Liberty in the Nineteenth Century

by Frederic May Holland

This tariff and the depreciation of currency made food excessively dear. The country labourer was often unable to earn more than the price of a loaf a day. Employers agreed on wages so low that the peasants had to ask continually for parochial relief, and could not afford to go out of the parish to seek higher pay. Their degradation was increased by their almost universal illiteracy; and their misdemeanours, especially poaching, were punished cruelly; for the rural magistrate was either the squire or his ally, the parson. There was little chance of justice for the poor against the rich; the rural labourer could seldom improve his position; and the bad harvests of 1816, 1817, and 1818 helped to make him worse off than ever before or since.

The operatives had higher wages, but suffered under the friction of an industrial revolution, which has done more than any political convulsion for human happiness. The factory had been enabled by the invention of the steam-engine and other machines, shortly before 1800, to take the place of the cottages in making cloth. British goods were in great demand abroad during the war, and had to be carried in British ships. Improved roads and canals led merchants and manufacturers to opulence. The rich grew richer, as has usually been the case; but there were some exceptional years during which the poor really grew poorer. One man could make as much cotton cloth in a day as two hundred could have done before; but what was to become of the one hundred and ninety-nine? Demand for factory labour kept increasing until 1815; but population grew faster still. Wages were already falling; the return of peace lessened the demand abroad; and hundreds of thousands of discharged soldiers and sailors were added to the multitude of unemployed. Labourers were forbidden either to emigrate or to combine in order to keep up wages; and their earnings were lowest at the time when bread was the highest. Meat, sugar, foreign fruit, and many other articles now in common use were almost unattainable by the poor until late in the century. There was much more intelligence in the towns than in the country; but there were no opportunities of education in 1818 in England for one-half of the children.

Boys and girls entered the factory at the age of six, and often from the poor-house, where they had been sold into slavery. The regular time was fourteen hours a day; sitting down was seldom permitted; food was scanty and bad; punishment was constant and cruel; deformity and disease were frequent; and the death-rate was unusually high. Terrible cases occurred of pauper children, kept sixteen hours at a stretch without rest or food, driven by hunger to rob the troughs in the pig-sty, tortured merely for amusement by the overseer, and even advertised for sale with the mill.

The middle class differed much more widely than at present, both from the masses on one hand and from the aristocracy on the other, as regards food, dress, culture, amusements, and political liberty. Taxation was heavy and vexatious; representation in Parliament was notoriously inadequate; and honest men and women were still liable to imprisonment for debt. No one but an Episcopalian had a right to study at a university, enter Parliament, or hold any civil, naval, or military office in England; and neither Dissenters nor Catholics could marry without going through ceremonies which conscience forbade. The press was fettered by laws which kept Leigh Hunt imprisoned for two years, on account of an article acknowledging the unpopularity of the Prince Regent. Cobbett underwent an equally long imprisonment in Newgate for blaming the cruelty of sentencing insubordinate militiamen to be flogged five hundred lashes. No plays could be performed in London in 1814 until they had been read and licensed by the Lord Chamberlain's deputy.

As soon as a strong government ceased to be needed for protection against Napoleon, there broke out much agitation for relief of the disfranchised as well as of the destitute. There was an unprecedented circulation of the cheap pamphlets in which Cobbett advised the discontented to abstain from lawless violence, which could only give them another Robespierre, and devote themselves to striving peaceably for their political rights. Among these he asserted that of every man who paid taxes to vote for members of Parliament. The serious riots which took place in many parts of Great Britain, even London, made the aristocracy consider all opportunities of addressing the people dangerous. The ministry were empowered in 1817 to arrest speakers and authors without any warrant, and keep them in prison without a trial. Prohibition of public meetings was made possible by an act which extended to reading-rooms, debating societies, even among students at Cambridge, and scientific lectures.

The mounted militia was sent to disperse a meeting of fifty thousand unarmed men and women at Manchester, on August 16, 1819, in behalf of parliamentary reform. The people were packed together so closely that they were unable to separate quickly. Fear that some of the young gentlemen who had ridden into the throng might get hurt led the magistrates to order several hundred hussars to charge, without notice, into the dense crowd. The meeting was soon reduced to heaps of fallen men and women, who had been overthrown in the general struggle to escape or cut down by the soldiers; and the field was covered with bloody hats, shawls, and bonnets. Six people were killed, and more than thirty others wounded severely. There was indignation everywhere against this wanton cruelty; and the Common Council of London voted their censure; but Parliament passed laws that same year which made public meetings almost impossible, and put cheap pamphlets under a prohibitory tax, by requiring that they must have such an expensive stamp as kept newspapers beyond the reach of people generally. Arrests for printing and selling unstamped publications were thenceforward frequent. There were many bloody riots; and a conspiracy for assassinating the Ministry was organised in 1820. A dangerous revolution might then have broken out, if food had not been made plenty by abundant harvests.

Roman Catholics were still forbidden to hold any office under the British Government. They could not sit in either House of Parliament, or be married legally in Ireland, where they formed four-fifths of the population, and almost all the offices on that island were filled by Protestants who had been sent over from England, or else elected by close corporations containing scarcely any Catholics. The disfranchised nation was all the more indignant on account of such facts as that two-thirds of the soil of Ireland had been taken away without compensation by English invaders before 1700, and that the share of the Irish in 1800 was only one-tenth. This was held mostly in great estates, as was the rest of the island. Rents were everywhere high and wages low, for population was superabundant; manufactures had been crushed by laws to protect British interests; the people were left ignorant, even of agriculture; and there were frequent famines. Both the land and the government were mismanaged by an anti-Irish minority which took little pains to keep its own partisans from lawless violence, but did its utmost to extort money for a legion of priests, who were merely servants of oppression to nine-tenths of the people. How little they cared about their professed duty may be judged from the case mentioned by a traveller named Inglis (vol. i., p. 349), of a bishop who drew four or five hundred pounds a year for calling himself rector of a parish where there was no pretence of any public worship but the Catholic. Indignation of Irish Presbyterians had been one main cause of the bloody rebellion of 1798; and all patriotic Irishmen were exasperated at the oppression of the poor by the rich. Removal of religious disabilities was urgently demanded, and most of the men were members in 1825 of an independent association, which could easily have turned the island into one vast camp.

V. Germany had been devastated by twenty years of battles; and many thousand Germans had perished, either in defending their homes against Napoleon, or in serving under him in Russia. His overthrow left them in deeper subjection than ever to a league of despots, who differed in pomp of title and extent of territory, but agreed in obstinately denying any political liberty to the people. The servitude of Germany was confirmed by the agreement of clergymen and philosophers, that absolute monarchy was "ordained of God." The ban of church and university was on the revolutionary rationalism which had inspired the eighteenth century. The predominant philosophy during the first half of the nineteenth century insisted on the infallibility of what was called intuition, but was often merely tradition. This was already the case in Germany, where moribund ideas of politics and theology were worshipped as the loftiest revelations of pure reason.

Devout disciples still hold that all established institutions are justified and all knowledge revealed by Hegel's method of deduction from his own peculiar definition of the Infinite. That definition seems self-contradictory; but this is only a trifle, compared with the method's permitting the master to prefer absolute monarchy, and forcing him to deny that any nation, not extremely limited in area, can long remain a democracy. Hegel's indifference to the existence of the United States was like his asserting, after the discovery of Ceres, that the place where it had been found, and where hundreds of other planets are now known to exist, must be empty. Among other results of his system were a denial that lightning is electricity, and an assertion that rain is merely a change of air into water. Neither liberty nor knowledge gains by disregard of experience in favour of deductions from imaginary intuitions.

Unfortunately, the experience of Europe under Napoleon, as well as during the Revolution, seemed to justify restoration of old institutions as well as of former boundaries. The latter purpose was ostensibly that for which the conquerors of Napoleon met at Vienna, soon after he had retired to Elba; but their real object was to divide the spoils among themselves. The Emperors of Russia and Austria had the assistance, or opposition, of five kings, and of so many princes and nobles that three hundred carriages of state were kept in constant readiness. Lovely ladies of high rank came from many lands; and it seemed to the uninitiated as if nothing was going on but masked balls, private theatricals, hunting parties, stately dinners, and concerts. Beethoven was among the musicians. There was no general meeting of the monarchs and ambassadors; but there were frequent conferences of those most interested in one point or another; and the name of Congress of Vienna was amply justified by the number of bargains and compromises. The only persons never consulted were the thirty millions whose masters were thus selected.