  A Census is Ordered.—Dissolution of Pitt's Administration.—Impeachment of Lord Melville.—Introduction of Lord Ellenborough into the Cabinet.—Abolition of the Slave-trade.—Mr. Windham's Compulsory Training Bill.—Illness of the King, and Regency.—Recurrence to the Precedent of 1788-'89.—Death of Mr. Perceval.—Lord Liverpool becomes Prime-minister.—Question of Appointments in the Household.—Appointment of a Prime-minister. The Union with Ireland was the last great work of Pitt's first administration, and a noble close to the legislation of the eighteenth century. But the last months of the year were also signalized by another enactment, which, though it cannot be said to have anything of a character strictly entitled to the name of constitutional, nevertheless established a practice so valuable as the foundation of a great part of our domestic legislation, that it will, perhaps, hardly be considered foreign to the scope and purpose of this volume to record its commencement. In November, 1800, Mr. Abbott, the member for Helstone, brought in a bill to take a census of the people of the United Kingdom, pointing out not only the general importance of a knowledge of the population of a country in its entire amount and its different classes to every government, but also its special bearing on agriculture and on the means requisite to provide subsistence for the people, on trade and manufactures, and on our resources for war. Such a census as he proposed had been more than once taken in Holland, Sweden, Spain, and even in the United States, young as was their separate national existence; it had been taken once—nearly fifty years previous—in Scotland; and something like one had been furnished in England in the reign of Edward III. by a subsidy roll, and in that of Elizabeth by diocesan returns furnished by the Bishops to the Privy Council.[148] He farther argued for the necessity of such a proceeding from the different notions entertained by men of sanguine or desponding tempers as to the increase or diminution of the population. "Some desponding men had asserted that the population had decreased by a million and a half between the Revolution and Peace of Paris, in 1763; others (of whom the speaker himself was one) believed that, on the contrary, it had increased in that interval by two millions." His motion was unanimously adopted by both Houses; and when the census was taken, its real result furnished as strong a proof of its usefulness as any of the mover's arguments, by the extent of the prevailing miscalculations which it detected. For Mr. Abbott, who had spared no pains to arrive at a correct estimate, while he mentioned that some persons reckoned the population of England and Wales at 8,000,000, pronounced that, according to other statements, formed on a more extensive investigation, and, as it seemed to him, on a more correct train of reasoning, the total number could not be less than 11,000,000. In point of fact, excluding those employed in the army and navy, who were nearly half a million, the number for England and Wales fell short of nine millions.[149] It would be quite superfluous to dilate on the value of the information thus supplied, without which, indeed, much of our subsequent legislation on poor-laws, corn-laws, and all matters relating to rating and taxation, would have been impracticable or the merest guesswork. As was mentioned in the preceding chapter, Pitt found himself unable to fulfil the hopes which, in his negotiations with different parties in Ireland, he had led the Roman Catholics to entertain of the removal of their civil and political disabilities. So rigorous were those restrictions, both in England and Ireland, that a Roman Catholic could not serve even as a private in the militia; and a motion made in 1797 by Mr. Wilberforce—a man who could certainly not be suspected of any leaning to Roman Catholic doctrine—to render them admissible to that service, though it was adopted in the House of Commons, was rejected by the House of Lords. But Pitt, who on that occasion had supported Wilberforce, did not confine his views to the removal of a single petty disability, but proposed to put the whole body of Roman Catholics on a footing of perfect equality with Protestants in respect of their eligibility to every kind of office, with one or two exceptions. And during the autumn of 1800 he was busily engaged in framing the details of his measure, in order to submit it to his royal master in its entirety, and so to avoid disquieting him with a repetition of discussions on the subject, which he knew to be distasteful to him. For, five years before, George III. had consulted the Chief-justice, Lord Kenyon, and the Attorney-general, Sir John Scott (afterward Lord Eldon), on the question whether some proposed concessions to Dissenters, Protestant as well as Roman Catholic, did not "militate against the coronation oath and many existing statutes;" and had received their legal opinion that the tests enacted in the reign of Charles II., "though wise laws, and in policy not to be departed from, might be repealed or altered without any breach of the coronation oath or Act of Union" (with Scotland).[150] Their opinions on the point were the more valuable, since they were notoriously opposed to their political convictions, and might be supposed to have carried sufficient conviction to the royal mind. But his Majesty's scruples were now, unfortunately, revived by the Lord Chancellor, who, strange to say, was himself a Presbyterian; and who treacherously availed himself of his knowledge of what was in contemplation to anticipate the Prime-minister's intended explanations to the King. He fully succeeded in his object of fixing the King's resolution to refuse his assent to the contemplated concessions (which, by a curious confusion of ideas, his Majesty even characterized as "Jacobinical"[151]), though not in the object which he had still more at heart, of inducing the King to regard him as the statesman in the whole kingdom the most deserving of his confidence. The merits of the question will be more appropriately examined hereafter. It is sufficient to say here that Pitt, conceiving himself bound by personal honor as well as by statesman-like duty to persevere in his intended measure, or to retire from an office which no man is justified in holding unless he can discharge its functions in accordance with his own judgment of what is required by the best interests of the state, resigned his post, and was succeeded by Mr. Addington. Addington's ministry was made memorable by the formation of the Northern Confederacy against us, and its immediate and total overthrow by Nelson's cannon; and for the Peace of Amiens, severely criticised in Parliament, as that of Utrecht and every subsequent treaty with a similar object had been, but defensible both on grounds of domestic policy, as well as on that of affording us a much-needed respite from the strain of war; though it proved to be only a respite, and a feverish one, since at the end of two years the war was renewed, to be waged with greater fury than ever. But it was too short-lived for any constitutional questions to arise in it. And when, in 1804, Pitt resumed the government, his attention was too completely engrossed by the diplomatic arrangements by which he hoped to unite all the nations east of the Rhine in resistance to a power whose ever aggressive ambition was a standing menace to every Continental kingdom, for him to be able to spare time for the consideration of measures of domestic policy, except such as were of a financial character. But, though his premature death rendered his second administration shorter than even Addington's, it was not wholly unproductive of questions of constitutional interest. It witnessed a recurrence to that which cannot but be regarded as among the most important privileges of the House of Commons, the right of impeaching a minister for maladministration. A report of a commission appointed for the investigation of the naval affairs of the kingdom had revealed to Parliament a gross misapplication of the public money committed by the Paymaster of the Navy. And, as that officer could not have offended as he had done without either gross carelessness or culpable connivance on the part of the Treasurer of the Navy, Lord Melville, who had since been promoted to the post of First Lord of the Admiralty, the House of Commons ordered his impeachment at the Bar of the House of Lords; the vote being passed in 1805, during Pitt's administration, though the trial did not take place till the year following. In reality, the charge did not impugn Lord Melville's personal honor, on which at first sight it appeared to press hardly, Mr. Whitbread himself, the member for Bedford, who was the chief promoter and manager of the impeachment, admitting that he never imputed to Lord Melville "any participation in the plunder of the public;" and, as Lord Melville was acquitted on every one of the charges brought against him, the case might have been passed over here with the barest mention of it, were it not that Lord Campbell has pointed out the mode of procedure as differing from that adopted in the great trial of Warren Hastings, twenty years before; and, by reason of that difference, forming a model for future proceedings of the same kind, if, unhappily, there should ever be occasion given for a similar prosecution. The credit of the difference Lord Campbell gives to the Chancellor, Lord Erskine, who, "instead of allowing the House of Lords to sit to hear the case a few days in a year, and, when sitting, being converted from a court of justice into a theatre for rhetorical display, insisted that it should sit, like every other criminal tribunal, de die in diem, till the verdict was delivered. And he enforced both upon the managers of the House of Commons and on the counsel for the defendant the wholesome rules of procedure established for the detection of crime and the protection of innocence."[152] It is well known that on the trial of Hastings the managers of that impeachment, and most especially Burke, claimed a right of giving evidence such as no court of law would have admitted, and set up what they entitled "a usage of Parliament independent of and contradistinguished from the common law."[153] But on that occasion Lord Thurlow, then Chancellor, utterly denied the existence of any such usage—a usage which, "in times of barbarism, when to impeach a man was to ruin him by the strong hand of power, was quoted in order to justify the most arbitrary proceedings." He instanced the trial of Lord Stafford, as one which "was from beginning to end marked by violence and injustice," and expressed a "hope that in these enlightened days no man would be tried but by the law of the land." We may fairly agree with Lord Campbell, that it is to be hoped that the course adopted by Lord Erskine in this case has settled the principle and mode of procedure for all future time; since certainly the importance of an impeachment, both as to the state interests involved in it, and the high position and authority of the defendant, ought to be considered as reasons for adhering with the greatest closeness to the strict rules of law, rather than for relaxing them in any particular. But, as was natural, the public could spare little attention for anything except the war, and the arrangements made by the minister for engaging in it with effect; the interest which such a state of things always kindles being in this instance greatly inflamed by Napoleon's avowal of a design to invade the kingdom, though it is now known that the preparations of which he made such a parade were merely a feint to throw Austria off her guard.[154] During Addington's administration Pitt had spoken warmly in favor of giving every possible encouragement to the Volunteer movement, and also in support of a proposal made by an independent member, Colonel Crawford, to fortify London; and one of his first measures after his resumption of office was a measure, known as the Additional Force Bill, to transfer a large portion of the militia to the regular army. It was so purely a measure of detail, that it would hardly have been necessary to mention it, had it not been for an objection made to it by the Prime-minister's former colleague, Lord Grenville, and for the reply with which that objection was encountered by the Chief-justice, Lord Ellenborough; the former denouncing it as unconstitutional, since, he declared, it tended to establish a large standing army in time of peace; and Lord Ellenborough, on the other hand, declaring the right of the crown to call out the whole population in arms for the defence of the realm to be so "radical, essential, and hitherto never questioned part of the royal prerogative, that, even in such an age of adventurous propositions, he had not expected that any lord would have ventured to question it."[155] Pitt died in the beginning of 1806, and was succeeded by an administration of which his great rival, Fox, was the guiding spirit while he lived, though Lord Grenville was First Lord of the Treasury, and, after Fox's death, which took place in September, the undisputed Prime-minister. But the formation of the administration was not completed without a step which was at once strongly denounced, not only by the regular Opposition, but by several members of political moderation, as a violation, if not of the letter, at least of the spirit, of the constitution, the introduction of the Lord Chief-justice, Lord Ellenborough, into the cabinet. It was notorious that he was invited to a seat among that body as the representative of a small party, the personal friends of Lord Sidmouth. For the ministry was formed in some degree on the principle of a coalition; Lord Grenville himself having been a colleague of Pitt throughout the greater part of that statesman's first ministry, and as such having been always opposed to Fox; while Lord Ellenborough had been Attorney-general in Addington's administration, which avowedly only differed from Pitt on the single subject of the Catholic question. The appointment was at once made the subject of motions in both Houses of Parliament. In the House of Lords, Lord Bristol, who brought the question forward, denounced "this identification of a judge with the executive government as injurious to the judicial character, subversive of the liberty of the people, and having a direct and alarming tendency to blend and amalgamate those great elementary principles of political power which it is the very object of a free constitution to keep separate and distinct." In the House of Commons, Mr. Canning took a similar objection; and, though he admitted that a precedent for the act might be found in the case of Lord Mansfield who, while Chief-justice, had also been a cabinet minister in the administration of 1757, he argued forcibly that that precedent turned against the ministry and the present appointment, because Lord Mansfield himself had subsequently admitted that "he had infringed the principles of the constitution by acting as a cabinet minister and Chief-justice at the same time." Fox, in reply, relied principally on two arguments. The first was, that "he had never heard of such a thing as the cabinet council becoming the subject of a debate in that House. He had never known of the exercise of the King's prerogative in the appointment of his ministers being brought into question on such grounds as had now been alleged." The second, that "in point of fact there is nothing in the constitution that recognizes any such institution as a cabinet council; that it is a body unknown to the law, and one which has in no instance whatever been recognized by Parliament." He farther urged that as Lord Ellenborough was a privy councillor, and as the cabinet is only a select committee of the Privy Council, he was, "in fact, as liable to be summoned to attend the cabinet, as a privy councillor, as he was in his present situation." The last argument was beneath the speaker to use, since not one of his hearers was ignorant that no member of the Privy Council unconnected with the government ever is summoned to the deliberations of the cabinet; and though, as he correctly stated, "there is no legal record of the members comprising any cabinet," it may safely be affirmed that since July, 1714, when the Duke of Argyll and the Duke of Somerset claimed admission to the deliberations of the ministers, on account of the danger in which the Queen lay, though they admitted that they had received no summons to attend,[156] there has been no instance of any privy councillor attending without a summons; nor, except at the accession of a new sovereign, of summonses being sent to any members of the council except the actual ministers. The second argument was even worse, as being still more sophistical. It might be true that no law nor statute recognized the cabinet as a body distinct from the Privy Council, but it was at least equally true that there was no one who was ignorant of the distinction; that it was, in truth, one without which it would be difficult to understand the organization or working of any ministry. The indispensable function and privilege of a ministry is, to deliberate in concert and in private on the measures to be taken for the welfare of the state; but there could be little chance of concert, and certainly none of privacy, if every one who has ever been sworn a member of the Privy Council had a right to attend all its deliberations. Again, to say that the King's prerogative, as exercised in the choice of his advisers, is a thing so sacred that no abuse of it, or want of judgment shown in its exercise, can warrant a complaint, is inconsistent with every principle of constitutional government, and with every conceivable idea of the privileges of Parliament. In fact, Parliament has claimed a right to interfere in matters apparently touching more nearly the royal prerogative, and it is only in the reign preceding the present reign that hostile comments have been made in Parliament on the appointment of a particular person as ambassador to a foreign power. Yet the post of ambassador is one which might have been supposed to have been farther removed from the supervision of Parliament than that of a minister, an ambassador being in a special degree the personal representative of the sovereign, and the sovereign therefore, having, it might be supposed, a right to a most unfettered choice in such a matter. Stripped of all technicalities, and even of all reference to the manifest possibility of such a circumstance arising as that the Chief-justice, if a member of a cabinet, may have a share in ordering the institution of a prosecution which, as a judge, it may be his lot to try, one consideration which is undeniable is, that a member of a cabinet is of necessity, and by the very nature of his position in it, a party man, and that it is of preeminent importance to the impartiality of the judicial bench, and to the confidence of the people in the purity, integrity, and freedom from political bias of their decisions, that the judges should be exempt from all suspicion of party connection. Lord Campbell even goes the length of saying, what was not urged on either side of either House in these debates, that it was alleged by at least one contemporary writer that Lord Mansfield's position in the cabinet did perceptibly influence some of his views and measures respecting the Press;[157] and, though in both Houses the ministry had a majority on the question of the propriety of the appointment, he records his own opinion[158] that "the argument was all on the losing side;" and that Mr. Fox showed his consciousness that it was so by his "concession that the Chief-justice should absent himself from the cabinet when the expediency of commencing prosecutions for treason or sedition was to be discussed." He adds, also, that "it is said that Lord Ellenborough himself ere long changed his opinion, and, to his intimate friends, expressed deep regret that he had ever been prevailed upon to enter the cabinet." But, if the composition of the cabinet of 1806 has in this respect been generally condemned, on the other hand the annals of that ministry, short-lived as it was, are marked by the enactment of one great measure which has been stamped with universal approbation. It may, perhaps, be said that the existence, promotion, discouragement, or suppression of a branch of trade has no title to be regarded as a constitutional question. But the course which the British Parliament, after a long period of hesitation, has adopted respecting, not only the slave-trade, but the employment of slave-labor in any part of the British dominions, is so intimately connected with the great constitutional principle, that every man, whatever be his race or nation or previous condition, whose foot is once planted on British soil, is free from that moment, that it cannot be accounted a digression to mention the subject here. To our statesmen of Queen Anne's time traffic in slaves was so far from being considered discreditable, that the ministry of that reign prided themselves greatly on what was called the Assiento Treaty with Spain, by which they secured for the British merchants and ship-owners the privilege of supplying the West India Islands with several thousand slaves a year. In 1748 the ministers of George II were equally jealous of the credit of renewing it. It had even on one occasion been decided in the Court of Common Pleas that an action of trover could be maintained for a negro, "because negroes are heathens;" though Chief-justice Holt scouted the idea of being bound by a precedent which would put "a human being on the same footing as an ox or an ass," and declared that "in England there was no such thing as a slave." Subsequent decisions, however, of two Lord Chancellors—Lord Talbot and Lord Hardwicke—were not wholly consistent with the doctrine thus laid down by Holt; and the question could not be regarded as finally settled till 1772, when a slave named Somersett was brought over to England from Jamaica by his master, and on his arrival in the Thames claimed his freedom, and under a writ of habeas corpus had his claim allowed by Lord Mansfield. The master's counsel contended that slavery was not a condition unsanctioned by English law, for villeinage was slavery, and no statute had ever abolished villeinage. But the Chief-justice, in the first place, denied that villeinage had ever been slavery such as existed in the West Indies; and, in the second place, he pronounced that, whether it had been or not, it had, at all events, long ceased in England, and could not be revived. "The air of England has long been too pure for a slave, and every man is free who breathes it. Every man who comes into England is entitled to the protection of English law."[159] But this freedom was as yet held to be only co-extensive with these islands. And for sixty years more our West India Islands continued to be cultivated by the labor of slaves, some of whom were the offspring of slaves previously employed, though by far the greater part were imported yearly from the western coast of Africa. The supply from that country seemed inexhaustible. The native chiefs in time of war gladly sold their prisoners to the captains of British vessels; in time of peace they sold them their own subjects; and, if at any time these modes of obtaining slaves slackened, the captains would land at night, and, attacking the villages on the coast sweep off the inhabitants on board their ships, and at once set sail with their booty. The sufferings of these unhappy captives in what was called the "middle passage"—the passage between their native land and the West India Islands—were for a long time unknown or disregarded, till, early in Pitt's first ministry, they attracted the notice of some of our naval officers who were stationed in the West Indies, and who, on their return to England, related the horrors which they had witnessed or heard of—how, between decks too low to admit of a full-grown man standing upright, the wretched victims, chained to the sides of the ships, lay squeezed together in such numbers, though the whole voyage was within the tropics, that, from the overpowering heat and scantiness of food, it was estimated that two-thirds of each cargo died on the passage. Most fortunately for the credit of England, the fearful trade was brought under the notice of a young member of Parliament singularly zealous in the cause of humanity and religion, endowed with untiring industry and powerful eloquence, and connected by the closest ties of personal intimacy with Mr. Pitt. To hear of such a system of organized murder, as the British officers described the slave-trade to be, was quite sufficient to induce Mr. Wilberforce to resolve to devote himself to its suppression. He laid the case in all its horrors before his friend the Prime-minister, a man as ready as himself to grapple with and extinguish all proved abuses; and Pitt at once promised him all the support which he could give. It was no easy task that he had taken on himself. A year or two before, Burke had applied himself to frame some regulations which he hoped might gradually remove the evil; but, little as he was moved by considerations of popularity or daunted by difficulty, he had abandoned the attempt, as one which would meet with a resistance too powerful to be overcome. Wilberforce was not a bolder man than Burke, but he had no other object to divide his attention, and, therefore, to this one he devoted all his faculties and energies, enlisting supporters in every quarter, seeking even the co-operation of the French government, and opening a correspondence with the French Secretary of State, M. Montmorin, a statesman of great capacity, and, what was far rarer in France, of incorruptible honesty. M. Montmorin, however, though alive to the cruelty of the traffic, was unable to promise him any aid, alleging the fears of the French planters that its abolition "would ruin the French islands. He said that it was one of those subjects upon which the interests of men and their sentiments were so much at variance, that it was difficult to learn what was practicable."[160] Wilberforce had already found that the English merchants were still less manageable. Pitt had entered so fully into his views, that in 1788 he himself moved and carried a resolution pledging the House of Commons to take the slave-trade into consideration in the next session. And another friend of the cause, Sir W. Dobben, brought in a bill to diminish the horrors of the middle passage by proportioning the number of slaves who might be conveyed in one ship to the tonnage of the vessel. But those concerned in the West India trade rose up in arms against even so moderate a measure, and one so clearly demanded by the most ordinary humanity as this. The Liverpool merchants declared that the absence of restrictions on the slave-trade had been the chief cause of the prosperity and opulence of their town, and obtained leave to be heard by counsel against the bill. But Fox united with Pitt on this subject, and the bill was carried. But this was all the practical success which the efforts of the "Abolitionists," as they began to be called, achieved for many years. And even that was not won without extreme difficulty; Lord Chancellor Thurlow opposing it with great vehemence in the House of Lords, as the fruit of a "five days' fit of philanthropy which had just sprung up," and pointing to the conduct of the French government, which, as he asserted, had offered premiums to encourage the trade, as an example that we should do well to follow. It was even said that he had contrived to incline the King himself to the same view; to have persuaded him that the trade was indispensable to the prosperity of our manufacturers, and, in the Chancellor's words, "that it was his royal duty to show some humanity to the whites as well as to the negroes." And more than once, when bills to limit or wholly suppress the trade had been passed by the Commons, the same mischievous influence defeated them in the Lords. The last years of Pitt's first administration were too fully occupied with the affairs of Ireland, negotiations with foreign powers, and the great war with France, to enable him to keep pace with his friend's zeal on the subject. But in his second administration, occupied though he was with a recurrence of the same causes, he found time to prepare and issue an Order in Council prohibiting the importation of slaves into our fresh colonial acquisitions, and the employment of British ships to supply the Dutch, French, and Spanish islands. And this Order in Council paved the way for the total abolition. One of the earliest proceedings of the new ministry was the introduction by the Attorney-general, Sir Arthur Pigott, of a bill to extend and make it perpetual; to forbid "the importation of African negroes by British ships into the colonies conquered by or ceded to us in war; or into the colonies of any neutral state in the West Indies. For at present every state that had colonies in America or the West Indies, and that was not actually at war with us, availed itself of the opportunity of British shipping to carry on the trade." It was resisted as vehemently as any former measure with the same object, and partly on the new ground that it would in no degree stop the trade or diminish the sufferings of the Africans, but would merely rob our ship-owners of their profits to enrich the Americans. Mr. Rose, the member for Christchurch, who advanced this argument, had been a friend of Pitt; yet, though he quoted an instance of a single vessel having buried one hundred and fifty-two slaves on one voyage, he was not ashamed to deprecate the bill, on the plea that "the manufacturers of Manchester, Stockport, and Paisley would be going about naked and starving, and thus, by attending to a supposed claim for relief from a distant quarter, we should give existence to much more severe distress at home." The bill, however, was carried in both Houses, and received the royal assent. And Fox, who supported it warmly in his speech on the third reading (one of the last speeches which he ever addressed to the House), invited Wilberforce to regard it as a stepping-stone to the total abolition of the trade, and as an encouragement to renew his motion for that object; and, though he could not promise him the support of the government as a government, he "could answer for himself and many of his friends who held the highest and most dignified stations in the other House of Parliament. They still felt the question of the total abolition as one involving the dearest interests of humanity, and as one which, should they be successful in effecting it, would entail more true glory upon their administration, and more honor upon their country, than any other transaction in which they could be engaged." Mr. Fox did not live to see the opening of another session; but, when that time came, the position which he had taken up, that the measure of which he had thus promoted the passing was an encouragement to do more, was adopted to its full extent by the chief of his colleagues, Lord Grenville, who, in February, 1807, himself brought forward a motion for the entire abolition of the trade. Though he was Prime-minister, he could not introduce it as a government measure, since two of his colleagues—Lord Sidmouth, the President of the Council, and Mr. Windham, the Secretary of State for the Colonies—opposed it; though the former professed a desire to see the trade abolished, but would have preferred to attain that end by imposing such a tax on every slave imported as should render the trade unprofitable. He had another obstacle also to encounter, in the vehement opposition of some of the princes of the royal family, the Dukes of Clarence and Sussex more especially, who were known to be canvassing against the bill, and were generally understood, in so doing, to be acting in accordance with the views of their elder brothers. But he was confident that by this time the feeling of the whole country was with him on the subject. He was resolved to rest his case on its justice, and therefore consented that the House should hear counsel on the subject, though he resisted their demand to be allowed to call witnesses. Accordingly, counsel were heard for the whole body of West India planters, and for those of one or two separate islands, such as Jamaica and Trinidad; for the Liverpool merchants, and even for the trustees of the Liverpool Docks. But some of their reasonings he even turned against themselves, refusing for a moment to admit "that the profits obtained by robbery could be urged as an argument for the continuance of robbery." He denounced the trade as "the most criminal that any country could be engaged in," and as one that led to other crimes in the treatment of the slaves after they reached the West Indies. He instanced "three most horrible and dreadful murders of slaves" that had been committed in Barbadoes, and quoted the report of Lord Seaforth, governor of the island, who, on investigation, had found that by the law of the colony the punishment affixed to such murders was a fine of eleven pounds. He was opposed by the Duke of Clarence, who directed his remarks chiefly to a defence of the general humanity of the planters; and by Lord Westmoreland, who, in a speech of singular intemperance, denounced the principle of the measure, as one after the passing of which "no property could be rendered safe which could fall within the power of the Legislature." He even made it an argument against the bill that its principle, if carried to its legitimate logical end, must tend to the abolition of slavery as well as of the slave-trade. He objected especially to the assertion in the preamble that the trade was "contrary to justice and humanity," declaring that those words were only inserted in the hope that by them "foreign powers might be humbugged into a concurrence with the abolition," and wound up his harangue by a declaration that, though he should "see the Presbyterian and the prelate, the Methodist and pew-preacher, the Jacobin and the murderer, unite in support of it, he would still raise his voice against it." It must have been more painful to the minister to be opposed by so distinguished an officer as Lord St. Vincent, who resisted the bill chiefly on the ground that "its effect would be to transfer British capital to other countries, which would not be disposed to abandon so productive a trade," and declared that he could only account for Lord Grenville's advocacy of it "by supposing that some Obi man had cast his spell upon him." But the case was too strong for any arguments to prevail which were based solely on the profits of a trade which no one pretended to justify. The bill passed the Lords by a majority of nearly three to one; in the House of Commons, where the opposition was much feebler, by one infinitely larger;[161] and, by a somewhat remarkable coincidence, it received the royal assent on the same day on which Lord Grenville announced to his brother peers that his administration was at an end. Even before the abolition had thus become law, the member for Northumberland, Earl Percy, endeavored to give practical effect to Lord Westmoreland's view, that emancipation of the slaves was its inevitable corollary, by moving for leave to bring in a bill for the gradual abolition of slavery in the British settlements of the West Indies. But he was opposed by Lord Howick,[162] though he had been among the earnest advocates of abolition, partly for the sake of the negroes themselves, and partly on the ground that the Legislature had no "right to interfere with the property of the colonists;" little foreseeing that the measure which he now opposed was reserved for his own administration, and that its accomplishment would be one of its chief titles to the respectful recollection of posterity. And, as the House was presently counted out, the discussion would not have been worth recording, were it not for the opportunity which it gave of displaying the practical and moderate wisdom of Wilberforce himself, who joined in the opposition to Lord Percy's motion. "The enemies of abolition had," he said, "always confounded abolition with emancipation. He and his friends had always distinguished between them; and not only abstained from proposing emancipation, but were ready to reject it when proposed by others. How much soever he looked forward with anxious expectation to the period when the negroes might with safety be liberated, he knew too well the effect which the long continuance of abject slavery produced upon the human mind to think of their immediate emancipation, a measure which at the present moment would be injurious both to them and to the colonies. He and those who acted with him were satisfied with having gained an object which was safely attainable." And they had reason to be satisfied. For the good work thus done was not limited by the extent of the British dominions, vast as they are. The example of the homage thus paid by the Parliament and the nation to justice and humanity was contagious; the principle on which the bill was founded and was carried being such that, for mere shame, foreign countries could hardly persist in maintaining a traffic which those who had derived the greatest profit from it had on such grounds renounced; though our ministers did not trust to their spontaneous sympathies, but made the abolition of the traffic by our various allies, or those who wished to become so, a constant object of diplomatic negotiations, even purchasing the co-operation of some by important concessions, in one instance by the payment of a large sum of money. The conferences and congresses which took place on the re-establishment of peace gave them great facilities for pressing their views on the different governments. And Lord Liverpool's instructions to Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington, as plenipotentiaries of our government,[163] show the keen interest which he took in the matter, and the skilful manner in which he sought to avail himself of the predominant influence which the exertions and triumphs of this country had given her with every foreign cabinet. Though Portugal was an ally to whom we regarded ourselves as bound by special ties, as well as by the great benefits we had conferred on her, yet, as she clung with the greatest pertinacity to the trade, he did not scruple to endeavor to put a constraint upon her which should compel her submission, and instructed Lord Castlereagh "to induce the Congress to take the best means in their power to enforce it by the adoption of a law, on the part of the several states, to exclude the colonial produce of those countries who should refuse to comply with this system of abolition." And exertions so resolutely put forward were so successful, that the trade was avowedly proscribed by every European nation, though unquestionably it was still carried on by stealth by merchants and ship-owners of more than one country—not, if the suspicions of our statesmen were well founded, without some connivance on the part of their governments. Nor were our efforts in the cause the fitful display of impulsive excitement. We have continued them and widened their sphere as occasions have presented themselves, exerting a successful influence even over unchristian and semi-civilized governments, of which an instance has very recently been furnished, in the assurances given by the Khedive of Egypt to our minister residing at his court, that he is taking vigorous measures to suppress the slave-trade, which is still carried on in the interior of Africa; and that we may believe his promise that he will not relax his exertions till it is extinguished, at least in the region on the north of the equator. Individuals, as a rule, are slow to take warning from the experience of others; slower, perhaps, to follow their example in well-doing. Nations are slower still. When such an example is followed, still more when it is adopted by a general imitation, it will usually be found not only that the good is of a very unusual standard of excellence, but that he or they who have set the example are endowed with a force of character that predisposes others to submit to their influence. And credit of this kind England may fairly claim for the general abolition of the slave-trade; for the condemnation and abolition of the slave-trade had this distinguishing feature, that the idea of such a policy was of exclusively British origin. No nation had ever before conceived the notion that to make a man a slave was a crime. On the contrary, there were not wanting those who, from the recognition of such a condition in the Bible, argued that it was a divine institution. And they who denounced it, and labored for its suppression, had not only inveterate prejudice and long custom to contend with, but found arrayed against them many of the strongest passions that animate mankind. The natural desire for gain united merchants, ship-owners, and planters in unanimous resistance to a measure calculated to cut off from them one large source of profit. Patriotism, which, however misguided, was sincere and free from all taint of personal covetousness, induced many, who wore wholly unconnected either with commerce or with the West Indies, to look with disfavor on a change which not only imperilled the interests of such important bodies of men, but which they were assured by those concerned, must render the future cultivation of estates in the West Indies impracticable; while such a result would not only ruin those valuable colonies, but would also extinguish that great nursery for our navy which was furnished by the vessels at present engaged in the West India trade. To disregard such substantial considerations to risk a loss of revenue, a diminution of our colonial greatness, and a weakening of our maritime power, even while engaged in a formidable war, under no other pressure but that of a respect for humanity and justice, was certainly a homage to those virtues, and also an act of self-denying courage, of which the previous history of the world had furnished no similar example; and it is one of which, in one point of view, the nation may be more justly proud than of the achievements of its wisest statesmen, or the exploits of its most invincible warriors. For it was the act of the nation itself. No previous sentiment of the people paved the way for Pitt's triumphs in finance, for Nelson's or Wellington's victories by sea and land; but the slave-trade could never have been abolished by any parliamentary leader, had not the nation as a whole become convinced of its wickedness, and, when once so convinced, resolved to brave everything rather than persist in it. The merit of having impressed it with this conviction belongs to Mr. Wilberforce, whose untiring, unswerving devotion of brilliant eloquence and practical ability to the one holy object, and whose ultimate success, give him a just claim to be reckoned among the great men of a generation than which the world has seen none more prolific of every kind of greatness. But the nation itself is also entitled to no slight credit for having so rapidly appreciated the force of his teaching, and for having encouraged its representatives to listen to his voice, by the knowledge that by adopting his measures they would be carrying out the wish and determination of the whole people. A measure for the strengthening of the army, introduced by the Secretary of State for War, Mr. Windham, though not one of perpetual force, since it required to be renewed every year, claims a brief mention, from the extent to which one of its clauses trenched on the freedom of the subject, by making every man of military age (from sixteen years old[164] to forty) liable to be compelled to submit to military training for a certain period of each year. "Nothing," to quote the Secretary's words, "was to exempt any man from the general training but his becoming a volunteer at his own expense, the advantage of which would be that he could train himself if he chose, and fight, if occasion required it, in the corps to which he should belong, instead of being liable to fall in among the regulars.... As out of the immense mass of the population some selection must be made, those called on to be trained were to be selected by lot, and he would have the people divided into three classes, between the ages of sixteen and forty: the first class to comprehend all from sixteen to twenty-four; the second, those between twenty-four and thirty-two; and the third, all from thirty-two to forty. The number of days for training he proposed to limit to twenty-six, with an allowance of a shilling a day for each man." The result aimed at by this part of his measure was the creation of a force different from and unconnected with the militia; and he did not conceal his hope that the military habits which it would implant in a large portion of the population would lead many of those thus about to be trained to enlist in the regular army. To the militia itself he paid a high but not undeserved compliment, declaring it "for home service certainly equal to any part of our regular forces, with the single exception that it had never seen actual service." But the militia could not be called on to serve out of the kingdom; and his object was to increase the force available for foreign service—"to see the great mass of the population of the country so far trained as to be able to recruit immediately whatever losses the regular army might sustain in action." As yet, the number of men yearly obtained by recruiting fell far short of the requirements of the service. Wellington had not yet begun that career of victory which created a national enthusiasm for war, and filled our ranks with willing soldiers. And another clause of the same bill was framed in the hope of making the service more acceptable to the peasantry, by limiting the time for which recruits were to be enlisted, and entering men, at first, in the infantry for seven years, or in the cavalry (as that branch of the service required a longer apprenticeship) for ten; then allowing them the option of renewing their engagement for two periods—in the infantry of seven years each, in the cavalry of six and five, with increased pay during each of the two periods, and a small pension for life, if the soldier retired after the second period; and "the full allowance of Chelsea," which was to be farther raised to a shilling a day, for those who elected to serve the whole twenty-one years. This principle the present reign has seen carried to a much greater extent, but the change is too recent for even the most experienced officers to be agreed on its effects. And it is only because of this recent extension of it that this clause is mentioned here. But the enactment of a law of compulsory service was clearly an inroad on the great constitutional right of every man to choose his own employment. At the same time, it is equally clear that it was only such an inroad as under the circumstances, was fully justifiable. It is true that all danger of French invasion had passed away with Trafalgar; but the kingdom was still engaged in a gigantic war, and the necessity of the case—always the supreme law—was so little denied by the Opposition, that their objections to the bill were directed entirely against the clause for limited enlistment, and not against that which abridged the subject's liberty, by compelling him to learn to serve his country in war. The reign of George III., which had now lasted fifty years, was drawing practically to a close. The excitement caused by the ministerial changes in 1801 had already brought on one relapse, though fortunately a very brief one, of the King's malady of 1788; and in the autumn of 1810 the death of the daughter who was supposed to be his especial favorite, the Princess Amelia, produced a recurrence of it, which, though at first the physicians entertained more sanguine hopes of his speedy recovery than on any former occasion, he never shook off. More than one change of ministry had recently taken place. In 1807 Lord Grenville had been compelled, as Pitt had been in 1801, to choose between yielding his opinions on the Catholic question or resigning his office, and had chosen the latter alternative. He had been succeeded for two years by the Duke of Portland; but in 1809 that nobleman had also retired, and had been succeeded by his Attorney-general, Mr. Perceval, the only practising barrister who had ever been so promoted. And he now being Prime-minister, and, as such, forced to make arrangements for carrying on the government during the illness of his sovereign, naturally regarded the course pursued in 1789 as the precedent to be followed. Accordingly, on the 20th of December he proposed for the adoption of the House of Commons the same resolutions which Pitt had carried twenty-two years before—that the King was prevented by indisposition from attending to public business; that it was the duty of Parliament to provide means for supplying the defect of the personal exercise of the royal authority, and its duty also to determine the mode in which the royal assent to the measures necessary could be signified. And he also followed Pitt's example in expressing by letter to the Prince of Wales his conviction that his Royal Highness was a person most proper to be appointed Regent, and explaining at the same time the restrictions which seemed proper to be imposed on his immediate exercise of the complete sovereign authority; though the advanced age at which the King had now arrived made it reasonable that those restrictions should now be limited to a single year. The Prince, on his part, showed that time had in no degree abated his repugnance to those restrictions, and he answered the minister's letter by referring him to that which he had addressed to Pitt on the same subject in 1788. And he induced all his brothers to address to Perceval a formal protest against "the establishment of a restricted Regency," which they proceeded to describe as perfectly unconstitutional, as being contrary to and subversive of the principles which seated their family upon the throne of this realm.[165] Perceval, however, with Pitt's example before him, had no doubt of the course which it was his duty to pursue; and the Opposition also, for the most part, followed the tactics of 1789; the line of argument now adopted by each party being so nearly identical with that employed on the former occasion, that it is needless to recapitulate the topics on which the different speakers insisted; though it is worth remarking that Lord Holland, who, as the nephew of Fox, thought it incumbent on him to follow his uncle's guidance, did on one point practically depart from it. As his uncle had done, he denied the right of the Houses to impose any restrictions on the Prince's exercise of the royal authority; but, at the same time, he consented to put what may be called a moral limitation on that exercise, by adding to an amendment which he proposed to the resolution proposed by the minister an expression of "the farther opinion of the House that it will be expedient to abstain from the exercise of all such powers as the immediate exigencies of the state shall not call into action, until Parliament shall have passed a bill or bills for the future care of his Majesty's royal person during his Majesty's present indisposition." It is remarkable that the leaders of the Opposition were in a great degree stimulated in the line they took by the very same hopes which had animated Fox and his followers in 1789—the expectation that the Regent's first act would be to discard the existing ministry, and to place them in office. But again they were disappointed in their anticipations, of the realization of which they had made so sure that they had taken no pains to keep them secret. They even betrayed their mortification to the world when the Prince's intentions on the subject of the administration became known by the violence of their language in Parliament, some of their party denouncing the employment of the Great Seal to give the royal assent to the bill as "fraud and forgery." Nor, indeed, could the Regent himself, even while expressing his intention to make no change in the administration, lest "any act of his might in the smallest degree have the effect of interfering with the progress of his sovereign's recovery," suppress an expression of dissatisfaction at the recent arrangements, which he considered had placed him in "a situation of unexampled embarrassment," and had created "a state of affairs ill calculated, as he feared, to sustain the interests of the United Kingdom in this awful and perilous crisis, and most difficult to be reconciled to the general principles of the British constitution."[166] There were at this time general and apparently well-founded hopes of the King's recovery. For at intervals during the whole of January the Prime-minister had interviews with his Majesty; and, on the very day on which the bill became law, the King himself mentioned it to Lord Eldon, the Chancellor, and said that he acquiesced in it from perfect confidence in the advice of his physicians, and on the sound judgment and personal attachment of his ministers. For the present, therefore, no change was made in the administration; but when, in the spring of the following year, Mr. Perceval was murdered, the necessity for a new arrangement which this strange and calamitous atrocity forced upon the Regent—who by this time had come into possession of his full authority—led to his making offers of the conduct of affairs to more than one prominent statesman, all of them, as is somewhat remarkable, being peers. And, though the proposals eventually came to nothing, and the negotiations terminated in the re-establishment of the former ministry, with Lord Liverpool at its head, yet some of the causes to which their failure was publicly or generally attributed seem desirable to be recorded, because the first, and that most openly avowed, bears a not very distant resemblance to the complication which baffled Sir Robert Peel's endeavors to form an administration in 1839; and another corresponds precisely to a proposal which, in 1827, the Regent—then King George IV.—did himself make to the Duke of Wellington. It is unnecessary to dwell on the singular manner in which the Regent first professed to give his confidence to Lord Wellesley, then transferred it to Lord Moira,[167] and then to a certain extent included Lord Grey and Lord Grenville in it. Nor would it be profitable to discuss the correctness or incorrectness of the suspicion expressed by Mr. Moore, in his "Life of Sheridan"—who was evidently at this time as fully in the Regent's confidence as any one else—that "at the bottom of all these evolutions of negotiation there was anything but a sincere wish, that the object to which they related should be accomplished."[168] The reason avowed by Lord Grey and Lord Grenville for refusing a share in the projected administration was the refusal of Lord Moira, who had been employed by the Prince to treat with them on the subject, to allow them to make a power of removing the officers at present filling "the great offices of the household"[169] an express condition of their acceptance of ministerial office. They affirmed that a "liberty to make new appointments" to these offices had usually been given on every change of administration. But Lord Moira, while admitting that "the Prince had laid no restriction on him in that respect," declared that "it would be impossible for him to concur in making the exercise of this power positive and indispensable in the formation of the administration, because he should deem it on public grounds peculiarly objectionable." Such an answer certainly gives a great color to Moore's suspicion, since it is hardly possible to conceive that Lord Moira took on himself the responsibility of giving it without a previous knowledge that it would be approved by his royal master. In a constitutional point of view, there can, it will probably be felt, be no doubt that the two lords had a right to the liberty they required. And the very men concerned, the great officers of the household, were evidently of the same opinion, since the chief, Lord Yarmouth, informed Sheridan that they intended to resign, in order that he might communicate that intention to Lord Grey; and Sheridan, who concealed the intelligence from Lord Grey, can hardly be supposed, any more than Lord Moira, to have acted in a manner which he did not expect to be agreeable to the Prince. But, in Canning's opinion, this question of the household was only the ostensible pretext, and not the real cause, of those two lords rejecting the Regent's offers; the real cause being, as he believed, that the Prince himself had already named Lord Wellesley as Prime-minister, and that they were resolved to insist on the right of the Whig party to dictate on that point to the Regent,[170] just as, in 1782, Fox had endeavored to force the Duke of Portland on the King, when his Majesty preferred Lord Shelburne. As has been intimated in a former page, it will be seen hereafter that in 1839 a similar claim to be allowed to remove some of the ladies of the royal household, and the rejection of that claim by the sovereign, prevented Sir R. Peel from forming an administration. And, as that transaction was discussed at some length in Parliament, it will afford a better opportunity for examining the principle on which the claim and practice (for of the practice there is no doubt) rest. For the present it is sufficient to point out the resemblance between the cases. But it is remarkable that, unwarrantable as the pretension of the Whig leaders was to dictate to the Regent to whom he should confide the lead of the government (if, indeed, Canning be correct in his opinion), yet it was not one to which the Regent felt any repugnance, since, in 1827, when Lord Liverpool's illness again left the Treasury vacant, he, being then on the throne as George IV., proposed to the Duke of Wellington to desire the remaining members of the administration themselves to select a chief under whom they would be willing to continue in his service; but the Duke told him that the plan of allowing them to choose their own leader would be most derogatory to his position; that the choice of the Prime-minister was an act which ought to be entirely his own, for that, in fact under the British constitution, it was the only personal act of government which the King of Great Britain had to perform.[171] Though not generally a great authority on constitutional points, we apprehend that the Duke was clearly correct in this view, which, indeed, has been so invariably carried out in practice, that the King's suggestion would not have deserved mention had it not been a king's. So far from it belonging to any individual subject or to any party to name the Prime-minister, to do so is even beyond the province of the Parliament. Parliament decides whether it will give its confidence to an administration of one party or the other; but not only has no vote ever been given on the question whether one member of the dominant party be fitter or not than another to be its head, but we do not remember a single instance of any member of either House expressing an opinion on the subject in his place in Parliament. To do so would be felt by every member of experience to be an infringement on the prerogative of his sovereign; and it may be added that a contrary practice would certainly open the door to intrigue, or, what would be equally bad, a suspicion of intrigue, and would thus inevitably diminish the weight which even the Opposition desire to see a Prime-minister possess both in Parliament and in the country. Notes: |
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