The Bill, however, was passed in the House of Commons by a large majority. It was carried after a hard fight through the House of Lords, and received the royal assent in August, 1834. It should be said that the Duke of Wellington, although usually strong and resolute as a party man, had good sense and fair spirit enough to make him a warm supporter of the measure, despite the vehement protestations of many of his own habitual supporters. Since that time it seems to be admitted by common consent that the measure has accomplished all the beneficial results which its promoters anticipated from it, and has, in many of its provisions, worked even better than some of its supporters had expected. Of course, our poor-law system has since that time been always undergoing modifications of one kind or another, and public criticism is continually pointing to the necessity for further improvement. We hear every now and then of cases in which, owing to local maladministration, some deserving men and women, honestly struggling to keep their heads above pauperism, are left to perish of hunger or cold. We read well-authenticated, only too well-authenticated, instances of actual starvation taking place in some wealthy district of a great city. We hear of parochial funds squandered and muddled away; of the ratepayers' money wasted in extravagance, and worse than extravagance; of miserable courts and alleys where the deserving and undeserving poor are alike neglected and uncared for. But it would be utterly impossible that some such defects as these should not be found in the management of any system worked by {230} human mechanism for such a purpose as the relief of a great nation's poverty. The predominant fact is that we have a system which is based on the representative principle, which is open to the inspection and the criticism of the whole country, and which frankly declares itself the enemy of professional beggary and the helper of the poverty which is honestly striving to help itself. Much remains yet to be done for the improvement of our national system of poor relief, but it has, at least, to be said that the reformed Parliament did actually establish a system founded on just principles and responsible to public judgment.
[Sidenote: 1833—The East India Company's charter]
Another of the great reforms which was accomplished in this age of reform found its occasion when the time came for the renewal of the East India Company's charter. The Government and the Houses of Parliament had to deal with the future administration of one of the greatest empires the world had ever seen, brought together by events and forces the like of which had not been at work in any previous chapter of the world's history. We have already traced, in this book, the growth of the East India Company's possessions, a growth brought about by a combination of the qualities which belonged to the Alexanders and the Caesars, and of the qualities also which go to the expansion of peaceful commerce and the opening up of markets for purely industrial enterprise. The charter of the Company had been renewed by legislation at long intervals, and the first reformed Parliament now found itself compelled to settle the conditions under which the charter should be renewed for another period of twenty years. Mr. Molesworth justly remarks that "it was a fortunate circumstance that the Reform Bill had passed, and a Reform Parliament been elected, before the question of the renewal of the Company's charter was decided; for otherwise the directors of this great Company and other persons interested in the maintenance of the monopolies and abuses connected with it would in all probability have returned to Parliament, by means of rotten boroughs, a party of adherents sufficiently large to have effectually prevented the Government and the House of Commons from dealing with {231} this great question in the manner in which the interests of England and India alike demanded that it should be dealt with."
Up to the time at which we have now arrived the East India Company had an almost absolute monopoly of the whole Chinese trade, as well as the Indian trade, and a control over the administration of India such as might well have gratified the ambition of a despotic monarch. The last renewal of the Company's charter had been in 1813, and it was to run for twenty years, so that Lord Grey's Government found themselves charged with the task of making arrangements for its continuance, or its modifications, or its abolition. Some distinction had already been effected between the powers of the Company as the ruler of a vast Empire under the suzerainty of England, and its powers as a huge commercial corporation, or what we should now call a syndicate, but the company still retained its monopoly of the India and China trade. In the mean time, however, the principles of political economy had been asserting a growing influence over the public intelligence, and the question was coming to be asked, more and more earnestly, why a private company should be allowed the exclusive right of conducting the trade between England and India and China. An agitation against the monopoly began, as was but natural, among the great manufacturing and commercial towns in the North of England. Miss Martineau, in her "History of the Thirty Years' Peace," ascribes the beginning of this movement to a once well-known merchant and philanthropist of Liverpool, the late Mr. William Rathbone, whom some of us can still remember having known in our earlier years. Miss Martineau had probably good reasons for making such a statement, and, at all events, nothing is more likely than that such a movement began in Liverpool, and began with such a man. In London the directors and supporters of the East India Company were too powerful to give much chance to a hostile movement begun in the metropolis, and it needed the energy, the commercial independence, and the advanced opinions of the northern cities to give it an effective start.
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When the time came for the renewal of the Company's charter, the Government had made up their mind that the renewal should be conditional on the abolition of the commercial monopoly, and that the trade between the dominions of King William and the Eastern populations should be thrown open to all the King's subjects. The measure passed through both Houses of Parliament with but little opposition. Mr. Molesworth is perfectly right in his remarks as to the different sort of reception which would have been given to such a measure if the charter had come up for renewal before the Act of Reform had abolished the nomination boroughs and the various other sham constituencies. But it is a striking proof of the hold which the representative principle and the doctrines of free-trade were already beginning to have on public opinion that the monopoly of the East India Company should not have been able to make a harder fight for its existence. The wonder which a modern reader will be likely to feel as he studies the subject now is, not that the monopoly should have been abolished with so little trouble, but that rational men should have admitted so long the possibility of any justification for its existence.
The renewal of the Charter of the Bank of England gave an opportunity, during the same session, for an alteration in the conditions under which the Bank maintains its legalized position and its relations with the State, and for a further reorganization of those conditions, which was in itself a distinct advance in the commercial arrangements of the Empire. Other modifications have taken place from time to time since those days, and it is enough to say here that the alterations made by the first reformed Parliament, at the impulse of Lord Grey and his colleagues, were in keeping with the movement of the commercial spirit and went along the path illumined by the growing light of a sound political economy.
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