Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century

by James Richard Joy

Had the nineteenth century nothing else to show save the improvement in transportation, its fame would be secure. Within a dozen years after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, Great Britain was covered with railways or railway surveys, establishing all the trunk-lines which now exist. The thirty and a half miles of the original line grew by leaps and bounds to a system of nearly two thousand miles, the property of a single company, whose property is valued at five hundred million dollars. Twenty-five years after the day of the "Rocket's" victory eight thousand miles of railway were in operation in the United Kingdom. Another twenty-five years brought the total up to eighteen thousand miles, which had cost for construction nearly four billion dollars. At the same time (1883) the number of locomotives was 14,469, of cars, 490,661. Before Manchester and Liverpool were connected by railway thirty stage-coaches sufficed for the passenger traffic. The railway carried seven hundred thousand passengers between the two cities in its first year and one-half. Fifty years later the passengers on all the English lines numbered six hundred million, of whom eighty-five per cent traveled third-class. The freight traffic in the same year was two hundred and twenty-six million tons. Robert Stephenson lived to see one per cent of the entire population of the United Kingdom employed on the railways. In 1884 the number of such employees was 367,793. These few figures are sufficient to suggest the magnitude of the economic changes which took place in England, and indeed throughout the civilized world, as the direct result of the talent, industry, and perseverance of George Stephenson, the Northumbrian plowboy.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. Describe the early life of George Stephenson. 2. What attempts at locomotives had been made prior to his time? 3. What success of Stephenson's led to the Stockton-Darlington railway? 4. How did the " Quarterly" comment on the proposed Liverpool line? 5. What was the view of the Parliamentary committee? 6. Describe Stephenson's work on the Liverpool & Manchester line. 7. What competitors had the "Rocket"? 8. Describe the later work of the two Stephensons. 9. Contrast Stephenson's England with that of to-day.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIFE OF STEPHENSON. Samuel Smiles. ("Lives of the Engineers.")

V

RUSSELL AND PARLIAMENTARY REFORM

[JOHN RUSSELL, Earl Russell, born, London, August 18, 1792; died,
Pembroke Lodge, Richmond Park, May 28,1878; educated at
Westminster School and Edinburgh University; Member of
Parliament, 1813; favored Catholic emancipation; 1830-34,
paymaster general; 1831, introduced the first Reform Bill; 1832,
carried the third Reform Bill; 1835-39, Home Secretary; 1839-41,
Colonial Secretary; 1846-52, Prime Minister; 1852-53, Foreign
Secretary; 1854-55, President of the Council; 1855, Colonial
Secretary; 1859-65, Foreign Secretary; 1865-66, Prime Minister.]

The Parliament of England is one of the most ancient of political institutions. Constitutional historians find its germs in the council of the wise men—"The Witenagemot"—which was summoned to give advice to the early Anglo-Saxon kings. In the thirteenth century Simon de Montfort had added to the assembly of the nobles certain representatives of the counties, cities, and boroughs. The monarchs found this gathering of the estates of the nation a useful instrument of taxation and the Parliament in turn acquired certain legislative rights. In time the nobles or peers began to sit by themselves, leaving the chosen representatives to meet in a House of Commons. The story of the increasing influence of Parliament is in great part the history of the English nation. Before the close of the seventeenth century the power of Parliament had become the leading force in the state. Yet much remained to be done in the nineteenth century to bring this supreme governing body into living touch with the heart of the nation.

The conservative habit of the English had left the constitution of the House of Commons untouched for so many years that it had lost all but the semblance of a representative body. No uniform qualification for the voter existed. In one locality the franchise was closely restricted, in others every man, however poor, might exercise the right to vote. There were all manner of variations in these "fancy franchises," which had been conferred by special charters at long separated intervals. Neither was there any existing relation between population and representation. Strange as the statement will appear to American readers, accustomed to the reapportionment of congressional representation after every federal census, it is a fact that there had been no radical change in the boundaries of election districts in England for centuries. The population had meanwhile undergone enormous changes. Not only had it increased manifold, but the rise of modern industry had occasioned a redistribution of the people. London had become a swarming hive. Liverpool docks and warehouses were surrounded by a crowded city. Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and other places scarcely known to the England of Tudor and Stuart, were centers of busy industrial life, attracting to themselves multitudes of the inhabitants of the countryside. The counties, large and small, continued to have equal representation in Parliament, though some of them were many times more populous than others. In the boroughs the inequalities were most flagrant. Where a goodly village had been in Tudor times there might now be nothing visible but the crumbling tower of the parish church, yet the place still retained its right to representation in the House of Commons. Such decayed or "rotten" boroughs existed in considerable numbers. Their few voters were controlled by the land-owning nobility. McCarthy says, "The case of Old Sarum is famous. It returned members to Parliament in the days of Edward III., and from that period down to the time of the Reform Bill. But the town of Old Sarum gradually disappeared. Owing to the rise of New Sarum (Salisbury) and to other causes the population gradually deserted it. The town became practically effaced from existence; its remains far less palpable or visible than those of any Baalbec or Palmyra. Yet it continued to be represented in Parliament. It was at one time bought by Lord Chatham's grandfather, Governor Pitt. It was coolly observed at the time that "Mr. Pitt's posterity now have an hereditary seat in the House of Commons as owners of Old Sarum," just as any earl had a seat in the House of Lords by virtue of his hereditary peerage. When the Reform Bill was passed the member of Parliament for the borough of Ludgershall was himself the only voter in the borough and had chosen himself to Parliament on his own nomination. Another place with two members had only seven qualified voters. McCarthy is quite within the truth when he asserts that two-thirds of the House of Commons was made up of the nominees of the peers and great landlords "who owned their boroughs and members just as they owned their parks and their cattle." Thus the power of the landed aristocracy, which was the House of Lords, lacked but little of being the House of Commons as well. The mass of the nation, which was now rapidly gaining in education and wealth, had no way of making its influence felt in Parliament except by the power of public opinion, to which the periodical and pamphlet press was beginning to give expression.