degradation such as had never been known in any civilized part of the world. His system of finance burdened the country with an unnecessary load of debt. His failure to adjust the customs tariff to the new conditions of a population which was no longer self-sufficing increased distress and discontent with it. His chief enterprise, the war with France, was begun in folly and conducted with incompetence, and it was not until after his death that it was efficiently conducted to a successful issue. The one thing which he did was to maintain a strong central government in the United Kingdom. But to this maintenance of government he sacrificed almost everything for which government exists. "The Pilot who weathered the storm" flung all the cargo out of the ship, and steered her from the high seas into dangerous shallows, from some of which she has not yet escaped.
CHAPTER IV
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND ENGLISH OPINION
The Revolution affected English society in two directly opposite ways. It is unquestionable that its violence drove the majority into hostility not only to Revolution, but to Reform. But many men and women welcomed the triumph of its principles with an enthusiasm which was almost as extravagant as the opposition of the rest. Those who had preached equality in the days of Wilkes and the American War were encouraged to greater zeal, and the bigness of the new shock awakened interest in masses of people who had previously been apathetic. The Industrial Revolution had by this time produced much of the social alteration of which some account has already been given, and the artisans of the North offered a fertile soil for doctrines which had previously fallen on barren ground. Political speculation now for the first time attracted the serious attention of the governing class. The new thinkers themselves belonged to all ranks, though very few of them were to be found among the aristocracy. They all preached, with more or less ardour, and with a more or less crude application of logic to political conditions, the doctrine that every man had an equal moral right with every other to control his own life. For practical purposes the speculation of these primitive Liberals did not extend beyond male limits. But some, of whom Mary Wollstonecraft was the most conspicuous,[[100]] even made the same claim for every woman. When only one woman in ten thousand had any substantial intellectual training, it was natural enough that men should give little
thought to their political rights. Until women were sufficiently educated to ask for equality in the State, it was impossible that men should think seriously of granting it. But the French Revolution, though its direct effect on the political condition of women was insignificant, started, in their case as in that of men, a train of events which has borne fruit in more modern times. The emancipation of women from the control of men, which is the most profound of all the social changes of the last fifty years, has been produced by precisely the same changes in social ideas as those which have abolished the political distinctions among sects and classes of men. It is only another part of the process of the emancipation of the individual which is called Liberalism.
The most obvious feature of this early Liberal movement is its neglect of economic questions, and its concentration upon the mere machinery of government. The science of political economy was indeed only in its infancy, and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, had little effect upon practical politicians of any school until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Political argument was therefore conducted in these early stages very largely upon a theoretical basis, and Tories, Whigs, and Radicals contended as mightily about the abstractions of natural rights and sovereignty as the early Churches about the difference between Homoousion and Homoiousion. Almost the only practical grievances alleged against the old system were expensive wars and the maintenance of sinecures. The early Reformers, though the doctrine of laissez faire was not formulated until half a century later, in fact believed it. They were in economics what the Whigs were in politics. They hated the interference of the executive, and they would probably have looked upon attempts to alter economic conditions as meddling, which would restrict the liberty of the citizen and increase the already dangerous influence of the Crown.
This indifference, or rather hostility, to economic reforms was shared by all parties alike. Practically everybody agreed that it was a bad thing for Government to interfere with trade, though few went so far as to condemn the system of Protection.
Arthur Young disliked Government interference as an economist. "All restrictive forcible measures in domestic policy are bad."[[101]] Burke declared that his opinion was against "an overdoing of any sort of administration, and more especially against this most momentous of all meddling on the part of authority, the meddling with the subsistence of the people."[[102]] Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations said that "According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to ... I. The duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; II. The duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and III. The duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain, because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society."[[103]] This was the general opinion of the manufacturers, and in 1806 it was embodied in a Parliamentary Report on industrial conditions: "The right of every man to employ the capital he inherits or has acquired according to his own discretion without molestation or obstruction, so long as he does not infringe on the rights or property of others, is one of those privileges which the free and happy constitution of this country has long accustomed every Briton to consider as his birthright."[[104]] The aristocracy and the commercial classes alike distrusted an interference which restricted their personal freedom.