the humblest birth might fight his way up to the Woolsack, and become a peer of the realm. But as a rule the ordinary avenues were open only to the landowning class.
The wage-earning common people were more contemptible than the merchants and manufacturers. On no account were they to be admitted into the political ring. "Send the people to the loom and the anvil," said Lord Westmoreland, and there let them earn bread, instead of wasting time at seditious meetings.[[36]] "I do not know," said Bishop Horsley, "what the mass of the people in any country have to do with the laws but to obey them."[[37]] "It requires no proof," said the Lord Justice Clerk from the bench, "to show that the British Constitution is the best that ever was since the creation of the world, and it is not possible to make it better.... A government in every country should be just like a corporation; and in this country it is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to be represented; as for the rabble who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation upon them?"[[38]] So Pitt "did not consider those to be the best friends of the people who were always goading them to bring forward petitions, and encouraging the agitation and discussion of political affairs."[[39]] Castlereagh, the last great leader of the Tory reaction, "always maintained that in a representative government the preponderance of property and high station was more conducive to order and general prosperity than that of mob orators or needy adventurers.... He was no friend to a system which was to be directed by men who had no other influence than what they could acquire by pandering to the low interests and lower passions of a misguided rabble."[[40]] The most consistent of all the Tories was Windham, a country gentleman of considerable learning and practical good sense, and the intimate friend of Pitt. He began his political
career as a Whig, but turned Tory after the outbreak of the Revolution, and died without a shred of Whiggery left to him, except a qualified dislike of the Slave Trade. He seldom lost an opportunity of depreciating the common people, and of excluding them from politics. "He could not see the harm there was of preventing all endeavours to explain to a poor, illiterate fellow, whose extent of powers was but barely adequate to the task of procuring food for his own subsistence, points which had divided the opinions of the ablest writers."[[41]] Referring to the case of Bloomfield, a labourer, who wrote a poem called "The Farmer's Boy," he said that "he had doubts how far it was proper to encourage ideas of literary profit or renown in those who had been bred to a useful trade."[[42]] Speaking against a Bill for the suppression of bull-baiting, he said that the petition from Stamford against the Bill came from "a body of sober, loyal men, who attended to their several vocations, and never meddled with politics."[[43]] When Whitbread introduced a Bill to provide a public school in every parish, Windham opposed it. "The increase of this sort of introduction to knowledge would only tend to make the people study politics, and lay them open to the arts of designing men."[[44]] The publication of the proceedings in Parliament was to be suppressed for similar reasons. "The people at large were entitled to justice—they were entitled to every favour that could be shown to them consistently with their own safety, on which depended their own happiness—they were entitled to every advantage they could possibly be capable of enjoying, as much as the proudest person in the state; but they had not education to enable them to judge of political affairs.... He confessed he never saw any man of a low condition with a newspaper in his hand, and who read any of it, without comparing him to a man who was swallowing poison under the hope of
improving his health."[[45]] Though Windham did not succeed in persuading the House to exclude the reporters, the basis of his case was generally accepted by the Tory party. Plunket described the working classes in the same style as Windham. "He was willing to allow to them the enjoyment of every constitutional privilege which they were entitled to possess; he never could consider that nice discussions on the very frame of the constitution, on the most essential changes in the institutions and fundamental laws of the country, were calculated for minds of such intelligence and cultivation."
Politics, in a word, were bad for the lower classes. "These men, the nature of whose employment and whose education disallowed them to be statesmen, might, however, learn enough to become turbulent and discontented subjects."[[46]] Government was not to be according to the will of the people, who were incapable of directing that will rightly. "If, to our misfortune," said Canning, "we had found a popular assembly existing under the direct control of the people, forced to obey its will, and liable to be dismissed by its authority,... it would have been the duty of wise legislators to diminish its overbearing freedom, and to substitute in its place a deliberative freedom."[[47]] Even public meetings were only to take place under the sanction of the superior class. "Far was it from him," said Castlereagh, in introducing his Six Acts, "to call on the House to do anything that would operate against the ancient and sacred right of the people to petition, under the protection and with the sanction of the magistrates, or the other constituted authorities of the land.... But meetings not called under such authorities, convened by men without character, rank, or fortune, were in all probability called for improper objects, and therefore were a fit subject for the animadversion of the law, and it was but reasonable that they should assemble under circumstances that gave a sort of prima
facie security against outrage."[[48]] There was a general presumption that a popular meeting was a seditious meeting, and if any such meeting was held at all, its respectability must be guaranteed by members of the upper classes. These opinions, aggravated as they were by the excesses of the French Revolution, may be taken as fairly representative of Toryism during the whole of the reign of George III.
The natural consequence of this general depreciation of the poorer people was that they were injured in other ways than mere disfranchisement. The whole scheme of society was so constructed as to prevent them from ever rising above the station in which they were placed. No facilities were provided for their education by the State, in spite of the obvious inadequacy of private enterprise. A Scottish Act of 1696 had compelled landowners to provide schools in every parish of Scotland. But in England the neglect was gross and widespread. A Select Committee reported in 1818 that not more than 570,000 children were publicly educated. As the number of children of school age was about 2,000,000, this meant that only one child in four received any sort of education. As the teaching was often hopelessly inefficient, the case was much worse even than the figures themselves showed; and as affairs had considerably improved during the twenty years before the Committee began its inquiry, it would probably be fair to assume that in 1788, immediately before the outbreak of the Revolution, only one poor child in ten received any substantial mental training. Lancaster the Quaker began to found schools in 1801, and the British and Foreign and National Societies commenced operations a few years later. No systematic teaching of the poor had been previously attempted except by private benevolence. But it must not be supposed that even charity was always disinterested. Lurking behind many of these projects was the belief in education as a precaution against disorder. Wilberforce spoke of popular education in language which showed that he believed in it not merely because it helped the poorer people to develop their natural capacities. Referring to
the political disturbances of 1819, he asked, "If a proper notion of the sacredness of property had been given to the people, would they have passed such resolutions as those by which they had disgraced themselves at Barnsley?"[[49]] The governing class thus used education partly, at any rate, as a measure of police. Ignorant poverty meant danger to wealth.
The poorer people, being kept in such a state of intellectual degradation, were naturally criminal to a far greater degree than at the present day, and the criminal law punished their offences with such savagery that juries often acquitted guilty persons rather than expose them to the consequences of an adverse verdict. In 1819 there were still on the Statute Book two hundred felonies punishable with death. When it was proposed to substitute transportation for life for the death penalty in the case of stealing goods worth five shillings from a shop, Lord Ellenborough, the Lord Chief Justice, protested in the House of Lords in the name of himself and all his colleagues on the bench.[[50]] Conspicuous in ferocity were the Game Laws. In 1816 it was made a crime punishable with transportation for seven years for any person to be found at night in possession of a net or a snare.[[51]] Spring-guns and man-traps might be set by any landowner about his premises. The public prisons were dens of vice and breeding-places of disease. Women were flogged in public till 1817, and in private till 1819, and transportation meant prostitution for nine women out of ten, if not on the voyage, at any rate after they reached the colony.[[52]]
While the general state of the common people was so low, some of them had religious consolations. Those of them who belonged to the Church of England were elevated above Dissenters and Catholics, as country gentlemen were elevated above themselves. The same habit of mind persisted in religion as in politics. A particular Church, connected with the ruling class, and staffed by