Walter Lyon Blease

“ Eight years later Macaulay declared that "It is the duty of Government to protect our persons and our property from danger. The gross ignorance of the common people is a principal cause of danger to our persons and property. Therefore it is the duty of the Government to take care that the common people shall not be grossly ignorant." ”

“ If I would refuse to the working people that larger share of power which some of them have demanded, I would refuse it because I am convinced that, by giving it, I should only increase their distress. ”

“ The utmost which could be got from the middle-class Parliaments which followed the Reform Act was a restriction of the work of children. The protection of adults, even by the regulation of machinery, ventilation, and temperature, was always repugnant to their stubborn belief in the power and the duty of the individual to work out his own salvation. ”

“ I admit that the end of government is their happiness. But that they may be governed for their happiness, they must not be governed according to the doctrines which they have learned from their illiterate, incapable, low-minded flatterers." [3] In just such language had Pitt referred to the working class and the Corresponding Society. Just as the old Tories had held that the landed gentry were the natural leaders of the nation, so the new Whigs paid the same tribute to the upper and middle classes combined. "The higher and middling orders are the natural representatives of the human race." ”

“ Men who value religious liberty do not, in these days, dread anything that can be called persecution, but they do dread privileges and oppressive exclusions, preferences to one sect over another;... they are resolved never to pay to man any tax to support education, if the fruit of the tax does not go to maintain education to which all shall have an equal access. ”

“ Slavery is not always a matter of buying and selling, of chaining and whipping; and in the sweated labour and prostitution which were rife in England there were things no less horrible than the worst barbarities of the colonial planters.
A Liberal reform no less important than the Factory Act was the establishment of a State department of education. In 1833 Radicals like Roebuck and Grote and Whigs like Brougham persuaded Parliament to grant £20,000 to supplement the private donations which were being administered by the different societies for education. ”

“ It must not be supposed that the majority of the Whigs supported these novel proposals in a very Liberal spirit. Brougham was passionately Liberal. The Radicals made State education part of their practical philosophy of equality. To men of this type education was a means of increasing the individual's power to develop and express himself. But to very many of the supporters of Government the measure was rather a measure of police than of emancipation. Ignorance meant discontent and danger to society and property. ”

“ The middle class was admitted to political power, but the working class was not. Catholics and Dissenters were no longer practically disabled by the Church, but both were still depreciated by the establishment of the rival sect, and the Jew was still excluded from Parliament and office by the Christian. Land was still privileged by the Corn Law as against industry, and particular industries as against the public by the protective tariff. The poor working man was still liable to be abused by his wealthy employer. If the Colonies were emancipated, Ireland was not. ”

“ Other reforms were novel not only in themselves, but also as implying a new attitude of mind, a new conception of the relations between the State and society. The education scheme and the Factory Act meant that men were ceasing to look upon the State as something external to the people, a thing which was contrived simply to protect individual human beings from being injured either by foreign invaders or by domestic law-breakers. ”

“ They assumed that nothing could increase wages but an increase of production, and consequently that so long as the total earnings of a trade remained fixed a Trade Union could produce no result except a bad temper. They ignored the possibility that the master's profits and the landlord's rent might both be reduced without injury to the industry as a whole. In all this the Utilitarians agreed with them. But theorists like Hume and Roebuck were compelled logically to admit that if a man was to be free to pursue his own interest, he was to be free to combine with others. ”

“ There was therefore very little disposition among the Whigs to undertake economic reforms. "We can no more prevent time," said Macaulay, "from changing the distribution of property and intelligence, we can no more prevent property and intelligence from aspiring to political power, than we can change the courses of the seasons and of the tides." [7] But in the immediate present they would decline to change the distribution of property as firmly as to change that of political power. The two things in fact went together. Society was based on property ”

“ It is melancholy to reflect that the men who expended so much honest sympathy and indignation over slavery in the West Indies should have so carefully refrained from using it to abolish the slavery which oppressed their fellow-countrymen. ”

“ A Bill to establish local courts for the recovery of small debts was introduced by Brougham, but abandoned. The reform of Parliament was followed by the reform of municipal corporations. The old close corporations were of the same type as the old close House of Commons. All were founded on monopoly, most were corrupt, and hardly any were responsible to the ratepayers whose affairs they administered. By an Act of 1835 the old system was destroyed, and the control of local government in towns was vested in bodies elected by the ratepayers. ”

“ The Chartists were sent to prison when they broke the law, their meetings were sometimes dispersed by force, and they were sometimes shot dead in the course of riots. For several years after the Reform Act the Whig Government was engaged in watching and suppressing political agitation almost as regularly as the Tories before it. But more than one important economic reform was carried through Parliament about the same time, and conferred considerable benefits upon the common people. One was the Act of 1834, which reconstructed the Poor Law system. ”

“ No large community of free and intelligent men will long feel contented with a political system which places them, because it places their country, in a position of inferiority to their neighbours." The object of the reforms was to give as much freedom to the colonists as was compatible with the sovereignty of the Crown. They would then lose two temptations to rebellion; the interference of foreign officials in the disputes of their own parties, and the contrast which the liberty of Americans as well as of English presented to their own condition. ”

“ The honest man who was made destitute by the bad organization of casual labour, by the periodic fluctuations of trade, by the introduction of machinery, or by the bankruptcy of his employer, could only be driven into the street. Where independence depended upon the will of the man himself the unpleasant nature of poor relief was beneficial. Where it depended upon causes beyond his control it was actually harmful. The Utilitarian dislike of positive attempts to improve conditions of life and labour thus left their work incomplete. ”

“ But for the purposes of this book the most important changes were in the system rather than in the machinery. Every applicant for relief must pass a test. He was offered relief, but only coupled with the workhouse, where he must make some return in labour for what he received. The workhouse must be of such an unattractive character that none but those who were in actual want would enter it. In short, the poor man must be forced, by this sufficient deterrent, to rely upon his individual strength and skill. The new system met with great apparent success, and much of the success was real. ”

“ The Prime Minister was not in the least aggressive in foreign policy, and was far more Liberal in abstaining from interference with other nations than was a Whig like Palmerston. At home he was influenced by the spirit, if not by the direct teaching of Bentham, and the Peelite school of Ministers was a group which for efficiency and economy has never been surpassed in England. Peel's most conspicuous virtue was perhaps his incapacity to make permanent resistance to sound argument. Men like Liverpool would hold to a bad principle at any cost. Peel was always open to conversion. ”

“ Candles will fall in price ... if peace, economy, and justice are the results of Reform, a number of small benefits ... will accrue to millions of the people; and the connection between the existence of Lord John Russell and the reduced price of bread and cheese will be as clear as it has been the object of his honest, wise, and useful life to make it. ”

“ I hold that, where public health is concerned, and where public morality is concerned, the State may be justified in regulating even the contracts of adults.... Never will I believe that what makes a population stronger, and healthier, and wiser, and better, can ultimately make it poorer. ”

“ Any unusual poverty will produce disorder, even among men of good understanding. The effect on men of poor education is much worse. The new-found power of combining was thus often abused, intimidation and assault were common, and even murder was not unknown. To the Whigs, as to the philosophic Radicals, the whole system of Trade Unionism was nothing but tyranny and oppression. ”

“ But there were few of the Whigs who held these wise opinions immediately after their triumph in 1831, and even Macaulay in 1832 defeated a Tory candidate whose views on Factory legislation were at that time far sounder than his own. Those Whigs who belonged to the middle class were generally hostile to the whole movement. Cobden, not yet in Parliament, would have prohibited all employment of children under the age of thirteen. [13] But Brougham, Harriet Martineau, and the type of business man which was best represented by John Bright, were bitter opponents of reform. ”

“ The Reform Bill would thus indirectly conduce to the national prosperity. "It will secure to us a House of Commons which, by preserving peace, by destroying monopolies, by taking away unnecessary public burdens, by judiciously distributing necessary public burdens, will, in the progress of time, greatly improve our condition." [5]
"Reform," said Sydney Smith, "will produce economy and investigation; there will be fewer jobs and a less lavish expenditure; wars will not be persevered in for years after the people are tired of them; taxes will be taken off the poor and laid upon the rich;... ”

“ The Church is the only recognized medium of communicating religious knowledge to the people at large; and where there is an Established Church the Legislature ought to embrace every fit opportunity of maintaining and extending the just influence of the clergy, due regard being had to complete toleration. ”

“ One of the worst consequences of the religious inequality was the ignorance of the Catholic clergy and population. No honest Catholic would set foot in the Irish Universities, which were exclusively Protestant in temper. ”

“ The best of them eventually came to the same conclusions as Macaulay. "I hardly know which is the greater pest to society, a paternal Government, that is to say, a prying, meddlesome Government which intrudes itself into every part of human life, and which thinks that it can do everything for everybody better than anybody can do anything for himself; or a careless, lounging Government which suffers grievances, such as it could at once remove, to grow and multiply, and which to all complaint and remonstrance has only one answer: 'We must let things alone ”

“ The issue was thus again joined between those who would dispose of the consciences of others and those who would allow every man an equal right with every other for the propagation of his own opinions.
On this point the Whigs were successful. Their proposals for distribution between the sects were in the direct line of their removal of ancient political disabilities, and they stood their ground. ”

“ This was all that had been done to carry out the conciliatory policy of Pitt. Peel in 1845 proposed to increase the grant to £26,000. This was not a purely Liberal way of dealing with the difficulty. No system of endowment can establish equality between sects, because no Government is capable either of endowing all sects or of deciding what sects should be selected in preference to the others. Endowment can only create inequalities. The only levelling process is disendowment. ”

“ This refusal to undertake anything in the nature of graduated taxation or social reform was accompanied by a dislike of the organizations by which the working people endeavoured to help themselves. After the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824 the number of Trade Unions had greatly increased. ”