Manchester was a place of especial unrelieved grimness in the early years of the nineteenth century. It had ceased to be a picturesque overgrown village, and was assuming the earlier and more forbidding aspect of an industrial town. It was, of course, compared with the widespreading city of to-day, a small place, and the surrounding country came close up to its centre, and is said to have been not unpleasing. But the toil and the striving were then unrelieved by any urban graces. There was no “Society” at Manchester, but a great deal of discontent existed and short commons were then the rule. Manchester was regarded in those days of depression, after the close of the great Continental wars, as a dangerous place; and here, indeed, Radicalism was born, of injustice and hunger. “Manchester! your Royal Highness,” exclaimed the fastidious Beau Brummell, in horror, to the Prince Regent—“only think of Manchester!” when his regiment was ordered there. He sped swiftly away and sold out of the Army, rather than be banished to a benighted place where the correct set of a cravat was unknown, and not considered especially worth knowing.

Manchester, as an industrial centre, has, in common with other great cities similarly placed, always keenly felt the vicissitudes of national prosperity, and, with the surrounding towns and districts of Lancashire, has ever ridden on the crest of the waves of commercial expansion, or wallowed in the depths of its depression. There is perhaps no other great city, nor any other county than Lancashire, in England which so surely feels the warming glow of good times, or the chilling nip of bad; caused by influences almost wholly beyond control.

The years immediately following Waterloo and the close of the great and long-continued wars with Napoleon were lean years in Lancashire in particular, and in England in general, and discontent was rife. The price of bread was high, employment was scarce and threatened by the continual introduction of labour-saving machinery. The outlook of all the wage-earning classes was very grim, and the position was further inflamed by agitators, who very speedily put a political complexion upon the economic crisis. It was the era before Reform, when all political power was frankly held by the classes and the wealthy. The people were not enfranchised, and were taught by mob orators to believe that there lay the secret of the ills and disabilities they suffered. To possess a vote was held up as an ideal which, when reached, would be the solution of all grievances. It was probably not declared in so many words that enfranchisement would bring more work and better paid, nor that the voting-power would enable the working-men to vote away the employment of the labour-saving machinery they dreaded; but so much was implied. Riots, more or less serious, took place sporadically, throughout the country, where the people were almost starving; for, side by side with scarcity of employment, the price of bread was extravagantly high, in consequence of a succession of bad harvests bringing up the price of corn to an unprecedented figure. The Government at length became seriously alarmed at the troubles. There had been destructive riots in 1816, in Spitalfields, when a mob of 30,000 had broken into shops and houses, and burned and pillaged. Nottingham, Preston, Bury, and many other places were scenes of mob rule. In 1818 the Manchester operatives had broken the factory-windows, and had to be dispersed by Dragoons; and in the same year there were riots at Barnsley. The year 1819 opened with the demagogue, “Orator Hunt,” being thrashed by Hussars in the theatre at Manchester, where, it was said, he had hissed the playing of “God Save the King”; and it was declared that the turbulent Reformers of Glasgow proposed marching upon London. At the same time a Reform meeting held at Birmingham was dispersed, a constable being shot by workmen endeavouring to rescue one of the arrested speakers.

It must be admitted that the classes were not conciliatory. Their representatives in high places scorned the masses as the “swinish multitude,” and did not propose any political changes.

Still, the methods of the mob-rulers were extremely provocative and alarming. Whatever else they were, or were not, Hunt and Bamford, leading spirits among the Reformers, were intelligent men, and should have been able to forecast the probable effect the drilling of the multitude would have upon the Government. It was very well to argue that the drilling that went on at night was merely intended to enable great bodies of men to march to and from mass-meetings in order. The leaders were philosophical Radicals, and did not for a moment contemplate force, and their followers were very generally of the same mind; but we may easily see into the mind of Governments, which themselves only employ drilling to one end: that of reducing brute force to a scientific form of defence and attack; and undoubtedly these exercises, even without arms, were alarming, for who was to tell whence weapons might not be procured at any given moment. In short, the Administration imagined the country to be on the brink of revolution: a thing not so wildly improbable when meetings were enlivened by banners bearing the inscriptions, “Annual Parliaments,” “Universal Suffrage,” and “No Corn Laws”; and when that offensive emblem, a Cap of Liberty, carried on a pole, was prominent. The authorities imagined themselves face to face with an organised attempt at a subversion of the Constitution, and, in that belief, it behoved them to be on their guard.

“Orator Hunt” and Samuel Bamford, who had already, in 1817, been arrested on suspicion of high treason in connection with the Reform movement, were active in the agitation of 1819. They had drilled thousands of men in readiness for a peaceful mass-meeting to be held in the small open space then called “St. Peter’s Field,” at the end of Mosley Street, Manchester, on August 16th, and the whole countryside was agog with excitement and the wildest rumours. Rustic folk, going home in the darkness, had heard the words of military command, “face right,” “face left,” “right wheel,” “left wheel,” and so forth, and extravagant notions of what was afoot very naturally spread. In readiness for the day, the magistrates enrolled a force of special constables, and a strong force of Yeomanry and military was kept near at call.

In from Middleton marched Bamford, at the head of 6,000 men, to “St. Peter’s Field,” and from other quarters came many columns; so that by the time appointed for the opening of the meeting in that narrow space of two or three acres, some 80,000 persons were assembled. The police held a warrant for the arrest of Hunt on a charge of seditious assembly, but, in the face of this huge crowd, declared themselves unable to execute it, and called upon the magistrates for military assistance. A more tactful method would have been to wait until the close of the meeting, when Hunt could probably have been easily secured; but tact is not a common possession.

Close by was a force of one hundred and forty of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry, hidden away in Pickford’s yard, and to them was entrusted the task of driving a way through the crowd, to seize Hunt. It was an unfortunate choice, for the Yeomanry were, to a man, master manufacturers, whose interests had been assailed violently by the mob. The regular troops near at hand would have been less prejudiced, and would have acted more gently; but the Yeomanry charged into the midst of the masses of people laying about them with the edge and point of their swords. Many inoffensive persons, men, women, and children, were cut and slashed and trampled down; but the crowd was so tightly packed that it could not have given way if it would, and the Yeomanry were not only stopped, but began to be severely handled; which, after all, was no more than they deserved. Then Hulton, prominent among the magistrates, lost his head, and ordered up the Hussars to the aid of the Yeomanry. People were ridden down by the hundred, the platforms were stormed, the banners torn down, and the field cleared. Vast crowds of weeping and cursing fugitives, many of them wounded, fled from the scene and out of Manchester into the country: afraid of arrest. Eleven people lay dead, thirty dangerously wounded, and forty “much injured.” Hunt, Bamford, and others were arrested. Thus ended the great Reform meeting in St. Peter’s Field. It was only four years from the time when Waterloo had been fought, and the people speedily found the name of “Peterloo” for this Yeomanry and Hussar victory. It was alternatively, with facile alliteration, known as the “Manchester massacre.” The site is now St. Peter’s Square, and on a portion of the ground stands the Free Trade Hall.

One cannot feel overmuch sympathy with the political agitation of that time. The history of all politics, in all ages, and still in progress, tells us that you succeed only in abolishing one tyranny to replace it with another: destroying the tyranny of aristocracy to replace it with that of wealth, which in its turn is overthrown by the worse tyranny of Socialism and the impossible doctrine of the essential equality of man. That which dominates will inevitably tyrannise, whether it be the strong over the weak, the aristocrat over the plebeian, or the wealthy over the poor; and sympathy with the downtrodden is a little blighted when it is realised that, when the poor grow rich and the humble powerful, they, too, begin to hector and to brow-beat. The cotton operative, rising by innate capacity from the position of a wage-earner to that of an employer, finds the centre of his interests shifted, and throws in his lot with the class to which he has won his way.

The necessity for Parliamentary and constitutional reform was acknowledged by Pitt, Earl of Chatham, so far back as 1782; and “radical reform”—i.e. reform going to the root of things—was demanded by the country in 1797-8; but it was left to agitators to bring the question of reform so greatly into disrepute that, in common speech, we hear always of a thing being “radically wrong”; never, by any chance, “radically right,” although the alliterative ease of either form is equal to the other.

The “Manchester School” of politics, founded in 1838 by Cobden and Bright, was a very virulent type of Radicalism, and, in some of its tenets, a singular creed for a commercial community of manufacturers and exporters to profess. It was nurtured on an agitation for the repeal of the Corn Law, and on a passion for Free Trade; it advocated peace-at-any-price, and regarded the Colonies with hatred. “It will be a happy day,” said Cobden, “when England has not an acre of territory in Continental Asia.” In these extraordinary aspirations John Bright shared to the full.

To reconcile the political creed of John Bright with his practice as a manufacturer is one of those tasks whose difficulties approach the impossible. He was an Apostle of Little Englandism: the passionate author of the phrase “Perish India!”; the ardent visionary of a day when “England” should cease to mean anything but this isle. What an ideal on which to dwell! Said he: “It may be a vision, yet I will cherish it.” He had what he termed the “noble vision” of Canada surrendered to the United States:

“From the frozen north to the glowing south, from the stormy waves of the Atlantic to the calmer waters of the Pacific main, I see one people, speaking one language, owning one law and holding one religion, and over all the flag of freedom, a refuge for the oppressed of every nation and of every clime.”

The “flag of freedom” was, if you please, the Stars and Stripes, and that “refuge for the oppressed” the land whose people are smarting under the tyrannies of the Trusts, and of the municipal disciples of the gospel of graft, as severely as any people ever suffered in the “oppressed” nations of Europe. At any rate, these are articles of belief to which few are now found to subscribe. That, with such aspirations as these, Bright could not endure the idea of Home Rule for Ireland, and so in 1886 broke with Gladstone and joined the Unionist party, is one of those extraordinary and illogical changes of front to which the careers of modern politicians of all shades of thought have so accustomed us that there are no surprises left.

Demagogues and silver-tongued orators have been the curse in modern times of this country. They and their audiences, grown drunken on their own wild words, have thrown over all consistency. In Bright you had a Radical politician opposed to the holding of an Empire, yet, as a manufacturer and exporter of cotton goods, having his interests largely bound up with the retention of our dependencies. It seemed honesty at the expense of sanity. But less honest was Bright’s bitter objection to any State interference with the factories. In 1836 he resented any attempt to control the hours of labour, and wrote a counter-blast to Fielden’s “Curse of the Factory System.” To the last, he opposed the reduction of factory hours. In 1861 he attributed the evils attendant upon over-production, in which he himself was engaged, to anything but their real cause; but, on the other hand, it must not be forgotten that, although himself a heavy loser by the Cotton Famine, he nobly championed the cause of the North in its darkest hours. Looking back upon things accomplished since he entered the political scene, his Radicalism seems to have been singularly diluted with Whiggism: inevitable, no doubt, from his position as a large employer of labour. As a Quaker, he was for Disestablishment; being a landowner, he endeavoured to bring about the abolition of the Game Laws; he was, as we have already seen, bitterly opposed, throughout his life, to State regulation of factories. He denounced Chartism, of which most of the points of reform demanded have long since been conceded, and, in reply to the demands of the factory hands for better payment, invented the comprehensive generality that “with bad trade, wages cannot rise”; tracing all evils to the Corn Law, that effectual red-herring drawn across many trails. Always the Corn Law, until its abolition in 1849. It was responsible for almost everything ill, short of earthquakes.

Bright opposed compulsory education—for that would probably educate the factory hands into discontent with their station; and was eager to extend the cultivation of cotton in India. When that project did not meet with the support he expected, and when his protest against the Indian protective duties failed to open India to cotton goods free of duty, “Perish India” became more than ever a pious wish. Perhaps one of his greatest mistakes was his contempt for the bogey of Papal aggression; not such a mere illuminated turnip on a post as he and his contemporaries believed. Rome stalks through the land, aggressive, at this day.