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FOR

TOWN AND COUNTRY.

FEBRUARY, 1850.

THE STATE AND PROSPECTS OF THE COUNTRY.

HATEVER opinion party-men may entertain of the political honesty of Sir Robert Peel and his late cabinet, it seems impossible to doubt, looking back upon the events of the last quarter of a century, that the great experiment on which the country has entered could have been postponed much longer.

Throughout the whole of that important period the tide of our legislation ran with a strong and steady current in one direction. First we disturbed the settlement of 1688, by passing a law to establish a principle, his endeavour to force which upon a reluctant nation cost the representative of a long line of native princes the throne of these realms. Next we took in hand to reform the Commons' House of Parliament, and effected in doing so one of the most complete revolutions that ever occurred in the influences of a great country. By and bye we unsettled the foundation of that law which the great statesmen of Elizabeth's day had enacted, with a view to keep the land free from the plague of mendicancy; and instead of setting on work every able-bodied pauper,' condemned him to pass days in idleness in the workhouse. In due time the Church, both in Ireland and in England, was cast into the crucible, from which she came forth not slightly attenuated in her privileges and dignities, and in her property reduced to the rank of a mere dependant on the will

VOL. XLI. NO. CCXLII.

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of the State. Nor was the moral and intellectual training of the people left, as had heretofore been the case, to the exertions of the clergy, acting as the trustees of individual benevolence. The Government stepped in with its Committee of Privy Council, and its Boards of Management, rendered as liberal in their constitution as possible, and undertook to do the work which it was alleged that the Church had either not done at all or done very imperfectly. Meanwhile our relations with foreign powers assumed an entirely novel character. England, which used to be the guarantee of order in Europe, became all at once the abettor of change, provided only there were involved in it a curtailment of the authority of governments, and the extension of the rights, real or imaginary, of subjects. And all this, be it observed, not because the English people required these changes-for the bulk of the people, if fairly polled, would have been found indifferent to most of them and hostile to some-but because agitators and demagogues succeeded in over-riding the law, and Government, finding itself unable to put them down, lost heart of grace, and came to the conclusion that policy required its submission to them. Moreover, successful agitators will be found to have begun almost invariably in this country-as, indeed, they begin in all countries-with the great provincial towns. In Ireland,

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no doubt, the peculiar eloquence of Daniel O'Connell drew after him potato-diggers from Connaught in as large numbers and with the same enthusiasm as animated the coal-porters of Burgh Quay. But in England and in Scotland the advocates of change have found their first and readiest listeners in Manchester, Birmingham, Preston, Glasgow, and Liverpool; delegates from which places have subsequently come up to inflame the capital, and to hint to the minister of terrible consequences in the event of the people's just demands being disregarded. Nor has the press, that faithful index rather than guide of what is called public opinion, been idle. Purely commercial in their organization and purposes, got up with the single view of affording a good investment for capital,-written, edited, printed, and published in order that they may sell, and in so doing pay back the costs of production with a profit, the majority of newspapers have really no choice except to advocate the opinions of the great body of their purchasers; and as the purchasers and readers of newspapers are far more numerous in the great manufacturing towns and districts than anywhere else, for the great towns and manufacturing districts the ablest of our newspapers are mainly written. Hence almost all the pressure from without' to which successive governments gave way has come from the great provincial towns and their organs; for though the rural constituency of Clare may have frightened the Duke into the abandonment of Protestant ascendancy, it was the Birmingham Political Union and The Times newspaper which between them carried the Reform Bill. And all that has since taken place, such as Municipal Reform, Church Reform, and what not, deserves to be regarded as little else than so many concessions made by parliament to the demands of clever men, who carried the great manufacturing towns along with them, and had the ablest and most popularly conducted of the journals to back them up.

Meanwhile, in the great manufacturing towns themselves vast changes were in progress. While population increased at a tremendous ratio, the

ingenuity of man was continually devising expedients whereby an increased amount of work might be done, and well done too, at a diminished expenditure of manual labour. But the appetite of Manufacture seems, like Ambition, to grow with what it feeds on. Mills multiplied, and new principles of mechanism came into play, as fast as spare hands could be got to work them, till the accumulation of stock became such as to set the ordinary channels of demand at defiance. As a necessary consequence millowners and brokers began to inquire after new markets, and the readiest means of gaining access to them. All the maxims of political economy were taken up, turned over, and twisted so as to suit the purposes of the hour. Nobody considered the actual state of the mother-country, overburdened with debt, and devoted to its antique institutions; nobody took into account the present state and future prospects of her settlements, which as yet seemed to operate as a drop in the bucket upon commerce. All looked further a-field. Nature had intended England to be the workshop of the world, and there must be something radically wrong in the tendency of the legislation which stood between her and this great destiny. Then awoke again the same desire of change which had opened the doors of parliament to Roman Catholics and carried the Reform Act. But a new field of operation presented itself. It was no longer the abstract theory of the Constitution that was at fault; it was in the commercial system of the empire, and the laws which maintained it, that the fault lay. These laws must be altered, this system must be changed; and by the self-same process which worked out the triumphs of 1829 and 1832 has the great purpose been achieved. Agitation has done it all.

agitation begun in Manchester and Liverpool, and carried thence through the manufacturing districts of Lancashire,-coming up to London,— scouted, ridiculed, and jeered at there,-resisted by the newspapers even after it had assumed the form of the Anti-Corn-law League, but holding its course steadily, till by degrees the manufacturing and trading mind was worked upon, and The

Times, at first its stoutest opponent, made common cause with it. From that moment the issues were inevitable. Nobody pretends to say that the great body of the people, gravely and on conviction, desired the legislative measures of 1846 and 1849. Quite otherwise. But the great manufacturing towns were united in favour of them-at least in favour of the former; and the great manufacturing towns, with The Times newspaper to plead for them, overbore as usual all opposition.

In giving this sketch of the causes which have brought us, for good or for evil, to the position in which we now stand, there are two mistakes into which it is necessary to keep our readers from falling. First, we do not say that the changes which have occurred during the last fiveand-twenty years are all for the bad. Quite otherwise. We feel that many have been changes for the better. We merely assert that they were forced, one by one, upon a supine majority by an active minority of the people. And next, it is by no means our purpose to represent one of the two great political parties as having been more completely carried away by the tide than the other. No minister ever felt so acutely the 'pressure from without' as Sir Robert Peel, or evinced greater uneasiness under it. His first public act, when forced reluctantly into office in 1835, was to make an ostentatious display of his sensibility in that respect. His published letter to the electors of Tamworth, wherein he told the people of their power, and sought to conciliate out-of-doors support by announcing a great scheme of Church Reform, stands on record as one of the most remarkable tokens which this remarkable age can show. The measure of Church Reform itself might have been a wise one, or it might not. That is a question which we certainly do not intend to argue now, and of which at the moment we took comparatively little heed, for there was another and more urgent subject of grave reflection forced upon us. When we saw the first minister of the Crown explaining his intended policy to the world through the columns of a newspaper, instead of waiting, as had heretofore been done, that he might explain it to

parliament when it met, we felt that times were indeed changed with this empire, and that wherever the battle of the Constitution might hereafter be fought, it would not be fought in the Houses of Lords and of Commons. Nor did the results of the struggle which immediately ensued, or the ministerial tactics displayed in it, lead to a different conclusion. Sir Robert's resistance to the tyrant majority' was scarcely that of one who took a real interest in the matters at issue. He fought like a general who is beaten ere the battle begins. And failing to conquer by proposing concessions more important, and therefore more perilous, than his rivals had as yet thought of demanding, he left the field, having shaken the confidence of his own party in their chosen leader, and surrendered to the enemy one of the keys of the position which he had been called upon by the sovereign and by his party to defend.

It is an instructive fact that the Whig policy, both previously to the interregnum here alluded to and for some years afterwards, was much more that of a body of Doctrinaires than of a set of practical innovators. They had, to be sure, abolished slavery in the West Indies, at the cost of twenty millions in the shape of compensation to the slave-owners; but they made no change in the fiscal administration of the empire, nor innovated in any degree on its system of commerce. Protecting duties still favoured the grower of British sugar in the colonies, as well as the producer of British corn, cattle, silk, gloves, cottons, and woollens at home. For the Whigs were content to go on tinkering the constitutions of boroughs, municipalities, schools, and such-like. And had they only managed to make the national income cover the national expenditure, the probability is that they would have been permitted to labour in the same comparatively speaking innocuous vocation to this day. But what with Commissions of Inquiry, non-intervention armaments, wars in the East, and rebellions in the West, they got as usual into difficulties and then arose the question how they were to get out of them. Somebody advised them in the House of Commons-we believe it was Mr.

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Villiers-to repeal or modify the Corn-laws, and strive by that means to force a way into foreign markets. But the proposal was scouted. Indeed Lord Melbourne, at that time head of the cabinet, declared, 'that the man must be mad who seriously thought of interfering with the Corn-laws.' Then came the memorable addition of ten per cent to the assessed taxes, under which, if we mistake not, the revenue sank below its original level. And now Mr. Cobden began to make a figure, and the Anti-Corn-law League to consolidate its strength. It is not worth while to pursue the current of history further. Beaten in the house and bullied out of doors, not more by their avowed rivals than by their professed supporters, the Whigs resolved to get up a cry and appeal to the country. They chose an alteration of the Corn-laws. They dissolved on the proposal of substituting for the then sliding scale a fixed duty on importation of eight shillings per quarter, and were signally defeated. If ever the country declared for anything through its constituencies, it was the continuance in 1841 of the established system of commerce and finance, and Sir Robert came in as the recognized leader of the majority which supported that opinion.

The Whigs had left Sir Robert a very difficult game to play. Apart from the disorganized condition of Ireland, he had a large deficiency in the Exchequer to provide for, with a revenue which for the two or three previous years had been steadily declining. He had also a great Indian war upon his hands, and a spirit more than half hostile in several countries of Europe to smooth down. With his foreign and colonial policy we have here no concern; they were both eminently successful: but his very first act of financial arrangement was a blunder,-if, indeed, we ought now to speak of it as anything else than a step in the direction of free trade. The attempt to combine a system of direct with one of indirect taxation, as he set about it, could not possibly succeed. The two things, looked to as of protracted co-operation, are absolutely incompatible, unless the nation be at war, and war taxes being confessedly the arrangements of necessity cannot fairly be

included under any system. They are exceptions to all rules. Observe, that it is of Sir Robert's attempt to combine the two systems that we speak; and observe, also, that it was the manner of this attempt which ensured its failure. Had he come boldly forward and said, 'The public deficiency is so and so; I believe that the failure of the revenue is occasioned by a temporary pressure which must be removed, but against the return of which, when removed, there will be no difficulty in providing security;' he might have done what he liked. For then his obvious course would have been, not to begin a series of alterations in the existing taxes under the plea of giving to the public some set-off against the Income-tax, but to propose an Incometax as a burden additional to those under which the nation already laya burden to be endured only till a particular end should be attained, of which he might have calculated the accomplishment well-nigh to a day. Had he done this, though there might have been opposition in the House, and plenty of clamour, perhaps some rioting, out of it, the measure must have been carried,-ay, and it would have served its purpose too; for three years of the tax would have made good all that Whig mismanagement had squandered, and we should have been delivered at the end of them from the most vexatious, and in the mode of its collection the most unjust, impost that ever was laid upon a people.

Sir Robert Peel went upon a principle directly the reverse of this. He wished to convert his deficiency into a surplus, and at the same time to press as lightly as possible on the industry of the country. So, at least, he said in the House of Commons, though his letter to the municipality of Elbing told a different tale. He therefore threw a tub to the whale by letting down the maximum of the variable duty on corn, and repealing or diminishing the duties heretofore levied on certain articles, as well of foreign as of home manufacture. The boon was accepted gratefully. Some people expected that if they themselves did not derive benefit from the arrangement their neighbours might; others, if they were gifted with a sharper vision, saw that

things could not stop there. Nor could they. The moment a country submits in peace to an Income or a Property-tax, the end of all other means of raising a revenue is a mere question of time. And the repeal of the Corn-laws and the breaking-up of the old protective system by the minister who had prevailed upon the nation to submit to his Income-tax, was just as much an inevitable sequence of events as the ebb of the tide is an inevitable sequence to its flow.

It is not worth while to inquire how far it might have been possible, at any moment subsequent to the passing of the Reform Act, to give a different direction to the spirit of change of which we have here traced the course. We ourselves entertain grave doubts on that subject; but we have no doubt at all that the tariff of Feb. 1842 rendered every such project-if, indeed, any were in any quarter entertained-illusory. Men of large minds might, indeed, concoct schemes of systematic colonization such as should at once lighten the pressure on the labour market at home, and create valuable markets for manufactured goods in the islands of the Pacific; and ministers might or might not regard these views with favour, and consider how far the necessary funds could be raised for carrying them into effect. But plans for colonization, besides involving a large immediate outlay, promise no more than remote and contingent advantages to an overtaxed people; whereas the towns having tasted the sweets of an immediate, though partial, improvement of trade, were easily persuaded to look to a still larger progress in that direction as the only road to prosperity. Hence the war of classes, which had slumbered for a while, broke out afresh; and the potatoe blight in England, with the terrible famine in Ireland, came in as powerful auxiliaries to the aggressive party. Was the onslaught to be resisted? We think not. Whether the Peel Cabinet had given way or held out, it is our deliberate conviction that the Corn-laws had ceased to be tenable. That Sir Robert Peel was the proper man to repeal them we are far from pretending to assert. In 1846, as in

1829, he undeniably betrayed his party; and became in consequence an object of bitter hostility to his late adherents. But these facts in no degree touch the real merits of the question, for Lord John had already announced his change of mind, and was prepared to repeal the Corn-laws absolutely when the convenient moment should arrive. And though he failed in the autumn of 1846 to form a cabinet, subsequent events have shown that the jealousies even of Lords Grey and Palmerston may be put in abeyance by the prospect of place. We repeat, then, that even if Sir Robert Peel had remained true to his colours, the Corn-laws could not have been maintained three years beyond 1846. The first dissolution would have found the great towns united against them, and angry, with the whole body of the Whig aristocrats ministering to their wrath. And had this event taken place in 1848, who will answer for the consequences?

Looking at the matter in this light, accepting the status quo as a positive social necessity, it is not our intention to pander to the bad taste of the public, by taking any part in the war of words which for the last two months has raged in all parts of the country. For it is not by dealing out hard names upon their opponents, and still less by threatening a revolution, which is more easily spoken of than effected, that party men need hope, in these days, to win their way to the confidence of the country. Such a mode of warfare may suffice for schemers who seek the attainment of some end that is yet hidden beyond the mists of the future. But when a nation is called upon to choose between two rival systems, both subjected to the ordeal of experience-one present, the other only just past something sounder and more intelligible than invective must be applied to determine the choice. And very happy are we to find, that while Mr. Cobden and Earl Stanhope recreate themselves and their hearers, each after the bent of his peculiar genius, men wiser than either are willing and able to examine the question at issue with a philosophic eye, and to give to the thinking portion of the public the results of their inquiries.

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