Walter Lyon Blease

“ The honour, the fame, the emoluments of war belong not to them; the battle-plain is the harvest-field of the aristocracy, watered with the blood of the people.... It is only when at peace with other States that a nation finds the leisure for looking within itself, and discovering the means to accomplish great domestic ameliorations." [8] So they suspected British rule in India, partly because it involved wars, partly because its temper reacted upon free government at home. So they maintained that England should never interfere in the quarrels of other peoples. ”

“ We must remember that if we claim the right not only to accept, when they come spontaneously and by no act of ours, but to create and catch at, opportunities for spreading in other countries the opinions of our own meridian, we must allow to every other nation a similar license both of judgment and of action. What is to be the result? That if in every country the name of England is to be the symbol and the nucleus of a party, the name of France and Russia, or of Austria, may and will be the same. ”

“ If Russia abused the Poles, or invaded Hungary to reduce it into the power of Austria, that was their affair, and not ours. "We are no more called upon," said Cobden, "to wrest the attribute of vengeance from the Deity, and deal it forth upon the Northern aggressor, than we are to preserve the peace and good behaviour of Mexico, or to chastise the wickedness of the Ashantees." [9] "It is not our duty," said Bright, "to make this country the knight-errant of the human race." ”

“ Protection was vicious precisely as government by a class was vicious or as a system of religious disabilities was vicious. It established an aristocracy of industry, which was as bad as an aristocracy of birth or of creed. Every industry should have an equal chance with every other, and no industry should be given the chance of exploiting the common people.
The Free Trade movement had begun with Adam Smith in the eighteenth century. But little progress had been made in practical politics before the Reform Act. ”

“ Norman Angell are descended politically from the Manchester School, and without the union of the two forces, moral and economic, the School would have effected little. No popular agitation can ever succeed without an appeal to a moral sense, good or bad. Cobden and Bright and the other Manchester men saw, what the men of the world who differ from them never see, that in politics, as in all life, your ultimate interest coincides with morality. Honesty, if it had no virtue in itself, would still be the best policy. ”

“ It was not until Lord John Russell published his manifesto in favour of repeal in 1845 that a Member of Parliament of official rank openly allied himself with the League. Once the leaders of Opposition had given way the work was easy. The political centre of gravity was thus shifted from Westminster to the country. It was no longer open to Parliament to decide policy, and to direct the fortunes of the nation as it thought fit. Not even Opposition could make a free choice of the topics of controversy and of legislation. ”

“ Now every one acknowledges that such an institution is not only in opposition to the principle of political science, but to the universal experience of Anglo-Saxon communities in every part of the globe.... An Englishman, when he emigrates to the United States, carries with him in reality all the laws, rights, and liberties of an Englishman; but if he emigrates to our Colonies, on touching colonial soil he loses some of the most precious of his liberties, and becomes the subject of an ignorant and irresponsible despot at the Antipodes. ”

“ A wiser generation declines to identify her merely with those gentle qualities in which she is rivalled by many thousands of her sex, and sees in her strong and imperious temper, her capacity for reducing order out of chaos, and her power of enforcing her wishes upon her subordinates, qualities in which she has seldom been surpassed even by the greatest men. No English statesmen engaged in the conduct of the war displayed in a higher degree than she the attributes of a great administrator, and the impression of her statesmanlike qualities can never be effaced. ”

“ The Powers watched this uprising of a people with mixed feelings. Austria, France, Prussia, and Russia expressed their emphatic disapproval. Lord John behaved like a Whig whose fire the Manchester School had not quenched. In a dispatch written on the 27th October, 1860, he supported the new Italian system. He quoted Vattel with point: "When a people from good reasons take up arms against an oppressor, it is but an act of justice and generosity to assist brave men in the defence of their liberties." ”

“ They had little respect for these ignorant country gentlemen who maintained their own dignity at the expense of the manufacturer's capital and the workman's life. "The sooner the power in this country is transferred from the landed oligarchy, which has so misused it, and is placed absolutely in the hands of the intelligent middle and industrious classes, the better for the condition and destinies of this country." ”

“ The manufacturer liked individual liberty, not because he believed that it was only by leaving every man to pursue his own interest that the greatest happiness of the greatest number could be secured, but because he felt that he could manage his business best if no outside person interfered with him, and that in similar circumstances others could do the same. The Radical was a Free Trader because Protection benefited one class at the expense of another. ”

“ He claimed to have maintained the honour of England, and to have entitled every subject of the Crown to boast of his citizenship like the old Romans. He was answered as brilliantly by Peel and Gladstone, by Molesworth, and by Cobden. "I protest," said the philosophic Radical, "against the honourable and learned gentleman's doctrines, which would make us the political pedagogues of the world.... I maintain that one nation has no more right to interfere with the local affairs of another nation than one man has to interfere in the private affairs of another man." ”

“ Mine is that masculine species of charity which would lead me to inculcate in the minds of the labouring class the love of independence, the privilege of self-respect, the disdain of being patronized or petted, the desire to accumulate, and the ambition to rise.... Whilst I will not be the sycophant of the great, I cannot become the parasite of the poor." [14] This habit of mind was expressed in a general opposition to institutions and policies which interfered with individual freedom. ”

“ Gladstone was less dogmatic but equally forcible, and it is in his speech rather than in those of Radicals and Manchester men that the real Liberal view of the case was expressed. He admitted that it might sometimes be right that one nation should interfere with another, and that if England ever interfered she should interfere on the side of liberty as against despotism. But his case against Palmerston was that he interfered on behalf of revolution before it was successful. We should interfere, if at all, to protect an established constitutional Government, and not to set it up. ”

“ Under the influence of this Liberal temper the self-governing Empire has grown to its present proportions. A queer freak of political fortune has made Tories of the present generation the self-styled champions of communities which, if Tory doctrines had been applied to their government half a century ago, would have been long since driven into revolt and independence. ”

“ We advance by the labours of those who identify interest with morality, and not of those who calculate morality in terms of interest. To domestic and foreign policy alike the Manchester School gave a tone which they had never possessed before. ”

“ In a Memorandum addressed to the Queen, Lord Granville laid down the main principles of the new foreign policy. They were a distinct expression of Liberal ideas. "It was the duty and interest of a country such as Great Britain to encourage progress among all other nations. But for this purpose the foreign policy of Great Britain should be none the less marked by justice, moderation, and self-respect, and avoid any undue attempt to enforce her own ideas by hostile threats.... ”

“ So far as personal intercourse is concerned, there is no part of the world where the social estimate of a man depends less upon the accidents of birth than that part of England where the Manchester School flourished. The manufacturers were not proof against the attacks of interest, and their opposition to factory legislation is a serious blot on their political character. They believed as firmly as the Whigs in the virtues of property, and most of them had no liking for such things as universal suffrage. ”

“ The Balance of Power was to them a mere phrase, and unless the interests of England were directly involved, the Government had no right to inflict upon her common people the miseries even of a successful war. ”

“ The Whigs denounced active interference in the domestic affairs of other peoples. The Manchester School would have prevented interference for the protection of one nation against another. Let the Continent settle its own quarrels, and however much we may abhor particular acts of immorality, let us confine ourselves to cases where we are ourselves concerned. This marked the extreme of the reaction against the policy of aggression, and it went farther than a Liberal ought to go. The Manchester men were probably driven to exaggerate their principles by the excesses of Palmerston. ”

“ Government was incapable of selecting what industries might be taxed in this way without injury. It made an arbitrary selection without regard to the general interest, or at the instigation of classes which desired to be benefited at the expense of the community. Some industries were maintained by this artificial system which could not have maintained themselves by their own efficiency. Other industries were crippled which, in a freer system, could develop themselves to an indefinitely greater extent. ”

“ Maleness did not of itself prevent either long hours or dirty premises. Here Radicals and Manchester men failed, and by 1867 Parliament had got no farther than to prohibit the employment of children under eight years, to restrict the hours of labour of women and youths under eighteen to ten or twelve hours a day, and to impose conditions about sanitation, ventilation, and the fencing of machinery upon some of the more unhealthy or dangerous trades. This progress, qualified by many exemptions, was all that could be won in the face of individualist opposition to economic reform. ”

“ They made Parliament think highly of the common people.
Their general principles were best stated by Fox, of Oldham. "I have gone into politics," he said, "with this question constantly in my mind, What will your theories, your forms, your propositions, do for human nature? Will they make man more manly? Will they raise men and women in the scale of creation? Will they lift them above the brutes? Will they call forth their thoughts, their feelings, their actions? Will they make them more moral beings? ”

“ The greatest practical service which they rendered was the emancipation of industry from the system of Protection. Import duties were an interference by Government with the freedom of the individual to use his capital and his intelligence as he thought best, and they gave advantages to certain classes and interests over other classes and interests and over the community at large. An import duty raised the price of the taxed article for the benefit of the industry which produced the same article in England. ”

“ The appropriation of Schleswig and Holstein by Germany in 1863 attracted at once Palmerston's zeal for national independence and his desire to assert himself in Europe. He was always eager to protect the little man irrespective of his merits. He and Lord John Russell ventured to interfere with some outrageous oppression of the Poles by Russia and Prussia in the beginning of 1863. It was a clear case of interference with domestic concerns of another nation, and the Russian Government in effect told them to mind their own business. ”

“ Her Majesty's Government turn their eyes rather to the gratifying prospect of a people building up the edifice of their liberties, and consolidating the work of their independence, amid the sympathies and good wishes of Europe." All the noble temper which had been wasted on Turkey, Poland, and Denmark was concentrated with triumphant success in this dispatch. The despotic Powers held their hands, and the Italian nation was enabled to work out its own destiny. ”

“ Implicitly the Act permitted a man to indulge freely in vice so long as he chose to live with his wife and not to beat her, at the same time that it sentenced her to social extinction for a single fault. ”

“ A few economists like Ricardo and Joseph Hume argued the case in the Commons with as much persistency as Cobden and Bright. But the country gentry were not economists, and their main practical object had been the maintenance of their rents by import duties on corn. The common people, without any direct voice in politics, had been stung by their own sufferings into a vision of the truth, and resolutions in favour of free imports of corn had been passed at some of the Radical meetings after the French War. ”

“ This is probably the noblest thing that has ever been done in the world. It is not uncommon for men and women, in the excitement of war and in defence of their homes and children, to sacrifice themselves and all they have. ”