Fifty Years Ago

by Walter Besant

IN THE QUEEN’S BENCH

It was not, again, until the year 1836 that counsel for a prisoner under trial for felony was permitted to address the jury. In the year 1834, there were 480 death sentences; in 1838, only 116. In 1834, 894 persons were sentenced to transportation for life, and in 1838 only 266. Remember that this wicked severity only served to enlist the sympathies of the people against the Government.

The second great step was the repeal of the Acts which forbade combination. Until the year 1820, the people had been forbidden to combine. Their only power against employers who worked them as many hours a day as they dared, and paid them wages as small as they could, who took their children and locked them up in unwholesome factories, was in combination, and they were forbidden to combine. When the law—an old mediæval law—was repealed, it was found that any attempt to hold public meetings might be put down by force; so that, though they could not combine, the chief means of promoting combination was taken from them.

The third great step was the Extension of the Suffrage, so that now there is no Briton or Irishman but can, if he please, have his vote in the government of the nation. It is not a great share which is conferred by one vote, but it enables every man to feel that he is himself a part of the nation; that the government is not imposed upon him, but elected and approved by himself.

Considering all these things, have we any reason to be surprised when we learn that, on the Queen’s Accession, there was among the people no loyalty whatever? Attachment to the Sovereign, personal devotion to the young Queen, rallying round the Throne—all these things were not even phrases to the working class. For they never heard them used.

There was no loyalty at all, either to the Queen, or to the institution of a limited Monarchy, or to the Constitution, or to the Church.

For a hundred and fifty years there had been no loyalty among the people. Loyalty left the country with James II. Not one of the Sovereigns who followed him commanded the personal enthusiasm of the people, not even Farmer George, for whom there had been some kind of affection with something of contempt. From 1687 until 1837, which is exactly one hundred and fifty years, not one Sovereign who sat upon the Throne of England could boast that he had the love of the people. Not one wished to have the love of the people. He represented a principle: he governed with the assistance of a few families and by the votes of a small class. As King he was a stranger. When he drove through the streets, the people hurrahed; but they did not know him, and they cared nothing for him.

Therefore the sentiment of loyalty had to be re-born. It could only be awakened by a woman, young, virtuous, naturally amiable, and resolved on ruling by constitutional methods. Yet in some of the journals written for, and read by, the working men, the things said concerning the Queen, the Prince Consort, and the Court were simply horrible and disgusting. Such things are no longer said. There are still papers which speak of the aristocracy as a collection of titled profligates, and of the clergy as a crowd of pampered hypocrites, but of the Queen it is rare indeed to find mention other than is respectful. Her life and example for fifty years have silenced the slanderers. It has been found once more possible for a Sovereign to possess the love of her people.

The papers read by the working men were not only scurrilous, but they were Republican and revolutionary. The Republic whose example they set before themselves was not the American, which is Conservative, for of this they knew nothing. Let us clearly understand this. Fifty years ago America was far more widely separated from England than is China now. The ideal Republic was then the earlier form of the first French Republic. These people cared little for the massacres which accompanied the application of Republican principles. I do not say that they wished to set the heads of the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting on pikes, but they thought the massacres of innocent women by the French an accident rather than a consequence. They loved the cry of ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,’ and still believed in it. They dreamed of a country which they thought could be established by law, in which every man was to be the equal of his neighbour—as clever, as skilful, as capable, as rich, and as happy. The dream continues, and will always continue, to exist. It is a generous dream—there never has been a nobler dream—so that it is a thousand pities that human greed, selfishness, ambition, and masterfulness will not suffer the dream to be realised. Those who advocated an attempt to realise it flung hard names at the Crown, the Court, the aristocracy, the Church, the educated, and the wealthy. Presently they began to formulate the way by which they thought to place themselves within reach of their object. The way was Chartism. They wanted to carry six measures—Universal Suffrage, Annual Parliaments, Vote by Ballot, Abolition of Property Qualification, Payment of Members, and Equal Electoral Districts. Very well; we have got, practically, four out of the six points, and there are many who think that we are as far off the Millennium as ever. Yet there are, however, still among us people who believe that we can be made happy, just, merciful, and disinterested by changing the machinery. Changing the machinery! The old party of Radicals still work themselves into a white heat by crying for change in the machinery.

And now a thing which was never contemplated even by the Chartists themselves—the really important thing—has been acquired by the people. They are no longer the governed, but the governors. The Government is no longer a thing apart from themselves, and outside them. It is their own—it is the Government of the People of England. If there is anything in it which they do not like, they can alter it; if there is anything they agree to abolish, they can abolish it, whether it be Church, Crown, Lords, wealth, education, science, art—anything. They may destroy what they please: they may reduce the English to an illiterate peasantry if they please.