EXIGENCIES of war had given the British nobles a despotic power, which they retained long after it ceased to be needed for the nation's safety. The King was their puppet and Parliament their property. The laws were framed and administered for their protection and emolument. Clergy, army, militia, and police were all organised for keeping the people down; and education could do nothing to raise the lowly. Pensions and salaries, even in the Church, were reserved for members and servants of the aristocracy, with little care for the public good. Wages were low, food dear, illiteracy common, and paupers numerous. Even the middle class was in great part disfranchised; taxation was needlessly severe; the press was restricted grievously; and Ireland was shamefully oppressed.

I. As public attention ceased to be absorbed by victorious generals, it turned to the miseries of the poor; and there was much discussion of plans for their relief. Early in the century it became generally known that Robert Owen's factories were unusually profitable, on account of what he did for the intelligence, health, and happiness of the operatives. His pamphlet, published in 1813, and often reprinted as a New View of Society argued strongly for universal education as the remedy for poverty and crime; public opinion was much enlightened on the Continent, as well as in England; but a sagacious member of the British aristocracy said to him: "Oh, I see it all! Nothing could be more complete for the working-classes; but what will become of us?"

Owen complained in this pamphlet that Sabbatarianism denied "innocent and cheerful recreation to the labouring man"; and he spoke in public of the influence of religion on progress, with a hostility which sadly injured his popularity. His life was examined with a jealousy which brought to light only its elevation. The opposition of people who thought themselves respectable drove him into agitation for what he was the first to call "Socialism." He published on May 1, 1820, his plan for forming villages, where the people were to work under the supervision of the eldest, and "be freely permitted to receive from the general store of the community whatever they might require." These last words contain the characteristic principle of Socialism, that every labourer is to be paid according to his needs, whatever the value of the work.

A dozen such experiments were made in the United States, about 1825; but it was found impossible to unlearn the experience of the race. Progress has consisted in bringing each man's welfare into more exact proportion to the value of his work. This tendency has never safely been suspended, except under such coercion as has kept up industry and economy among monks, Rappites, Shakers, and other docile enthusiasts. The cooperative stores which Owen was among the first to open seem to have failed because the salaries were not high enough to secure skilful managers.

II. The proof that a reformer was before his age is the fact that later years caught up with him; and this is by no means so true of Owen as of Bentham, who declared Socialism impracticable. He was one of the first to advocate woman suffrage (Works, vol. iii., p. 463), savings banks, cheap postage, collection of statistics, direction of punishment towards reformation, and repeal of usury laws. His bulky volumes are in great part occupied with suggestions for making the courts of justice less dilatory and uncertain, less expensive to the poor, and less partial to the rich. His Principles of Morals and Legislation declared, in 1787, that the sole end of a ruler ought to be the happiness of all the people, and that this rule should be the basis of ethics as well as politics. One of his publications in 1817 claimed the suffrage for every man and woman who could read, but insisted that this would be "worse than nothing" without that "shield to freedom," the secret ballot. An opponent who feared that this would destroy private property was answered thus: "Has he ever heard of Pennsylvania?" The complaint that freedom of the press to expose corrupt officials might weaken the government was met by showing that there can be no good government without it. To think our ancestors wiser than us, he says, is to take it for granted that it is not experience but inexperience that is the "mother of wisdom."

Bentham's best work was in sowing seed that his friends might reap the harvest. Other authors were generously assisted by his manuscripts, purse, and library; and there has been no stronger advocate of reform than the Westminster Review, which he founded in 1824. The first number showed that the Whigs were too much like the Tories. Their leaders were noblemen or millionaires; their favourite measure, abolition of rotten boroughs, was mainly in the interest of the middle class; and their policy towards the masses was a seesaw between promising elevation and permitting oppression. This article was by James Mill, who showed in a later number that any church which was established must, on that account, be bigoted. His essay On Government urges that the masses cannot be protected unless fully represented. They had not yet found out all they needed; but education would teach it; and occasional mistakes would not be so bad as systematic oppression. Among his ablest books is a defence of the rationalism, bequeathed by the eighteenth century, against Transcendentalism, which eclipsed it during the first half of the nineteenth.

The inspiration of the new philosophy was added to that of many new reforms; and a glorious literature blossomed in the long summer of peace. Wordsworth's fear of "too much liberty" did not prevent his encouraging intellectual independence most impressively. Scott tried "to revive the declining spirit of loyalty"; but the result was universal admiration of rebels and sympathy with peasants. Many authors who adapted themselves much more closely and intentionally to the needs of the age ceased long ago, for this very reason, to find readers. This, for instance, was the fate of the indefatigable Cobbett.

Landor, on the other hand, was unpopular from the first, because devotion to Greek and Latin literature made his style as well as some of his favourite topics uninteresting, except for scholarly people who were soon offended by such remarks as "Law in England and in most other countries is the crown of injustice. According to her laws and usages, Brutus would have been hanged at Newgate; Cato buried with a stake through his body in the highroad; Cicero transported to Botany Bay." "Certain I am, that several of the bishops would not have patted Cain upon the back while he was about to kill Abel." "A peerage I consider as the park-paling of despotism." In his Imaginary Conversations, Hofer and Metternich, the emperors of Russia and China, the kings of Spain and Portugal, the Spanish priest, Merino, and many other extraordinary personages tell how badly England was governed by "the hereditarily wise," and what a misfortune it was for all Europe, to have her rulers enjoy such an intimate and universal friendship as was never known among their predecessors.

No writer has spoken more mightily than Byron against the "blasphemy" of ascribing divine authority to these "royal vampires." He knew that Napoleon had been "the scourge of the world"; but he was indignant to see the men who had struck down the lion kneeling before wolves; and yet he looked forward to the reign everywhere of "equal rights and laws." He spoke freely of the "sacerdotal gain but general loss" in superstition; and his own highest faith was that "they who die in a great cause" would

His poems revealed the grandeur of scenery, as well as history, and made delight in mountains and thunderstorms felt as an ennobling influence. His speeches in the House of Lords were pleas for parliamentary reform, Catholic emancipation, and mercy to rioters infuriated by famine. In 1820, he was one of the leading Carbonari in Italy; he gave his life to help the Greeks become free; and his name is still a watchword of revolution.

His friend, Shelley, went so far in the same direction as to call himself a republican, as well as an atheist. His life was pure in his own eyes; but his opinions about divorce were punished by a decision in Chancery that he was unfit to be trusted with his own children. He had consecrated himself in boyhood to war against all oppressors; and his position to the last was that of his own Prometheus, suffering continually with the enslaved, but consoled by faith that his sympathy will hasten the glorious day when every man shall be "king over himself," when women, free "from custom's evil taint," shall make earth like heaven, when "thrones, altars, judgment-seats, and prisons" shall seem as antiquated as the pyramids, and when human nature shall be "its own divine control." He took the side of the poor against the rich in a drama which was suppressed on account of its severity against George IV., and which ends with a portentous scene, where

He spoke as well as wrote for the independence of Ireland; and he would have done much for that of Greece, if he had not died soon after publishing a magnificent tragedy, in which he showed what cruel massacres were perpetrated while the rulers of Christendom refused to help Christian patriots against the Turks. Byron is called the poet of revolution; but Shelley was the poet of liberty. One was like a painter who captivated the multitude, sometimes by his brilliancy of colour, sometimes by his tragic pathos, and sometimes by his amorous warmth. The other was like a sculptor who left a few statues and tablets, fanciful in design and majestic in execution, for the delight of connoisseurs. Fortunately the marble is likely to outlast the canvas.

III. These poets and philanthropists helped the people of England contrast the wrongs they were suffering with the rights they ought to have. That love of liberty which drove out the Stuarts revived, as despotism was seen to increase pauperism and excite more crime than it suppressed. The conflict between republicanism and monarchy in Europe had changed to one between despotism and constitutionalism; and peace made England free to resume the advanced position she had held in the eighteenth century. The declaration of President Monroe, in December, 1823, that the United States would not permit the South American republics to be overthrown by any despot in Europe, gained much authority from the concurrence of the British Ministry; and the latter was induced by Canning to form that alliance with France and Russia which gave independence to Greece.

The attack on the slave-trade, which began while England was at peace with her neighbours, had slackened in the shadow of the long war. The wicked traffic was prohibited in 1807; but little more could be done before 1823. Then an appeal for emancipation in the West Indies was made to Parliament by Wilberforce and other organised abolitionists; and the agitation went on until victory was made possible by the rescue of the House of Commons from the aristocrats. The acts forbidding workingmen to combine for higher wages, or to emigrate were repealed in 1824. The criminal laws had already been mitigated, and some protection given to children in factories; and the duties on wool and raw silk were now reduced, to the common benefit of consumer, manufacturer, and operative.

The Whigs were strong enough in 1828 to repeal the Test Act, which had been passed in 1673, for the purpose of enabling the Episcopalians to hold all the offices, but had become a dead letter so far as regarded Protestants. The House of Lords gave way unwillingly; and one of the bishops secured such a compromise as kept Jews out of Parliament for the next thirty years. Conscientious scruples against taking oaths were treated at this time with due respect; and all British Protestants became equals before the law. Canning had already made the House of Commons willing to emancipate Catholics; but neither this reform nor that of abolishing rotten boroughs could pass the bench of bishops; and the Church stood in the way of a plan for free public schools. It was the organised resistance of all Ireland to disfranchisement of Catholics which won toleration from a Tory Ministry. Its leader, Wellington, cared nothing for public opinion or the people's rights; but he was too good a general to risk a war with a united nation. Even the minister whose sympathy with Orangemen had won the nickname of "Orange Peel" declared that it was time to yield. Popular prejudice against Romanism had been much diminished by gratitude for the aid given by Catholic allies against Napoleon. The bishops rallied around the King, who had never before been influenced by what he called religion; but he was forced to sign, on April 13, 1829, the bill which ended a strife that had cursed Europe for three hundred years. Two-thirds of the bishops resisted to the last; and the Tory party was so badly divided as to be unable to prevent England from following the example set next year by France.

IV. By the Constitution of 1814, the power belonged mainly to the Parisian bankers, merchants, and manufacturers. These men preferred constitutional monarchy to either democracy or military despotism; but they meant to maintain their own rights; and they were much offended at the attempts of Charles X. to check mental progress and revive superstition. His plans for fettering the press were voted down in the Chamber of Nobles; journalists prosecuted by his orders were acquitted by the courts; and he could not enforce a law under which burglars who robbed a Catholic church would have mounted the guillotine.

Early in 1830, he dissolved the Legislature for declaring that he was not governing according to the wish of the people. The candidates next elected were two to one against him. On Monday, July 26, appeared his ordinances forbidding publication of newspapers without his permission, unseating all the deputies just chosen, and threatening that subsequent elections would be empty formalities. The plan was like that of 1797; but this time the soldiers in Paris were few in number and ill-supplied with provisions, while their general was not even notified of his appointment. The police allowed the journalists to spread the news throughout Paris and publish a protest declaring that they would not obey the ordinances and appealing to the people for support. The leader, Thiers, had already called for a king who would reign but not govern. Lawyers and magistrates pronounced the ordinances illegal. Printers and other employers told their men that the next day would be a holiday.

On Tuesday, the crowds of operatives, clerks, students, ragged men and boys could not be dispersed by the police. Marmont took command of the troops that afternoon, and shot a few insurgents. That night all the street-lamps were put out; thousands of barricades went up, after plans but recently invented; and gun-shops, powder-magazines, arsenals, and even museums were broken open. On Wednesday, there was a new city government in the HÔtel de Ville; everywhere hung the tri-coloured banner of Napoleon and the Republic; and the tocsin called out a hundred thousand rebels in arms. The weapons of Crusaders were seen side by side with the bayonets and uniforms of the National Guard, which had been revived by Napoleon but disbanded by Charles X.

Marmont's orders were to clear the streets that afternoon; but the soldiers were met everywhere by a heavy fire and a shower of paving stones and furniture. One patriotic girl was said to have sacrificed her piano. All the detachments were finally hemmed in between barricades and crowds of rebels with pikes, muskets, and bayonets. During the night they were concentrated around the Tuileries, where they suffered greatly from hunger and thirst, as they had done during the day. Their ammunition was almost exhausted; and new barricades were put up around them. Marmont ordered that there should be no more firing, except in self-defence, and tried in vain to make truce with the rebels. The latter were joined on Thursday by the regiments in the Place VendÔme. This position was entrusted to part of the Swiss who had defended the Louvre; but the others were soon driven out by men and boys who swarmed in at unguarded doors and windows. All the soldiers took flight that noon from Paris.

All this time the King was amusing himself at St. Cloud, and boasting that there would be no concessions. He now offered to dismiss his Ministry and revoke the ordinances; but more than a thousand lives had been lost. The Parisians marched against him: he abdicated and fled: the Bourbons had ceased to reign. The men who had fought against him called for a republic with universal suffrage and no State church; but the wealthier citizens were afraid of war with Russia and Austria. A descendant of Louis XIII. and a friend of Thiers was made King by the Legislature. He called himself Louis Philippe, and promised cordially to carry out the Constitution, which now meant freedom of the press, and equal privileges for all Christian churches. The supremacy of Rome in France was at an end. Seats in the Upper House could no longer be inherited; and the right to vote for deputies was given to twice as many Frenchmen as before. Patriots in all nations were encouraged; and the Swiss cantons became more democratic; but Hegel was frightened to death.

Among other results were unsuccessful revolts in Rome and Warsaw, with successful ones in Brussels, Cassell, and Dresden. The subjection to Holland, which had been imposed by the Congress of Vienna, was hated by the Belgians, partly because it made education secular, and partly because it gave them only half the Legislature, and very few offices elsewhere, although they formed three-fifths of the population. Priests were active in stirring up the revolt which began at Brussels on August 25, 1830, after the performance of an opera telling how Masaniello had set Naples free. The Dutch were driven out; Belgium was made a separate constitutional monarchy by the vote of a convention of deputies; France and England helped her maintain political independence; but it was to the loss of intellectual liberty.

V. The success of rebellion with the pressure of hard times enabled the Whigs to carry England for parliamentary reform. Peel and Wellington hastened their fall by boasting that there could be no improvement of a Legislature which accepted members for places without any inhabitants, but not for Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, or some parts of London, and which actually enabled one Scotchman to elect himself as sole representative of fourteen thousand people, in a district where he was the only voter.

The people were so discontented with the whole system of Church and State, that thousands of sympathisers gathered around Cobbett in July, 1831, when he was tried for printing a statement that riots of farm hands were doing good in forcing the clergy to reduce their tithes. Lord Brougham, who had been made Chancellor, was among the witnesses to the generally pacific tendency of Cobbett's writings. The jury did not agree; and the Government gave up the case. There was but little more political persecution of British authors.

Reform triumphed that autumn in the House of Commons. The House of Lords would then have been conquered, if the bishops had acted like successors of the apostles; but twenty-one out of twenty-three voted for prolonging their own dominion. Their conduct made it unsafe for them to wear their peculiar costume in the streets. Bells tolled, and newspapers put on mourning. There were riots in all the cathedral towns. A duke's castle was burned, because he insisted that the votes of his tenants were his private property, and attempts to punish the incendiaries brought Bristol, one Sunday, into the hands of a mob which burned the bishop's palace, the custom-house, and many other buildings. It was agreed by a meeting of a hundred thousand people at Birmingham, that no more taxes should be paid until Parliament was reformed; and on very many houses, especially in London, there was the following notice: "To save the Collector unnecessary trouble, he is informed that No Taxes on this house will be paid, until the Reform Bill pass into a Law." It was at a meeting to encourage this course that Sydney Smith, who had done good service for Catholic emancipation, told how vainly Mrs. Partington tried to sweep back the Atlantic, during a great storm, and added: "Be quiet and steady. You will beat Mrs. Partington."

The episcopal Partingtons continued to be even more hostile than the lay members of the House of Lords; but all finally yielded to the threat that there would be new peers enough created to vote them down. A popular song made the Reform Bill boast that, "Twenty peers shall carry me, If twenty won't, then forty will; For I 'm his Majesty's bouncing Bill."

The throne was then filled by William IV., who reigned from 1830 to 1837, and who gave his consent, though sometimes unwillingly, to several of the greatest reforms ever passed in England. The bill which he signed on June 7, 1832, enabled 141 members of Parliament to be elected by populous districts hitherto unrepresented, instead of by little boroughs where the voters were so few as to be bought up easily, or else intimidated constantly; and the franchise was also much extended, though not outside of the middle class. Thus Great Britain ceased to be governed by a league of irresponsible nobles, bishops, and other lords of vast estates.

VI. They had kept the lower classes ignorant, in order to secure obedience; and their methods were not given up at once. Newspapers had already become the chief teachers of politics; and therefore they were under a triple tax. A duty on paper added one-fourth to the cost of publication. There was also a tax of three-and-sixpence on each advertisement; and more of this lucrative business was done by the publishers in New York City than by all those in Great Britain. A third exaction was that of fourpence for a stamp on every copy; and prices were thus prevented from falling below seven-pence, except in case of violation of the laws. These threatened fine or imprisonment to whoever should publish or sell any periodical costing less than sixpence, and containing "news, intelligence, occurrences, and remarks and observations thereon, tending to excite hatred and contempt of the government and constitution of this country as by law established, and also to vilify religion." This purpose was avowed explicitly, in so many words, by The Poor Man's Guardian, which announced that it was published "contrary to law" and would be sold for one penny. The circulation was twice that of The Times, and the language often violent. The publisher, Hetherington, was sent twice to prison for six months; and could not go about except disguised as a Quaker. His papers were packed in chests of tea, by an agent who was afterwards mayor of Manchester. Another publisher, who devoted himself to reports of criminal trials, used to send them out in coffins. Many unstamped periodicals were in circulation. Some dealers carried them about in their hats and pockets. Others hawked them in the streets, and declared, when sentenced to prison, that they should resume the business on the same spot as soon as they were released. Paid informers and spies helped the Whig Government carry on more than two hundred prosecutions in 1835, and more than five hundred previously. Subscription boxes for the relief of the martyrs could be seen everywhere. Remonstrances were signed and indignation meetings held in London and Manchester. "The Society for the Repeal of All Taxes on Knowledge" kept up a vigorous agitation, which was aided by Bulwer in Parliament. At last the publishers who bought stamps found they could not compete with men who bought none. This duty, and also that on advertisements, were reduced in 1836; and the result was so gratifying, even to publishers of the best periodicals, that all these taxes have been abolished.

Protestant bigotry had not prevented unsectarian public schools from being opened in Ireland in 1833; and that year is also memorable for the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, the extension of universal suffrage in Scotland, the beginning of free trade with India and China, the removal of disability for office from Hindoo subjects of Great Britain, the protection of children from being overworked in factories, and the suppression of supernumerary bishops and rectors in Ireland.

During the next three years, the local government of most English towns and cities, though not yet of London, was taken from corrupt oligarchies and given to all inhabitants who paid even a moderate rent; seamen ceased to be impressed; Irish Catholics and English dissenters were enabled to marry without apostasy; vexatious methods of collecting tithes were abolished in England; the poor-laws were made less favourable to the increase of pauperism; and the growth of prosperity and independence among the poor was assisted by the introduction of a system of unsectarian education, in 1839, though the bishops would have preferred that one-third of the people of England should remain illiterate. Penny postage was established in 1840, the last year when Great Britain was governed by the Whigs.

Parliament was so philanthropic and tolerant as to reject repeatedly a proposal to impose heavy fines for attending secular meetings, visiting eating-houses, travelling, fishing, or hiring horses on Sunday. Labour, too, was to be forbidden, but not that of "menial servants." This bill would have prevented the poor from enjoying their only holiday; but there was to be no interference with the pleasures of the rich; and the fact was pointed out by a young man, whose Pickwick Papers had just begun to appear in monthly parts. His illustrated pamphlet is entitled: Sunday as it Is; as Sabbath Bills would Make it; as it might be Made. It has been reprinted with his plays and poems. He tells how much was done for the health and happiness of London by those privileges which the Sabbatarians were trying to abolish; and he shows what gain there would be in knowledge and virtue from opening all the museums and galleries Sunday afternoons.

The pamphlet shows that delight in the bright side of life, and that sympathy with the pleasures of the poor, which won popularity for The Pickwick Papers in 1836, and afterwards for The Old Curiosity Shop and the Christmas Carol. The novels most like Sunday as it Is, however, are such protests against bigotry and cruelty as Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and Barnaby Rudge. Powerful pictures of the gloom of that British Sabbath which locked up everything "that could by any possibility afford relief to an overworked people," may be found in Little Dorrit; and the plot turns on the Sabbatarianism of a cruel fanatic who had made felony part of her religion. Much was done by this novel, as well as by Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby towards the abolition of imprisonment for debt in 1869. His tone was very mild, compared with that of the popular orators. Resistance to bad laws was urged by Richard Carlile; and a clergyman named Taylor, who held the Gospel to be a solar myth, was imprisoned on October 24, 1827, for saying that the first martyrs for Jesus Christ were the Gadarene pigs. Another London lecturer declared on Sunday evening, December 2, 1832, that "The elective franchise should belong to women, as a part of the people," and again that "Women are qualified to elect and to be elected to all public offices." "Any argument for exclusion is of that kind which has justified every tyranny," says this discourse, which was printed for the first time, on May 11, 1833, in an American newspaper, The Free Enquirer. Its columns show that a young lady had already presented very advanced ideas as a lecturer at the Rotunda in London; but the general opinion of the sex was expressed by the wife of the Rev. John Sandford, whose popular book declared that "There is something unfeminine in independence. A really sensible woman... is conscious of inferiority." The Irish have supported themselves so successfully in America, and obeyed the laws so generally, as to prove that failure to do either in Ireland should not be attributed to their race or their religion, but wholly to their oppression. Memory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was all the more bitter in the nineteenth, because the destitution of the peasantry was increasing hopelessly. Removal of religious disabilities and reform of Parliament did not prevent bands of armed peasants from fighting against attempts to take away their cattle in payment of the tithes exacted by well-paid dignitaries of the hated Church. It sometimes happened that a dozen of the combatants were killed. Sydney Smith estimated that this way of keeping up a state church cost a million lives, from first to last, and Ireland had to be as heavily garrisoned as India, until a less vexatious system was established in 1838. Municipal government was wholly in the hands of little corporations, which had the sole power of electing new members and seldom admitted a Catholic. The ruling oligarchy was to the population as one to two hundred in Limerick, and only as one to twenty-five hundred in Protestant Belfast. The right of local self-government was given to the people of these cities and a few others in 1840; but even this small and tardy justice provoked an English bishop to threaten that it would call down vengeance from God. Full municipal suffrage throughout the island and a domestic Parliament were demanded by all Ireland, under the guidance of the mighty orator O'Connell; but the prejudice against his cause in Great Britain was made invincible by his denouncing "the Saxons," as he called the English, for the crimes of their ancestors.

VII. All reforms stopped in 1841, when the Whigs lost the supremacy. It was not their fault that excess in speculation on both sides of the Atlantic had brought on a panic which threw thousands of people out of work in the factory towns, and reduced other thousands to earning only twopence a day. A succession of bad harvests, just before 1841, made wages very low on the farms, and food too dear everywhere. Bread was sold in halfpenny slices; labourers robbed pigs of swill; children fought with dogs for bones in the streets; one person in every eleven was a pauper; and England seemed to Dickens like one vast poorhouse. The old ways of giving charity had been so lavish and indiscriminate as to encourage pauperism; the new system of relief proved really kinder; but at first it was administered too slowly and cautiously for the emergency; and there was some ground for the complaints in Oliver Twist. Knowledge that paupers were neglected strengthened the belief of the working-men, that all they needed to make them as well off as their brethren in America was the ballot. Paine, Cobbett, and Hetherington were widely read; manhood suffrage and a secret ballot were called "the People's Charter"; and there were more than a million signatures to the Chartist petition in 1839. These demands were just; but about one Englishman in three was unable to write his name at this time; and many who had acquired this accomplishment knew dangerously little about politics. When we think how much mischief has recently been done in the United States by illiterate and venal votes, we cannot blame Englishmen of the upper and middle classes for delaying to grant universal suffrage. They ought to have made rapid preparation for it, by liberal encouragement of popular education through free schools and a cheap press; but even the Whigs were too indignant at the violence of the Chartists, who made bloody riots in 1841. How ignorant these men were was shown by their doing their worst that year to help carry the elections against the Whigs, who were much less hostile to Chartism than the Conservatives, as those Tories were called who still condescended to politics.

The most culpable blunder of the Whigs had been that of allowing the revenue to fall below the expenses; and the policy they had proposed for making up the deficit was too much like that halfhearted way of dealing with slavery which brought ruin upon the party of the same name in America. The British tariff was raised by the war against Napoleon, as the American was under similar pressure afterwards, so high as in some cases to prohibit imports and actually check revenue. Either tariff could have been used as an almost complete list of the world's products; and both were framed on the principle of protecting everybody, except consumers, against competition. Great Britain unfortunately could produce only part of the food needed by the people; and the tariff was so much in the interest of owners of land as to make bread and meat dearer than if the island had been barren. Importation of cattle was prohibited; and that of wheat and other grain was not permitted until prices were high enough to cause famine. Then importation would begin slowly, and keep increasing until the supply of both foreign- and home-grown wheat would become large enough to glut the market and make farmers bankrupt. These duties on grain, which were known as the corn laws, acted with similar taxes on all other necessaries of life in impoverishing factory hands and other members of the working class. They were told that the laws which kept living dear kept wages high; but we shall see that this turned out not to be the fact. The only real gainers by the corn laws were those wealthy owners of great estates of whom Parliament was composed entirely, with the exception of a few members of the House of Commons.

That body allowed Manchester and other factory towns to send representatives who had found out the tendency of protectionism from their own business experience, as well as from study of political economy. Among these men was Cobden, who had already planted himself in the road to wealth, but who preferred to remain poor that he might make England rich. He and his associates knew that imports are paid for by exporting what can be produced most profitably; that nothing is imported which could be produced as cheaply at home; that large imports make large exports; that the average Englishman knows how to carry on his own business; and that the Government could not encourage any otherwise unprofitable industry without checking the really profitable ones. On these facts were based the following predictions. In the first place, free trade in grain and cattle would lower the average price of food in England, and make the supply so regular that there would be no more famines. Second, those countries which were allowed to send grain and cattle, cotton and other raw materials, etc., to England would buy British manufactures in return. Third, removal of duties from raw materials would enable factories to produce goods more cheaply, and sell larger quantities at home as well as abroad. Then, fourth, this increased activity in manufacturing would raise wages, while remission of duties would make all the necessaries of life cheaper, so that pauperism would diminish and prosperity become more general in the working class. And finally, the commerce of England with other countries would grow rapidly to their mutual benefit; and thus international relations would be kept friendly by free trade.

In this faith the reformers at Manchester and Birmingham asserted the right of all men to buy and sell freely, and demanded the removal of all duties except those best adapted to bring in necessary revenue. They were wise enough to attack the monstrous tariff at its weakest point, the tax on bread. The Anti-Corn-Law League was organised in 1839; the spot where the Peterloo massacre had been perpetrated, twenty years before, was soon used for a free trade banquet in which five thousand working-men took part; and appeals to the people were made in all parts of England. The Conservatives were all protectionists; and so many Whigs were on that side that those leaders who were opposed to the bread tax did not dare to come out against it. They did propose in 1841 to meet the deficit in the revenue by reducing some duties which were so high as to prevent importation, for instance, the tax on all sugar not grown in British colonies. The protectionist Whigs voted with the Conservatives against the Ministry; and it had to go out of office without having done enough against the corn laws to secure the support of the League. Protectionists, Chartists, and opponents of the new poor-law helped to give the Conservatives control of the next Parliament, where the free-traders were one to four.

Such was the state of things in October, 1841, when the League went to work more vigorously than before in educating the people, and especially voters of the poorer class. During the next twelve months, half a million dollars was spent in this work. In 1843, there were fourteen regular lecturers in the field, besides countless volunteers, and five hundred distributors of tracts. The annual number of publications was about ten million copies; and the annual weight exceeded a hundred tons. The dissenting ministers did good work for reform; but the Episcopalian clergy were too friendly to a tax which kept up the value of tithes. The League soon had the support of John Bright, who was one of the greatest of British orators. Prominent among opponents was the Chartist leader, Feargus O'Connor; and those Chartists who were not protectionists held that their cause ought to take the lead. Public opinion was so strongly for free trade in 1845 that Parliament took off the duties from cotton and other raw materials, in hope of conciliating the manufacturers; but these latter redoubled their efforts to abolish the tax on food. Subscriptions were larger than ever; and much land was bought by free-traders who wished to qualify themselves as voters for members of the next Parliament, which would have to be elected in or before 1848.

Reform seemed still distant, when Shelley's prophecy was fulfilled. Freedom's eternal foe, Famine, came suddenly to her help. Dearness of wheat and meat had obliged half of the Irish and many of the English to live entirely on potatoes. Wages were often paid in Ireland by loan of land for raising this crop. The rot which began in August, 1845, soon became so destructive that Peel, who was then Prime Minister, proposed in October that grain should be made free of duty. Wellington and other members of the Cabinet demurred; and the question had to be submitted to Parliament. Disraeli insisted to the last on keeping up the tariff; but famine was increasing; and both Houses finally agreed, after long debate, to accept Peel's proposal, that not only the duties on food and raw materials, but most of the others, should be either reduced or abolished. His conservatism did not keep him from seeing that the whole system of protecting home industries must stand or fall together. Prominent among obstructionists were the bishops. The House of Lords did not agree before June 25, 1846, to the reform which had been accepted on May 15th by the House of Commons, and which was publicly acknowledged by Wellington to be inevitable. Such was the exasperation of the protectionists that they helped the opponents, of coercion in Ireland to drive Peel out of office, by a vote which was taken in the House of Commons on the very day when his plan of tariff reform gained that victory in the House of Lords which made free trade for ever the system of Great Britain.

About one-half of the import duties are now levied on tobacco, one-fourth more on wine and strong drink; and most of the rest on tea and other groceries. Duties on articles which could be produced in Great Britain are offset by internal-revenue taxes. No monopoly is given to farm or factory; no necessary article is made too dear for the poor; and there are no needless violations of the right of the labourer to spend his wages in the best market.

This reform made the relief of Ireland possible, though the loss of life was terrible. Never again has England been so near to a famine as in 1841. Food is now so plenty that five times as much sugar is used in proportion to population as in 1842, and more than twice as much butter and eggs. This does not mean that the millionaire eats five times as much sugar, or twice as many eggs, as before, but that poor people can now buy freely what formerly were almost unattainable luxuries. The proportion of money in savings banks in England and Wales has doubled; and that of paupers sank from 1 in 11 in 1842 to 1 in 37 in 1895. Wages have risen fifty per cent., while other prices have fallen; and British workmen are better off than any others in Europe. The annual value of English exports declined steadily from 1815 to 1842; but it is now four times as great as in the latter year; and it is more than twice as large in proportion to population as in those highly protected countries, the United States and France. Low tariffs also enable Belgium to export nearly three times as much for each inhabitant as France, and New South Wales to export five times as much as the United States. Large exports do not depend on density of population but on ability to import freely. Readiness of any country to buy freely of her neighbours keeps them able and willing to buy whatever she has to sell. Free trade has given Great Britain, New South Wales, and Belgium their choice of the world's markets. Great Britain has also been enabled to keep up much more friendly relations with the rest of Europe than would otherwise have been the case. Liberty of commerce has helped her enjoy peace; and peace has preserved free institutions.

The reforms which culminated in free trade showed Englishmen that they could right any wrong without resort to violence. The attempt of the Chartists to overawe Parliament in 1848 was seen to be inexcusable; and it failed ridiculously. Never since then has insurrection in England been even possible. The atmosphere of thought has been so quiet that suffrage was greatly extended in 1867, and made practically universal in 1894. Voters gained the protection of a secret ballot in 1872; and municipal self-government was given in 1894 to every part of England where it had not already been established.

No wonder that there is little of the revolutionary ardor of Shelley and Byron in Tennyson, Browning, and other recent poets. They have delighted in progress; but they have seen that it must come through such peaceable changes in public opinion, and then in legislation, as are caused by free discussion. The benign influence of peace has enabled them to display such brilliancy as had not been seen in England for more than two hundred years. No other writers ever paid so much attention to public health and the general happiness. The ablest thought of the century has been devoted to enriching human life, and not to destroying it. This has enabled science to make unprecedented progress. A new period of intellectual history has been opened by Spencer and Darwin.

VIII. Prominent among reformers who had no wish for revolution, and no respect for science, were Dickens and Carlyle. The latter's ("former's" Ed.) aversion to political economy as "the dismal science" was echoed in the pages of Hard Times; and the absence of any reference in Dombey and Son to the great movement against the corn laws is characteristic of a novelist whose Pickwick Papers made fun of scientific investigation. What was there called the "tittlebat" is really that nest-building fish, the stickleback. Passages ridiculing the use of statistics might be quoted at great length from both authors. Dickens had too much sympathy with paupers, especially those who suffered under the poor-law of 1834; and Carlyle had much too little. They agreed in opposition to model prisons and other new forms of philanthropy. Perhaps it was mainly the habit of indiscriminate ridicule which suggested such caricatures as Mrs. Jellaby and Mrs. Pardiggle. Carlyle's belief that abolitionism was "an alarming Devil's Gospel" and his denunciation of "the sugary, disastrous jargon of philanthropy" were legitimate results of idolatry of what he called "early, earnest times," namely the Dark Ages. His sympathy with mediaeval methods was so narrow that he spoke of a poet of weak health and high culture, whom he saw suffering under a sentence of two years in a pestilential prison, forbidden books or writing materials, kept most of the time alone and on bread and water, but guilty of nothing worse than a Chartist speech, as "master of his own time and spiritual resources to, as I supposed, a really enviable extent." Dickens shows much more appreciation of the real superiority of modern times, though personal disappointments, during his visit to America, prevented him from acknowledging the merits of democracy. Carlyle's reverence for the early Hebrews and other primitive barbarians made him present hero-worship as the only secure corner-stone of politics. His receipt for a perfect government is this: "Find in any country the ablest man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place; and loyally reverence him." "Such a government is not to be improved by voting or debating." "Neither except in obedience to the Heaven-chosen is freedom so much as conceivable." This theory showed its own absurdity in prompting eulogies on Francia and other despots; but Carlyle's apologies for Cromwell were of some service to the cause of liberty fifty years ago, when England had forgotten to honour the champions of the Long Parliament. Dickens thought more about the asceticism than the independence of the Puritans. He and Carlyle have dispelled some of the prejudices against the heroes of the First Republic; but they perpetuated others. Carlyle's best work was in encouraging the readers of his first books to think for themselves. The power of Dickens to call out sympathy with the unfortunate will never cease to bless mankind.

As much pity for the outcast has been shown by his great rival, Victor Hugo, and even more fellow-feeling with the oppressed. The spirit which has made France free animates all his writings, especially those grand poems which were called out by the usurpation of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. His early dramas dealt so vigorously with royal weakness and vice that Marion de Lorme was suppressed by Charles X. and Le Roi s'amuse by Louis Philippe. The work which has made him best known, and which appeared in 1862 in nine languages, is a plea for mercy to criminals, or in his own words, to "the miserable." The chief aim is to show "the oppression of laws," and the mistake of aiding the tyranny of the police by thinking too severely of the fallen. He finds an opportunity to introduce an enthusiastic panegyric on the victories of Napoleon, closing with the question: "What could be more grand?" "To be free," is the reply. Full justice to the French Revolution is done by that most dramatic of novels, Ninety-Three. Here he says: "The agony of the nations ended with the fall of the Bastile." "Perhaps the Convention is the culmination of history." "It declared poverty and disability sacred." "It branded the slave-trade, and freed the blacks." "It decreed gratuitous education." "The object of two-thirds of its decrees was philanthropic." Such facts are all the more worthy of mention, because they were omitted by Carlyle.

SUPPLEMENT TO CHAPTER II

I. Thomas Carlyle's prejudice against democracy was strengthened by the failure of the revolutions of 1848. Constitutional monarchy was as hostile to reform in France as it was friendly in England.

Only one Frenchman in thirty could vote; and the legislature cared nothing for public opinion. Louis Philippe was hated for habitual dishonesty. There had been several attempts at regicide and some bloody revolts. One of the latter gave a basis from history for Victor Hugo's MisÉrables. Restrictions on the press and on public meetings increased the unwillingness of the working-men at Paris to be governed by the rich. Socialism was popular, and employment insufficient. The prohibition of a reform banquet caused barricades to be thrown up on February 22d in Paris. The militia took sides with the populace; the King fled to England; and all France accepted the Republic, which was proclaimed on February 24th. Slavery had been reestablished in the colonies by Napoleon; but it was now abolished; and so was capital punishment for political offences.

The example of Paris was followed in March by successful insurrections at Berlin, Vienna, and other German cities, as well as in Lombardy and Venice. Home rule was demanded by Hungary and Bohemia, and constitutional governments were soon established there as well as in Austria, Prussia, and other German states, and in every part of Italy. The King of Sardinia took the lead in a war for driving back the Austrians across the Alps. Co-operation of French, German, Hungarian, and Italian patriots might have made all these countries permanently free.

Such a union would have been difficult on account of international jealousies; and it was made impossible by the Socialists at Paris. Scarcely had a provisional government been set up, when recognition of "the right of employment" was demanded by a workman, who came musket in hand, and was supported by a multitude of armed artisans. They extorted a decree which promised every citizen work enough for his support. A ten-hour law was passed. Co-operative factories were started with aid from the city authorities, and had some success. Opening national workshops was not advised by leading Socialists; but it was considered necessary by some of the Ministry in order to keep the unemployed from revolt. Every applicant drew money constantly, even if not at work. What little labour was actually performed was done so lazily, and paid so highly, that the number of men soon rose to 120,000. The expenses became enormous; and the tax-payers insisted that they too had rights. In order to be able to employ all the labourers a government would have to own all the property; and it would also have to be strong enough to enforce industry. Even Victor Hugo admitted that the experiment had failed. The National Assembly, of which he was a member, notified the men in the shops that they must enlist in the army, or go to work at a safe distance from Paris on state pay, or look out for themselves. They rose in arms against the Republic, and took possession of nearly one-half of the city on June 23, 1848. "Bread or Lead" was the motto on their red flags; and two of their terrible barricades are described at the beginning of the last Part of Les MisÉrables. They held out against regular troops and cannon during four days of such fighting as had never been seen before in Paris. More Frenchmen are supposed to have fallen than in any of Napoleon's battles. Two thousand of the soldiers were slain; but no one knows how many times that number of insurgents perished in the fight or in penal colonies.

Thenceforth the French Government was much more desirous to repress insurrection at home than to sustain it abroad. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was elected President that same year, partly on account of his name, and partly on account of his promise that he would defend the right of private property against Socialism. Austrian generals of the rough and reckless type which Carlyle loved forced Lombardy and Bohemia back into the Empire, and restored absolute monarchy at Vienna, while the King of Sardinia was obliged to abdicate after such a defeat in March, 1849, as almost extinguished liberty in Italy. Venice alone held out against them under that purest of patriots, Manin, and suffered terribly during a siege of twenty-one weeks. Hungary was subdued that summer with the aid of Russia. France did nothing except to revive the papal despotism at Rome. Mazzini's republic was crushed by that which had a Bonaparte for President. His power had been increased by the disfranchisement of several million French voters of the poorer class. His promise to restore universal suffrage joined with memory of the massacres of June, 1848, in preventing much resistance to his usurpation of absolute power on December 2, 1851. There was a monstrous vote, next November, for an empire, where the centralisation of administration was complete, and the legislature merely ornamental. Thus the liberation of Europe was prevented, partly by race prejudices, but mainly by attempts to benefit the poor by overtaxing the rich. France and Hungary were left with less political liberty than before; and Italy gained very little; but some of the constitutional freedom acquired in 1848 was retained in Prussia and other parts of Western Germany.

II. It was contrary to the general tendency of wars, that those of the latter half of the century aided the growth of free institutions in Italy. An honoured place among nations was given by the Crimean war to Sardinia. Then her patriotic statesman, Cavour, persuaded Napoleon III. to help him rescue Lombardy from Austria. Garibaldi took the opportunity to liberate Naples; and Victor Emanuel made himself King over all Italy except Rome and Venice. The latter city also was brought under a constitutional and friendly government by a third great war, which made the King of Prussia and his successors Emperors of Germany, while Austria was compelled to grant home rule to Hungary. The liberation and secularisation of Italy were completed in 1870 by the expulsion from Rome of the French garrison. The Emperor had lost his throne by waging war wantonly against a united Germany.

III. The Third Republic was soon obliged to fight for her life against the same enemy which had wounded her sister mortally. Socialism was still the religion of the working-men of Paris, who now formed the majority of the National Guard. Indignation at the failure of the new Government to repulse the Prussians led, on March 18, 1871, to the capture of all Paris by what was avowedly the revolution of the workmen against the shopkeepers, "in the name of the rights of labour," for "the suppression of all monopolies," "the reign of labour instead of capital," and "the emancipation of the worker by himself." This was in harmony with the teaching of the International Working-men's Association, which endorsed the insurrection fully and formally, and which held with Karl Marx that wealth is produced entirely by labour and belongs only to the working class. Socialists were active in the rebellion; but property-holders in Paris took no part; and all the rest of France took sides with the Government. What professed to be the rising of the many against the few turned out to be that of the few against the many. Impressment was necessary for manning the barricades, and pillage for raising money. The general closing of stores, factories, and offices showed that capital had been frightened away by the red flag. One of the last decrees of its defenders was, "Destroy all factories employing more than fifteen workers. This monopoly crushes the artisan." This spirit would have caused the confiscation of the funds of the National Bank, if the managers had not said: "If you do that, you will turn the money your own comrades have in their pockets to waste paper." The priceless pictures and statues in the Louvre were condemned to destruction because they represented "gods, kings, and priests." Millions of dollars worth of works of art perished in company with docks, libraries, and public buildings; but this vandalism, like the massacre of prisoners, was largely the work of professional criminals. The capture of Paris, late in May, was accompanied with pitiless slaughter of the rebels, though many lives were saved by Victor Hugo.

Since then the French Republic has been able to keep down not only the Socialists but the Bonapartists and Royalists. It has also succeeded, with the help of writers like Renan, in checking the ambition of the clergy. Continuance of peace in Europe has assisted the growth of local self-government in France, and also in Germany. The famous Prussian victories seem, however, to have increased the power of the German Emperor; and there is still danger that the growth of standing armies may check that of free institutions.