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.