THE EVANGELICALS.
Within the Church rapid progress was made by the evangelical movement. Many of the earlier evangelical clergy were methodists, some workers with Wesley, others preachers of Lady Huntingdon's "connexion" before her secession in 1781. During the last two decades of the century the evangelicals became distinct from the methodists and formed an increasing body inside the Church. Among its clerical chiefs were Romaine, Venn, Cecil, and Newton of Olney, the spiritual guide of many of its leading adherents; it owed much to Lord Dartmouth's patronage, Cowper's poetry presented its doctrine in a pleasing form, Hannah More furthered its cause by her writings, and Wilberforce brought it into connexion with political life. Only one of the avowed evangelical clergy, Isaac Milner, Dean of Carlisle, received dignified preferment before 1800, for the king was averse from "enthusiasm," and though Pitt's Church appointments were eminently respectable, he does not seem to have been guided in making them by any exalted consideration. Whatever the failings of the evangelical party may have been, it certainly exercised a strong and wholesome influence on the national life, which was aided by the effects of the war with France. Not only did the discipline of war sober the nation, but it also extended the revolt against unreality which took place in the domains of literature and art, to that of religion, and brought people to accept a teaching which appealed more strongly to the heart than that of the older school of clergy. While most of the work of the evangelicals lies outside our subject, the character of its influence on society may be gathered from their efforts for the suppression of the slave trade; from the stricter observance of Sunday which became general towards the end of our period; from their plans for bettering the condition, and their care for the education of the poor. The institution of Sunday schools was largely due to Robert Raikes, of Gloucester, who began his work in 1780. Six years later some 200,000 children attended these schools, and in many cases gained in them their only education. The work was encouraged by the king and queen, and along with other efforts for the education of the poor was helped forward by Hannah More, Wilberforce, and other evangelicals.
Apart from any religious movement, many laymen, among whom Burke holds a high place, strove to soften the hardness and cruelty of the age. There was need of their efforts. The criminal law was fearfully severe. Early in the reign as many as 160 crimes were capital felonies, and the number was constantly augmented. A theft of more than the value of twelve pence by picking a pocket was punishable by death. This severity led to an increase of crime. The injured would not prosecute, juries would not convict on clear evidence, judges recommended to mercy, and criminals were emboldened by the chances of escape. The heavy punishments attached to light offences tended to multiply serious crimes; for a thief who knew that he might be hanged was tempted to commit murder rather than be caught. Though only about a fifth of the capital sentences were carried out, executions were terribly numerous, especially between 1781 and 1787. In 1783, at two consecutive executions, twenty persons were hanged together. Ninety-six were hanged at the Old Bailey in ten months in 1785, and at the Lent assizes of that year there were twenty-one capital sentences at Kingston, twelve at Lincoln and sixteen at Gloucester, and in each town nine persons were hanged. Executions were popular spectacles; 80,000 persons are said to have been present at one at Moorfields in 1767, and over 20,000 assembled at Tyburn in 1773 to see a woman burnt—she was previously strangled at the stake—for the murder of her husband. The ghastly procession to Tyburn was stopped in 1783, and executions were ordered to be carried out in front of the prison; and in 1790 the burning of women was abolished. Otherwise, in spite of Burke's efforts, the criminal law was not materially ameliorated till the next century. The punishment of the pillory was one of its worst abuses. When inflicted for some popular act, such as libelling a minister, the offender was treated as a hero, but if a man's crime outraged the moral sense of the mob, he was exposed to horrible barbarity. Two men were pelted to death, in 1763 and 1780, on the pillory in London. After the second of these murders Burke brought the matter before parliament; he was supported by Sir Charles Bunbury, who quoted a similar case at Bury, but the punishment was not abolished. Whipping was constantly inflicted, not merely on men but on women, and in public as well as privately. The poor were brutalised by cruel and indecent punishments, and were far too much under the power of magistrates, some of them vicious and ignorant men, who had summary jurisdiction in a large number of criminal cases.
PRISONS AND POLICE.
The prisons were horrible dens in which felons and debtors, men and women, old and young, were crowded together. Many of them had no water-supply and very little air; some had no sewers, and where sewers existed they were generally choked up. Great numbers died of gaol-fever and small-pox. In about half the county gaols debtors had no allowance of bread. Everywhere prisoners were exposed to extortion, and were sometimes detained in gaol after acquittal for non-payment of the gaolers' fees. Such was the state of things in 1773 when John Howard began to inquire into the condition of the prisons. He roused the attention of parliament and of the public to these abuses, and by 1779 some of the more flagrant of them were removed. He spent the remainder of his life in efforts to reform the prisons, and accomplished much, though much still remained to be done. After 1776 convicts could no more be transported to America, and male convicts were kept in hulks on the Thames and elsewhere. These hulks soon became overcrowded, and in 1784 the old system of assigning convicts to employers in different parts of the British dominions oversea was again adopted. The evils of this system were recognised, and it was decided to send criminals sentenced to transportation to New South Wales. A government was established; Captain Phillip, of the navy, was appointed governor, and in 1787 took out the "first fleet" with convicts. He established a settlement at Port Jackson, and founded a city which he called Sydney, after the then secretary for home affairs. Such was the unworthy beginning of the present magnificent colony of New South Wales.
The population outgrew the police system. Riots were frequent in times of scarcity or popular excitement, and often could only be quelled by soldiers. Throughout the whole of our period highwaymen infested the roads; in 1774 Horace Walpole at Twickenham declared that it was scarcely safe to venture out by day; Lady Hertford had been attacked on Hounslow Heath at three in the afternoon. Some daring robberies, two of them of mails, were effected in 1791. In the earlier years of the reign smuggling was carried on with amazing audacity, specially on the south and east coasts. It was calculated that 40,000 persons were engaged in it by sea and land, and that two-thirds of the tea and half the brandy consumed in England paid no duty. Bands of armed smugglers rode up to London with their goods, and attempts to interfere with their trade were fiercely and often successfully resisted. Smuggling, however, was checked, as we shall see, by the wise policy of Pitt. The weakness of the police caused an alarming increase of crimes against property; footpads stopped carriages even in Grosvenor Square and Piccadilly, and in 1792 the streets are said on good authority to have been unsafe by night. With the exception of a few Bow street officers and some mounted patrols, the only police in London were parish constables and the watchmen, many of them old and decrepit. The magistracy of Middlesex had largely fallen into the hands of men described by Burke as "the scum of the earth," who used their office as a means of getting gain, and frightful abuses were common.[179] In 1792 parliament established stipendiary magistrates appointed by the crown for the London police courts, and a few police officers were attached to each court. This important reform would have been more effective if a larger number of police had been placed under the orders of the new magistrates, for after that date the police of London and its immediate neighbourhood consisted of not more than 2,044 watchmen and patrols and 1,000 constables and other officers, of whom only 147 received pay and gave their whole time to police work.[180]
The general belief that the trade of Great Britain would be ruined by the loss of the American colonies was not justified. Between 1783 and 1800 her foreign trade and manufactures were developed at an extraordinary rate. The official value of English exports in 1760 was £14,694,970, and of imports £9,832,802; in 1783, of exports £13,896,415, and of imports £11,651,281; in 1800 the exports of Great Britain were officially valued at £34,381,617, and the imports at £28,257,781.[181] Her foreign trade, which provided her with an extended market, was maintained through her naval supremacy. Before 1780 the war with the colonies had little effect on her trade; the declaration of the armed neutrality decreased its profits by increasing risks and raising the rate of insurance, but does not appear to have inflicted special injury on any particular branch of it. The American shipping was destroyed and Dutch commerce suffered severely. At the end of the war England was far stronger by sea than she was before it began; her manufactures, specially of iron and cotton, began to develop rapidly, and she kept the American trade. During the revolutionary war the French believed that they could reduce England to impotence by ruining her commerce. They failed to understand the consequences of her power at sea and the firmness of the foundation on which her wealth rested. The ports of France and her allies were blockaded; England may be said to have carried the greatest part of the trade of Europe, her manufactures flourished exceedingly, and foreign nations could not afford to abstain from purchasing them.
LAISSEZ-FAIRE.
Before entering on the expansion of manufactures and the industrial revolution which accompanied it, a word may be said as to the attitude of the state towards these changes. For some two centuries it had been held that it was the duty of the state to order trade with the object of increasing the wealth and power of the nation, and a policy was followed of interference with trade and its conditions by regulations, bounties, and restrictions, which is called the mercantile system. To this policy belong the navigation acts and the regulation of colonial trade and manufactures for the benefit of the mother-country. The American revolution dealt it a mortal blow. About the same time Adam Smith's work led to the idea that national wealth would increase if men were left to seek their own wealth without interference. While trade outgrew the old regulations which ordered its conditions, the system of state interference became discredited, a new economic policy of non-interference, called laissez-faire, took its place, and questions of trade, manufacture, wages, and other conditions of labour were increasingly left to settle themselves. This reversed the policy long and successfully pursued by the whigs, who fostered trade as the basis of national prosperity. The tories on the other hand held that national prosperity was based on land, and desired to lighten its burdens by taxing personal property, and we shall find Pitt distributing his taxation widely and so as to fall mainly on the moneyed class.[182] Laissez-faire reached its full development in the establishment of free trade; it has already been modified in many respects, and may hereafter be subjected to further modification to suit altered circumstances.
The expansion of trade during our period was due to improved processes of manufacture and increased facilities of transport, and in a far higher degree to the substitution of machinery moved by the power of water or steam for manual labour. The north, hitherto the most backward part of England, became the chief seat of industrial life and commercial enterprise. Wealth was increased, industry became more dependent on capital, and changes were effected in its conditions which for a time pressed heavily on the poor. In 1760 there was no Black Country. Charcoal was employed in the manufacture of hardware, and the Sussex iron works produced a small quantity of pig-iron at a great cost. Fuel was giving out, and England, rich in iron, imported over 49,000 tons of iron a year from Russia and Sweden. The discovery that coal and coke could be used for smelting was made about 1750, and in 1760 a new era in the manufacture was ushered in by the foundation of the Carron ironworks, which had blast furnaces for coal. The improvements in Newcomen's steam engine, effected by Watt between 1765 and 1782, facilitated smelting by coal by providing the furnaces with a stronger blast. In 1783-4 Cort of Gosport invented processes for converting pig-iron into malleable by the use of coal, and for converting malleable iron into bars by rollers, instead of sledge-hammers. Iron became cheap and was used for purposes never dreamt of a few years before; the first iron bridge crossed the Severn at Coalbrookdale in 1779. By 1796 the use of charcoal had almost ceased, and the produce of blast furnaces had risen from 68,300 tons in 1788 to over 125,000 tons. Vast iron works were established in the coal districts, which soon ceased to be agricultural. Among the many other manufactures expanded by new processes was that of pottery. In 1760 Staffordshire stoneware was rough and badly glazed, and much ware was imported from France. A few years later Wedgwood succeeded in producing a ware at his works at Etruria which was superior to any brought from abroad; it was largely used in England, and five-sixths of the produce of his works was exported.