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have provided himself with a wife and child to add to the perplexities of himself and country. When the famine of 1847 at length brought the miseries of Ireland to a crisis, Parliament showed the utter incapacity of its leaders to deal with a national crisis. Sums which might have benefited Ireland for ages, if expended by statesmen worthy of the name, were disbursed so foolishly as to leave not a trace of the generous gift on the face of Ireland a year after. Emigration, also, was still as little understood as it was in 1826; and Parliament stood by helplessly witnessing the yearly exodus of hundreds of thousands of the population. We need not point out the advantage it would have been for us to have directed the main-stream of that migration to our own colonies, rather than to have left it to seek as its nearest port the United States,-seeing that the inhabitants of our colonies are found to consume, per head, about four times as much of our goods as the people of the Union. A State system of emigration would have done this; and it would likewise

have achieved the still more important end of drafting away from Ireland all its pauper population, by making these the exclusive recipients of its gratis aid; instead of which it was, as a matter of course, those who had the money that went away, and those who had not that remained.

Sir Archibald Alison has the following excellent remarks upon this subject; and the views which he here expresses are no after-thought, but have been entertained and discussed by him nearly twenty years ago:

"Admitting that the strength of a State is at all times to be measured by its numbers, coupled with their well-being, what is to be said of the condition of a country which is overrun with paupers, who cannot by possibility find a subsistence, and must, in one way or other, fall as a burden on the more prosperous classes of the community? Emigration, when they have it in their power, is, in such circumstances, their only resource; and if it is left to the unaided efforts of the work

ing classes, what is to be expected, but that the better conditioned of these classes will go off, and leave the destitute and paupers behind? Thus the holders of small capital, whether in town or country, the little farmers, the small shopkeepers, the workmen who have amassed ten or fifteen pounds-in other words, the employers of labour-disappear, and none are left but the rich, who will not, and the poor, who cannot, emigrate. No

state of things can be imagined more calamitous; and it only becomes the more so when measures are in progress through the Legislature calculated to diminish the price of commodities, and consequently lessen the remuneration of industry, and passions afloat among the people which lead them to long passionately for a general, and, it is to be feared, unattainable felicity.

"The common sophism, that it is useless to send the poor abroad, because their place will soon be supplied by others from the impulse given to population at home, admits of a short and decisive answer. It takes a week to send a poor man abroad; it takes twenty years to supply his place. In the interval between the two, the supply of the labourmarket is lessened, and the pressure on the working classes diminished. Even, therefore, if every one sent abroad caused the production of one at home who would not otherwise have come into the world, there is a great gain: the supply is kept twenty years behind the demand occasioned by the removal. But the truth is, that the emigration of the poor, so far from occasioning their reproduction, has a tendency to check it. It is among the utterly destitute that the principle of population always acts with most force, because they are wholly uninfluenced

by the reason and artificial wants which in

more comfortable circumstances restrain it. This has now been decisively demonstrated. Since the great emigration from Ireland began, in 1847, the population, so far from having increased, has declined above 2,000,000; the cotters have got better clothes, better beds, more comforts, higher wages, but not more children."

Let us turn now to England. The fundamental cause of the Reform Bill was the growth of a new class in the community, the rise of a new power in the State. The ruling power in all countries is originally (except where sacerdotal power prevails) the landed interest; and in the earliest times of a nation no other exists. All subsist on the products of the soil; then a few traders, dawning into existence, begin to traverse the country, chiefly with the view of supplying the wants of the chieftains and feudal courts. As the rural society grows richer, and its members more enterprising, trade increases with other countries, and manufactures develop themselves at home. Instead of each

family manufacturing for its own wants, a division of labour takes place, and goes on increasing until every class of articles, except those imported, has a class of operatives attached to it. These various trades, it will be ob

served, are called into existence by that origo primalis, the landed interest. It is by wealth drawn from the land that its magnates become able to purchase the wines and velvets brought by merchants from other countries, and the woollens, arms, and furniture, manufactured at home. And it was the increasing skill of our farmers which, by producing more food from the labour of a like number of men, allowed sections of the community to be drafted from the ranks of agriculture, to engage in trade and commerce. From age to age the skill and industry of our rural population went on increasing, until, at the close of the war, the labour of one-third of the people in the actual operations of the field nearly sufficed to produce food for the other two-thirds engaged in commerce and manufactures (a considerable portion of these trades, however, such as smiths and farriers, bakers, and workers in iron and machinery, &c., being wholly dependent upon the rural population).* It was in the concluding part of last century that domestic manufactures began to cease throughout the mass of the population,-the inventions of the steam-engine, power-loom, and spinning-jenny then causing the erection of large factories, with which it was useless for spinning-wheels or handlooms to attempt to compete. The general enterprise and inventiveness of our nation, backed by the immense coal-deposits of the land, caused this and similar branches of industry to progress with extraordinary celerity; and by 1830 the towns of Manchester and Birmingham had become vast foci of this species of industry, while Glasgow and Liverpool embraced large populations chiefly dependent upon commerce. For while manufactures had thus benefited by our inventiveness, our commerce had benefited in a not

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less remarkable manner from the supremacy of our fleets at sea during the war, when for nearly twenty years the main portion of the carrying trade of the world had been transacted by British merchantmen. Moreover, even as commerce and manufactures arose from the success of our agriculture, so the three united gave birth to a fourth class in the community-namely, the Shopkeepers, who, producing nothing themselves, simply retailed the goods produced or brought into the country by others. And thus the landed interest, like Saturn of old, had brought into existence a succession of offspring nearly equal in power to itself, and which would not fail to take the first opportunity of claiming equal privileges.

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Gathered into towns, quickened in wits, and prone to association, the trading and manufacturing classes possess a greater power of combination than the agricultural, and, being given to clamor, generally exercise a much larger influence in the State than is due to their wealth and numbers. consequence of their great increase since the old parliamentary constitution was framed, these classes were not properly represented in the legislature; and this it was which gave the greatest impetus to, as it formed the justest ground for reform. But other causes came into operation after the close of the war, which, by producing great excitement and discontent in the country, prompted the people towards change, and induced the legislature to adopt greater innovations than they would have done in times of more quietness and wisdom. The Tory party were split, owing to their leaders having acceded to the demand for Catholic Emancipation; while the Whigs. thirsted for office, and prepared to ride back to power on the wild billows of the popular discontent and agitation.

Sir Francis Burdett, speaking in 1826, remarked- "The great and striking proof of the prosperity of the country is comprised in the fact, that, with the small number of hands employed in agriculture, not exceeding a third of the whole, they raise enough to maintain themselves and all the rest in prosperity and abundance; for such, notwithstanding partial and passing visitations, is the general condition of the people of this country. The result of the labours of the agriculturist exhibits a spectacle not equalled in any country in the world, that a third of the inhabitants raise food for double their own numbers besides themselves— a state of things quite unexampled, and which is the real cause of our acknowledged superiority in commerce and manufactures, as well as in the power of capital, over any other nation.... The only reason why England has so large a body of manufacturers, the only reason why she is able to support them, is that her agriculturists produce, with so little labour, comparatively speaking, so much more than is needed for their own consumption."

It was the national suffering that gave success to their projects. "It is a mistake to suppose," says Sir A. Alison, "that political discontent, or an earnest desire for change, either social or religious, is ever excited among the people of this country by mere fickleness of disposition, or the arts of demagogues, how skilful in their vocation soever they may be. That is sometimes the case among a people ardent and changeable, like the French, who have been long excited by the changes of revolution, and among whom large parties have come to look for advancement by its success. But in a peaceable, industrious community, like that of Great Britain, intent on individual well-being and social amelioration, it is in general suffering that the foundation must be laid for the general desire for political change. Demagogues, when the feeling is once excited by this means, often inflame it, and determine the direction which it is to take, but they cannot call the passion into being. All the popularity of the cry for cheap bread, and all the talents of Mr. Cobden, would have failed in bringing about the repeal of the corn laws, had not five bad seasons in succession brought the reality and evils of dear bread home to every family; and all attempts to pacify Ireland while the prices of agricultural produce were unremunerating, were as fruitless as all attempts to disturb it have been since the great emigration, and the opening of the huge banks of issue, by Providence, in California and Australia, have secured an adequate return for rural labour in the Emerald Isle." It was distress which produced the demand for parliamentary reform twenty-five years ago, even as it has been the disasters of last winter's campaign which have originated the present growing movement in favour of Administrative Reform.

In truth there was a great misery in the land. By a plentiful issue of paper-money the nation had prospered during the war, even when, as in 1810, there was hardly a guinea in the country. Reversing the process when peace returned, the legislature caused the greater part of the banknotes to be withdrawn, and the currency again to depend upon gold. The first forerunner of the national distress was the over-trading in the last two years of the war of the export mer

chants, who imagined that, after their long exclusion, the whole Continent · would be thirsting for English goods, and likewise the South American continent, then opened to our commerce by the revolt of the Spanish colonies; but so greatly did they miscalculate, that English goods became a drug in these markets, and were to be bought cheaper at Buenos Ayres, and in the north of Europe, than they could be at home. Simultaneously with this overtrading came the opening of the Baltic ports, and the expected influx of grain from Poland produced a great fall in the price of grain in this country. These circumstances, followed by the very bad harvest of 1816, hurt credit, and of themselves caused bankers to be more chary in advancing money to the producing classes. But the close of the war brought a more alarming influence into operation; for by the Act of 1797 the return to payments in gold was to be delayed until six months after the close of the war, and no longer." Accordingly, no sooner was peace established than the banks began everywhere to contract their issues, refusing further money-accommodation to their customers for fear of being called upon to meet their notes in gold. Every session for the three years after 1815 the question was discussed in Parliament- thus keeping up the general uneasiness on the subject. At length, in 1819, an Act was passed for a speedy return to a gold currency. The measure was singularly ill-timed. "At the moment,' says Alison, "when the annual supplies of the precious metals had been reduced by the South American revolutions to a fourth of their former amount,—when the coin annually issued from the British mint had in consequence sunk from £6,770,000 in 1817 to only £1,500,000, when the drains of gold on the bank, to meet the gigantic loans contracted for in this country for the continental powers, and pay for the immense importations of the year, had reduced the bullion in the bank from £12,000,000 to £3,500,000, — and when the large mercantile transactions recently entered into in this country imperatively required, instead of a contraction, a great increase of the currency, Parliament passed an Act requiring the Bank of England at no distant period to resume cash payments thereby rendering the currency

dependent on the retention of gold, the very thing which, in the circumstances of the country, could not be retained." The effects of this measure, however, were found so embarrassing, that in 1821 a bill was passed permitting small notes to continue part of the currency for ten years longer a measure which, along with the return of gold from the Continent, again expanded the currency, producing three years' prosperity; but the great export of bullion in 1825, in the shape of loans to and speculations in South America, at length brought the country to the verge of bankruptcy, and plunged all classes into embarrassment and suffering.

We shall now attempt in a few sentences to depict the actual state of the country in the memorable period which intervened between 1815 and Mr. the passing of the Reform Bill. Wallace, the able President of the Board of Trade, has left the following picture of the woful condition of the country in the years immediately following the war: -"The general export of the country, in the four years from 1815 to 1819, had decreased £14,000,000; and in the single year following 5th Jan., 1819, the exports fell off no less than £11,000,000. Nobody, therefore, could be surprised that at that period the industry of the country appeared to be in a state of the utmost depression; that our manufacturers were most of them unemployed; that our agriculturists were many of them embarrassed; and that the country, to use the phrase of a friend of his in presenting a petition from the merchants of London, exhibited all the appearance of a dying_nation." Peace had brought greater horrors than war.

Of the effects of the Act of 1819, for resuming cash payments, Sir A. Alison says:

"The industry of the nation was speedily congealed, as a flowing stream is by the seThe alarm beverity of an arctic winter. came universal-as widespread as confidence and activity had recently been. The country bankers, who had advanced largely on the stocks of goods imported, refused to continue their support to their customers, and they were in consequence forced to bring their stock into the market. Prices in consequence rapidly fell that of cotton, in particular, sunk in the space of three months to half its former level. The country bankers' circulation was contracted by no less than five

millions sterling; the entire circulation of England fell from £48,278,000 in 1818, to £40,928,000 in 1820; and in the succeeding year it sunk as low as £34,145,000. The effects of this sudden and prodigious contraction of the currency were soon apparent, and they rendered the next three years a period of ceaseless distress and suffering in the British islands. The accommodation granted by bankers diminished so much, in consequence of the obligation laid upon them of paying in specie when specie was not to be got, that the paper under discount at the Bank of England, which in 1810 had been £23,000,000, and in 1815 not less than £20,660,000, sunk in 1820 to £4,672,000, and in 1821 to £2,676,000. The effect upon prices was not less immediate or appalling. They sunk in general, within six months, to half their former amount, and remained at that low level for the next three years. The three per cents, which had been at 79 in January, gradually fell, after the Bank Restriction Act passed, to 65 in December; and the Bankruptcies, which had been 86 in January, rose in May to 178; the total in the year was 1,499, being an increase of 531 over the preceding year."

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Distress, as usual, brought sedition. The latter end of 1819 and beginning of 1820 witnessed the trial of Hunt for sedition-the Cato-street conspiracy led by Thistlewood,-the riots and fight of Peterloo in England,—and an extensive insurrection in the West of Scotland. The country was on the verge of revolution. The great firmness and energy of Lord Sidmouth, who was well styled a Wellington on home service," joined to the loyalty of the yeomanry and volunteers, averted the danger; and a temporary expansion of the currency between 1822 and 1825 cast a gleam of passing prosperity over the land. But as the principle had now been adopted of making the quantity of paper-money in circulation depend upon the amount of gold in the bank, and as gold poured out of the country in 1825, the whole fabric of prosperity was brought down with a terrific crash at the end of that year. The year 1826 opened amidst misery greater than ever. All classes were suffering alike; the banks, struck with terror from the numerous failures which had taken place, could hardly be prevailed upon, by any terms or securities, to make advances to their customers; the merchants, dreading the continued fall in the prices of commodities, declined entering into speculations; the manufacturers, finding their usual orders se

riously diminished, contracted their operations; and the workmen, thrown out of employment, became desperate, and vented their despair upon the machinery, which they imagined was the prime cause of their suffering. "It was a woful sight to see the streets of Manchester, and the chief towns in the vicinity, filled with vast crowds, sometimes ten thousand in number, whose wan visages and lean figures but too clearly told the tale of their sufferings. Snatching their food from bakers' shops, breaking into factories, and destroying power-loom mills, and throwing stones at the military at the hazard of being shot, rather than relinquish an object on the attainment of which they sincerely believed their very existence depended. Serious riots took place in Carlisle, in the course of which a woman and child were shot dead; and in Norwich, where twelve thousand weavers were employed, an alarming disturbance, attended with great violence, ensued." In all the iron districts, too, strikes to arrest the fall of wages took place; and in Dublin and Glasgow immense crowds of operatives paraded the streets, entreating relief, which was, in some degree, afforded them by munificent subscriptions opened by the wealthy classes, and which, being judiciously laid out in the purchase of the fabrics of these poor people, instead of being merely given as money-gifts, relieved distress to triple the amount it would otherwise have done. Political riots must be quelled by force, but the riots of want require also the intervention of the wealth and sympathy of the better classes. The ladle of the soup-kitchen, in such circumstances, will be found a more efficient instrument than either the bayonet of the soldier or the baton of the police.

The agricultural population was not exempt from the general suffering. For fifteen years preceding the introduction of the Reform Bill, petitions expressing the distress of the rural districts, and demanding relief, had been unceasingly presented to Parliament. But neither the petitioners nor the Legislature (with the exception of Mr. Baring, and a few others) perceived that the root of the misery lay in the state of the currency; and the Committees, while acknowledging the distress, reported that they could suggest nothing to remedy it. Accordingly, discontent at existing institutions and the desire for change became even more

general among the farmers and landholders than among the urban popula. tion; and the question was often put in the form of an algebraic problem — "Given, the Toryism of a landed proprietor; required, to find the period of want of rents which will reduce him to a Radical reformer." Many of the numerous county petitions had warned the Government, that if relief were not afforded, it would be impossible to prevent the rural population from breaking into acts of violence; and, in 1830, the warning was seen to have been wellfounded. The disturbances began in Kent, from whence they rapidly spread to Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Buckinghamshire. Night after night new conflagrations were lighted up by bands of incendiaries; corn-stacks, barns, farm buildings, and live cattle were indiscriminately consumed. Bolder bands attacked mills and demolished machinery, thrashingmills being in an especial manner the object of their hostility. During Oetober and November these acts of incendiarism became so frequent as to excite universal alarm. The first rioters who were seized were, from feelings of humanity, treated with undue lenity by the county magistrates, which naturally augmented the disorders; and it was not till severe examples were made, by a Special Commission sent into the disturbed districts, and a large body of military quartered in them, that they were at length put down. Distress, joined to the influence of the Paris revolution, and the example of similar acts of agrarian outrage in Normandy, was making even the English peasantry Jacobins; and the Duke of Richmond only stated the truth when he said in Parliament "I believe a feeling now exists among the labouring classes, that your lordships and the upper classes of society are to be regarded rather as their foes than their friends."

Parliament had been prorogued with a view to a dissolution, on the 23rd July 1830; and the very day after the proclamation dissolving Parliament appeared in the Loudon Gazette, the famous ordinances were signed by Charles X., and the contest began in the streets of Paris, which terminated in the overthrow of the French monarchy! This coincidence of events had an important influence on the English elections; and the spread of liberalism and desire for political change, as well as the irrita

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