by misgovernment as fatally unsympathetic as that which had preceded it. English rule in Ireland was less ferocious in the

nineteenth century than in the eighteenth. But it was no less conspicuous a failure. No constitutional machinery can be better than the men who work it, and Englishmen after the Union showed themselves no less unimaginative and egoistic than their predecessors. The objects of the Union were stated by Pitt, with perfect good faith, to be the substitution of government by an impartial authority for government by a faction which was steeped in the memories of old oppression. "An impartial Legislature standing aloof from local party connection, sufficiently removed from the influence of contending factions to be advocate or champion of neither, being so placed as to have no superstitious reverence for the names and prejudices of ancient families, who have so long enjoyed the exclusive monopolies of certain public patronages and property ... this is the thing that is wanted for Ireland."[^[147]] That was what was wanted for Ireland. What it obtained was a Legislature as partial, as inextricably involved in local party connection, and as closely wrapped about with superstitious reverence for ancient families and their patronages and property as could have been contrived. For half a century at least the government of Ireland remained what it has always been in the hands of England, government by armed force, in the interests of the landlords against the tenants, of the Protestants against the Catholics. A system which Pitt devised as a protection against the old abuses was converted into an effective engine for their maintenance. Pitt was himself partly to blame for this disastrous failure. He probably never saw the need for economic reorganization. But he saw clearly enough the need for the ending of religious strife, which poisoned the whole temper of the people and wasted on the jealousies of sects and the hatred of government energy which would otherwise be free to run in healthy and productive channels. His weakness in not pushing on with Lord Fitzwilliam made the rebellion of 1798 inevitable. Similar weakness after the Union made the constitutional change useless. It was undoubtedly part of his original plan to emancipate the Catholics. But the King, the

Church, and Protestant Ireland were too strong for him. Pitt resigned. The Whigs came into office, with a Ministry which was united at least on the Catholic question. The King again had his way, and rather than hold office without fulfilling their Catholic pledges, they resigned in their turn.[^[148]] Pitt's course was clear. He should have refused to come back without permission to do what he thought right. But he preferred the convenience of the King, and accepted office on condition that the Catholic question was left open. This was as effective as a definite refusal. Canning persuaded the House of Commons in 1812, but Eldon in the Lords defeated his colleague's Bill, and until Eldon could be expelled there was no hope for Ireland. The friendly Tories would never unite with the Whigs to defeat the hostile Tories. Nothing was done to solve the problem, and Ireland, for a generation after the Union, was governed by coercion.

Throughout this wretched dispute the Whigs maintained the ancient doctrines of their party with regard to religious disabilities. But the problem aroused controversy about a second conception of more recent growth, the conception of nationality. Burke had tried to treat Ireland as an equal nation for commercial purposes. The Whigs of 1801 extended the idea to its extreme limits. Had the Irish Parliament the right to surrender its powers to a Parliament of the United Kingdom without receiving the approval of its own electors? Unquestionably it had the legal right. Had it also the moral right? The Whigs held that it had not. "What right," asked Sheridan, "has the Irish Parliament to resolve that, instead of going back to their constituents, they shall form part of a foreign legislature?"[^[149]] "The Union," said Fox, "is not an alteration, but a destruction and annihilation of the Irish Constitution. Union therefore, like revolution, cannot be justifiable but by the unequivocal

consent of the people."[^[150]] Pitt opposed this doctrine on the usual Tory ground. It led, he said, immediately "to the system of universal right of suffrage in the people, to the doctrine that each man should have a share in the government of the country by having a choice for his representative; and then goes back to the whole system of Jacobinism."[^[151]]

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

The foreign policy of the Government gave not a few opportunities for expressions of Liberalism. The rights of nationalities were in issue in the beginning of the French War, in the treatment of Ireland, in the descent upon Copenhagen, and in the negotiations which followed the downfall

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

Against a war of this kind the Whigs spoke forcibly and with justice. Lansdowne described it as "a war, the alleged object of which was to repel unprovoked aggressions, but the real one to prescribe laws to an independent country."[^[153]] It was "a metaphysical war; it was declared against France on account of her internal circumstances."[^[154]] Fox said it was no better than the methods of the Inquisition. We were killing people because they thought differently from ourselves. "How could we blame all

those abominable acts of bloodshed and torture, which had been committed from time to time under the specious name of religion, when we ourselves had the presumption to wage a similar war?"[^[155]] It was "the most gross violation of everything sacred which could exist between nation and nation, as striking at the root of the right which each must ever possess of internal legislation."[^[156]] "Whatever our detestation of the guilt of foreign nations may be, we are not called to take upon ourselves the task of avengers; we are bound only to act as guardians of the welfare of those with whose concerns we are immediately entrusted."[^[157]]

This language was wise, and its wisdom was proved by events. The Bourbons were not restored. The temper of the French people was incredibly stimulated. The new system which might have repelled by its violence and rapacity became the centre of the national enthusiasm. It inflicted a crushing defeat upon its foreign invaders and then proceeded to avenge this additional injury by the massacre of those whom the invasion was intended to assist. Whether Napoleon would have appeared in French history or not without this strengthening of the Revolutionary system, it is impossible to say. Certainly the foreign interference with the first Government consolidated the nation, and prepared for Napoleon's use the most formidable weapon that he could have obtained for the braying of Europe. There is a tragic instance of that insight which is not foresight in the correspondence of Castlereagh, and it shows how completely the English Government misunderstood what they had done. "The only thing ... which really dispirits me is, the unprecedented struggle of order against anarchy, and the unfortunate facility with which France recruits her army as fast as the sword exterminates it. A few days transforms their ragamuffins into troops, which are not contemptible even when opposed to the best soldiers in Europe.... It is the first time that all the population and all the wealth of a great kingdom has been concentrated in the field: what may be the result is beyond my perception."[^[158]]

What was going on was that anarchy was being reduced into order within the boundaries of France, and no hatred of early extravagance or subsequent tyranny need blind us to the courage, energy, and skill of those French statesmen who, in the face of their enemies, built up the new system upon the ruins of the old. The war made their task comparatively easy, and if it diminished their strength, it made their material more workable. The foreign invasion operated like a powerful electric current, and fused the scattered particles of French nationalism into a solid bulk. The whole fiery mass of France was being beaten and welded and forged into something which Castlereagh could not understand: a nation, every member of which had a personal interest in and a personal devotion to his nationality. Such a thing had not been known before in France. But it was not long before even Castlereagh was made to feel that in the councils of Europe the rights of man might count for as much as government by orders.

The Whigs carried their maintenance of the equal rights of nationalities to its inevitable conclusion that nations, no less than individuals, must be bound by moral rules in their dealings with each other. Fox declared that "the greatest resource a nation can possess, the sweet source of power, is a strict attention to the principles of justice. I firmly believe that the common proverb of honesty being the best policy is as applicable to nations as to individuals ... and that cases which may sometimes be supposed exceptions arise from our taking narrow views of the subject, and being unable at once to comprehend the whole."[^[159]] When he was almost at the point of death he proceeded to suggest an international congress for settling disputes. "He disapproved ... of any government pursuing under the title of indemnities a system of partition of States, making some republics, some monarchies, and annihilating the political existence of others, without regard to moral rectitude or to the common feelings of mankind, which considerations had more influence on the affairs of the world than some politicians were aware. The partition

of Poland, the seizure of Holland, the subjugation of Switzerland, and the division of States, by the agreement of some, and by the fraud and rapacity of others, had done more to destroy the confidence of mankind in each other than all the other misconduct of the powers put together. In private society, when men lost their confidence in one another, the compact was dissolved. The same rule applied to States, for they were only aggregates of individuals. He recommended to all the powers of Europe a system of justice and moderation, as the only means of putting an end to the evils under which we labour. He recommended a general congress, and that these principles should be prevalent in its deliberations."[^[160]]

These principles of international morality were applied most forcibly to the destruction of the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in 1805. The Danes were not hostile to us, and in common with all the other small peoples of Europe they had every reason to fear Napoleon. The English Government knew that Napoleon intended, if he could, to use the Danish fleet against them. The English fleet accordingly was sent to Copenhagen to demand the surrender of the Danish ships, and on receiving a very natural refusal, destroyed some and carried off the rest. This proceeding is generally treated in English schools as a matter for national gratification. To Liberals it appears a very dangerous abuse of arbitrary power. Contemporary Europe was of the same opinion, and the direct consequence of the affair was to range all the Northern States on the side of Napoleon. We deprived him of the Danish ships, and we threw into his hands the Danish army, and all the forces of Sweden, Norway, and Russia as well. The chorus of denunciation in Parliament was for once not confined to the Whigs. Even Windham said "he would sooner have seen the Danish fleet in Buonaparte's hands than in ours, under all the circumstances of the case."[^[161]] Erskine lamented that the whole course of civilization had been interrupted by this act. "If anything could give delight in reading the history of civilized nations, it was the progressive improvement that was to be traced

in law and civilization amongst the nations of the world. This was the first instance in which the principles of that amelioration had been trampled upon by us."[^[162]] Lord Moira spoke in the same strain. "As long as there was a power in Europe which, from its regard to justice and to the rights of other States, could form a sort of rallying-point to the oppressed, there was some probability that the nations who were groaning under the yoke of a pitiless and inexorable tyrant would have watched for some opportunity, and made some exertion in common to throw it off. Such a power was this country, previous to the late most unjustifiable and unfortunate attack upon Denmark; but by this attack that hope had been completely extinguished."[^[163]] Grey disposed of the argument that reasons of State could justify immorality. "So far from adding to the safety of the country, that point on which its safety most particularly depended, he meant its honour, had not only been greatly weakened, but had in fact received a mortal stab."[^[164]] Prior to this oppression of the Danes, England had had the chance of heading a European movement for emancipation from Napoleon. Every small State might have supported her as a protector, and every large one as an ally against a dangerous rival. After the attack it became for the small States simply a choice between two protectors, either of whom seemed to offer security against the other if not against itself. The exasperation of the moment swung the balance to the side of Napoleon, and England found herself face to face with a hostile Continent.[^[165]]

Fortunately for the country, the Government soon effected a great change in their policy. For the first time they enlisted on their side what the French had had from the beginning, the idea of nationality. The war had entirely changed its character. Beginning as an interference with the internal affairs of the French people, it had merged, since the rise of Napoleon, into a struggle against a power which was as universal in its appetite

as it was unscrupulous in its methods. Against this force, which was so astonishing that it appeared to many pious Christians as Anti-Christ himself, schemes and combinations had proved powerless. England had escaped disaster because she was an island. The rest of Europe, with the exception of Russia, had been beaten to the ground. These dynastic contrivances of kings and emperors wanted the national spirit which supported their adversary. To the common people in many parts of Europe Napoleon appeared as a deliverer from their domestic oppressors, and the little states of Germany and Italy, which he had carved out of the bigger, were ready enough to see a champion of freedom in one who tyrannized only over tyrants. The end began when he deposed a Spanish king and put his own brother on the throne of the proudest and most exclusive nation of Europe. The Peninsular War at last found England in her right place, at the head of a league of nationalities. The Whig Opposition, always weak in numbers, was now broken to pieces. Part of it repeated the old arguments, which applied to everything but the present facts, hailed Napoleon as the champion of liberty, and even expressed regret at his downfall at Waterloo. The wiser men saw at once the significance of the Spanish expedition. Canning was now the Tory Foreign Secretary. He found a hearty supporter in Grey among the Whigs, and both felt an idea in what for Castlereagh was still no more than a matter of business. "Of all the infamies ever incurred by a nation," said Grey, "I think the greatest would have been to have appeared to abandon the Spaniards."[^[166]] "The allies have now been placed by France in the situation in which France was originally placed by the allies. The success of both has been occasioned by the spirit of resistance, produced by injury and oppression; and my great hopes of the present confederacy are chiefly derived from this, that it has arisen rather from the feeling of the peoples than the policy of the Governments which it embraces."[^[167]] The new principle succeeded at last. The Spanish people, with English

help, crippled Napoleon, the Russian people wore him out, and the German people overwhelmed him. In 1815 the victory of Waterloo completed his destruction, and the European peoples had at last leisure to look to themselves.

Comparing the England of 1815 with the England of 1790, the Liberals of the time would find little cause for satisfaction. The economic problems of the country were more acute, and the attempts to remedy them directly by legislation and indirectly by encouraging combinations of workmen had been defeated. A solitary Act of 1802, which did something to regulate the conditions of parish children who had been apprenticed to private employers, was the only measure of protection which had passed into law. Parliamentary Reform and Religious Emancipation seemed more remote than ever. The principle of nationality had been violated in Ireland, and if the recognition of it in the later stages of the war gave some ground for future confidence, hope was soon to be dispelled.

Unhappily for the common people, the spirit of nationality had been used only as a means and not as an end by the various enemies of Napoleon. No sooner was the common enemy destroyed than the victorious monarchs sat down to cut up and distribute Europe among themselves. They had fought, not the French, but the French Revolution, and when the main conflagration had been extinguished, they had still to stamp out the burning embers which had been blown about its borders. The young Republics which had been created were to be restored to their old rulers, and all the ancient monarchies were to be re-established, and where necessary strengthened by the acquisition of new territory. There is something almost ludicrous to modern eyes in the spectacle of these kings and emperors and their chancellors and envoys assigning and allotting human beings, by millions together, without inquiring into the wishes or interests of those with whom they dealt. England participated in the game, and Toryism and Liberalism were again brought into conflict.

The Tory view, expressed by Castlereagh and Liverpool, was hardly less callous than that of the Tzar Alexander himself. There is hardly a word in any of their speeches or dispatches which shows any tenderness for men and women as such. Human beings to them were only subjects. The old form of Europe was to be restored, subject only to such changes as were necessary to strengthen the principal enemies of Revolutionary France. To the balance of power was to be sacrificed all local or national independence. "Upon the subject of Austria and Prussia," wrote Lord Liverpool, "we must always expect a degree of jealousy on the part of every French Government. It is quite essential, however, to any balance of power that these two monarchies should be made respectable. The principle recognized in the early part of this year, that Austria should have a population in the whole of about 27,000,000 of souls, and Prussia one of about 11,000,000, appears to be quite reasonable, and ought to give no umbrage to France."[^[168]] Lord Liverpool wrote of "souls," but if he had been writing of cattle his language would have been no different. Castlereagh was no better. The Congress of Vienna, at which this vivisection of a continent took place, had in his eyes two objects, to check France and to check Russia. Prussia and Austria must therefore be aggrandized. Italy might be the next free people and become as dangerous as France, and the dream of her unity and independence must be subordinated to the necessity of at once strengthening Austria against Russia and of suppressing those small states upon which Napoleon had conferred independence. Venice, an ancient Republic, was handed over to Austria. Lest France should infect Italy, the Genoese Republic must be annexed to the Kingdom of Piedmont. Lest Russia should dominate Sweden, Norway must be taken from Denmark and given to Sweden. In order that Holland might be strengthened against France in the North, she must be allowed to annex Belgium. Prussia must be strengthened, but not too much, and accordingly the Kingdom of Saxony was cut in half. The Poles had been

divided between Russia, Austria, and Prussia in 1792. They now expressed a desire for independence, but in vain.[^[169]] Austria and Prussia must be maintained at all costs. Castlereagh regretted that they should be sacrificed and left them to their fate.