In from Middleton marched Bamford, at the head of 6,000 men, to “St. Peter’s Field,” and from other quarters came many columns; so that by the time appointed for the opening of the meeting in that narrow space of two or three acres, some 80,000 persons were assembled. The police held a warrant for the arrest of Hunt on a charge of seditious assembly, but, in the face of this huge crowd, declared themselves unable to execute it, and called upon the magistrates for military assistance. A more tactful method would have been to wait until the close of the meeting, when Hunt could probably have been easily secured; but tact is not a common possession.
PETERLOO
Close by was a force of one hundred and forty of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry, hidden away in Pickford’s yard, and to them was entrusted the task of driving a way through the crowd, to seize Hunt. It was an unfortunate choice, for the Yeomanry were, to a man, master manufacturers, whose interests had been assailed violently by the mob. The regular troops near at hand would have been less prejudiced, and would have acted more gently; but the Yeomanry charged into the midst of the masses of people laying about them with the edge and point of their swords. Many inoffensive persons, men, women, and children, were cut and slashed and trampled down; but the crowd was so tightly packed that it could not have given way if it would, and the Yeomanry were not only stopped, but began to be severely handled; which, after all, was no more than they deserved. Then Hulton, prominent among the magistrates, lost his head, and ordered up the Hussars to the aid of the Yeomanry. People were ridden down by the hundred, the platforms were stormed, the banners torn down, and the field cleared. Vast crowds of weeping and cursing fugitives, many of them wounded, fled from the scene and out of Manchester into the country: afraid of arrest. Eleven people lay dead, thirty dangerously wounded, and forty “much injured.” Hunt, Bamford, and others were arrested. Thus ended the great Reform meeting in St. Peter’s Field. It was only four years from the time when Waterloo had been fought, and the people speedily found the name of “Peterloo” for this Yeomanry and Hussar victory. It was alternatively, with facile alliteration, known as the “Manchester massacre.” The site is now St. Peter’s Square, and on a portion of the ground stands the Free Trade Hall.
One cannot feel overmuch sympathy with the political agitation of that time. The history of all politics, in all ages, and still in progress, tells us that you succeed only in abolishing one tyranny to replace it with another: destroying the tyranny of aristocracy to replace it with that of wealth, which in its turn is overthrown by the worse tyranny of Socialism and the impossible doctrine of the essential equality of man. That which dominates will inevitably tyrannise, whether it be the strong over the weak, the aristocrat over the plebeian, or the wealthy over the poor; and sympathy with the downtrodden is a little blighted when it is realised that, when the poor grow rich and the humble powerful, they, too, begin to hector and to brow-beat. The cotton operative, rising by innate capacity from the position of a wage-earner to that of an employer, finds the centre of his interests shifted, and throws in his lot with the class to which he has won his way.
The necessity for Parliamentary and constitutional reform was acknowledged by Pitt, Earl of Chatham, so far back as 1782; and “radical reform”—i.e. reform going to the root of things—was demanded by the country in 1797-8; but it was left to agitators to bring the question of reform so greatly into disrepute that, in common speech, we hear always of a thing being “radically wrong”; never, by any chance, “radically right,” although the alliterative ease of either form is equal to the other.
The “Manchester School” of politics, founded in 1838 by Cobden and Bright, was a very virulent type of Radicalism, and, in some of its tenets, a singular creed for a commercial community of manufacturers and exporters to profess. It was nurtured on an agitation for the repeal of the Corn Law, and on a passion for Free Trade; it advocated peace-at-any-price, and regarded the Colonies with hatred. “It will be a happy day,” said Cobden, “when England has not an acre of territory in Continental Asia.” In these extraordinary aspirations John Bright shared to the full.
THE LITTLE ENGLANDERS
To reconcile the political creed of John Bright with his practice as a manufacturer is one of those tasks whose difficulties approach the impossible. He was an Apostle of Little Englandism: the passionate author of the phrase “Perish India!”; the ardent visionary of a day when “England” should cease to mean anything but this isle. What an ideal on which to dwell! Said he: “It may be a vision, yet I will cherish it.” He had what he termed the “noble vision” of Canada surrendered to the United States:
“From the frozen north to the glowing south, from the stormy waves of the Atlantic to the calmer waters of the Pacific main, I see one people, speaking one language, owning one law and holding one religion, and over all the flag of freedom, a refuge for the oppressed of every nation and of every clime.”
The “flag of freedom” was, if you please, the Stars and Stripes, and that “refuge for the oppressed” the land whose people are smarting under the tyrannies of the Trusts, and of the municipal disciples of the gospel of graft, as severely as any people ever suffered in the “oppressed” nations of Europe. At any rate, these are articles of belief to which few are now found to subscribe. That, with such aspirations as these, Bright could not endure the idea of Home Rule for Ireland, and so in 1886 broke with Gladstone and joined the Unionist party, is one of those extraordinary and illogical changes of front to which the careers of modern politicians of all shades of thought have so accustomed us that there are no surprises left.