Liberty in the Nineteenth Century

by Frederic May Holland

The pamphlet shows that delight in the bright side of life, and that sympathy with the pleasures of the poor, which won popularity for The Pickwick Papers in 1836, and afterwards for The Old Curiosity Shop and the Christmas Carol. The novels most like Sunday as it Is, however, are such protests against bigotry and cruelty as Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and Barnaby Rudge. Powerful pictures of the gloom of that British Sabbath which locked up everything "that could by any possibility afford relief to an overworked people," may be found in Little Dorrit; and the plot turns on the Sabbatarianism of a cruel fanatic who had made felony part of her religion. Much was done by this novel, as well as by Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby towards the abolition of imprisonment for debt in 1869. His tone was very mild, compared with that of the popular orators. Resistance to bad laws was urged by Richard Carlile; and a clergyman named Taylor, who held the Gospel to be a solar myth, was imprisoned on October 24, 1827, for saying that the first martyrs for Jesus Christ were the Gadarene pigs. Another London lecturer declared on Sunday evening, December 2, 1832, that "The elective franchise should belong to women, as a part of the people," and again that "Women are qualified to elect and to be elected to all public offices." "Any argument for exclusion is of that kind which has justified every tyranny," says this discourse, which was printed for the first time, on May 11, 1833, in an American newspaper, The Free Enquirer. Its columns show that a young lady had already presented very advanced ideas as a lecturer at the Rotunda in London; but the general opinion of the sex was expressed by the wife of the Rev. John Sandford, whose popular book declared that "There is something unfeminine in independence. A really sensible woman... is conscious of inferiority." The Irish have supported themselves so successfully in America, and obeyed the laws so generally, as to prove that failure to do either in Ireland should not be attributed to their race or their religion, but wholly to their oppression. Memory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was all the more bitter in the nineteenth, because the destitution of the peasantry was increasing hopelessly. Removal of religious disabilities and reform of Parliament did not prevent bands of armed peasants from fighting against attempts to take away their cattle in payment of the tithes exacted by well-paid dignitaries of the hated Church. It sometimes happened that a dozen of the combatants were killed. Sydney Smith estimated that this way of keeping up a state church cost a million lives, from first to last, and Ireland had to be as heavily garrisoned as India, until a less vexatious system was established in 1838. Municipal government was wholly in the hands of little corporations, which had the sole power of electing new members and seldom admitted a Catholic. The ruling oligarchy was to the population as one to two hundred in Limerick, and only as one to twenty-five hundred in Protestant Belfast. The right of local self-government was given to the people of these cities and a few others in 1840; but even this small and tardy justice provoked an English bishop to threaten that it would call down vengeance from God. Full municipal suffrage throughout the island and a domestic Parliament were demanded by all Ireland, under the guidance of the mighty orator O'Connell; but the prejudice against his cause in Great Britain was made invincible by his denouncing "the Saxons," as he called the English, for the crimes of their ancestors.

VII. All reforms stopped in 1841, when the Whigs lost the supremacy. It was not their fault that excess in speculation on both sides of the Atlantic had brought on a panic which threw thousands of people out of work in the factory towns, and reduced other thousands to earning only twopence a day. A succession of bad harvests, just before 1841, made wages very low on the farms, and food too dear everywhere. Bread was sold in halfpenny slices; labourers robbed pigs of swill; children fought with dogs for bones in the streets; one person in every eleven was a pauper; and England seemed to Dickens like one vast poorhouse. The old ways of giving charity had been so lavish and indiscriminate as to encourage pauperism; the new system of relief proved really kinder; but at first it was administered too slowly and cautiously for the emergency; and there was some ground for the complaints in Oliver Twist. Knowledge that paupers were neglected strengthened the belief of the working-men, that all they needed to make them as well off as their brethren in America was the ballot. Paine, Cobbett, and Hetherington were widely read; manhood suffrage and a secret ballot were called "the People's Charter"; and there were more than a million signatures to the Chartist petition in 1839. These demands were just; but about one Englishman in three was unable to write his name at this time; and many who had acquired this accomplishment knew dangerously little about politics. When we think how much mischief has recently been done in the United States by illiterate and venal votes, we cannot blame Englishmen of the upper and middle classes for delaying to grant universal suffrage. They ought to have made rapid preparation for it, by liberal encouragement of popular education through free schools and a cheap press; but even the Whigs were too indignant at the violence of the Chartists, who made bloody riots in 1841. How ignorant these men were was shown by their doing their worst that year to help carry the elections against the Whigs, who were much less hostile to Chartism than the Conservatives, as those Tories were called who still condescended to politics.

The most culpable blunder of the Whigs had been that of allowing the revenue to fall below the expenses; and the policy they had proposed for making up the deficit was too much like that halfhearted way of dealing with slavery which brought ruin upon the party of the same name in America. The British tariff was raised by the war against Napoleon, as the American was under similar pressure afterwards, so high as in some cases to prohibit imports and actually check revenue. Either tariff could have been used as an almost complete list of the world's products; and both were framed on the principle of protecting everybody, except consumers, against competition. Great Britain unfortunately could produce only part of the food needed by the people; and the tariff was so much in the interest of owners of land as to make bread and meat dearer than if the island had been barren. Importation of cattle was prohibited; and that of wheat and other grain was not permitted until prices were high enough to cause famine. Then importation would begin slowly, and keep increasing until the supply of both foreign- and home-grown wheat would become large enough to glut the market and make farmers bankrupt. These duties on grain, which were known as the corn laws, acted with similar taxes on all other necessaries of life in impoverishing factory hands and other members of the working class. They were told that the laws which kept living dear kept wages high; but we shall see that this turned out not to be the fact. The only real gainers by the corn laws were those wealthy owners of great estates of whom Parliament was composed entirely, with the exception of a few members of the House of Commons.

That body allowed Manchester and other factory towns to send representatives who had found out the tendency of protectionism from their own business experience, as well as from study of political economy. Among these men was Cobden, who had already planted himself in the road to wealth, but who preferred to remain poor that he might make England rich. He and his associates knew that imports are paid for by exporting what can be produced most profitably; that nothing is imported which could be produced as cheaply at home; that large imports make large exports; that the average Englishman knows how to carry on his own business; and that the Government could not encourage any otherwise unprofitable industry without checking the really profitable ones. On these facts were based the following predictions. In the first place, free trade in grain and cattle would lower the average price of food in England, and make the supply so regular that there would be no more famines. Second, those countries which were allowed to send grain and cattle, cotton and other raw materials, etc., to England would buy British manufactures in return. Third, removal of duties from raw materials would enable factories to produce goods more cheaply, and sell larger quantities at home as well as abroad. Then, fourth, this increased activity in manufacturing would raise wages, while remission of duties would make all the necessaries of life cheaper, so that pauperism would diminish and prosperity become more general in the working class. And finally, the commerce of England with other countries would grow rapidly to their mutual benefit; and thus international relations would be kept friendly by free trade.

In this faith the reformers at Manchester and Birmingham asserted the right of all men to buy and sell freely, and demanded the removal of all duties except those best adapted to bring in necessary revenue. They were wise enough to attack the monstrous tariff at its weakest point, the tax on bread. The Anti-Corn-Law League was organised in 1839; the spot where the Peterloo massacre had been perpetrated, twenty years before, was soon used for a free trade banquet in which five thousand working-men took part; and appeals to the people were made in all parts of England. The Conservatives were all protectionists; and so many Whigs were on that side that those leaders who were opposed to the bread tax did not dare to come out against it. They did propose in 1841 to meet the deficit in the revenue by reducing some duties which were so high as to prevent importation, for instance, the tax on all sugar not grown in British colonies. The protectionist Whigs voted with the Conservatives against the Ministry; and it had to go out of office without having done enough against the corn laws to secure the support of the League. Protectionists, Chartists, and opponents of the new poor-law helped to give the Conservatives control of the next Parliament, where the free-traders were one to four.

Such was the state of things in October, 1841, when the League went to work more vigorously than before in educating the people, and especially voters of the poorer class. During the next twelve months, half a million dollars was spent in this work. In 1843, there were fourteen regular lecturers in the field, besides countless volunteers, and five hundred distributors of tracts. The annual number of publications was about ten million copies; and the annual weight exceeded a hundred tons. The dissenting ministers did good work for reform; but the Episcopalian clergy were too friendly to a tax which kept up the value of tithes. The League soon had the support of John Bright, who was one of the greatest of British orators. Prominent among opponents was the Chartist leader, Feargus O'Connor; and those Chartists who were not protectionists held that their cause ought to take the lead. Public opinion was so strongly for free trade in 1845 that Parliament took off the duties from cotton and other raw materials, in hope of conciliating the manufacturers; but these latter redoubled their efforts to abolish the tax on food. Subscriptions were larger than ever; and much land was bought by free-traders who wished to qualify themselves as voters for members of the next Parliament, which would have to be elected in or before 1848.

Reform seemed still distant, when Shelley's prophecy was fulfilled. Freedom's eternal foe, Famine, came suddenly to her help. Dearness of wheat and meat had obliged half of the Irish and many of the English to live entirely on potatoes. Wages were often paid in Ireland by loan of land for raising this crop. The rot which began in August, 1845, soon became so destructive that Peel, who was then Prime Minister, proposed in October that grain should be made free of duty. Wellington and other members of the Cabinet demurred; and the question had to be submitted to Parliament. Disraeli insisted to the last on keeping up the tariff; but famine was increasing; and both Houses finally agreed, after long debate, to accept Peel's proposal, that not only the duties on food and raw materials, but most of the others, should be either reduced or abolished. His conservatism did not keep him from seeing that the whole system of protecting home industries must stand or fall together. Prominent among obstructionists were the bishops. The House of Lords did not agree before June 25, 1846, to the reform which had been accepted on May 15th by the House of Commons, and which was publicly acknowledged by Wellington to be inevitable. Such was the exasperation of the protectionists that they helped the opponents, of coercion in Ireland to drive Peel out of office, by a vote which was taken in the House of Commons on the very day when his plan of tariff reform gained that victory in the House of Lords which made free trade for ever the system of Great Britain.

About one-half of the import duties are now levied on tobacco, one-fourth more on wine and strong drink; and most of the rest on tea and other groceries. Duties on articles which could be produced in Great Britain are offset by internal-revenue taxes. No monopoly is given to farm or factory; no necessary article is made too dear for the poor; and there are no needless violations of the right of the labourer to spend his wages in the best market.

This reform made the relief of Ireland possible, though the loss of life was terrible. Never again has England been so near to a famine as in 1841. Food is now so plenty that five times as much sugar is used in proportion to population as in 1842, and more than twice as much butter and eggs. This does not mean that the millionaire eats five times as much sugar, or twice as many eggs, as before, but that poor people can now buy freely what formerly were almost unattainable luxuries. The proportion of money in savings banks in England and Wales has doubled; and that of paupers sank from 1 in 11 in 1842 to 1 in 37 in 1895. Wages have risen fifty per cent., while other prices have fallen; and British workmen are better off than any others in Europe. The annual value of English exports declined steadily from 1815 to 1842; but it is now four times as great as in the latter year; and it is more than twice as large in proportion to population as in those highly protected countries, the United States and France. Low tariffs also enable Belgium to export nearly three times as much for each inhabitant as France, and New South Wales to export five times as much as the United States. Large exports do not depend on density of population but on ability to import freely. Readiness of any country to buy freely of her neighbours keeps them able and willing to buy whatever she has to sell. Free trade has given Great Britain, New South Wales, and Belgium their choice of the world's markets. Great Britain has also been enabled to keep up much more friendly relations with the rest of Europe than would otherwise have been the case. Liberty of commerce has helped her enjoy peace; and peace has preserved free institutions.

The reforms which culminated in free trade showed Englishmen that they could right any wrong without resort to violence. The attempt of the Chartists to overawe Parliament in 1848 was seen to be inexcusable; and it failed ridiculously. Never since then has insurrection in England been even possible. The atmosphere of thought has been so quiet that suffrage was greatly extended in 1867, and made practically universal in 1894. Voters gained the protection of a secret ballot in 1872; and municipal self-government was given in 1894 to every part of England where it had not already been established.