FOOTNOTES:
Addington had been created Lord Sidmouth long before this, but to avoid confusion his better-known name is still used.
See page [409].
Lambeth, Greenwich, Marylebone, Finsbury, Tower Hamlets.
CHAPTER XL.
CHARTISM AND THE CORN LAWS.
1832-52.
Fears excited by the Reform Bill.
The struggle over the Reform Bill had been so fierce, and the change in the House of Commons caused by it had been so sweeping, that it was generally supposed at the time that the immediate consequences of the triumph of the Whigs would be very marked and startling. The Tories prophesied the introduction, at no very distant date, of legislation on behalf of all the Radical cries which the more extreme followers of Lord Grey had adopted—such as manhood suffrage, vote by ballot, the abolition of the standing army, the disestablishment of the Church of England. Some even whispered that Great Britain would have ceased to be a monarchy within ten years.
Its actual results.
All these suspicions were unfounded. By the action of the Reform Bill, the power to make and unmake cabinets had passed, not into the hands of the masses, but into those of the middle classes—the shopkeepers of the towns and the farmers of the countryside. These were a very different body from the excited mobs who had rioted in the streets and threatened civil war in the years 1830-32. As a matter of fact, the bill had done comparatively little for those who supported it most violently, and caused grave disappointment to the wilder spirits among the followers of Lord Grey. It had put an end to borough-mongering; no ministry could henceforth hope to keep in office unless it had the support of the majority of the constituencies. It had placed the individual member much more under the control of the electors than had been the case in earlier years, so that the power of public opinion was greatly increased. It had modified the composition of the House of Commons, by bringing in a large number of new members of a different type from the old; for the great industrial centres in the North and Midlands, which now obtained representatives for the first time, had mostly returned wealthy local manufacturers and merchants to speak in their behalf.
But neither the newly enfranchised classes nor their members in Parliament were likely to be in favour of sudden and violent changes in the constitution or the social condition of the realm, such as had sometimes appeared imminent in the turbulent years between 1816 and 1832. The Whigs were no Radicals; it was more than thirty years before they began seriously to think of enfranchising the labouring classes, and facing all the problems of democracy. A sufficient indication of the character of Lord Grey's ministry is to be found in the fact that some of its most important members were recruited from the ranks of the moderate Tories; Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, and Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary, had both been followers of Canning, and had joined the ranks of the Whigs only when they saw the Tories under Wellington finally committed to reactionary views. Perhaps Huskisson, Canning's minister of commerce, would have gone with them, but he had been killed—just before Lord Grey came into office—in the first railway accident that ever occurred in England.
The new Poor Law.
The Grey ministry held office for four years only, but did much for the country in that time. Its best piece of work was the new Poor Law of 1834, which put an end to the ruinous and degrading system of outdoor relief, [59] which had been crushing the agricultural labourer and loading the parishes with debt ever since the unwise legislation of 1795. The new law reimposed the old test of the workhouse on applicants for charity. Only aged and impotent persons were to receive doles of money and food at their own homes; able-bodied men were forced to enter the workhouse—which they naturally detested on account of its restraint—or to give up their weekly allowance. The result was to force the farmers to pay the whole of their labourers' wages, and to cease to expect the parish to find half of the amount. This was perfectly just and rational; the parish finances were at once lightened of their crushing burden, while the labourers ceased to be pauperized, and did not lose anything by the change of the method of payment. But if they lost nothing, they gained nothing, and the condition of the rural classes of England still remained much inferior to what it had been in the old days, before enclosure acts and high rents came into vogue in the second half of the eighteenth century. The new Poor Law compelled small neighbouring parishes to combine into "unions" to keep a common workhouse, and it was found that one large institution was worked both more efficiently and less expensively than several small ones. In seven years the total cost of the poor relief of England fell from nearly £8,000,000 to £4,700,000, an immense relief to the country.
Abolition of slavery.
Another splendid piece of work done by the ministry of Lord Grey was the final abolition of slavery in the English colonies. Though the slave-trade had long been prohibited, yet slavery itself still subsisted, and the West Indian planters were a body strong and wealthy enough to offer a vigorous opposition to the enfranchisement of their negroes. Many of the old Tories were narrow and misguided enough to lend them aid in Parliament, but the bill was carried. Twenty million pounds were set aside to compensate the owners, and on August 1, 1834, all the slaves became free, though they were bound to work as apprentices to their late masters for seven years—a period afterwards shortened to three.
The Municipal Corporations Act.
A third useful measure was the reform of the municipal corporations of England, of which many had hitherto been wholly unrepresentative bodies, not chosen by the people, but co-opting each other, and often worked by small and corrupt party or family rings. For this absurd arrangement the Act of 1835 substituted a popular and elective constitution, to the enormous improvement of the purity and respectability of the municipal bodies.
Palmerston's foreign policy,—France.
The European policy of the Whigs was in the hands of the brisk and self-reliant Lord Palmerston, who directed the foreign relations of England for nearly thirty years, with a few intervals of retirement from office. He had left the Tories because he disliked their policy of non-intervention in continental affairs, and because he nourished an active dislike for the despotic monarchies of the Holy Alliance. His end was to raise up a league in Western Europe which should support national liberties and constitutional government in each country, against the autocratic and reactionary powers of Central and Eastern Europe. He therefore allied himself with Louis Philippe of Orleans, the new King of France, who had been set up by the Liberal party in that country as a constitutional king after the expulsion of Charles X.
Spain and Portugal.
He actively assisted the parties in Spain and Portugal who were fighting for limited monarchy and the nation's right to choose its own sovereign. In each of those countries there was a civil war in progress between the Liberal party, backing a young queen with a parliamentary title to the crown, and the reactionary party, supported by the priesthood, and upholding a prince who claimed the throne under the Salic law, and appealed to the divine hereditary right of kings. Palmerston supported both Donna Maria in Portugal and Donna Isabella in Spain against their uncles Don Miguel and Don Carlos, by every means short of the actual sending of British troops to the Peninsula. But many officers were allowed to volunteer into the Portuguese and Spanish service, and the struggle was largely settled by their aid. The designs of Don Miguel in Portugal were finally frustrated by the defeat of his fleet by Admiral Napier, who commanded the young queen's ships (1831). In Spain the fighting lasted much longer, and the efforts of Sir De Lacy Evans' "British Legion" against the Carlists were not altogether successful (1835-38), but the war ultimately came to an end in the favour of Queen Isabella in 1840.
Holland and Belgium.
Palmerston also lent his support to the national party in a struggle nearer home. Holland and Belgium had been united into a single kingdom by the treaty of Vienna, and placed under the House of Orange, the old Stadtholders of the United Provinces. But the Belgians much disliked the arrangement; they were divided by religion from their northern kinsfolk, and had no national sympathy with them, or loyalty to their Dutch king. In 1830 they rose in arms and declared their independence; William I. of Holland endeavoured to subdue them, and perhaps might have succeeded but for the interference of England and of Louis Philippe, the new King of France. When the Dutch refused to come to terms, a French army entered Belgium and expelled the garrison of Antwerp, while an English fleet blockaded the Scheldt. On this pressure being applied, the Dutch yielded, and the kingdom of Belgium was established, its first sovereign being a prince well known in England, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the widower of the much-lamented Princess Charlotte. [60]
Thus when France, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium were in the hands of governments professing liberal principles and opposed to despotism, the reactionary monarchs of the Holy Alliance ceased to appear such a danger to the existence of constitutional monarchy in Europe.
Peel and the "Conservative" party.
While fairly successful alike in its foreign policy and its English legislation, the Grey cabinet was never so strong as might have been expected from its triumphant commencement of office. The Tory party, which had seemed shattered for ever by the Reform Bill, and had remained for some years in a broken and helpless condition, began gradually to reorganize itself under the wise and cautious leadership of Sir Robert Peel. Though Palmerston Melbourne, and the other Canningites who had quitted it in 1828, did not return to its ranks, and remained moderate Whigs, yet there were many others who gradually rallied themselves to the old "Church and State" party. The new voters whom the Reform Bill had created did not prove so universally devoted to Radical principles as had been expected. There was always much attachment to the old ideals in the middle classes. When Peel appeared as leader, in place of narrow old Tories of the type of Castlereagh and Addington, he was gradually enabled to collect a large body of followers, and to form an opposition commanding a respectable number of votes. About this time he wisely dropped the name of Tory, and called himself and his followers "Conservatives," in order to get rid of the unfortunate associations of the older party appellation.
The Tithe War.—Lord Grey resigns.
But the time was still far off when the Conservatives were to obtain a preponderance in the House of Commons. Lord Grey resigned in 1834, but only to give place to another Whig prime minister, who continued the policy and work of his predecessor with the aid of most of his cabinet. The change of premiers was due to a division among the Whigs caused by Irish affairs. The grant of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 had completely failed to quiet Ireland. It only caused the Irish to substitute new demands for the old ones. O'Connell, flushed with his victory on the Emancipation question, had started two new agitations, combined with each other much as Home Rule and the Land Question are combined by modern Irish politicians. The first of them was the demand for "Repeal," that is, the abolition of the Union of 1800, and the establishment of a local Parliament in Dublin—the cry that is called Home Rule in our own day. The second was the Tithe War, a crusade against the payment by the Romanist peasantry of tithes for the support of the Established Church of Ireland, a body which they naturally detested. The Tithe War lasted for six or seven years, and was accompanied by much rioting and outrage; the peasantry withheld the tithe, and the Protestant clergy were in many cases absolutely ruined and reduced to starvation by being deprived of their sustenance. A coercion bill for the suppression of riots and violence was passed in 1833, and had some effect in restoring order.
But the ministry was divided on the question of the justice of continuing to extract money from the Romanist peasantry to support an alien Church. The premier proposed that the government should take over the collection of the tithe, but use it for such purposes, secular or otherwise, as might be deemed fit. But many of his colleagues objected to diverting Church money from its original uses, and the cabinet fell to pieces after a stormy scene in the House over a renewal of the Coercion Act. Grey retired, and the king sent for Sir Robert Peel, who at once dissolved Parliament, but the Whigs had a majority in the new House, and Peel fell, after holding office for four months only. Grey's colleague, Lord Melbourne, took over the conduct of affairs and rearranged the cabinet, excluding only the late premier, and his clever but eccentric Chancellor, Lord Brougham.
The Melbourne ministry.—
This ministry struggled on for six years, confronted always by the strong Conservative following and the master mind of Peel, and dependent on the uncertain support of O'Connell and his "Tail." Its chief achievement was the final passing of the Irish Tithe Act, which relieved the peasantry of the duty of paying that contribution to the Established Church, and transferred it to their landlords, so that the tithe was for the future a charge on rent. O'Connell accepted this compromise, and the Tithe War ended, but the Repeal agitation went on vigorously, and monster meetings all over Ireland were continually demanding Home Rule. O'Connell had the priests on his side to a man, and, using them as his instruments, could dictate orders to the countryside, and return all the members for the Catholic districts of Ireland. To his great credit, he kept the agitation clear of outrages, as he had already done in the case of Emancipation ten years before. Without having recourse to any such expedients, he was able to keep the government in continual hot water, and more than once to wrest concessions of importance from it.
Death of William IV.
The Melbourne cabinet was still wandering on its feeble way when on June 20, 1837, the worthy old king, William IV., died. His decease had no great effect on the politics of the realm, for when the election for a new Parliament took place—as was necessary on the sovereign's death—the ministry was found to have in the new House a small majority, of much the same numbers as that which they had enjoyed in the old.
Accession of Queen Victoria.—Hanover separated from England.
The successor of King William was his niece Victoria, daughter of Edward Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III. She was a young girl of eighteen, who had been brought up very quietly at Kensington Palace by her widowed mother, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg. Little was known of her by the nation at large, and some of the baser spirits among the Tories whispered at first that she would prove a party-sovereign and a mere tool of the Whigs. But it was not long before the world discovered that the young queen was likely to be a model for constitutional monarchs. She was simple, straightforward, filled with a deep consciousness of the responsibility of her position, and anxious to discharge her duties with all possible regard for the well-being of her subjects. The more she was known, the more was she liked and respected, and there was accordingly a general feeling of relief that the throne had not gone to the next heir, the queen's unpopular uncle, Ernest Duke of Cumberland. That prince, moreover, now became ruler of Hanover, where the Salic law prevailed, and the kingdom was finally separated from England after a hundred and twenty-three years of union. Thus England was freed from all necessity for interfering in the internal politics of Germany.
The Queen and Lord Melbourne.
Lord Melbourne, behind an air of studied levity, possessed a strong will and a conscientious desire to do well by his country. He determined to place his experience at the disposal of the young queen, and to teach her the ways of constitutional monarchy. Until her marriage he acted as her private secretary, using his position for no party purpose. In the language of the Duke of Wellington, he "taught her to preside over the destinies of this great country."
The Government and the Radicals.
The Melbourne cabinet lasted till September, 1841, much vexed in its later years by social troubles in England, the result of the growing discontent among the working classes at the failure of the Reform Bill to bring about a golden age. They had thought that the creation of a representative House of Commons would be followed by all manner of Radical reforms, and were now complaining that the new government was little better than the old. "The Tories scourged us with whips, but the Whigs use scorpions," complained Cobbett, the Radical pamphleteer, while Lord Grey was still in power. There was this amount of truth in the complaint, that the Tories were always trying to interfere in social matters, and believed in "paternal government" and the duty of the State to care for the individual citizen; but the Whigs, under the influence of the rules of strict political economy, held that the State must not meddle with private men, that the rule of laissez faire, or non-intervention, was right, and that free competition between man and man was the true order of life. Now, Tory interference with social matters had generally been wrong-headed and disastrous, but Whig indifference and abstention was quite as exasperating to the masses.
The People's Charter.
The old delusion that men can be made happy by legislation and grants of political rights, was still universally prevalent, and the discontent of the labouring classes took shape—now, as in the last generation—in a demand for Parliamentary Reform. The new agitation got its name from the document called "the People's Charter," which was put forward as the programme of the movement. It contained five claims—(1) for manhood suffrage, (2) for the vote by ballot at elections, (3) for annual Parliaments, (4) for the payment of members, (5) for the throwing open of seats in the House of Commons to all men by the abolition of the property qualification, which was still required, in theory, to be possessed by members. It is curious to reflect how entirely useless all these five demands would have been to cure the social discontents of the day. The second and fifth clauses of the charter have long been granted, the first is practically conceded, and the fourth may be so ere long, yet the ills against which the Chartists were protesting are still with us. For the real end of the agitation was in truth purely social; it was much the same as the cry for the so-called "living wage" that is heard among us to-day. "The principle of the People's Charter," said one of its advocates in 1838, "is the right of every man to have his home, his hearth, and his happiness. It means that every working man in the land has a right to a good coat, a good hat, a good dinner, no more work than will keep him in health, and as much wages as will keep him in plenty." The demagogues—honest or dishonest—who led the Chartist movement insisted that the golden age would follow the introduction of universal suffrage and their other demands, though it is difficult to see how they can have been so simple as to hold such a view. But they were, for the most part, mere windy orators, with no grasp of the means or ends that they needed; the most prominent man of the whole band being Feargus O'Connor, an Irishman with an enormous flow of words and an ill-balanced brain, who ended his days in a lunatic asylum. Riotous public meetings, where threats of physical force were freely used, were rife all through the years 1838-42, and gave the Whig ministry no small trouble. But the movement was never so dangerous to law and order as the troubles of the years 1816-32 had been, for the Chartists were backed by neither of the great political parties, had no competent leaders, and were detested for their noisy turbulence by the whole of the middle classes, Whig and Tory alike. Parliament refused to take them seriously, even when they kept sending up monster petitions to the House of Commons, purporting to contain a million and a half or even three million signatures. One of these documents, as large in circumference as a cart-wheel, had to be carried by sixteen men, and stuck in the door of the House, so that it had to be cut up in order to allow it to enter. But petitions, riots, and wild talk had none of them any practical effect.
The Opium War.
There was little that was eventful in the foreign policy of the later years of the Melbourne cabinet. The only events of importance were our first war with China, and our interference in the Levant to prevent the break-up of the Turkish empire. The Chinese quarrel—the Opium War, as it was often called—arose from the destruction of a quantity of that drug belonging to English merchants by the mandarins of Canton, who had resolved not to allow it to be imported into their country. In consequence, an army was sent out to the far East, which, after some desultory fighting, compelled the Chinese to sue for peace, pay an indemnity of 21,000,000 dollars, and cede the island of Hong-Kong, which, in British hands, has since become one of the greatest ports of the world (1839-41).
England and Mehemet Ali.
The war in Syria was caused by the attempt of Mehemet Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, to assert his independence, and to tear Syria and Asia Minor from his suzerain the Sultan. Thinking that the maintenance of Turkey was essential to British interests in the East, Lord Palmerston bade the rebel pasha retire within his own borders, and, on his refusal, bombarded and took Acre and Sidon. This brought Mehemet Ali to reason, and he acquiesced in an agreement which left him the position of a quasi-independent ruler in Egypt, but stripped him of his conquests beyond the Syrian desert (January, 1841).
The Prince Consort.
In the year which preceded this last war, England had been rejoiced to see her queen happily married. The young sovereign's choice had been her own first cousin, Albert of Saxe-Coburg, whom the country knew so well first as "Prince Albert," then as the "Prince Consort." He was very young at the time of the marriage, being only in his twenty-first year, but from his earliest days in England showed a remarkable wisdom and power of adapting himself to his new surroundings. While carefully refraining from taking any ostensible part in politics, he was able in many ways to act as a useful counsellor both for his wife and his wife's ministers, for he had a large knowledge of foreign politics, and a sound and cautious judgment. His blameless private life and many amiable qualities endeared him to all who came into personal contact with him; but for many years he was not properly appreciated by the English people, who were vaguely suspicious of a foreign prince placed in such a difficult position as that of husband to a constitutional queen. All their suspicions of him and his influence were ungrounded, but it was not till after his death in 1861 that most men realized what a thoroughly wise and unselfish friend of England he had been.
The Conservatives in office.
The Melbourne ministry went out of power a few months after the queen's marriage. A general election took place in June-July, 1841, and a Conservative majority was returned to the House of Commons, whereupon Sir Robert Peel was called upon to take office in the due course of constitutional etiquette.
Peel as premier.
The Tories, now again in power after an interval of twelve years, were a very different party from what they had been in the old days before 1830. The whole body of them had moved slowly forward, but there were still, as always, a more and a less progressive section among them, as in the days of Canning and Castlereagh. Peel himself had generally been considered to belong to the former body, though he had been one of those who opposed Parliamentary Reform to the last. His own breeding and character account for his position; he was not a member of one of the old aristocratic Tory families, but the son of a wealthy Lancashire millowner, a representative of the Conservatism of the middle classes, not of the old landed interest. He was a firm, able, conscientious man, rather too masterful in dealing with his followers, and prone to command rather than to persuade. But in 1841 his authority over them seemed so firmly established, that men prophesied that he would rule for as many years as the younger Pitt. As a matter of fact, his ministry was only to last from September, 1841, to July, 1846, and, instead of establishing the Conservative party firmly in power, he was fated to break it up, and to condemn it to almost continuous exile from office for nearly thirty years. [61]
Peel's finance.—The income tax.
But Peel's early years of power promised well. His first achievement was to restore the national finances, which had been left in a most unsatisfactory condition by the Melbourne ministry. His budget of 1842 was long remembered as being the first important step in the direction of Free Trade that had been taken for many years. He reduced the import duties on nearly 750 articles of consumption, reasoning that the advantage to the consumer far outweighed the loss to the English manufacturer, whose interests were served by the protective duties which he removed. To make up the deficit in the revenue caused by these remissions of import duties, he imposed the income tax, under a pledge that it was to be an exceptional impost; five years, he said, would suffice to restore the revenue to its old amount, and it should then be dropped. Unfortunately for all persons with fixed incomes, Peel was out of office long before the five years were over, and none of his successors has ever redeemed his pledge. The income tax still remains with us, the easy and obvious method by which any impecunious Chancellor of the Exchequer can wring more money from the middle classes, by adding an extra "penny in the pound." It must, however, be granted that at its first imposition it tided England very successfully over a dangerous financial crisis.
The Chartist agitation.
The Melbourne cabinet had left the task of dealing with two troublesome agitations as a legacy to their successors. The Chartists were still thundering away at monster meetings, and bombarding Parliament with gigantic petitions. One sent to the House of Commons in 1842 purported to be signed by 3,000,000 persons, and was actually signed by, perhaps, a third of that number. It was couched in such seditious terms that the government refused to receive it, and were supported by a majority of 238, when certain Radical members pressed them to a division. But Peel's hand was known to be firm, and it was obvious that there was no chance of intimidating him; so the Chartist agitation, though it continued to simmer all through his time, never boiled up into any dangerous effervescence.
The "Young Ireland Party."
In Ireland matters seemed for a time more serious. Daniel O'Connell was still pressing on his campaign for Repeal. He was the master of the greater part of the Irish people, and had his well-disciplined "Tail" to follow him in the Commons. But as long as both Conservatives and Whigs refused to buy his aid at the price of granting his demands for Home Rule, he could do no more than bluster and declaim at public meetings. But O'Connell was joined, in the year 1842, by a body of recruits who refused to be fettered by his command to refrain from the use of physical force. A band of ardent young politicians, the political heirs of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Robert Emmet, bound themselves together to strive for Repeal by the old method of armed rebellion—when "England's extremity should be Ireland's opportunity." They called themselves the "Young Ireland Party," revived the old watchwords of the United Irishmen, and gloried in the principles of '98. The chiefs of this faction were Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and Gavan Duffy. O'Connell was afraid of their rashness, and the priesthood, who acted as O'Connell's agents all over Ireland, viewed them with suspicion as possible republicans and atheists; but they gained considerable influence in the land.
O'Connell's influence declines.
The Repeal agitation came to a head in 1843, when O'Connell gathered several hundred thousand people together at a meeting at Tara, the old seat of the Kings of Ireland, and addressed them in an excited strain, promising them "a Parliament of their own on College Green within the year." But Peel had him and his chief lieutenants arrested, and tried for sedition. The whole agitation seemed to collapse when the government made a show of force, and, though O'Connell was ultimately acquitted, his hold on the Irish people was much shaken by the obvious uselessness for any practical end of all his meetings and harangues. The majority of his followers fell back into apathy, the minority resolved to join the "Young Irelanders," and to plot armed treason at some convenient date in the future. Meanwhile Repeal was dead, and O'Connell died a few years later, just before the miserable years 1846-7 revived the troubles of Ireland.
England and the United States.
English foreign policy in Peel's day continued on the good lines on which Palmerston had placed it, for the new Conservative party were vigilant to defend our interests abroad, and to resent the aggression of our neighbours. A very threatening dispute with the United States about the south-western boundaries of British America was settled in 1842, by a satisfactory treaty which gave England Vancouver's Island and all the coast north of the Straits of Juan da Fuca, taking the forty-ninth degree of latitude as the dividing-line from the Pacific to the end of Lake Superior. The Americans had claimed, but had to give up, the whole western shore of North America, up to the Russian province of Alaska.
England and France.
Twice England appeared likely to engage in war with France—in 1844 and 1846—while Peel was in power. The first quarrel was about the annexation of the island of Tahiti, in the Pacific, where a French admiral arrested the English consul, and seized the island in the most arbitrary way from its queen. But Louis Philippe did not wish for war with the only power in Europe that looked kindly on a constitutional monarchy in France, and forced his ministers to apologize to England and abandon Tahiti. In the second quarrel, the crafty and intriguing old king was himself to blame. He had formed a design for securing Spain for his younger son Anthony, Duke of Montpensier, by means of a marriage. The crown of that country was now worn by the young Queen Isabella, whose heiress was her still younger sister Louisa. Louis Philippe secured the marriage of the younger princess with his own son. At the same time, by disreputable intrigues with the Spanish queen-mother, Christina of Naples, and the factious parties in the Cortes, he got the unfortunate queen married to her cousin, Don Francisco, Duke of Cadiz, a wretched weakling, who—as he thought—was certain to die without heirs, so that the crown must ultimately fall to the Montpensiers (1846). This scheme reproduced the old danger that had brought about the war of the Spanish succession in the days of William III. and Anne,—the chance that the crowns of Spain and France might be united. The English government and people were bitterly provoked, high words passed between London and Paris, and there appeared for some time a danger that a rupture might ensue. But external events intervened to prevent such a misfortune. Peel's government lost office in 1846, and Louis Philippe was dethroned in 1848, after which the Spanish marriages ceased to have any importance.
Peel and the Free Trade movement.
While that question was at its height, England had been going through an unexpected political crisis, caused by Peel's sudden conversion to complete Free Trade. His budget of 1842 had shown that all his tendencies lay in that direction; but he had not yet touched the one point which was certain to bring him into collision with the majority of his own party—the question of Free Trade in corn. Since England had become a great manufacturing country, with a population that advanced by leaps and bounds, it was daily growing more impossible to feed the new mouths with English corn alone. But the heavy duties on imported grain, which survived from the last century, only allowed the foreign wheat to come in at an exorbitant price. Hence the poor man's loaf was always dear. Farmers and landlords profited by this protection of English agriculture, but, since the landed interest had ceased to be the most important element in the state, the Corn Laws injured many more persons than they benefited. For the last five or six years a vigorous agitation in favour of their abolition had been in progress, whose guiding spirit was Richard Cobden, "the prophet of Free Trade." It seemed more likely that the Whigs would be converted by him than the Conservatives, for the backbone of Peel's majority in the House of Commons was composed of the county members, who represented the farmers and landlords of England.
The Protectionists.—Disraeli and Lord G. Bentinck.
But in 1845, a famine in Ireland, caused by the failure of the potato-crop, called for a large importation of corn to feed the starving Irish cottiers. Peel proposed to suspend the Corn Laws as a temporary measure, to allow of the introduction of the needed supply of food at the cheapest possible rate. His colleagues in the ministry resolved to support the proposal, but they proved unable to persuade the whole of their party to follow them. About a hundred members of the House of Commons—the representatives of the corn-growing shires and the old Tory families—refused to be convinced by Peel's arguments. They were headed by two men of mark, neither of whom had as yet been taken very seriously by the House. The first was Lord George Bentinck, a younger son of the great ducal house of Portland, who had hitherto been seen more frequently on the racecourse than at St. Stephen's, but who showed an unexpected ability when he proceeded to attack his chief. The second was Benjamin Disraeli, the son of a Jewish man of letters, then known as a young and volatile member of the House, who combined high Tory notions on Church and State with extreme Radical views on certain social questions. But he had been hitherto more notorious for his eccentric and gorgeous dress, and his curious high-flown and bombastic novels, than for any serious political doings.
The Corn Laws repealed.
When Peel brought forward his bill for abolishing the Corn Laws, he found himself bitterly opposed by Bentinck and Disraeli and their protectionist followers, who scouted him as a turncoat and a traitor to the Tory cause. He carried the abolition of the obnoxious duties by the aid of the votes of his enemies, the Whigs (May 15, 1846). A month later the angry Protectionists took their revenge; on the question of an Irish coercion bill, Bentinck and Disraeli led some scores of Tory members into the opposition lobby, and left the prime minister in a minority of seventy-three (June 25, 1846).
Break up of the Conservative party.
Peel immediately resigned. He had carried his bill, but broken up his party, and the Whigs were now to have a fresh lease of office that lasted thirty years, for the two sections into which the Conservatives had broken up—the Peelites and the Protectionists—would never join again, so bitterly did they dislike each other. In the course of time most of the Peelites drifted over to the Whig camp, among them two who were destined to be prime ministers of England—Lord Aberdeen, who had been Peel's Foreign Secretary, and William Ewart Gladstone, then a rising young member, who had held the Presidency of the Board of Trade from 1843 to 1846.
Lord John Russell's ministry.
The Whigs, or the Liberal party, as they were now beginning to call themselves, came back to power with every advantage, as the opposition was divided into two irreconcilable sections, who would never join on account of their old grudge. Yet the new cabinet was never a very strong one, because the Whigs refused to put Lord Palmerston, their strongest and ablest man, at the head of affairs. Some of the party could never forget that he had once been a Canningite, and thought that he was not Liberal enough for them; others were afraid of his firm and incisive way of dealing with foreign powers, and prophesied that he would some day land England, unexpectedly, in the midst of a great war. Instead of Palmerston, Lord John Russell, the promoter of the great Reform Bill of 1832, was made premier. He was a much less notable personage than Palmerston, and not strong enough for his place, being nothing more than an adroit party tactician with no touch of genius about him. Yet he held power for six years, and made no great mistakes if he performed no great achievements at home; while, as the foreign policy of England was handed over to Palmerston, there was no lack of strong guidance in things abroad.
The famine in Ireland.
The chief problem which the Liberal cabinet found to trouble them when they took office was an Irish one. In 1845 there had been a partial failure of the potato-crop, the staple food of the Irish peasantry; this was followed in 1846, just after Lord John Russell came into power, by a far more dreadful disaster of the same kind. In August the whole potato harvest of Southern and Western Ireland was struck down by a sudden blight, such as had never been seen before or since, and 4,000,000 persons were suddenly brought to the verge of starvation. The disaster was aggravated by the hopeless state of the rural population. For the last half-century the population of Ireland had been advancing with disastrous rapidity; it had swelled from 5,000,000 to 8,000,000, yet there had been no corresponding increase either of improved cultivation, or of land taken under tillage. The improvident landlords had allowed the still more improvident tenantry to divide their farms into smaller and smaller fractions, till the land only fed its population in years of exceptional fertility. The greater part of Ireland was cut up into miserable slips of a few acres, where the cottier paid intermittently as much as he could of a rent which was rated at a higher amount than the wretched little farm could ever produce. The unexampled disaster of two successive years of blight brought the whole of the miserable peasantry to the edge of the grave. The workhouses were soon crammed, all local funds used up, and yet the people were dying by thousands from famine, or from the fevers which were bred by insufficient nourishment. The government paltered with the evil by establishing relief works, and refused for some time to face the fact that nothing but wholesale distribution of food would keep the wretched peasantry alive. It was not till 1847 that they faced the full horror of the problem, and established soup-kitchens and depôts for free food all over the land. By this time scores of thousands had died, and the bitterest feelings of wrath had been bred in the Irish mind at the neglect or incompetence of the cabinet.
Evictions and emigration.
When the famine was over, it was generally recognized that the worst of the disaster had been owing to the congested state of the population, who were trying to live on smaller farms than could really support them. This led to wholesale evictions by the landlords, who, half ruined by the famine themselves, wished to avoid another such experience by thinning off the pauperized cottiers, and throwing several farms into one. In many cases these evictions were carried out with ruthless haste and cruelty, for the proprietors—often absentees who did not know their tenants by sight—had no sympathy for the wretched peasants, and only wanted to be rid of them. The unwilling emigrants were driven out of Ireland by the hundred thousand, and retired for the most part to America, carrying away a fanatical hatred for the Anglo-Irish landholding classes who had evicted them, and for the English government which had sanctioned their expulsion.
Smith O'Brien's insurrection.
With such class rancour in the air, it was no wonder that troubles broke out in Ireland in 1848, the year after the famine was over. The chiefs of the "Young Ireland" party [62] thought that the times were ripe for open insurrection, and, seeing revolutions rife all over Europe, and the Chartist riots stirring again in England, resolved to strike at once. Their leader, Smith O'Brien, after using threatening language in the House of Commons, went over to Ireland and called the discontented to arms. But he proved a very incapable chief when he essayed the part of Catiline. Gathering together some hundreds of armed followers, he attacked fifty constables on Bonlagh common, in Tipperary. His men scattered after a few volleys, and he and his chief adherents fled to the hills, where they were soon caught (July, 1848). They were tried for treason and condemned, but the government commuted their punishment to exile, and a few years later they were given a free pardon.
Revolutionary agitation abroad.
This abortive revolt in Ireland was one of the least noteworthy events of 1848, the most turbulent year of the nineteenth century. The whole continent was ablaze with insurrections in favour of liberal ideas and national rights. The French drove out Louis Philippe, because he had grown reactionary in his old age, and refused to grant universal suffrage; on his expulsion they established a republic. Another great insurrection arose in Hungary, when the people tried to wrest a constitution by force of arms from their king Ferdinand, the Austrian Emperor. In the same year a great rising in Italy strove to win national unity by expelling the Austrians from Lombardy and Venetia, and making an end of the petty dukes and kings of Central and Southern Italy. Germany was at the same time convulsed by popular agitation, which demanded constitutional liberty from its many rulers, while the diet at Frankfort declared in favour of unifying the land on a republican basis.
End of the Chartist agitation.
All these troubles could not pass unnoticed in England, and the Chartists, whose movements had been small and unimportant for the last five years, once more began to stir up trouble. The last of their "monster petitions" was sent in to the House of Commons, and the "Five points" demanded more noisily than ever. Things came to a head when their chief, Feargus O'Connor, summoned a great meeting on Kennington Common, and threatened to march on Westminster with 500,000 men at his back. But the government refused to be cowed, and the middle classes, in fierce anger at the noisy agitation, took arms against the rioters. Two hundred thousand "special constables" were enrolled to face the rioters, the bridges leading to Westminster were manned with troops, and the great meeting was awaited with resolution. These preparations overawed the rioters; only a few thousand Chartists assembled, and Feargus O'Connor, frightened at the display of military force and the steady attitude of the special constables, bade his followers go home, and disappeared. This was the last outbreak of the Chartists, who proved to be a mere bugbear when they were once met and faced (April, 1848).
The continental insurrection.—Louis Napoleon.
For the future England was undisturbed, and, secure at home herself, could watch all the turmoil on the continent with composure. Palmerston did his best to favour the liberal and national parties abroad by all peaceful means, but would not commit England to war on their behalf. To his regret, Italy and Hungary were at last reconquered by their old masters, and the German liberals were also put down, so that the unification of their land was delayed for twenty years (1849). The French Republic proved weak and ill-governed; after several anarchist risings in Paris had frightened the French bourgeoisie, they took refuge under a military dictatorship, electing as president Louis Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon I., and the son of his younger brother Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland. The new president's record was not encouraging; twice during the reign of Louis Philippe he had made hairbrained attempts to raise military revolts in France, trading on the great name of his uncle. On each occasion he had failed lamentably, his preparations having been entirely inadequate to carry out his purpose. He had acquired the reputation of a rash and wild adventurer, ready to embark in any scheme, yet the French, dazzled by the name of Bonaparte, and over-persuaded by his promises to give them peace and prosperity, were unwise enough to elect him as president.
The Second Empire.
Louis Napoleon soon strengthened himself by placing in office, both in the army and the ministry, a band of unscrupulous men whom he could trust to follow him in any dark scheme, if only they were well enough paid. When he had made his preparations, he seized and imprisoned most of the members of the Chamber of Deputies, shot down all who took arms to defend the Republic, and assumed despotic power (December 2, 1851). Soon afterwards he assumed the title of Emperor and the name of Napoleon III.
Palmerston's dismissal.
The French president's treacherous usurpation brought about Palmerston's dismissal from office, and ultimately the fall of the Russell cabinet. Immediately after Louis Bonaparte had perpetrated his coup d'état, the great foreign minister expressed to the French ambassador his acquiescence in the revolution. He had so much disliked the turbulent and anarchic Republic which the usurper had destroyed, that he was quite ready to acknowledge the new government, which was at any rate settled and strong for the moment. Palmerston took this action before he had consulted with his colleagues in the ministry, or obtained the formal permission of the queen to recognize the legality of Bonaparte's position. Both the sovereign and the cabinet were vexed at his acting without any consultation, and Lord John Russell dismissed him from office (January, 1852).
Fall of Lord John Russell's ministry.
But Palmerston had many friends and admirers, and was soon able to revenge himself. Less than a month after his dismissal, he led a section of the Whigs into the opposition lobby on a division concerning a bill to strengthen the militia, and put Russell in a minority. The ministry was therefore obliged to resign (February, 1852).