At night the Home Secretary spent the money of the State, in telegraphing to all the mayors in the land "the day had passed off quietly," thus creating a false terror everywhere that London had been in danger—danger of the Government's creating.
The Bull Ring Riots in Birmingham in 1839, when I was resident there, were created entirely by the magistrates, who introduced a hundred London policemen into the town, which led to the loss of life and property.
I and others on the deputation to Mr. Walpole told him at the time, when the railings were broken down in Hyde Park, that if he made a show of soldiers and policemen, people were sure to be killed. At the peril of his own reputation, he kept them out of sight, and no disorder took place, though violent members of the Government tried to destroy Mr. Walpole for his wise and noble forbearance. Dean Stubbs, in his interesting book on Charles Kingsley, says (p. 97): "On the 10th of April, 1848, a revolution was threatened in England. One hundred thousand armed men were to meet on Kennington Common and thence to march on Westminster, and there to compel, by physical force, if necessary, the acceptance of the People's Charter by the Houses of Parliament." Could such a lunatical statement be written by any one, and his friends not procure a magistrate's order for his removal to the nearest asylum? How were the "hundred thousand" to get the arms into London—if they had them. Whence were they to procure them? Where could they store them, seeing that at that time there was not a single place of Chartist meeting that was not known to be in debt, unless its rent was paid by the charity of some well-to-do sympathiser? What were muskets or pikes to do against the stone walls of the Houses of Parliament or the Bank? How were cannon to be drawn from the centre of London to Kennington Common with ample service of powder and shot? Marvellous is the history which Churchmen can write!
The utterly groundless and incredible representations of the "10th April," which Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes published, as we have seen, were to my amazement resuscitated as late as 1902 for the historic instruction of the students of the Working Mens College in Great Ormond Street, London, by Mr. R. P. Lichfield, vice-principal of the college, who for forty-seven years has rendered it important service, for which all friends of education for workmen are grateful. Yet in his address to the students (October 1, 1902), he tells them that in 1848 "the wave of democracy which swept over Europe gave fresh impetus to the Chartist agitation. On the memorable 10th of April it looked as if we were to have a revolutionary outbreak on the Parisian pattern. This we were saved from, partly by an army of volunteers, special constables, partly by the Duke of Wellington's discreet placing of his troops.... The attempt to overawe Parliament by a 'physical force' demonstration was a fiasco." The world knows a good deal of historians who draw upon their imagination for their facts, but here is a responsible teacher, drawing upon his terrors of fifty years ago, for statements which nobody believes now or believed then, who knew the facts. The Duke of Wellington's great name in war imposed upon amateur politicians. The Duke—contrary to his reputation for military veracity—readily lent himself to the Government of that day, that they might figure before the country as the deliverers of England, from the nation-shaking assault of a miscellaneous crowd of penniless and unarmed combatants, who had neither cannon nor commissariat. Everybody was aware that the knowledge of the Iron Duke, outside war, was very limited, and his political credulity was unbounded. At the end of the Peninsular War he wrote to the Government of that day, informing them "the bankers of Paris were furnishing large sums to Revolutionists in England." Only old residents in Bedlam would believe that. There were no leaders of Revolutionists in England, to whom the money could be assigned or consigned, and bankers were the last persons in the world to subscribe money for a wild, speculative, and uncertain enterprise. No spy of Pitt, or Sid-mouth, would have sent home so insane a report, from fear of instant dismissal from their sinister employment.
This is but a sample of the airy, false, and fictionary foundation on which the Legend of the Tenth of April was built. These incidents of historic perversion, though bygones of half a century ago, are worth remembering.
CHAPTER VIII. THE CHARTISTS OF FICTION
The Chartists have made as much noise in the world as they knew how—yet to the generation of to-day they are ambiguous. They have had no historian. Carlyle went to look at them in prison, and defamed them with that bitterness and contempt he had for partisans who lacked the sense of submission to the dictates of those superior persons who knew what was best for everybody, of whose aspirations they knew nothing, and for whose needs they had no sympathy. Chartism, however, has won conspicuous treatment in fiction. What it was in fact, is a very different thing. There is the Church Chartist by Canon Kingsley, and the Positivist Chartist by George Eliot, drawn by two famous artists. The pictures are hung upon the line in the great gallery of literature. So brilliant is the work of Kingsley that it has imposed on so accomplished a connoisseur as Dean Stubbs, who, in his life of the fervid Rector of Eversley, has taken it for a painting from real life. I present the Church Chartist first.
In my time I have seen much good done by Christians with a view to extend their faith. Some few, like Samuel Morley, who excelled all lay Dissenters I have known in the manly sense of the dignity and independence of Nonconformity, would do generous things from the humaneness of their own minds alone. Some Quakers and Unitarians have had this quality. Others, Churchmen, Roman Catholics, and orthodox Christians, I have known to mitigate privation for the "Lord's sake," not for humanity's sake. This was to some extent the case of the Rev. Frederick Denison Maurice, Canon Kingsley, and their noble colleagues, Edward Vansittart Neale, Judge Thomas Hughes, and J. M. Ludlow. They became Christian Socialists not so much because they cared for Socialism, as Maurice owned his "object was not to Socialise society, but to Christianise Socialism." Startled by the dislike and even resentment against Christianity expressed by men of poverty and intelligence at being asked to adopt a belief which brought them no relief, Maurice, Kingsley, and their associates concluded that privation was the cause of alienation from the Church. In like manner Dissenters thought that it was the bad condition of industrial life which kept working people from chapel. None realised that alienation from Christianity had its seat in the understanding—in intellectual dissatisfaction with the tenets of Theology. The absentees from church and chapel alleged that no relief came of belief, and never had since the days when manna fell in the Jewish wilderness, and loaves and fishes were miraculously plentiful on the hills of Galilee. There was no sense or profit in adopting a faith which had been unproductive for nearly 2,000 years. It had taken the slave, the serf, and the hired worker a long time to see this. But at last experience had told upon the thoughtful. But the theologians neither in the dominant, nor dominated camps perceived it.
Very generous is Kingsley's sympathy, in "Alton Locke," with the lot of working people, but he believed that when the rebellious shoemaker fully realises that good priests would mitigate the lot of those who labour in workshops or in fields and mines, he will become reconciled to the Thirty-nine Articles. Alton Locke is a Church Chartist—not one of the Chartists of real life whom I knew, who were current in Kingsley's days, who signed the famous document which Place drew and Roebuck revised. They had principles. They did not seek paternal government of friendly Churchmen, nor of Positivists, nor that nobly organised kind of passive competence which Mr. Ruskin meditated for the people. The real Chartists—like the Co-operators—sought self-government for the people by the people. The alienation of the people from church and chapel was not founded on lack of spiritual patronage, or thirst for it, but from intellectual dissatisfaction with theological tenets.