 Section 6 of a history of our own times, Volume 1, by Justin McCarthy, this LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Pamela Nagami. CHAPTER III. CANADA AND LORD DURAM, PART II. The whole of this incident, the fierce attack, and the sudden pathetic expression of regret, will serve well enough to illustrate the emotional, uncontrolled character of Lord Durham. He was one of the men who, even when they are thoroughly in the right, have often the unhappy art of seeming to put themselves completely in the wrong. He was the most advanced of all the reformers in the reforming ministry of Lord Gray. His plan of reform in 1821 proposed to give four hundred members to certain districts of town and country in which every householder should have a vote. When Lord Gray had formed his reform ministry, Lord Durham sent for Lord John Russell and requested him to draw up a scheme of reform. A committee was formed on Lord Durham's suggestion, consisting of Sir James Graham, Lord Duncanin, Lord John Russell, and Lord Durham himself. Lord John Russell drew up a plan which he published long after with the alterations which Lord Durham had suggested and written in his own hand on the margin. If Lord Durham had had his way, the secret ballot would at that time have been included in the program of the government, and it was indeed understood that at one point, of the discussions, he had won over his colleagues to his opinion on that subject. He was, in a word, the radical member of the Cabinet, with all the energy which became such a character, with that magnificent indiscretion which had been attributed to a greater man, Edmund Burke, with all that courage of his opinions, which in the Frenchified phraseology of modern politics is so much talked of, so rarely found, and so little trusted or successful when it is found. Not long after, Lord Durham was raised in the peerage and became an Earl. His influence over Lord Gray continued great, but his differences of opinion with his former colleagues he had resigned his office became greater and greater every day. More than once he had taken the public and do his confidence in his characteristic and heedless way. He was sent on a mission to Russia, perhaps to get him out of the way, and afterwards he was made ambassador at the Russian court. In the interval between his mission and his formal appointment he had come back to England and performed a series of enterprises which in the homely and undignified language of American politics would probably be called stumping the country. He was looked to with much hope by the more extreme liberals in the country and with corresponding dislike and dread by all who thought the country had gone far enough or much too far in the recent political changes. None of his opponents, however, denied his great ability. He was never deterred by conventional beliefs and habits from looking boldly into the very heart of a great political difficulty. He was never afraid to propose what in times later than his have been called heroic remedies. There was a general impression, perhaps even among those who liked him least, that he was a sort of unemployed Caesar, a man who only required a field large enough to develop great qualities in the ruling of men. The difficulties in Canada seemed to have come as if expressly to give him an opportunity of proving himself all that his friends declared him to be or of justifying forever the distrust of his enemies. He went out to Canada with the assurance of everyone that his expedition would either make or mire a career if not a country. Our Durham went out to Canada with the brightest hopes and prospects. He took with him two of the men best qualified in England at that time to make his mission a success, Mr. Charles Fuller and Mr. Edward Gibbon Wakefield. He understood that he was going out as a dictator and there can be no doubt that his expedition was regarded in this light by England and by the colonies. We have remarked that people looked on his mission as likely to make or mire a career if not a country. What it did, however, was somewhat different from that which anyone expected. Lord Durham found out a new alternative. He made a country and he mired a career. He is distinctly the founder of the system which has since worked with such gratifying success in Canada. He is the founder even of the principle which allowed the quiet development of the provinces into a confederation with neighboring colonies under the name of the Dominion of Canada. But the singular quality which in home politics had helped to mire so much of Lord Durham's personal career was in full work during his visit to Canada. It would not be easy to find in modern political history so curious an example of splendid and lasting success combined with all the appearance of utter and disastrous failure. The mission of Lord Durham saved Canada. It ruined Lord Durham. At the moment it seemed to superficial observers to have been as injurious to the colonies to the man. Lord Durham arrived in Quebec at the end of May 1838. He at once issued a proclamation in style like that of a dictator. It was not in any way unworthy of the occasion which especially called for the intervention of a brave and enlightened dictatorship. He declared that he would unsparingly punish any who violated the laws, but he frankly invited the cooperation of the colonies to form a new system of government really suited to their wants and to the altering conditions of civilization. Slightly he had hardly entered on his work of dictatorship when he found that he was no longer a dictator. In the passing of the Canada bill through Parliament the powers which he understood were to be conferred upon him had been considerably reduced. Lord Durham went to work, however, as if he were still invested with absolute authority over all the laws and conditions of the colony. A very Caesar laying down the lines for the future government of a province could hardly have been more boldly arbitrary. Let it be said also that Lord Durham's arbitrariness was for the most part healthy in effect and just in spirit, but it gave an immense opportunity of attack on himself and on the government to the enemies of both at home. Lord Durham had hardly begun his work of reconstruction when his recall was clamored for by vehement voices in Parliament. Lord Durham began by issuing a series of ordinances intended to provide for the security of lower Canada. He proclaimed a very liberal amnesty to which, however, there were certain exceptions. The leaders of the rebellious movement, Papano and others who had escaped from the colony were excluded from the amnesty. So likewise were certain prisoners who either had voluntarily confessed themselves guilty of high treason or had been induced to make such an acknowledgement in the hope of obtaining a mitigated punishment. These Lord Durham ordered to be transported to Bermuda and for any of these or of the leaders who had escaped who should return to the colony without permission, he proclaimed that they should be deemed guilty of high treason and condemned to suffer death. It needs no learned legal argument to prove that this was a proceeding not to be justified by any of the ordinary forms of law. Lord Durham had no power to transport anyone to Bermuda. He had no authority over Bermuda. He had no authority which he could delegate to the officials of Bermuda enabling them to detain political prisoners. Nor had he any power to declare that persons who returned to the colony were to be liable to the punishment of death. It is not a capital offense by any of the laws of England for even a transported convict to break bounds and return to his home. All this was quite illegal, that is to say, was outside the limits of Lord Durham's legal authority. Lord Durham was well aware of the fact. He had not for a moment supposed that he was acting in accordance with ordinary English law. He was acting in the spirit of a dictator at once bold and perciful, who is under the impression that he has been invested with extraordinary powers for the very reason that the crisis does not admit of the ordinary operations of law. For the decree of death to banished men returning without permission, he had indeed the precedent and authority of acts passed already by the colonial parliament itself. But Lord Durham did not care for any such authority. He found that he had on his hands a considerable number of prisoners, whom it would be absurd to put on trial in lower Canada with the usual forms of law. It would have been absolutely impossible to get any unpacked jury to convict them. They would have been triumphantly acquitted. The authority of the crown would have been brought into greater contempt than ever. So little faith had the colonists in the impartial working of the ordinary law in the governor's hands that the universal impression in lower Canada was that Lord Durham would have the prisoners tried by a packed jury of his own officials, convicted as a matter of course, and executed out of hand. It was with amazement people found that the new governor would not stoop to the infamy of packing a jury. Lord Durham saw no better way out of the difficulty than to impose a sort of exile on those who admitted their connection with the rebellion, and to prevent, by the threat of a severe penalty, the return of those who had already fled from the colony. His amnesty measure was large and liberal, but he did not see how he could allow prominent offenders to remain unrebuked in the colony, and to attempt to bring them to trial would have been to secure for them not punishment, but public honour. Another measure of Lord Durham's was likewise open to the charge of excessive use of power. The act which appointed him prescribed that he should be advised by a council, and that every ordinance of his should be signed by at least five of its members. There was already a council in existence nominated by Lord Durham's predecessor, Sir J. Colburn, a sort of provisional government put together to supply for the moment the place of the suspended political constitution. This council Lord Durham set aside altogether, and substituted for it one of his own making, and composed chiefly of his secretaries and the members of his staff. By truth, this was but a part of the policy which he had marked doubt for himself. He was resolved to play the game which he honestly believed he could play better than anyone else. He had in his mind, partly from the inspiration of the gifted and well-instructed men who accompanied and advised him, a plan which he was firmly convinced would be the salvation of the colony. Events have proved that he was right. His disposal of the prisoners was only a clearing of the decks for the great action of remodeling the colony. He did not allow a form of law to stand between him and his purpose. Indeed, as we have already said, he regarded himself as a dictator sent out to reconstruct a whole system in the best way he could. When he was accused of having gone beyond the law, he asked, with a score not wholly unreasonable, what are the constitutional principles remaining in force where the whole constitution is suspended? What principle of the British constitution holds good in a country where the people's money is taken from them without the people's consent, where representative government is annihilated, where martial law has been the law of the land, and where trial by jury exists only to defeat the ends of justice and to provoke the righteous scorn and indignation of the community? End of section 6 Section 7 of a history of our own times, Volume 1 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 3 Canada and Lord Durham, Part 3 Still there can be no doubt that a less impestuous and impatient spirit than that of Lord Durham might have found a way of beginning his great reforms without provoking such a storm of hostile criticism. He was, it must always be remembered, a dictator who only strove to use his powers for the restoration of liberty and constitutional government. His mode of disposing of his prisoners was arbitrary, only in the interests of mercy. He declared openly that he did not think it right to send to an ordinary penal settlement, and thus brand with infamy, men whom the public feeling of the colony entirely approved, and whose cause, until they broke into rebellion, had far more of right on its side than that of the authority they complained of could claim to possess. He sent them to Bermuda, simply as into exile, to remove them from the colony but nothing more. He lent the weight of his authority to the Colonial Act, which prescribed the penalty of death for returning to the colony because he believed that the men thus proscribed never would return. But his policy met with the severest and most unmeasured criticism at home. If Lord Durham had been guilty of the worst excesses of power which Burke charged against war and hastings, he could not have been more fiercely denounced in the House of Lords. He was accused of having promulgated an ordinance which would enable him to hang men without any trial or form of trial. None of his opponents seemed to remember that whether his disposal of the prisoners was right or wrong, it was only a small and incidental part of a great policy covering the readjustment of the whole political and social system of a splendid colony. The criticism went on as if the promulgation of the Capec ordinances was the be-all and the end-all of Lord Durham's mission. His opponents made great complaint about the cost of his progress in Canada. Lord Durham had undoubtedly a lavish taste and a love for something like Oriental display. He made his goings about in Canada like a gorgeous royal progress. Yet it was well known that he took no remuneration whatever for himself, and did not even accept his own personal traveling expenses. He afterward stated in the House of Lords that the visit cost him personally ten thousand pounds at least. After Hume the advocate of economy made sarcastic comment on the sudden fit of parsimony which seemed to have seized, in Lord Durham's case, men whom he had never before known to raise their voices against any prodigality of expenditure. The ministry was very weak in debating power in the House of Lords. Lord Durham had made enemies there. The opportunity was tempting for assailing him and the ministry together. Many of the criticisms were undoubtedly the conscientious protests of men who saw danger in any departure from the recognized principles of constitutional law. Eminent judges and lawyers in the House of Lords naturally looked, above all things, to the proper administration of the law as it existed. But it is hard to doubt that political or personal enmity influenced some of the attacks on Lord Durham's conduct. Almost all the leading men in the House of Lords were against him. Lord Broome and Lord Lindhurst were, for the time, leaked in opposition to the government and in attack on the Canadian policy. Lord Broome claimed to be consistent. He had opposed the Canada coercion from the beginning, he said, and he opposed illegal attempts to deal with Canada now. It seems a little hard to understand how Lord Broome could really have so far misunderstood the purpose of Lord Durham's proclamation as to believe that he proposed to hang men without the form of law. However Lord Durham may have broken the technical rules of law, nothing could be more obvious than the fact that he did so in the interest of mercy and generosity and not of tyrannical severity. Lord Broome invaded against him with thundering eloquence as if he were denouncing another sagianus. It must be owned that his attacks lost some of their moral effect because of his known hatred to Lord Melbourne and the Ministry, and even to Lord Durham himself. People said that Broome had a special reason for feeling hostile to anything done by Lord Durham. A dinner was given to Lord Grey by the Reformers of Edinburgh in 1834, at which Lord Broome and Lord Durham were both present. Broome was called upon to speak, and in the course of his speech he took occasion to condemn certain two zealous Reformers who could not be content with the changes that had been made, but must demand that the Ministry should rush forward into wild and extravagant enterprises. He enlarged upon this subject with great vivacity and with amusing variety of humorous and rhetorical illustrations. Lord Durham assumed that the attack was intended for him. His assumption was not unnatural. When he came in his turn to speak, he was indiscreet enough to reply directly to Lord Broome to accept the speech of the former as a personal challenge and in bitter words to retort invective and sarcasm. The scene was not edifying. The guests were scandalized. The effect of Broome's speech was wholly spoiled. Broome was made to seem a disturber of order by the indiscretion which provoked into retort a man notoriously indiscreet and incapable of self-restraint. It is not unfair to the memory of so fierce and unsparing a political gladiator as Lord Broome to assume that when he felt called upon to attack the Canadian policy of Lord Durham the recollection of the scene at the Edinburgh dinner inspired with additional force his criticism of the Quebec ordinances. The ministry was weak and yielded. They had in the first instance approved of the ordinances but they quickly gave way and abandoned them. They avoided a direct attempt on the part of Lord Broome to reverse the policy of Lord Durham by announcing that they had determined to disallow the Quebec ordinances. Lord Durham learned for the first time from an American paper that the government had abandoned him. He had once announced his determination to give up his position and to return to England. His letter announcing this resolve crossed on the ocean the dispatch from home disallowing his ordinances. With characteristic imprudence he issued a proclamation from the castle of San Louis in the city of Quebec which was virtually an appeal to the public feeling of the colony against the conduct of Her Majesty's government. When the news of this extraordinary proclamation reached home Lord Durham was called by the Times newspaper the Lord High Seditioner. The representative of the Sovereign it was said had appealed to the judgment of a still rebellious colony against the policy of the sovereign's own advisers. Of course Lord Durham's recall was inevitable. The government had once sent out a dispatch removing him from his place as governor of British North America. Lord Durham had not waited for the formal recall. He returned to England a disgraced man. Yet even then there was public spirit enough among the English people to refuse to ratify any sentence of disgrace upon him. When he landed at Plymouth he was received with acclamations from the population although the government had prevented any of the official honor usually shown to returning governors from being offered to him. Mr. John Stuart Mill has claimed with modest firmness and with perfect justice a leading share in influencing public opinion in favor of Lord Durham. Lord Durham, he says in his autobiography, was bitterly attacked from all sides, invaded against by enemies, given up by timid friends, while those who would willingly have defended him did not know what to say. He appeared to be returning a defeated and discredited man. I had followed the Canadian events from the beginning. I had been one of the prompters of his prompters. His policy was almost exactly what mine would have been. And I was in a position to defend it. I wrote and published a manifesto in the Westminster Review, in which I took the very highest ground in his behalf, claiming for him not mere acquittal but praise and honor. Instantly a number of other writers took up the tone. I believe there was a portion of truth in what Lord Durham soon after with polite exaggeration said to me that to this article might be ascribed the most triumphal reception which he met with on his arrival in England. I believe it to have been the word in season which at a critical moment does much to decide the result. The touch which determines whether a stone set in motion at the top of an eminence shall roll down on one side or on the other. All hopes connected with Lord Durham as a politician soon vanished. But with regard to Canadian and generally to colonial policy, the cause was gained. Lord Durham's report, written by Charles Buller, partly under the inspiration of Wakefield, began a new era. Its recommendations extending to complete internal self-government were in full operation in Canada within two or three years, and have been since extended to nearly all the other colonies of European race which have any claim to the character of important communities. In this instance the Victor Causa pleased not only Cato but in the end the gods as well. Lord Durham's report was acknowledged by enemies as well as by the most impartial critics to be a masterly document. As Mr. Mill has said, it laid the foundation of the political success and social prosperity not only of Canada but of all the other important colonies. After having explained in the most exhaustive manner the causes of discontent and backwardness in Canada, it went on to recommend that the government of the colony should be put as much as possible into the hands of the colonists themselves, that they themselves should execute as well as make the laws, the limit of the imperial government's interference being in such matters as affect the relations of the colony with the mother country such as the constitution and form of government, the regulation of foreign relations in trade and the disposal of the public lands. Lord Durham proposed to establish a thoroughly good system of municipal institutions to secure the independence of the judges, to make all provincial officers except the governor and his secretary responsible to the colonial legislature and to repeal all former legislation with respect to the reserves of land for the clergy. Finally, he proposed that the provinces of Canada should be reunited politically and should become one legislature containing the representatives of both races and of all districts. It is significant that the report also recommended that in any act to be introduced to this purpose a provision should be made by which all or any of the other North American colonies should, on the application of their legislatures and with the consent of Canada, be admitted into the Canadian Union. Thus the separation which Fox thought unwise was to be abolished and the Canada's were to be fused into one system which Lord Durham would have had a federation. In brief Lord Durham proposed to make the Canada's self-governing as regards their internal affairs and the germ of a federal union. It is not necessary to describe in detail the steps by which the government gradually introduced the recommendations of Lord Durham to Parliament and carried them to success. Lord Glenelg, one of the feeblest and most apathetic of colonial secretaries, had retired from office partly no doubt because of the attacks in Parliament on his administration of Canadian affairs. He was succeeded at the colonial office by Lord Norman B. and Lord Norman B. gave way in a few months to Lord John Russell, who was full of energy and earnestness. Lord Durham's successor and disciple in the work of Canadian government, Lord Sydenham, best known as Mr. Charles Poolett Thompson, one of the pioneers of free trade, received Lord John Russell's cordial cooperation and support. Lord John Russell introduced into the House of Commons a bill which he described as intended to lay the foundation of a permanent settlement of the affairs of Canada. The measure was postponed for a session because some statesmen thought that it would not be acceptable to the Canadians themselves. Some little sputterings of the rebellion had also lingered after Lord Durham's return to this country, and these for a short time had directed attention away from the policy of reorganization. In 1840, however, the Act was passed which reunited Upper and Lower Canada on the basis proposed by Lord Durham. Further legislation disposed of the clergy reserve lands for the general benefit of all churches and denominations. The way was made clear for that scheme, which in times nearer to our own has formed the Dominion of Canada. Lord Durham did not live to see the success of the policy he had recommended. We may anticipate the close of his career. Within a few days after the passing of the Canada government bill he died at Cowes in the Isle of Wight on July 28, 1840. He was then little more than 48 years of age. He had for some time been in failing health, and it cannot be doubted that the mortification attending his Canadian mission had worn away his strength. His proud and sensitive spirit could ill-bear the contradictions and humiliations that had been forced upon him. His was an eager and passionate nature. Full of that saywa indignatio which by his own acknowledgment tortured the heart of Swift, he wanted to the success of his political career, that proud patience which the gods are said to love, and by virtue of which great men live down misappreciation and hold out until they see themselves justified and hear the reproaches turned to cheers. But if Lord Durham's personal career was in any way a failure, his policy for the Canada's was a splendid success. It established the principles of colonial government. There were undoubtedly defects in the construction of the actual scheme which Lord Durham initiated and which Lord Sidonim, who died not long after him, instituted. The legislative union of the two Canada's was in itself a makeshift and was only adopted as such. Lord Durham would have had it otherwise if he might, but he did not see his way then to anything like the complete federation scheme afterwards adopted. But the success of the policy lay in the broad principles it established and to which other colonial systems as well as that of the Dominion of Canada owe their strength and security today. One may say with little help from the merely fanciful that the rejoicings of emancipated colonies might have been in his dying years as he sank into his early grave. VIII. The opening of the reign of Queen Victoria coincided with the introduction of many of the great discoveries and applications in science, industry and commerce, which we consider specially representative of modern civilization. A reign which saw in its earlier years the application of the electric current to the task of transmitting messages, the first successful attempts to make use of steam for the business of transatlantic navigation, the general development of the railway system all over these countries, and the introduction of the penny post must be considered to have obtained for itself had it secured no other memorials and abiding place in history. A distinguished author has lately invaded against the spirit which would rank such improvements as those just mentioned with the genuine triumphs of the human race and has gone so far as to insist that there is nothing in any such which might not be expected from the self-interested contrivance of a very inferior animal nature. Amid the tendency to glorify beyond measure the mere mechanical improvements of modern civilization it is natural that there should arise some angry questioning, some fierce disparagement of all that is done. There will always be natures to whom the philosophy of contemplation must seem far nobler than the philosophy which expresses itself in mechanical action. It may however be taken as certain that no people who are ever great in thought and in art willfully neglected to avail themselves of all possible contrivances for making life less laborious by the means of mechanical and artificial contrivance. The Greeks were to the best of their opportunity and went at the highest point of their glory as an artistic race, as eager for the application of all scientific and mechanical contrivances to the business of life as the most practical and boastful Manchester man or Chicago man of our own day. We shall afterwards see that the reign of Queen Victoria came to have a literature and art and a philosophy distinctly its own. For the moment we have to do with its industrial science, or at least with the first remarkable movements in that direction which accompany the opening of the reign. This at least must be said for them that they have changed the conditions of human life for us in such a manner as to make the history of the past forty or fifty years almost absolutely distinct from that of any preceding period. In all that part of our social life which is affected by industrial and mechanical appliances, the man of the latter part of the eighteenth century was less widely removed from the Englishmen of the days of the past in letters than we are removed from the ways of the eighteenth century. The man of the eighteenth century travelled on land and sea in much the same way that his forefathers had done hundreds of years before. His communications by letter with his fellows were carried on in very much the same method. He got his news from abroad and at home after the same slow uncertain fashion. His streets and houses were lighted very much as they might have been when Mr. Peeps was in London. His ideas of drainage and ventilation were equally elementary and simple. We see a complete revolution in all these things. A man of the present day suddenly thrust back fifty years in life would find himself almost as awkwardly unsuited to the ways of that time as if he were sent back to the age when the Romans occupied Britain. He would find himself harassed at every step he took. He could do hardly anything as he does it today. Whatever the moral and philosophical value of the change in the eyes of thinkers too lofty to concern themselves with the common ways and doings of human life, this is certain at least, that the change is of immense historical importance and that even if we look upon life as a mere pageant and show, interesting to wise men only by its curious changes, a wise man of this school could hardly have done better if the choice lay with him than to desire that the lines of his life might be so cast as to fall into the earlier part of this present reign. It is a somewhat curious coincidence that in the year when Professor Wheatston and Mr. Cook took out their first patent for improvements in giving signals and sounding alarms in distant places by means of electric currents transmitted through metallic circuit. Professor Morse, the American electrician, applied to Congress for aid in the construction and carrying on of a small electric telegraph to convey messages a short distance and made the application without success. In the following year he came to this country to obtain a patent for his invention, but he was refused. He had come too late. Our own countrymen were beforehand with him. Very soon after we find experiments made with the electric telegraph between Houston Square and Camden Town. These experiments were made under the authority of the London and Northwestern Railway Company, immediately on the taking out of the patent by Messier's Wheatston and Cook. Mr. Robert Stevenson was one of those who came to watch the operation of this new and wonderful attempt to make the currents of the air man's faithful aerial. The London and Birmingham Railway was opened through its whole length in 1838. The Liverpool and Preston line was opened in the same year. The Liverpool and Birmingham had been opened in the year before. The London and Croydon was opened the year after. The act for the transmission of the males by railways was passed in 1838. In the same year it was noted as an unparalleled and to many an almost incredible triumph of human energy and science over time and space that a locomotive had been able to travel at a speed of 37 miles an hour. The prospect of traveling from the metropolis to Liverpool, a distance of 210 miles in 10 hours, calls forcibly to mind the tales of fairies and genie by which we were amused in our youth and contrasts forcibly with the fact attested on the personal experience of the writer of this notice that about the commencement of the present century, this same journey occupied a space of 60 hours. These are the words of a writer who gives an interesting account of the railways of England during the first year of the reign of Queen Victoria. In the same volume from which this extract is taken, an illusion is made to the possibility of steam communication being successfully established between England and the United States. Preparations on a gigantic scale, a writer is able to announce, are now in a state of great forwardness for trying an experiment in steam navigation, which has been the subject of much controversy among scientific men. Ships of an enormous size, furnished with steam power equal to the force of 400 horses and upwards, will before our next volume shall be prepared, have probably decided the question whether this description of vessels can in the present state of our knowledge profitably engage in transatlantic voyages. It is possible that these attempts may fail, a result which is indeed predicted by high authorities on the subject. We are more sanguine in our hopes, but should these be disappointed, we cannot if we are to judge from our past progress doubt, that longer experience and a further application of inventive genius will, at no very distant day, render practicable and profitable by this means the longest voyages in which the adventurous spirit of man will lead him to embark. The experiment thus alluded to was made with perfect success. The Sirius, the Great Western, and the Royal William accomplished voyages between New York and this country in the early part of 1838, and it was remarked that transatlantic voyages by means of steam may now be said to be as easy of accomplishment with ships of adequate size and power as the passage between London and Margate. The Great Western crossed the ocean from Bristol to New York in fifteen days. She was followed by the Sirius which left Cork for New York and made the passage in seventeen days. The controversy as to the possibility of such voyages, which was settled by the Great Western and the Sirius, had no reference to the actual safety of such an experiment. During seven years the males for the Mediterranean had been dispatched by means of steamers. The doubt was as to the possibility of stowing in a vessel so large a quantity of coal or other fuel as would enable her to accomplish her voyage across the Atlantic where there could be no stopping-place and no possibility of taking in new stores. It was found to the delight of all those who believed in the practicability of the Enterprise that the quantity of fuel which each vessel had on board when she left her port of departure proved amply sufficient for the completion of the voyage. Under the Sirius nor the Great Western was the first vessel to cross the Atlantic by means of steam propulsion. Nearly twenty years before a vessel called the Savanna, built at New York, crossed the ocean to Liverpool, and some years later an English-built steamer made several voyages between Holland and the Dutch West Indian colonies as a packet vessel in the service of that government. Indeed a voyage had been made round the Cape of Good Hope, or lately still by a steamship. These expeditions, however, had really little or nothing to do with the problem which was solved by the voyages of the Sirius and the Great Western. In the former instances the steam power was employed merely as an auxiliary. The vessel made as much use of her steam propulsion as she could, but she had to rely a good deal on her capacity as a sailor. This was quite a different thing. From the enterprise of the Sirius and the Great Western, which was across the ocean by steam propulsion and steam propulsion only. It is evident that so long as the steam power was to be used only as an auxiliary, it would be impossible to reckon on speed and certainty of arrival. The doubt was whether a steamer could carry, with her cargo and passengers, few enough to serve for the whole of her voyage across the Atlantic. The expeditions of the Sirius and the Great Western settled the whole question. It was never again a matter of controversy. It is enough to say that two years after the Great Western went out from Bristol to New York, the canard line of steamers was established. The steam communication between Liverpool and New York became thenceforth as regular and as unvarying a part of the business of commerce as the journeys of the trains on the Great Western railroad between London and Bristol. It was not Bristol which benefited most by the transatlantic voyages. They made the greatness of Liverpool. Year by year the scepter of the commercial marine passed away from Bristol to Liverpool. No port in the world can show a line of docks like those of Liverpool. There the stately mercy flows for miles between the superb and massive granite walls of the enclosures within whose shelter the ships of the world are arrayed as if on parade for the admiration of the traveller who has hitherto been accustomed to the irregular and straggling arrangements of the docks of London or New York. On July 5th, 1839, an unusually late period of the year, the Chancellor of the Exchequer brought forward his annual budget. The most important part of the financial statement so far as later times are concerned is set out in a resolution proposed by the Finance Minister which perhaps represents the greatest social improvement brought about by legislation in modern times. The Chancellor proposed a resolution declaring that it is expedient to reduce the postage on letters to one uniform rate of one penny charged upon every letter of a weight to be hereafter fixed by law. Parliamentary privileges of franking being abolished and official frankings strictly regulated, this house pledging itself at the same time to make good any deficiency of revenue which may be occasioned by such an alteration in the rates of the existing duties. Up to this time, the rates of postage had been both high and various. They were varying both as to distance and as to the weight and even the size or the shape of a letter. The district or London Post was a separate branch of the Postal Department, and the charge for the transmission of letters was made on a different scale in London from that which prevailed from town to town. The average postage on every chargeable letter throughout the United Kingdom was six pence farthing. A letter from London to Brighton cost eight pence to Aberdeen one shilling and three pence haypenny to Belfast one shilling and four pence. Nor was this all, for if the letter was written on more than one sheet of paper it came under the operation of a higher scale of charge. Members of Parliament had the privilege of franking letters to a certain limited extent. Members of the Government had the privilege of franking to an unlimited extent. It is perhaps as well to mention for the sake of being intelligible to all readers in an age which has not, in this country at least, known practically the beauty and liberality of the franking privilege, that it consisted in the right of the privileged person to send his own or any other person's letters through the Post, free of charge, by merely writing his name on the outside. This meant in plain words that the letters of the class who could best afford to pay for them went free of charge, and that those who could least afford to pay had to pay double, the expense that is to say of carrying their own letters and the letters of the privileged and exempt. The greatest grievances were felt everywhere because of this absurd system. It had along with its other disadvantages that of encouraging what may be called the smuggling of letters. Everywhere sprang up organizations for the illicit conveyance of correspondence at lower rates than those imposed by the Government. The proprietors of almost every kind of public conveyance were said to have engaged in this unlawful, but certainly not very unnatural or unjustifiable, traffic. Five-sixths of all the letters sent between Manchester and London were said to have been conveyed for years by this process. One great mercantile house was proved to have been in the habit of sending sixty-seven letters by what may be called this underground post office for every one on which they paid the Government charge. It was not merely to escape heavy cost that these stratagems were employed. As there was an additional charge when a letter was written on more sheets than one, there was a frequent and almost a constant tampering by officials with the sanctity of sealed letters, for the purpose of ascertaining whether or not they ought to be taxed on the higher scale. It was proved that in the years between 1815 and 1835, while the population had increased thirty percent and the stagecoach duty had increased one hundred and twenty-eight percent, the post office revenues had shown no increase at all. In other countries the postal revenue had been on the increase steadily during that time. In the United States the revenue had actually troubled, although then and later the postal system of America was full of faults which at that time only seemed intelligible or excusable when placed in comparison with those of our own system. End of Section 8. Section 9 of a history of our own times, Volume 1 by Justin McCarthy, this LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 4. Science and Speed, Part 2 Mr. afterwards Sir Roland Hill is the man to whom this country and indeed all civilization owes the adoption of the cheap and uniform system. His plan has been adopted by every state which professes to have a postal system at all. Mr. Hill belonged to a remarkable family. His father Thomas Wright Hill was a teacher, a man of advanced and practical views in popular education, a devoted lover of science, an advocate of civil and religious liberty, and a sort of celebrity in the Birmingham of his day where he took a bold and active part in trying to defend the house of Dr. Priestley against the mob who attacked it. He had five sons, every one of whom made himself more or less conspicuous as a practical reformer in one path or another. The eldest of the sons was Matthew Davenport Hill, the philanthropic recorder of Birmingham, who did so much for prison reform and for the reclamation of juvenile offenders. The third son was Roland Hill, the author of the cheap postal system. Roland Hill, when a little weakly child, began to show such precocious love for arithmetical calculations as Pascal showed for mathematics. His favorite amusement as a child was to lie on the heart rug and count up figures by the hour together. As he grew up he became teacher of mathematics in his father's school. Afterwards he was appointed secretary to the South Australian Commission and rendered much valuable service in the organization of the colony of South Australia. His early love of masses of figures it may have been, which in the first instance turned his attention to the number of letters passing through the post office, the proportion they bore to the number of the population, the cost of carrying them, and the amount which the post office authorities charged for the conveyance of a single letter. A picturesque and touching little illustration of the veritable hardships of the existing system seems to have quickened his interest in a reform of it. Miss Martinot thus tells the story. Coleridge, when a young man was walking through the Lake District, when he one day saw the postman deliver a letter to a woman at a cottage door. The woman turned it over and examined it and then returned it, saying she could not pay the postage which was a shilling. Hearing that the letter was from her brother, Coleridge paid the postage in spite of the manifest unwillingness of the woman. As soon as the postman was out of sight she showed Coleridge how his money had been wasted as far as she was concerned. The sheet was blank. There was an agreement between her brother and herself that as long as all went well with him he should send a blank sheet in this way once a quarter, and she thus had tidings of him without expensive postage. Most persons would have remembered this incident as a curious story to tell, but there was one mind which wakened at once to a sense of the significance of the fact. It struck Mr. Rowland Hill that there must be something wrong in a system which drove a brother and sister to cheating in order to gratify their desire to hear of one another's welfare. Mr. Hill gradually worked out for himself a comprehensive scheme of reform. He put it before the world early in 1837. The public were taken by surprise when the plan came before them in the shape of a pamphlet which its author modestly entitled, Post Office Reform, Its Importance and Practicability. The root of Mr. Hill's system lay in the fact made evident by him beyond dispute that the actual cost of the conveyance of letters through the post was very trifling and was but little increased by the distance over which they had to be carried. His proposal was therefore that the rates of postage should be diminished to the minimum, that at the same time the speed of conveyance should be increased and that there should be much greater frequency of dispatch. His principle was in fact the very opposite of that which had prevailed in the calculations of the authorities. Their idea was that the higher the charge for letters, the greater the return to revenue. He started on the assumption that the smaller the charge, the greater the profit. He therefore recommended the substitution of one uniform charge of one penny to half ounce without reference to the distance within the limits of the United Kingdom which the letter had to be carried. The post office authorities were at first uncompromising in their opposition to the scheme. The Postmaster General Lord Litchfield said in the House of Lords that of all the wild and extravagant schemes he had ever heard of it was the wildest and most extravagant. The males, he said, will have to carry twelve times as much weight and therefore the charge for transmission instead of one hundred thousand pounds as now must be twelve times that amount. The walls of the post office would burst, the whole area in which the building stands would not be large enough to receive the clerks and the letters. It is impossible not to be struck by the paradoxical peculiarity of this argument, because the charge would be so much welcomed by the public, Lord Litchfield argued, and it ought not to be made. He did not fall back upon the then familiar assertion that the public would not send anything like the number of letters the advocates of the scheme expected. He argued that they would send so many as to make it troublesome for the post office authorities to deal with them. In plain words it would be such an immense accommodation to the population in general that the officials could not undertake the trouble of carrying it into effect. Another post office official, Colonel Maverly, was at all events more liberal. My constant language, he said afterwards, to the heads of the departments was, this plan we know will fail. It is your duty to take care that no obstruction is placed in the way of it by the heads of the department and by the post office. The allegation I have not the least doubt will be made at a subsequent period that this plan has failed in consequence of the unwillingness of the government to carry it into fair execution. It is our duty as servants of the government to take care that no blame eventually shall fall on the government through any unwillingness of ours to carry it into proper effect. It is perhaps less surprising that the routine mind of officials should have seen no future but failure for the scheme when so vigorous and untrammeled a thinker as Sidney Smith spoke with anger and contempt of the fact that a million of revenue is given up in the nonsensical penny post scheme to please my old excellent and universally dissentient friend, Noah Warburton. Mr. Warburton was then member for Bridport, and with Mr. Wallis, another member of parliament, was very active in supporting and promoting the views of Mr. Hill. I admire the Wig Ministry, Sidney Smith went on to say, and think they have done more good things than all the ministries since the revolution, but these concessions are sad and unworthy marks of weakness and feel reasonable men with alarm. It will be seen from this remark alone that the ministry had yielded somewhat more readily than might have been expected to the arguments of Mr. Hill. At the time his pamphlet appeared, a commission was actually engaged in inquiring into the condition of the post office department. Their attention was drawn to Mr. Hill's plan, and they gave it a careful consideration and reported in its favour, although the post office authorities were convinced that it must involve an unbearable loss of revenue. In parliament, Mr. Wallis, whose name has been already mentioned, moved for a committee to inquire into the whole subject and especially to examine the mode recommended for charging and collecting postage in the pamphlet of Mr. Hill. The committee gave the subject a very patient consideration, and at length made a report recommending uniform charges and prepayment by stamps. That part of Mr. Hill's plan, which suggested the use of postage stamps, was adopted by him on the advice of Mr. Charles Knight. The government took up the scheme with some spirit and morality. The revenue that year showed a deficiency, but they determined to run the further risk which the proposal involved. The commercial community had naturally been stirred greatly by the project which promised so much relief and advantage. Sidney Smith was very much mistaken indeed when he fancied that it was only to please his old and excellent friend Mr. Warburton that the ministry gave way to the innovation. Petitions from all the commercial communities were pouring in to support the plan and to ask that at least it should have a fair trial. The government at length determined to bring in a bill which should provide for the almost immediate introduction of Mr. Hill's scheme and for the abolition of the franking system except in the case of official letters actually sent on business directly belonging to Her Majesty's service. The bill declared as an introductory step that the charge for postage should be at the rate of four pence for each letter under half an ounce in weight irrespective of distance within the limits of the United Kingdom. This, however, was to be only a beginning for on January 10, 1840, the postage was fixed at the uniform rate of one penny per letter of not more than half an ounce in weight. The introductory measure was not, of course, carried without opposition in both houses of Parliament. The Duke of Wellington in his characteristic way declared that he strongly objected to the scheme, but as the government had evidently set their hearts upon it, he recommended the House of Lords not to offer any opposition to it. In the House of Commons it was opposed by Sir Robert Peale and Mr. Goldburn, both of whom strongly condemned the whole scheme as likely to involve the country in vast loss of revenue. The measure, however, passed into law. Some idea of the effect it has produced upon the postal correspondence of the country may be gathered from the fact that in 1839, the last year of the heavy postage, the number of letters delivered in Great Britain and Ireland was a little more than 82 millions, which included some five millions and a half of frank letters returning nothing to the revenues of the country, whereas in 1875 more than a thousand millions of letters were delivered in the United Kingdom. The population during the same time has not nearly doubled itself. It has already been remarked that the principle of Sir Rowland Hill's reform has since been put into operation in every civilized country in the world. It may be added that before long we shall in all human probability see an inter-oceanic postage established at a rate as low as people sometimes thought Sir Rowland Hill a madman for recommending as applicable to our inland post. The time is not far distant. When a letter will be carried from London to San Francisco or to Tokyo and Japan, at a rate of charge as small as that which made financiers stare and laugh when it was suggested as profitable remuneration for carrying a letter from London to the towns of Sussex or Hartfordshire. The penny post, let it be said, is an older institution than that which Sir Rowland Hill introduced. A penny post for conveyance of letters had been set up in London so long ago as 1683, and it was adopted or annexed by the government some years after. An effort was even made to set up a half penny post in London in opposition to the official penny post in 1708, but the government soon crushed this vexatious and intrusive rival. In 1738 Dr. Johnson writes to Mr. Cave, to entreat that you will be pleased to inform me by the penny post whether you resolve to print the poem. After a while the government changed their penny post to a two-penny post and gradually made a distinction between the district and other postal systems and contrived to swell the price for deliveries of all kinds. Long before even this time of the penny post, the old records of the city of Bristol contained an account of the payment of one penny for the carriage of letters to London. It need hardly be explained, however, that a penny in that time, or even in 1683, was a payment of very different value indeed from the modest sum which Sir Roland Hill was successful in establishing. The ancient penny post resembled the modern penny post, only in name. Section 10 of A History of Our Own Times, Volume 1 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 5 Chardism, Part 1 It cannot, however, be said that all the omens under which the new Queen's reign opened at home were as auspicious as the coincidences which made it contemporary with the first chapters of these new and noble developments in the history of science and invention. On the contrary, it began amid many grim and unpromising conditions in our social affairs. The winter of 1837 and 8 was one of unusual severity and distress. There would have been much discontent and grumbling in any case among the class described by French writers as the proletaire, but the complaints were aggravated by a common belief that the young Queen was wholly under the influence of a frivolous and selfish minister who occupied her with amusements while the poor were starving. It does not appear that there was at any time the slightest justification for such a belief, but it prevailed among the working classes and the poor very generally and added to the sufferings of genuine want the bitterness of imaginary wrong. Popular education was little looked after so far as the State was concerned might be said not to be looked after at all. The laws of political economy were as yet only within the appreciation of a few, who were regarded not uncommonly because of their theories somewhat as phrenologists or mesmerists might be looked on in a more enlightened time. Some writers have made a great deal of the case of Tom and his disciples as evidence of the extraordinary ignorance that prevailed. Tom was a broken-down brewer and, in fact, a madman who had for some time been going about in Canterbury and other parts of Kent bedizzened in fantastic costume and styling himself at first Sir William Courtney of Powderham Castle, Knight of Malta, King of Jerusalem, King of the Gypsy Races, and we know not what else. He announced himself as a great political reformer, and for a while he succeeded in getting many to believe in and support him. He was afterwards confined for some time in a lunatic asylum, and when he came out he presented himself to the ignorant peasantry and the character of a second messiah. He found many followers and believers again among a humbler class indeed than those whom he had formerly won over. Much of his influence over the poor Kentish laborers was due to his denunciations of the new poor law which was then popularly hated and feared with an almost insane intensity of feeling. Tom told them he had come to regenerate the whole world and also to save his followers from the new poor law and the latter announcement commended the former. He assembled a crowd of his supporters and undertook to lead them to an attack on Canterbury. With his own hand he shot dead a policeman who endeavored to oppose his movements exactly as a savior of society of bolder pretensions and greater success did it Boulogne not long after. Two companies of soldiers came out from Canterbury to disperse the rioters. The officer in command was shot dead by Tom. Tom's followers then charged the unexpected soldiers so fiercely that for a moment there was some confusion. But the second company fired a volley which stretched Tom and several of his adherents lifeless on the field. That was an end of the rising. Several of Tom's followers were afterwards tried for murder, convicted and sentenced, but some pity was felt for their ignorance and their delusion and they were not consigned to death. Long after the fall of their preposterous hero and saint many of Tom's disciples believed that he would return from the grave to carry out the promised work of his mission. All this was lamentable but could hardly be regarded as specially characteristic of the early years of the present reign. The Tom delusion was not much more absurd than the tick-borne mania of a later day. Down to our own time there are men and women among the social Democrats of culture Germany who still cherish the hope that their idol Ferdinand LaSalle will come back from the dead to lead and guide them. But there were political and social dangers in the opening of the present reign more serious than any that could have been conjured up by a crazy man in a fantastic dress. There were delusions having deeper roots and showing a more inviting shelter than any that a religious fanatica the vulgar type could cause to spring up in our society. Only a few weeks after the coronation of the queen a great radical meeting was held in Birmingham. A manifesto was adopted there which afterwards came to be known as the Chartist Petition. With that moment, Chartism began to be one of the most disturbing influences of the political life of the country. It is a movement which although its influence may now be said to have wholly passed away well deserves to have its history fully written. For ten years it agitated England. It sometimes seemed to threaten an actual uprising of all the proletaire against what was then the political and social institutions of the country. It might have been a very serious danger if the state had been involved in any external difficulties. It was backed by much genuine enthusiasm, passion and intelligence. It appealed strongly and naturally to whatever there was of discontent among the working classes. It afforded a most acceptable and convenient means by which ambitious politicians of the self-seeking order could raise themselves into temporary importance. Its fierce and fitful flame went out at last under the influence of the strong, clear and steady light of political reform and education. The one great lesson it teaches is that political agitation lives and is formidable only by virtue of what is reasonable in its demands. Consumers of ignorant and miserable men all over the country joined the chartist agitation who cared nothing about the substantial value of its political claims. They were poor, they were overworked, they were badly paid, their lives were altogether wretched. They got into their heads some wild idea that the people's charter would give them better food and wages and lighter work if it were obtained, and that for that very reason the aristocrats and the officials would not grant it. No political concessions could really have satisfied these men. If the charter had been granted in 1838 they would no doubt have been as dissatisfied as ever in 1839. But the discontent of these poor creatures would have brought with it little danger to the state if it had not become part of the support of an organization which could show some sound and good reason for the demands it made. The moment that the clear and practical political grievances were dealt with the organization melted away. Vague discontent, however natural and excusable it may be, is only formidable in politics when it helps to swell the strength and the numbers of a crowd which calls for some reform that can be made and is withheld. One of the vulgarest fallacies of statecraft is to declare that it is of no use granting the reforms which would satisfy reasonable demands because there are still unreasonable agitators whom these will not satisfy. Get the reasonable man on your side and you need not fear the unreasonable. This is the lesson taught to statesmen by the chartist agitation. A funeral oration over chartism was pronounced by Sir John Campbell, and Attorney General, afterwards Lord Chief Justice Campbell, at a public dinner at Edinburgh on October 24, 1839. He spoke at some length and with some complacency of chartism as an agitation which had passed away. Some ten days afterwards occurred the most formidable outburst of chartism that had been known up to that time and chartism continued to be an active and a disturbing influence in England for nearly ten years after. If Sir John Campbell had told his friends and constituents at the Edinburgh dinner that the influence of chartism was just about to make itself really felt, he would have shown himself a somewhat more acute politician than we now understand him to be. Seldom as a public man, setting up to be a political authority, made a worse hit than he did in that memorable declaration. Campbell was indeed only a clever shrewd lawyer of the hard and narrow class. He never made any pretensions to statesmanship or even to great political knowledge, and his unfortunate blunder might be passed over without notice, were it not that it illustrates fairly enough the manner in which men of better information and judgment than he were at that time in the habit of disposing of all inconvenient political problems. The Attorney General was aware that there had been a few riots and a few arrests, and that the law had been what he would call vindicated, and as he had no manner of sympathy with the motives which could lead men to distress themselves and their friends about imaginary charters, he assumed that there was an end of the matter. It did not occur to him, to ask himself whether there might not be some underlying causes, to explain, if not to excuse the agitation that just then began to disturb the country, and that continued to disturb it for so many years. Even if he had inquired into this subject, it is not likely that he would have come to any wiser conclusion about it. The dramatic instinct, if we may be allowed to call it so, which enables a man to put himself for the moment into the condition and mood of men entirely unlike himself in feelings and conditions, is an indispensable element of real statesmanship. But it is the rarest of all gifts among politicians of the second order. If Sir John Campbell had turned his attention to the chartest question, he would only have found that a number of men, for the most part poor and ignorant, were complaining of grievances where he could not for himself see any substantial grievances at all. That would have been enough for him. If a solid, wealthy and rising lawyer could not see any cause for grumbling, he would have made up his mind that no reasonable person's worthy the consideration of sensible legislators would continue to grumble after they had been told by those in authority that it was their business to keep quiet. But if he had, on the other hand, looked with the light of sympathetic intelligence of that dramatic instinct which has just been mentioned at the condition of the classes among whom charters was then rife, he would have seen that it was not likely the agitation could be put down by a few prosecutions and a few arrests and the censure of a prosperous attorney general. He would have seen that charters was not a cause but a consequence, the intelligence of a very ordinary man, who approached the question in an impartial mood, might have seen that charters was the expression of a vague discontent with very positive grievances and evils. We have in our time outlived the days of political abstractions. The catch words which thrilled our forefathers with emotion on one side or the other fall with hardly any meaning on our ears. We smile at such phrases as the rights of man. We hardly know what is meant by talking of the people as the words were used long ago and the people was understood to mean a vast mass of wronged persons who had no representation and were oppressed by privilege and the aristocracy. We seldom talk of liberty. Anyone venturing to found a theory or even a declamation on some supposed deprival of liberty would soon find himself in the awkward position of being called on to give a scientific definition of what he understood liberty to be. He would be as much puzzled as were certain English working men who desiring to express to Mr. John Stuart Mill their sympathy with what they called in the slang of continental democracy, the revolution, were calmly bitten by the great liberal thinker to ask themselves what they meant by the revolution, which revolution, what revolution, and why they sympathized with it. But perhaps we are all a little too apt to think that because these abstractions have no living meaning now they never had any living meaning at all. They convey no manner of clear idea in England now, but it does not by any means follow that they never conveyed any such idea. The phrase which Mr. Mill so properly condemned when he founded in the mouths of English working men had a very intelligible and distinct meaning when it first came to be used in France and throughout the continent, the revolution expressed a clear reality as recognizable by the intelligence of all who heard it as the name of free trade or ultramontanism to men of our time. The revolution was the principle which was asserting all over Europe the overthrow of the old absolute power of kings, and it described it just as well as any word could do. It is meaningless in our day for the very reason that it was full of meaning then, so it was with the people and the rights of the people and the rights of labor and all the other grand eloquent phrases which seem to us so empty and so meaningless now. They are empty and meaningless at the present hour, but they have no application now, chiefly because they had application then. The reform bill of 1832 had been necessarily and perhaps naturally a class measure. It had done great things for the constitutional system of England. It had averted a revolution which without some such concession would probably have been inevitable. It had settled forever the question which was so fiercely and so gravely debated during the discussions of the reform years, whether the English constitution is or is not based upon a system of popular representation. To many at present it may seem hardly credible that sane men could have denied the existence of the representative principle. But during the debates on the great reform bill such a denial was the strong point of many of the leading opponents of the measure, including the Duke of Wellington himself. The principle of the constitution, it was soberly argued, is that the sovereign invites whatever communities or interests he thinks fit to send in persons to Parliament to take counsel with him on the affairs of the nation. This idea was got rid of by the reform bill. That bill abolished 56 nomination or rotten boroughs and took away half the representation from 30 others. It disposed of the seats thus obtained by giving 65 additional representatives to the counties and conferring the right of returning members on Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and some 39 large and prosperous towns which had previously had no representation. While as Lord John Russell said in his speech when he introduced the bill in March 1831, a ruined mound sent two representatives to Parliament, three niches in a stone wall sent two representatives to Parliament, a park where no houses were to be seen, sent two representatives to Parliament. The bill introduced a 10 pound household qualification for boroughs and extended the county franchise to leaseholders and copyholders. But it left the working classes almost altogether out of the franchise. Not merely did it confer no political emancipation on them, but it took away in many places the peculiar franchises which made the working men voters. There were communities, such for example as that of Preston and Lancashire, where the system of franchise existing created something like universal suffrage. All this was smoothed away if such an expression may be used by the Reform Bill. In truth, the Reform Bill broke down the monopoly which the aristocracy and landed classes had enjoyed and admitted the middle classes to a share of the lawmaking power. The representation was divided between the aristocracy and the middle class, instead of being as before the exclusive possession of the former. End of Section 10. Section 11 of A History of Our Own Times, Volume 1 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 5. Chartism, Part 2. The working class, in the opinion of many of their ableist and most influential representatives, were not merely left out but shouldered out. This was all a more exasperating because the excitement and agitation by the strength of which the Reform Bill was carried in the teeth of so much resistance were kept up by the working men. There was, besides at the time of the Reform Bill, a very high degree of what may be called the temperature of the French Revolution still heating the senses and influencing the judgment even of the aristocratic leaders of the movement. What Richter calls the seed grains of the revolutionary doctrines had been blown abroad so widely that they rested in some of the highest as well as in most of the lowliest places. Some of the Reform leaders, Lord Durham, for instance, were prepared to go much farther in the way of radicalism than at a later period Mr. Cobden or Mr. Bright would have gone. There was more than once a sort of appeal to the working men of the country which, however differently it may have been meant, certainly sounded in their ears as if it were an intimation that in the event of the bill being resisted too long it might be necessary to try what the strength of a popular uprising could do. Many years after, in the defense of the Irish state prisoners at Klan Mell, the council who pleaded their cause insisted that they had warrant for their conduct in certain proceedings which were in preparation during the Reform agitation. He talked with undisguised significance of the teacher being in the ministry and the pupils in the dock, and quoted Captain McKeith to the effect that if laws were made equally for every degree there might even then be rare company at Tibern Tree. It is not necessary to attach too much importance to assertions of this kind or to accept them as sober contributions to history, but they are very instructive as a means of enabling us to understand the feeling of soreness which remained in the minds of large masses of the population when after the passing of the Reform bill they found themselves left out in the cold. Rightly or wrongly they believed that their strength had been kept in reserve or in terorum to secure the carrying of the Reform bill and that when it was carried they were immediately thrown over by those whom they had thus helped to pass it. Therefore at the time when the young sovereign ascended the throne the working classes in all the large towns were in a state of profound disappointment and discontent almost indeed of disaffection. The kingdom was beginning to succeed to the Reform agitation. The leaders who had come from the ranks of the aristocracy had been discarded or had withdrawn. In some cases they had withdrawn in perfect good faith, believing sincerely that they had done the work which they undertook to do and that that was all the country required. Men drawn more immediately from the working class itself or who had in some way been dropped down by a class higher in the social scale took up the popular leadership now. Chartism may be said to have sprung definitively into existence in consequence of the formal declarations of the leaders of the Liberal Party and Parliament that they did not intend to push Reform any farther. At the opening of the first Parliament of Queen Victoria's reign the question was brought to a test. A radical member of the House of Commons moved as an amendment to the address, a resolution declaring in favour of the secret ballot and of shorter duration of Parliament. Only twenty members voted for it and Lord John Russell declared distinctly against all such attempts to reopen the Reform question. It was impossible that this declaration should not be received with disappointment and anger by great masses of the people. They had been in the full assurance that the Reform bill itself was only the means by which greater changes were to be brought about. Lord John Russell said in the House of Commons that to push Reform any farther then would be a breach of faith toward those who helped him to carry it. A great many outside Parliament not unnaturally regarded the refusal to go any farther as a breach of faith toward them on the part of the Liberal leaders. Lord John Russell was right from his point of view it would have been impossible to carry the Reform movement any farther just then. In a country like ours where interests are so nicely balanced it must always happen that a forward movement in politics is followed by a certain reaction. The Parliamentary leaders in Parliament were already beginning to feel the influence of this law of our political growth. It would have been hopeless to attempt to get the upper and middle classes at such a time to consent to any further changes of considerable importance. But the feeling of those who had helped so materially to bring about the Reform movement was at least intelligible when they found that its effects were to stop just short of the measures which alone could have made any direct influence on their political position. A conference was held almost immediately between a few of the Liberal members of Parliament who professed radical opinions and some of the leaders of the working men. At this conference the program, or what was always afterwards known as the Charter, was agreed upon and drawn up. The name of Charter appears to have been given to it for the first time by O'Connell. There's your Charter, he said to the Working Men's Association. Agitate for it and never be content with anything less. It is a great thing accomplished in political agitation to have found a telling name. The name is almost as important for a new agitation as for a new novel. The title of The People's Charter would of itself have launched the movement. Quietly studied now, The People's Charter does not seem a very formidable document. There is little smell of gunpowder about it. Its points, as they were called, were six. Manhood suffrage came first. It was then called universal suffrage, but it only meant manhood suffrage for the promoters of the movement had not the slightest idea of insisting on the franchise for women. The second was annual parliaments. Vote by secret ballot was the third. Abolition of the property qualification, then and for many years after required for the election of a member to parliament was the fourth. The payment of members was the fifth, and the division of the country into equal electoral districts, the sixth of the famous points. Of these proposals, some it will be seen were perfectly reasonable. Not one was so absolutely unreasonable as to be outside the range of fair and quiet discussion among practical politicians. Three of the points, half, that is to say, of the whole number have already been made part of our constitutional system. The existing franchise may be virtually regarded as manhood suffrage. We have for years been voting by means of a written paper dropped in a ballot box. The property qualification for members of parliament could hardly be said to have been abolished. Such a word seems far too grand and dignified to describe the fate that befell it. We should rather say that it was extinguished by its own absurdity and viciousness. It never kept out of parliament any person legally disqualified, and it was the occasion of incessant tricks and devices, which would surely have been counted disreputable and disgraceful to those who engaged in them, but that the injustice and folly of the system generated a sort of false public conscience where it was concerned, and made people think it is as lawful to cheat it as at one time the most respectable persons in private life thought it allowable to cheat the revenue and wear smuggled lace or drink smuggled brandy. The proposal to divide the country into equal electoral districts is one which can hardly yet be regarded as having come to any test, but it is almost certain that sooner or later some alteration of our present system in that direction will be adopted. Of the two other points of the charter, the payment of members may be regarded as decidedly objectionable, and that four-yearly parliament says embodying a proposition which would make public life an almost insufferable nuisance to those actively concerned in it, but neither of these two proposals would be looked upon in our time as outside the range of legitimate political discussion. Indeed the difficulty anyone engaged in their advocacy would find just now would be in getting any considerable body of listeners to take the slightest interest in the argument either for or against them. The chartists might be roughly divided into three classes, the political chartists, the social chartists, and the chartists of vague discontent who joined the movement because they were wretched and felt angry. The first were the regular political agitators who wanted a wider popular representation. The second were chiefly led to the movement by their hatred of the bread tax. These two classes were perfectly clear as to what they wanted. Some of their demands were just and reasonable. None of them were without the sphere of rational and peaceful controversy. The disciples of mere discontent naturally swerved alternately to decide of those leaders or sections who talked loudest and fiercest against the lawmakers and the constituted authorities. Chartism soon split itself into two general divisions, the moral force and the physical force-chartism. Nothing can be more unjust than to represent the leaders and promoters of the movement as mere factious and self-seeking demagogues. Some of them were men of great ability and eloquence. Some were impassioned young poets drawn from the class whom Kingsley has described in his Alton Locke. Some were men of education. Many were earnest and devoted fanatics. And so far as we can judge, all or nearly all were sincere. Even the man who did the movement most harm and who made himself most odious to all reasonable outsiders, the once famous, now forgotten, Fergus O'Connor, appears to have been sincere and to have personally lost more than he gained by his chartism. Four or five years after the collapse of what may be called the act of chartist agitation, a huge white-headed, vacuous eyed man was to be seen of mornings wandering through the arcades of covent garden market, looking at the fruits and flowers, occasionally taking up a flower, smelling at it and putting it down with a smile of infantile satisfaction. A man who might have reminded observers of Mr. Dick in Dickens's David Copperfield. This was the once renowned, once dreaded and detested Fergus O'Connor. For some time before his death his reason had wholly deserted him. Men did not know at first in the House of Commons the meaning of the odd pranks which Fergus was beginning to play there to the bewilderment of the Great Assembly. At last it was seen that the fallen leader of chartism was a hopeless madman. It is hardly to be doubted that insanity had long been growing on him, and that some at least of his political follies and extravagances were the result of an increasing disorder of the brain. In his day he had been the very model of a certain class of demagogue. He was of commanding presence, great stature, and almost gigantic strength. He had education, he had mixed in good society. He belonged to an old family, and indeed boasted his descent from a line of Irish kings, not without some ground for the claim. He had been a man of some fashion at one time, and had led a life of wild dissipation in his early years. He had a kind of eloquence which told with immense power on a mass of half-ignorant hearers, and indeed men who had no manner of liking for a more sympathy with his doctrines have declared that he was the most effective mob orator they had ever heard. He was ready, if needs were, to fight his way single-handed through a whole mass of Tory opponents at a contested election. Thomas Cooper, the venerable poet of Chartism, has given an amusing description in his autobiography of Fergus O'Connor, who was then his hero, leaping from a wagon at anotting him election into the midst of a crowd of Tory butchers, and with only two stout, chartest followers fighting his way through all opposition, flooring the butchers like nine pins. Once says Mr. Cooper, the Tory lambs fought off all who surrounded him and got him down, and my heart quaked, for I thought they would kill him, but in a very few moments his red head emerged again from the rough human billows, and he was fighting his way as before. There were many men in the movement of a nobler moral nature than poor, huge, wild Fergus O'Connor. There were men like Thomas Cooper himself, devoted, impassioned, full of poetic aspiration and no scant measure of poetic inspiration as well. Henry Vincent was a man of unimpeachable character and of some ability, an effective popular speaker who has since maintained in a very unpretending way a considerable reputation. Jones was as sincere and self-sacrificing a man as ever joined a sinking cause. He had proved his sincerity more indeed than word. His talents only fell short of that height which might claim to be regarded as genius. His education was that of a scholar and a gentleman. Many men of education and ability were drawn into sympathy, if not into actual cooperation with the chartists, by a conviction that some of their claims were well founded, and that the grievances of the working classes, which were terrible to contemplate, were such as a parliament better representing all classes would be able to remedy. Some of these men have since made for themselves an honorable name in parliament and out of it. Some of them have risen to high political position. It is necessary to read such a book as Thomas Cooper's autobiography to understand how genuine was the poetic and political enthusiasm which was at the heart of the chartist movement and how bitter was the suffering which drove into its ranks so many thousands of stout working men, who in a country like England, might well have expected to be able to live by the hard work they were only too willing to do. One must read the anti-corn law rhymes of Ebenezer Elliot to understand how the bread tax became identified in the minds of the very best of the working class and identified justly with the system of political and economic legislation which was undoubtedly kept up, although not of conscious purpose, for the benefit of a class. In the minds of too many, the British constitution meant hard work and half starvation. End of section 11. Section 12. Of a history of our own times Volume 1 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 5. Chartism, Part 3. A whole literature of chartist newspapers sprang up to advocate the cause. The northern star, owned and conducted by Fergus O'Connor, was the most popular and influential of them. But every great town had its chartist press. Meetings were held at which sometimes very violent language was employed. It began to be the practice to hold torchlight meetings at night, and many men went armed to these, and open clamour was made by the wilder of the chartists for an appeal to arms. A formidable riot took place in Birmingham where the authorities endeavored to put down a chartist meeting. Laser Elliot and other sensible sympathizers endeavored to open the eyes of the more extreme chartists to the folly of all schemes for measures of violence. But for the time the more violent a speaker was, the better chance he had of becoming popular. Efforts were made at times to bring about a compromise with the middle class liberals and the anti-corn law leaders. But all such attempts proved failures. The chartists would not give up their charter. Many of them would not renounce the hope of seeing it carried by force. The government began to prosecute some of the orators and leaders of the charter movement, and some of these were convicted, imprisoned, and treated with great severity. Henry Vinson's imprisonment at Newport in Wales was the occasion of an attempted rescue, which bore a very close resemblance indeed to a scheme of organized and armed rebellion. Newport had around it a large mining population, and the miners were nearly all physical force chartists. It was arranged among them to march in three divisions to a certain rendezvous, and when they had formed a junction there, which was to be two hours after midnight, to march into Newport, attack the jail, and defect the release of Vincent and other prisoners. The attempt was to be under the chief command of Mr. Frost, a trader of Newport, who had been a magistrate, but was deprived of the commission of the peace for violent political speeches, a man of respectable character and conduct up to that time. This was on November 4, 1839. There was some misunderstanding and delay, as almost invariably happens in such enterprises, and the divisions of the little army did not effect their junction in time. When they entered Newport they found the authorities fully prepared to meet them. Frost entered the town at the head of one division only, another following him at some interval. The third was nowhere as far as the object of the enterprise was concerned. A conflict took place between the rioters and the soldier and police, and the rioters were dispersed with a loss of some ten killed and fifty wounded. In their flight they encountered some of the other divisions coming up to the enterprise all too late. Everything was more remarkable than the courage shown by the mayor of Newport, the magistrates and the little body of soldiers. The mayor, Mr. Phillips, received two gunshot wounds. Frost was arrested next day along with some of his colleagues. They were tried on June 6, 1840. The charge against them was one of high treason. There did really appear ground enough to suppose that the expedition led by Frost was not merely to rescue Vincent, but to set going the great rebellious movement of which the physical force-chartists had long been talking. The chartists appear at first to have numbered some ten thousand, twenty thousand indeed according to other accounts, and they were armed with guns, pikes, swords, pickaxes, and bludgeons. If the delay in misunderstanding had not taken place, and they had arrived at their rendezvous at the appointed time, the attempt might have led to very calamitous results. The jury found Frost and his two companions, Williams and Jones, guilty of high treason, and they were sentenced to death. The sentence, however, was commuted to one of transportation for life. Even this was afterwards relaxed, and when some years had passed away and charism had ceased to be a disturbing influence, Frost was allowed to return to England, where he found that a new generation had grown up and that he was all but forgotten. In the meantime the Corn Law agitation had been successful, the year of revolutions had passed harmlessly over, Fergus O'Connor's day was done. But the trial and conviction of Frost, Williams, and Jones did not put a stop to the chartist agitation. On the contrary, that agitation seemed rather to wax and strengthen and grow broader because of the attempt at Newport and its consequences. Thomas Cooper, for example, had never attended a chartist meeting nor known anything of chartism beyond what he read in the newspapers until after the conviction of Frost and his companions. There was no lack of what were called energetic measures on the part of the government. The leading chartists all over the country were prosecuted and tried literally by hundreds. In most cases they were convicted and sentenced to terms of imprisonment. The imprisonment served rather to make the chartist leaders popular and to advertise the movement than to accomplish any purpose the government had at heart. They helped to make the government very unpopular. The working classes grew more and more bitter against the Whigs, who they said had professed liberalism only to gain their own ends and were really at heart less liberal than the Tories. Now and then an imprisoned representative of the chartist movement got to the end of his period of sentence and came out of endurance. He was a hero all over again and his return to public life was the signal for fresh demonstrations of chartism. At the general election of 1841, the vast majority of the chartists acting on the advice of some of their more extreme leaders threw all their support into the cause of the Tories and so helped the downfall of the Melbourne administration. Wide and almost universal discontent among the working classes in town and country still helped to swell the chartist ranks. The weavers and stockingers in some of the manufacturing towns were miserably poor. Wages were low everywhere. In the agricultural districts, the complaints against the operation of the new poor law were vehement and passionate and although they were unjust in principle and sustained by monstrous exaggerations of statement, they were not the less potent as recruiting agents for chartism. There was a profound distrust of the middle class and their leaders. The anti-corn law agitation which was then springing up and which one might have thought must find its most strenuous support among the poor artisans of the towns was regarded with deep disgust by some of the chartists and with downright hostility by others. A very temperate orator of the chartists put the feeling of himself and his fellows in clear terms. We do not object to the repeal of the corn laws he said, on the contrary. When we get the charter, we will repeal the corn laws and all the bad laws. But if you give up your agitation for the charter to help the free traders, they will never help you to get the charter. Don't be deceived by the middle classes again. You help them to get the reform bill and where are the fine promises they made you. Don't listen to their humbug anymore. Stick to your charter. Without your votes you are veritable slaves. The chartists believed themselves abandoned by their natural leaders. All manner of socialist doctrines began to creep in among them while then infidel opinions were proclaimed by many. Thomas Cooper tells one little anecdote which he says fairly illustrates the feeling of many of the fiercer spirits among the artisan chartists in some of the towns. He and his friends were holding a meeting one day in Lester. A poor religious stockinger said, Let us be patient a little longer. Surely God Almighty will help us soon. Talk to us no more about your God Almighty was the fierce cry that came in reply from one of the audience, there isn't one. If there was one, he wouldn't let us suffer as we do. About the same time, a poor stockinger rushed into Cooper's house and throwing himself wildly in a chair exclaimed, I wish they would hang me. I have lived on cold potatoes that were given me these two days and this morning I've eaten a raw potato for sheer hunger. Give me a bit of bread and a cup of coffee or I shall drop. Thomas Cooper's remark about this time is very intelligible and simple. It tells a long clear story about chartism. How fierce he says, my discourses now became in the marketplace on Sunday evenings. My heart often burned with indignation I knew not how to express. I began with sheer sympathy to feel a tendency to glide into the depraved thinking of some of the stronger but coarser spirits among the men. So the agitation went on. We need not follow it through all its incidents. It took in some places the form of industrial strikes in others of socialistic assemblages. Its fanaticism had in many instances a strong flavor of nobleness and virtue. Some men under the influence of thoughtful leaders pledged themselves to total abstinence from intoxicating drinks in the full belief that the agitation would never succeed until the working classes had proved themselves by their self-control to be worthy of the gift of freedom. In other instances, as has been already remarked, the disappointment and despair of the people took the form of infidelity. There were many riots and disturbances, none indeed of so seemingly rebellious in nature as that of Frost and his companions, but many serious enough to spread great alarm and to furnish fresh occasion for government prosecutions and imprisonments. Some of the prisoners seemed to have been really treated with a positively wanton harshness and even cruelty. Thomas Cooper's account of his own sufferings in prison is painful to read. It is not easy to understand what good purpose any government could have supposed the prison authorities were serving by the unnecessary degradation and privation of men who whatever their errors were conspicuously and transparently sincere and honest. It is clear that at that time the Chartists who represented the bulk of the artists in class and most of the large towns did in their very hearts believe that England was ruled for the benefit of aristocrats and millionaires who were absolutely indifferent to the sufferings of the poor. It is equally clear that most of what are called the ruling class did really believe the English working men who joined the Chartist movement to be a race of fierce unmanageable and selfish communists who if they were allowed their own way for a moment would prove themselves determined to overthrow throne, altar and all established securities of society. An ignorant panic prevailed on both sides. England was indeed divided as Mr. Disraeli's novel described it into two nations, the rich and the poor in towns at least, and each hated and feared the other with all that unthinking hate and fear which hostile nations are capable of showing even amid all the influences of civilization. End of section 12.