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Bygones Worth Remembering, Vol. 1 (of 2)

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Title: Bygones Worth Remembering, Vol. 1 (of 2)

Author: George Jacob Holyoake


        
Release date: July 20, 2011 [eBook #36795]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BYGONES WORTH REMEMBERING, VOL. 1 (OF 2) ***




Produced by David Widger






BYGONES WORTH REMEMBERING

By George Jacob Holyoake

"The best prophet of the future is the past."

Lord Byron

Volume I.

New York E. P. Dutton And Company

31 West Twenty-Third Street 1905


[Illustration: Holyoake]




PREFACE

If the preface of a book be a plea to the reader, its force must lie in
the aims of the author. In the following pages his main aim has been
to be of service to somebody. That is a principle, which, amid the
ravelment, perplexity, and entanglements of the world, always finds a
pathway open. Such a principle is as an All-Seeing Eye, to which he who
acknowledges it, is amenable, since it makes plain to him the devious,
time-serving byways he should avoid.

The writer has no interest, no taste, no trust, save in definite,
verifiable ideas. His aim has been to keep clear of the Sin of
Pretension, which consists in declaring, or assuming to be true, that
which the writer or speaker does not know to be true. What errors
negligence of this rule has bred! What misdirection it has perpetuated!
Into how many labyrinths, where truth was not to be found, has it led
men! What can be more useful, or holier, than inciting the reader to
beware of pretension in speech, in morals, in politics, and in piety?
To keep as clear as possible of this universal sin may serve many and
mislead none.

Professor Jowett has told us that "where Inquiry is denied at the door,
Doubt gets in at the window." This is the way it came to the writer
of this preface, and accounts for a certain liberty of expression the
reader may meet with, if he ventures further into these pages.

A sentence of Mr. Allen Upward will sufficiently describe the spirit
of this book: "Let us try to tolerate each other instead of trying to
convert each other." The author disclaims belonging to that class who
have "great expectations," which are as vain in literature as in life.
The utmost the author looks forward to is that semi-friendly applause
which is accorded to a platform speaker, not so much for any merit in
his oration as for his unexpected consideration for the audience by
concluding.

G. J. HOLYOAKE.




CHAPTER I. CONCERNING BYGONES PREFATORY

It was a saying of Dryden that "Anything, though ever so little, which
a man speaks of himself, in my opinion, is still too much." This depends
upon what a writer says. No man is required to give an opinion of
himself. Others will do that much better, if he will wait But if a
man may not speak of himself at all--reports of adventure, of personal
endeavour, or of service, will be largely impossible. To relate is not
to praise. The two things are quite distinct. Othello's imperishable
narrative of his love of Desdemona contained no eulogy of himself. A
story of observation, of experience, or of effort, or estimate of men
or of opinions, I may venture upon--is written for the reader alone. The
writer will be an entirely negligible quantity.

Lord Rosebery, who can make proverbs as well as cite them, lately
recalled one which has had great vogue in its day, namely, "Let bygones
be bygones." Life would be impossible or very unpleasant if every one
persisted in remembering what had better be forgotten. Proverbs are like
plants: they have a soil and climate under which alone they flourish.
Noble maxims have their limitations. Few have universal applicability.
If, for instance, the advice to "let bygones be bygones" be taken as
universally true, strange questions arise. Are mistakes never more to
teach us what to avoid? Are the errors of others no more to be a warning
to us? Is the Book of Experience to be closed? Is no more history to be
written? If so philosophy could no longer teach wisdom by examples, for
there would no longer be any examples to go upon. If all the mistakes
of mankind and all the miscalculations of circumstance be forgotten, the
warnings of the sages will die with them.

He who has debts, or loans not repaid, or promises not kept, or
contracts unfulfilled in his memory, had better keep them there until
he has made what reparation he can. The Bygone proverb does not apply to
him. There are other derelictions of greater gravity than fall under the
head of intellectual petty larceny, such as the conscious abandonment
of principle, or desertion of a just cause, which had better be kept in
mind for rectification.

If an admiral wrecked his ships, or a general lost his army, or a
statesman ruined his country, by flagrant want of judgment--ever so
conscientiously--it is well such things should be borne in mind by those
who may renew, by fresh appointment, these opportunities of calamity.
It would be to encourage incapacity were such bygones consigned to
oblivion. It may be useless to dwell upon "spilt milk," but further
employment of the spiller may not be prudent.

Slaves of the saying, "Let bygones perish," would construct mere
political man-traps, which never act when depredators are about. In
human affairs bygones have occurred worth remembering as guides for the
future.

It is said that "greatness is thrust upon a man"--what is meant is a
position of greatness. Greatness lies in the quality of the individual,
and cannot be "thrust" on any man. It is true that intrinsic greatness
is often left unrecognised. It would be a crime against progress were
these cases, when known, consigned to forgetfulness. Noble thoughts as
well as noble acts are worth bearing in mind, however long ago they may
have occurred.

My friend Joseph Cowen, who from his youth had regarded me as a
chartered disturber of the unreasoning torpidity of the public
conscience, described me as an agitator. All the while I never was a
Pedlar of Opinions. I never asked people to adopt mine, but to reason
out their own. I merely explained the nature of what I took to be
erroneous in theological and public affairs. Neither did I find fault
with prevailing ideas, save where I could, or thought I could, suggest
other principles of action more conducive to the welfare of all who
dwell in cottages or lodgings--for whom I mainly care. I was for
equal opportunities for all men, guaranteed by law, and for equitable
participation in profit among all who, by toil of hand or brain,
contributed to the wealth of the State.

Yet, though I never obtruded my convictions, neither did I conceal them.
No public questioner ever went empty away,--if his inquiry was relevant
and I had the knowledge he sought Sometimes, as at Cheltenham (in 1842),
when an inquiry was malicious and the reply penal, the questioner got
his answer. My maxim was that of Professor Blackie:--

     "Wear thy heart not on thy sleeve,
     But on just occasion
     Let men know what you believe,
     With breezy ventilation."

Thus, without intending it, I came to be counted an "agitator."

As to the matter of the following pages, they relate, as all
autobiographical reminiscences do, to events that are past. But whether
they relate to acts, or events, or opinions, to tragedy or gaiety, they
are all meant to fulfil one condition--that of having instruction or
guidance of some kind in them--which bring them within the class of
"bygones worth remembering."

One day as I was walking briskly along Fleet Street, a person in greater
haste than myself running down Johnson's Court collided with me, and
both of us fell to the ground. On rising, I said, "If you knocked me
down, never mind; if I knocked you down, I beg your pardon." He did
not reciprocate my forgiveness, thinking I had run against him
intentionally. Nevertheless, I say to any resenting reader who does
me mischief, "never mind." If I have done him any harm it has been
unwittingly, and I tender him real apologies.




CHAPTER II. PERSONAL INCIDENTS

These pages being autobiographic in their nature, something must be said
under this head. I was born April 13, 1817, which readers complained I
omitted to state in a former work* of a similar kind to this, probably
thinking it a "Bygone" of no importance.

     * "Sixty Years 01 an Agitator's Life," afterwards referred
     to as "Sixty Years."

*****

It was in 1817 that Robert Owen informed mankind that "all the religions
in the world were in error," which was taken to mean that they were
wrong throughout; whereas all the "Prophet of the City of London Tavern"
sought to prove was that all faiths were in error so far as they rested
on the dogma that men can believe if they will--irrespective of evidence
whatever may be the force of it before them. Mr. Owen's now truistical
statement set the dry sticks of every church aflame for seventy years.
In many places the ashes smoulder still. By blending Theology with
Sociology, the Churches mixed two things better kept apart Confusion
raged for years on a thousand platforms and pulpits. I mention this
matter because it was destined to colour and occupy a large portion of
my life.

*****

The habit of my thoughts is to run into speeches, as the thoughts of a
poet run into verse; but if there be a more intrinsic characteristic of
my mind it is accurately described in the words of Coleridge:--

"I am by the law of my nature a Reasoner. A person who should suppose
I meant by that word, an arguer, would not only not understand me, but
would understand the contrary of my meaning. I can take no interest
whatever in hearing or saying anything merely as a fact--merely as
having happened. I must refer to something within me before I can regard
it with any curiosity or care. I require in everything a reason why the
thing _is_ at all, and why it is _there_ or _then_ rather than elsewhere
or at another time."

This may be why I entitled the first periodical edited in my name, _The
Reasoner_.

*****

My firstborn child, Madeline, perished while I was in Gloucester
Prison.* There is no other word which described what happened in 1842.

     * See "Last Trial for Atheism."

In 1895 (as I had always intended), I had a brass tablet cast bearing
the simple inscription--

                                    "Near this spot was buried

                                             MADELINE,

                          Daughter of George Jacob and Eleanor Holyoake,

                                           WHO  PERISHED

                                          October! 1842."

This tablet I had placed on the wall over the grave where the poor
child lay. The grave is close to the wall. The cemetery authorities
had objections to the word "Perished." When I explained to them the
circumstances of Madeline's death, they permitted its erection, on my
paying a cemetery fee of two guineas. The tablet will endure as long
as the cemetery wall lasts. The tablet is on the left side of the main
entrance to the cemetery, somewhat obscured by trees now.

*****

Dr. Samuel Smiles published a book on Self-Help in 1859. In 1857, two
years earlier, I had used the same title "Self-Help by the People." In a
later work, "Self-Help, a Hundred Years Ago," the title was continued. I
had introduced it into Co-operation, where it became a watchword. I have
wondered whether Dr. Smiles borrowed the name from me. He knew me
in 1841, when he was editing the Leeds _Times_ to which I was a
contributor. He must have seen in Mill's "Principles of Political
Economy," "Self-Help by the People--History of Co-operation in
Rochdale," quoted in Mill's book (book iv. chap. viii.).

*****

The phrase "Science is the Providence of Life" was an expression I had
used in drawing up a statement of Secular Principles twenty-four years
before I found it in the poem of Akenside's.

*****

Two things of the past I may name as they indicate the age of opinions,
by many supposed to be recent. Co-operators are considered as intending
the abolition of competition, but as what we call nature--human,
animal, and insect--is founded upon competition, nobody has the means of
abolishing it. In the first number of the _Reasoner_, June 3, 1846, in
the first article, I stated that Mr. Owen and his friends proclaimed
co-operation as the "Corrector of the excesses of competition in social
life"--a much more modest undertaking than superseding it.

*****

The second thing I name that I wrote in the same number of the
_Reasoner_ is a short paper on "Moral Mathematics," setting forth that
there is a mathematics of morality as well as of lines and angles. There
are problems in morality, the right solution of which contributes as
much to mental discipline as any to be found in Euclid. These I thus set
forth--

Problem 1. Given--an angry man to answer without being angry yourself.

Problem 2. Given--an opponent full of bitterness and unjust insinuations
to reply to without asperity or stooping to counter insinuations.

Problem 3. Given--your own favourite truths to state without dogmatism,
and to praise without pride, adducing with fairness the objections to
them without disparaging the judgment of those who hold the objections.

Problem 4. Given--an inconsistent and abusive opponent. It is required
to reply to him by argument, convincing rather than retorting. All
opportunities of "thrashing" him are to be passed by, all pain to be
saved him as far as possible, and no word set down whose object is not
the opponent's improvement.

Problem 5. Given--the error of an adversary to annihilate with the same
vigour with which you could annihilate him.

Problem 6. Required--out of the usual materials to construct a public
body, who shall tolerate just censure and despise extravagant praise.

*****

One day I found a piece of twisted paper which I picked up thinking I
had dropped it myself. I found in it a gold ring with a snake's head. It
was so modest and curious that I wore it. Four years after, on a visit
to Mr. W. H. Duignan, at Rushall Hall, on the border of Cannock Chase,
I lost it. Four days later I arrived by train at Rugby Station with five
heavy-footed countrymen. I went to the refreshment room. On my return
only one man was in the carriage. The sun was shining brightly on
the carriage floor, and there in the middle, lay, all glittering and
conspicuous, my lost ring unseen and untrodden. I picked it up with
incredulity and astonishment. How it came there or could come there, or
being there, how it could escape the heavy feet of the passengers
who went out, or the eyes of the one remaining, I cannot to this day
conceive. After I had lost it, I had walked through Kidderminster,
Dudley Castle, and Birmingham, and searched for it several times. I
had dressed and undressed four times. I lost it finally during Lord
Beaconsfield's last Government, at the great Drill Hall meeting at
Blackheath,* in a Jingo crush made to prevent Mr. Gladstone entering to
speak there on the Eastern policy of that day. In future times should
the ground be excavated, the spot where I stood will be marked with
gold--the only place so marked by me in this world.

     * November 30, 1878.

*****

It is probably vanity--though I disguise it under the name of
pride--that induces me to insert here certain incidents. Nevertheless
pride is the major motive. When I have been near unto death, and have
asked myself what has been the consolation of this life, I found it in
cherished memories of illustrious persons of thought and action,
whose friendship I had shared. There are other incidents--as Harriet
Martineau's Letter to Lloyd Garrison, Tyndall's testimony, elsewhere
quoted--which will never pass from my memory.

*****

The first dedication to me was that of a poem by Allen Davenport,
1843--an ardent Whitechapel artisan. The tribute had value in my eyes,
coming from one of the toiling class--and being a recognition on the
part of working men of London, that I was one of their way of thinking
and could be trusted to defend the interests of industry.

*****

The next came from the theological world--a quite unexpected incident in
those days. The Rev. Henry Crosskey dedicated his "Defence of Religion"
to me. He was of the priestly profession, but had a secular heart, and
on questions of freedom at home and abroad he could be counted upon,
as though he was merely human. The dedication brought Mr. Crosskey into
trouble with Dr. Martineau. Unitarians were personally courteous to
heretics in private, but they made no secret that they were disinclined
to recognise them in public. Dr. Martineau shared that reservation.

Letter from Dr. James Martineau to Rev. W. H. Crosskey:--

"It is very difficult to say precisely how far our respect for honest
conviction, and indignation at a persecuting temper, should carry us in
our demonstrations towards men unjustly denounced. I do confess that,
while I would stoutly resist any ill-usage of such a man as Holyoake, or
any attempt to gag him, I could hardly dedicate a book to him: this act
seeming to imply a special sympathy and admiration directed upon that
which distinctively characterises the man. Negative defence from injury
is very different from positive homage. After all, Holyoake's principles
are undeniably more subversive of the greatest truths and genuine basis
of human life than the most unrelenting orthodoxy. However, it is a
generous impulse to appear as the advocate of a man whom intolerance
unjustly reviles."*

     * From "Life of W. H. Crosskey," p. 90.

Thus he gave the young minister to understand--that while there was
nothing wrong in his having respect for me, he need not have made it
public. At that time it was chivalry in Mr. Crosskey to do what he did,
for which I respected him all his days.

*****

A third dedication I thought more of, and still value, came from the
political world, and was the first literary testimony of my interest
in it. It came from "Mark Rutherford" (William Hale White), who knew
everything I knew, and a good deal more. He inscribed to me, 1866, a
remarkable "Argument for the Extension of the Franchise," which had all
the characteristics of statement, which have brought him renown in later
years. He said in his prefatory letter to me: "If my argument does any
service for Reform, Reformers will have to thank you for it, as they
have to thank you for a good many other things." They were words to
prize.

*****

Recently a letter came from Professor Goldwin Smith, who was Cobden's
admiration and envy, as he once told me, for the power of expressing an
argument or a career in a sentence. His letter to me was as follows:--

"You and I have lived together through many eventful and changeful
years. The world in these years has, I hope and believe, grown better
than it was when we came into it. In respect of freedom of opinion and
industrial justice, the two objects to which your life has been most
devoted, real progress has certainly been made."

The main objects of my life are here distinguished and expressed in six
words.

*****

Reviewers of the autobiographic volumes preceding these, complained
that they contained too little about myself. If they read the last four
paragraphs given here they will be of opinion that I have said enough
now.

*****

At the Co-operative Congress held in Gloucester, 1879, a number of
delegates went down to see the gaol. When they arrived before it, Mr.
Abraham Greenwood, of Rochdale, exclaimed, "Take off your hats, lads!
That's where Holyoake was imprisoned." They did so. That incident--when
it was related to me--impressed me more than anything else connected
with Co-operation. I did not suppose those tragical six months in that
gaol were in the minds of co-operators, or that any one had respect for
them.

*****

The chapter, "Things which went as they Would," shows that serving
co-operators had its inconveniences, but there were compensatory
incidents which I recount with pleasure. One was their contribution to
the Annuity of 1876, which Mr. Hughes himself commended to them at
the London Congress. It was owing to Major Evans Bell and Mr. Walter
Morrison that the project was successful.

*****

The other occurred at the Doncaster Congress, 1903. In my absence a
resolution had been passed thanking me for services I had rendered
in Ten Letters in Defence of Co-operation. When I rose to make
acknowledgment, all the large audience stood up. It was the first time
I had ever been so received anywhere, showing that services which seemed
un-noted at the time, lived in remembrance.

*****

Here I may cite a letter from Wendell Phillips. Of the great American
Abolitionists, Phillips, with his fine presence and intrepid eloquence,
was regarded as the "noblest Roman of them all." Theodore Parker, he
described to me as the Jupiter of the pulpit; and Russell Lowell has
drawn Lloyd Garrison, in the famous verse--

     "In a dark room, unfriended and unseen,
     Toiled o'er his types, a poor unlearn'd young man.
     The place was low, unfurnitured and mean,
     But there the freedom of a race began."

I corresponded with them in their heroic days. It is one of the letters
of Phillips to me I quote here:--

"Boston,

"July 22, 1874.

"My dear Sir,--I ought long ago to have thanked you for sending
me copies of your pamphlets on John Stuart Mill and the Rochdale
Pioneers--and with so kind and partial a recognition of my co-operation
with you in your great cause.

"That on Mill was due certainly to a just estimate of him, but how sad
that human jackals should make it necessary. That on Co-operation I read
and read again, welcoming the light you throw on it, for it is one of
my most hopeful stepping-stones to a higher future. Thank you for
the lesson--it cleared one or two dark places--not the first by any
means--for I've read everything of yours I could lay my hands on. There
was one small volume on Rhetoric--'Public Speaking and Debate,' methods
of address, hints towards effective speech, etc.--which I studied
faithfully, until some one to whom I had praised and lent it, acting
probably on something like Coleridge's rule, that books belong to those
who most need them--never returned me my well-thumbed essay, to my keen
regret. Probably you never knew that we had printed your book. This was
an American reprint--wholly exhausted--proof that it did good service.
We reprinted, some ten years ago, one of your wisest tracts, the
'Difficulties that obstruct Co-operation.' It did us yeoman service. But
enough, I shall beg you to accept a volume of old speeches printed long
ago, because it includes my only attempt to criticise you--which you
probably never saw. In it I will put, when I mail it, the last and best
photograph of Sumner, and if you'll exchange, I'll add one of

"Yours faithfully, and ever,

"Wendell Phillips.

"Mr. G.J. Holyoake."

*****

With Mr. Charles Bradlaugh I had personal relations all his life. I took
the chair for him at the first public lecture he delivered. I gave
him ready applause and support. At the time of what was called his
"Parliamentary struggle," I was entirely with him and ready to help him.
It was with great reluctance and only in defence of principle, to which
I had long been committed, that I appeared as opposed to him. He claimed
to represent Free Thought, with which I had been identified long before
his day. My conviction was that a Free Thinker should have as much
courage, consistency, and self-respect as any Apostle, or Jew, or
Catholic, or Quaker. All had in turn refused to make a profession of
opinion they did not hold, at the peril of death, or, as in the case of
O'Connell and the Jews, at the certainty of exclusion from Parliament.
They had only to take an oath, to the terms of which they could not
honestly subscribe. Mr. Bradlaugh had no scruple about doing this. In
the House of Commons he openly kissed the Bible, in which he did not
believe--a token of reverence he did not feel. He even administered to
himself the oath, which was contrary to his professed convictions. This
seemed to be a reflection upon the honour of Free Thought. Had I not
dissented from it, I should have been a sharer in the scandal, and Free
Thought--so far as I represented it--would have been regarded as below
the Christian or Pagan level.

The key to Mr. Bradlaugh's character, which unlocks the treasure-house
of his excellences and defects, and enables the reader to estimate him
justly, is the perception that his one over-riding motive and ceaseless
aim was the ascendancy of the right _through him_. It was this passion
which inspired his best efforts, and also led to certain aberration of
action. But what we have to remember now, and permanently, is that it
was ascendancy of the _right_ in political and theological affairs that
he mainly sought for, fought for, and vindicated. It is this which will
long cause his memory to be cherished.

At the time of his death I wrote honouring notices of his career in
the _Bradford Observer_ and elsewhere, which were reproduced in other
papers. Otherwise, I found opportunity on platforms of showing my
estimate of his character and public services. I had never forgotten
an act of kindness he had, in an interval of goodwill, done me. When
disablement and blindness came in 1876, he collected from the readers
of his journal L170 towards a proposed annuity for me. It was a great
pleasure to me to repay that kindness by devising means (which others
neither thought of nor believed in) of adding thrice that sum to the
provision being made for his survivors. It was a merit in him that
devotion to pursuits of public usefulness did not, in his opinion,
absolve him from keeping a financial promise, as I knew, and have
heard friends who aided him testify--a virtue not universal among
propagandists. No wonder the coarse environments of his early life lent
imperiousness to his manners. In later years, when he was in the society
of equals, where masterfulness was less possible and less necessary,
he acquired courtesy and a certain dignity--the attribute of conscious
power. He was the greatest agitator, within the limits of law, who
appeared in my time among the working people. Of his own initiative he
incurred no legal danger, and those who followed him were not led into
it. He was a daring defender of public right, and not without genius
in discovering methods for its attainment. One form of genius lies in
discovering developments of a principle which no one else sees. Had he
lived in the first French Revolution, he had ranked with Mirabeau and
Danton. Had he been with Paine in America, he had spoken "Common Sense"
on platforms. He died before being able to show in Parliament the
best that was in him. Though he had no College training like Professor
Fawcett, Indian lawyers found that Mr. Bradlaugh had a quicker and
greater grasp of Indian questions than the Professor. It was no mean
distinction--it was, indeed, a distinction any man might be proud to
have won--that John Stuart Mill should have left on record, in one of
his latest works, his testimony to Mr. Bradlaugh's capacity, which he
discerned when others did not. Like Cobbett, the soldiers' barracks
did not repress Bradlaugh's invincible passion for the distinction of a
political career. In the House of Commons he took, both in argument and
debate, a high rank, and surpassed compeers there of a thousand times
his advantages of birth and education. That from so low a station he
should have risen so high, and, after reaching the very platform of
his splendid ambition, he should die in the hour of his opportunity
of triumph, was one of the tragedies of public life, which touched the
heart of the nation, in whose eyes Mr. Bradlaugh had become a commanding
figure.

*****

It was in connection with the controversy concerning the Oath that I
received a letter from John Stuart Mill, which when published in the
_Daily News_, excited much surprise. Mr. Mill was of opinion, that the
oath, being made the condition of obtaining justice, ordinary persons
might take it. But one who was known to disbelieve the terms of it, and
had for years publicly written and spoken to that effect, had better
not take it. This was the well-known Utilitarian doctrine that the
consequences of an act are the justification of it. Francis Place
had explained to me that Bentham's doctrine was that the sacrifice
of liberty or life was justifiable only on the ground that the public
gained by it. A disciple should have very strong convictions who differs
from his master, and I differ with diffidence from Mr. Mill as to
the propriety of carrying the Utilitarian doctrine into the domain of
morals. Truth is higher than utility, and goes before it. Truth is a
measure of utility, and not utility the measure of truth. Conscience is
higher than consequence. We are bound first to consider what is right.
There may be in some cases, reasons which justify departure from the
right. But these are exceptions. The general rule is--Truth has the
first claim upon us.

To take an oath when you do not believe in an avenging Deity who will
enforce it, is to lie and know that you lie. This surely requires
exceptional justification. It is nothing to the purpose to allege that
the oath is binding upon you. The security of that are the terms of the
oath. The law knows no other. To admit the terms to be unnecessary is to
abolish the oath.

*****

When a youth, attending lectures at the Mechanics' Institution, I soon
discerned that the more eminent speakers were the clearer. They knew
their subjects, were masters of the outlines, which by making bold and
plain, we were instructed. Outline is the beginning of art and the charm
of knowledge. Remembering this, I found no difficulty in teaching very
little children to write in a week.

It is a great advantage to children to take care that their first
notions are true. The primary element of truth is simplicity--with
children it is their first fascination. I had only to show them that the
alphabet meant no more than a line and a circle. A little child can make
a "straight stroke" "and a round O."

The alphabet is made up of fifteen straight line and dozen curved line
letters. The root of the fifteen straight line letters is J placed in
various ways. The root of the eleven curved line letters is O or parts
of O and I joined together.

A is made by two straight lines leaning against each other at the top,
and a line across the middle.

H is made of two upright lines with a straight line between them.

V is made of two straight lines meeting at the bottom. If two upright
lines are added to the V it becomes M.

Two V's put together make W. The letters L and T and X and Z make
themselves, so easy is it to place the straight lines which compose
them.

O makes itself. A short line makes it into Q. If the side of O be left
open it is a C. If two half O's are joined together they make S. Half O
and an upright line make D. An upright line and a half O make P. Another
half added and B is made.

After a second or third time a child will understand the whole alphabet.

Such is the innate faculty of imitation and construction in children
that they will put the letters together themselves when the method is
made plain to them, and within a week will compose their own name and
their mother's. At the same time they learn to read as well as to
write. What they are told they are apt to forget, what they write they
remember.

Reason is the faculty of seeing what follows as a consequence from what
is, but to define distinction well is a divine gift. My one aim was to
make things clear.

*****

One of my suggestions to the young preachers, who had two sermons on
Sunday to prepare, was that they should give all their strength to the
evening discourse and arrange with their congregation to deliver the
other from one of the old divines of English or Continental renown,
which would inform as well as delight hearers. It would be an attraction
to the outside public. Few congregations know anything of the eloquence,
the happy and splendid illustrations and passages of thought to be found
in the fathers of the Church of every denomination. Professor Francis
William Newman, whose wide knowledge and fertility of thought had few
equals in his day, told me that he should shrink from the responsibility
of having to deliver a proficient and worthy discourse fifty-two times
a year. Anyhow, for the average preacher, better one bright ruddy
discourse, than two pale-faced sermons every Sunday.

*****

Those who remained true to Chartism till the end of it are recorded
in the following paragraph under the title of the "National Charter
Association," which appeared in _Reynolds's Newspaper_, January 4,
1852:--

"On Wednesday evening last, the scrutineers appointed by the
metropolitan localities attended at the office, 14, Southampton Street,
Strand, and having inspected the votes received, gave the following as
the result, in favour of the following nine:--

"Ernest Jones (who received 900 votes), Feargus O'Connor, John Arnott,
T. M. Wheeler, James Grassby, John Shaw, W. J. Linton, J. J. Bezer, G.
J. Holyoake.

"Messrs. J. B. O'Brien, Gerald Massey, and Arthur Trevelyan having
declined to serve, the votes received on their behalf have not been
recognised.

"We, the undersigned, hereby declare the nine persons first named to be
duly elected to form the Executive Committee for the ensuing year.

"John Washington, City Locality.

"Edwd. John Loomes, Finsbury Locality.

"December 31, 1851."

*****

After I became an octogenarian, I was asked whether my years might be
ascribed to my habits. I could only explain what my habits were. In the
first half of my life I ate whatever came to hand, and as not enough
came I easily observed moderation. But then I was disposed to be
moderate on principle, having read in the _Penny Magazine_, about
1830, that Dr. Abernethy told a lady "she might eat anything eatable
in moderation." In the second and later half of my life I gave heed to
Carnaro, and sought to limit each meal to the least quantity necessary
for health. The limitation of quantity included liquids as well as
solids, decreasing the amount of both "in relation to age and activity,"
as Sir Henry Thompson advised. Not thinking much of meat, I limited that
to a small amount, and cereals to those that grow above ground. A tepid
bath for the eye (on the recommendation of the Rev. Dr. Molesworth, of
Rochdale) and a soap bath for the body every morning ends the catalogue
of my habits.

My general mode of mind has been to avoid excess in food, in pleasure,
in work, and in expectation. By not expecting much, I have been saved
from worry if nothing came. When anything desirable did arrive, I had
the double delight of satisfaction and surprise. Shakespeare's counsel--

     "Be not troubled with the tide which bears
     O'er thy contents its strong necessities,
     But let determined things to destiny
     Hold, unbewailed their way"--

ought to be part of every code of health.

The conduciveness of my habits to longevity may be seen in this. More
than forty of my colleagues, all far more likely to live than myself,
have long been dead. Had I been as strong as they, I also should have
died as they did. Lacking their power of hastening to the end, I have
lingered behind.

*****

For the rest--

     "From my window is a glimpse of sea
          Enough for me,
     And every evening through the window bars
          Peer in the friendly stars."

The principles and aims of earlier years are confirmed by experience at
88. Principles are like plants and flowers. They suit only those whom
they nourish. Nothing is adapted to everybody.

*****

Goethe said: "When I was a youth I planted a cherry-tree, and watched
its growth with delight. Spring frost killed the blossoms, and I had
to wait another year before the cherries were ripe--then the birds ate
them--another year the caterpillars ate them--another year a
greedy neighbour stole them--another year the blight withered them.
Nevertheless, when I have a garden again, I shall plant another
cherry-tree." My years now are "dwindling to their shortest span "; if
I should have my days over again, I shall plant my trees again--certain
that if they do grow they will yield verdure and fruit in some of the
barren places of this world.




CHAPTER III. OTHER INSTANCES

My first public discussion in London was with Mr. Passmore
Edwards--personally, the handsomest adversary I ever met. A mass of wavy
black hair and pleasant expression made him picturesque. He was slim,
alert, and fervid. The subject of debate was the famous delineation of
the Bottle, by George Cruikshank, which I regarded as a libel on the
wholesome virtue of Temperance. Exaggerations which inform and do not
deceive, as American humour, or Swift's Lilliputians, Aztecs, and
giants of Brobdingnag, have instruction and amusement. The exaggeration
intended to deride and intimidate those who observe moderation is a
hurtful and misleading extreme. Mr. Edwards took the opposite view.
Cruikshank could not be moderate, and he did right to adopt the rule of
absolute abstinence. It was his only salvation. To every man or woman of
the Cruikshank tendency I would preach the same doctrine. To all others
I, as fervently, commend the habit of use without abuse. Without that
power no man would live a month. Had Mr. Edwards been of this way of
thinking, there had been no debate between us.

Mr. Edwards had much reason on his side. Mankind are historically
regarded as possessing insufficiency of brains, and it is bad economics
to put an incorrigible thief into their mouths to steal away what brains
they have.

I had respect for Mr. Edwards' side of the argument. For when a man
makes a fool of himself, or fails to keep an engagement, or departs, in
his behaviour from his best manner--through drink--he should take the
next train to the safe and serene land of Abstinence.

The first person who mentioned to me the idea of a halfpenny newspaper
was Mr. Passmore Edwards. One night as we were walking down Fleet Street
from Temple Bar, when the Bar stood where the Griffin now stands,
Mr. Edwards asked me, as I had had experience in the publishing trade
whether I thought a halfpenny newspaper would pay, which evidently had
for some time occupied his mind. The chief difficulty I foresaw was,
would newsagents give it a chance? It afterwards cost the house of
Cassells'--the first to make the experiment--many thousands. The
_Workman_, in which I had a department, was intended, I was told, to be
a forerunner of the halfpenny paper. But that title would never do, as I
ventured to predict. Workmen, as a rule with no partnership in
profits, had enough of work without buying a paper about it. Tradesmen,
middle-class and others, did not want to be taken for workmen, and the
_Workman_ was discontinued. But, strange to say, the same paper issued
under the title of _Work_ became successful Everybody was interested in
work but not in being workmen. Such are the subtleties of titles! Their
right choice--is it art or instinct? The _Echo_ was the name fixed
upon for the first halfpenny paper. Echo of what? was not indicated. It
excluded expectations of originality. Probably curiosity was the charm.
It committed no one to any side. There were always more noises about
than any one could listen to, and many were glad to hear the most
articulate. I wrote articles in the earliest numbers under the
editorship of Sir Arthur Arnold.

*****

The House of Allsop, as known to the world of progress in the last
century, is ended. The first who gave it public interest was Thomas
AIlsop, who assisted Robert Owen in 1832 in the Gray's Inn Lane Labour
Exchanges. He was a watchful assistant of those who contributed to the
public service without expecting or receiving requital. His admiration
of genius always took the form of a gift--a rare but encouraging form
of applause. Serjeant Talfourd somewhere bears testimony to the generous
assistance Mr. AIlsop rendered to Hazlitt, Lamb, and Coleridge. To Lamb,
he continually sent gifts, and Coleridge dined at his table every Sunday
for nineteen years. Landor, who had always nobility of character, and
was an impulsive writer--represented Mr. Allsop's interest in European
freedom as proceeding from "vanity," forgetful of his own letter to
Jessie Meriton White, offering L100 to any assassin of Napoleon III.;
and John Forster preserves Landor's remark upon Mr. Allsop, but does
not, so far as I remember, give Landor's Assassin Letter. The fact was,
no man less sought publicity or disliked it more than Mr. Allsop. When
Feargus O'Connor was elected member for Nottingham, Mr. Allsop qualified
him by conferring upon him lands bringing an income of L300. He divided
his Lincoln estate into allotments for working men, but he never
mentioned these things himself. His son Robert held his father's
intellectual views. His eldest son Thomas, who was class-mate with Mr.
Dixon Galpin at Queenwood, a considerable landowner in British Columbia,
was the philosopher of the family, and like Archbishop Whately, had a
power of stating them with ever apt and ready illustrations.

They were like Mr. Owen, Conservative in politics; but in social and
mental matters they were intrepid in welcoming new truth. It was at
Thomas's suggestion that I omitted his father's name altogether in my
chapter, "Mr. Secretary Walpole and the Jacobin's Friend."* Landor was
quite wrong, there was no "vanity" in the Allsop family. Were Thomas
Allsop the younger now living I should not write these paragraphs. As it
is, I may say that I owed to his generosity an annuity of L100. He
commenced it by a subscription of L200, and by Mr. Robert Applegarth's
friendly secretaryship, which had devotion and inspiration in it, a
committee to which the Rev. Dr. Joseph Parker, with his intrepid
tolerance, gave his name, was formed, and an annuity of L100 was
purchased for me.

     * "Sixty Years," chap. lxx. p. 72.

[Illustration: Parker]

*****

When the Taxes on Knowledge were repealed, Mr. Collet and I attempted
to procure the repeal of the Passenger Tax on Railways. For forty years
after the imposition of the tax of Lord Halford, 1832, the workman was
taxed who went in search of an employer. When a poor sailor, arriving in
London after a long voyage, desired to visit his poor mother in Glasgow,
the Government added to his fare a tax of three shillings, to encourage
him in filial affection. In the interests of locomotion and trade, two
or three associations had attempted to get this pernicious tax repealed,
without success. It was remarked in Parliament in 1877 that no
committee representing the working class asked for the repeal of this
discreditable impost, which most concerned them. This was the reason of
the formation of the Travelling Tax Abolition Committee, of which Mr.
Collet became secretary and I the chairman. We were assisted by an
influential committee of civic and industrial leaders. After six years'
agitation we were mainly instrumental (that was in Mr. Gladstone's
days) in obtaining the repeal of the penny a mile tax on all third-class
fares, effected by Mr. Childers in 1883, which ever since has put into
the pocket of working-class travellers L400,000 a year, besides the
improved carriages and improved service the repeal has enabled railway
companies to give. We continued the committee many years longer in the
hope of freeing the railways wholly from taxation, which still hampers
the directors and is obstructive of commerce. I was chairman for
twenty-four years, during which time twenty-two of the committee died.
Our memorials, interviews with ministers, correspondence with officials,
petitions to Parliament, public meetings and various publications,
involved a large and incessant amount of work without payment of any
kind. Subsequently a committee of publicists, journalists and members of
Parliament, for whom Mr. Applegarth was the secretary, caused L80 to be
given to me, in recognition of my services. Though it represented less
than L4 a year as the salary of the chairman, it was valuable in my
eyes from the persons who gave it, as they were not the persons much
benefited by the work done, and who really taxed themselves on behalf
of others. A subscription of a halfpenny each from the working-class
travellers who had profited by the repeal would have amounted to a
handsome acknowledgment. But from them it was impossible to collect
it. Testimonials, I believe, are often given by persons who generously
subscribe for others upon whom the obligation of making it more properly
rests.

*****

It would seem insensibility or ingratitude not to record, that on
my eightieth birthday--now eight years ago--I was entertained at a
numerously attended dinner party in the National Liberal Club, at which
to my gratification, Mr. Walter Morrison presided. The speakers, and
distinction of many in the assembly, were a surprise, transcending all
I had foreseen. The words of Mr. Morrison's speech, to use Tennyson's
words, were like

     "Jewels
     That on the stretch'd forefinger of all time
     Sparkle forever"

in my memory.

On my eighty-sixth birthday a reception was given me by the Ethical
Society of South Place Chapel, Finsbury--the oldest Free Thought temple
in London, where the _duty_ of free inquiry was first proclaimed by W.
J. Fox. The place was filled with faces familiar and unfamiliar, from
near and far, of artists, poets, publicists, journalists, philosophers,
as at the National Liberal Club, but in greater numbers. Lady Florence
Dixie purchased a large and costly oil painting,* and sent it for me to
present to the Library of the Rationalist Press Association. Among the
letters sent was one, the last sent to a public meeting, by Herbert
Spencer. The reader will pardon the pride I have in quoting it.

     * By my nephew, Roland Holyoake.

Writing from 5, Percival Terrace, Brighton, March 28, 1903, Mr. Spencer
said: "I have not been out of doors since last August, and as Mr.
Holyoake knows, it is impossible for me to join in the Reception to
be given to him on the occasion of his eighty-sixth birthday. I can do
nothing more than express my warm feeling of concurrence. Not dwelling
upon his intellectual capacity, which is high, I would emphasise my
appreciation of his courage, sincerity, truthfulness, philanthropy, and
unwearied perseverance. Such a combination of these qualities, it will,
I think, be difficult to find."

*****

For a period I had the opportunity accorded me of editing a daily
newspaper--_The Sun_. The Rev. Dr. Joseph Parker had been my
predecessor. I was left at liberty to say whatever I pleased, and I did.
In one week I wrote twenty-nine articles.

But opulent opportunity of working was afforded me. As I was paid ten
times as much as I had received before, I thought myself in a paradise
of journalism.

*****

In the correspondence of Robert Owen, now in possession of the
Co-operative Union Memorial Committee, Manchester, is the following
letter from his customary legal adviser, who then resided at Hornsey.

     "6,  Old Jewry,  London,

     "February 17, 1853. "R. Owen, Esq.,

     "Dear Sir,--I am glad to see your handwriting upon an
     envelope conveying to me a pamphlet of yours.

     "Holyoake I expect will breakfast with me on Sunday morning.
     He comes down by the railway to Hornsey, which leaves London
     at nine o'clock precisely.

     "I am afraid it is too cold for you, and that the walk from
     the railway to our house, which is three quarters of a mile,
     may not be agreeable.

     "Yours truly,

     "W. H. Ashurst.

     "H. will return about 12 or 1."

After breakfast Mr. Owen walked briskly with me into town. He was then
eighty-two. On his way he explained to me that, when walking as
often had done from Birmingham to Worcester, or from Huddersfield to
Sheffield--to lecture, I should find it an advantage to use the horse
road, as on the footpath there is more unevenness and necessity of
deviation to allow persons to pass, which increases the fatigue of a day
on foot. So thoughtful and practical was the reputed visionary.

*****

Of letters on public affairs I confine myself to three instances.
When the South Kensington Exhibitions were in force, more than twenty
thousand visitors a day thronged the Exhibition Road. Mothers with their
children had to cross the wide Museum Road, where policemen, stationed
to protect the passengers, had enough to do to keep their own toes on
their feet, in the undivided traffic of cabs. I wrote to the _Times_
suggesting that a lamp should be erected in the middle of the wide road
serving as a light, a retreat, and a division of traffic. All the cabmen
who could write protested against the danger, or the necessity, and
possibility of the proposal. But it was done, to the great joy of
mothers and advantage to the public.

*****

After the fall of the French Assassin at Sedan when Marshal Bazaine
was hanging about Europe in obscurity and ignominy, Mr. Arthur Arnold
proposed that he should be invited to a banquet in London. Seeing that
the citizens of Paris went out at night in bands of twenty or thirty
heroically to help to raise the siege--on what ground could we offer to
honour Bazaine, who with 192,000 soldiers under his command, was afraid
to attempt it? I asked the question in the Press, and the proposal,
which had a sentiment of chivalry in it to a fallen general, and was
commanding some concurrence--went out--like the Marshal--into outer
darkness. *****

When public opinion was in the balance respecting the South American
War, Mr. Reverdy Johnson and a Copperhead colleague arrived in London
and began to do a respectable business in public mystification. From
information supplied to me I wrote letters explaining the real nature
of that sinister mission, in consequence of which the two emissaries of
slavery made tracks for New York.

But of instances, as of other things, there must be an end.




CHAPTER IV. FIRST STEPS IN LITERATURE

Surely environment is the sister of heredity? Mr. Gladstone once said to
me that "The longer he lived the more he thought of heredity." Next to
heredity is environment--the moulder of mankind. My first passion was to
be a prize-fighter. Nature, however, had not made me that way. I had
no animosity of mind, and that form of contest was not to my taste. But
prize-fighting was part of the miasma the Napoleonic war had diffused in
England. It was in the air; it was the talk of the street "Hammer" Lane,
so called from the iron blow he could deliver, was the local hero of the
Ring in the Midlands in my youth. He was a courtier of my eldest sister,
and created in me a craving for fistic prowess. I fought one small
battle, but found that a lame wrist, which has remained permanent, cut
me off from any prospect of renown in that pursuit Next, to be a circus
jester seemed to me the very king of careers. My idea was to leap into
the arena exclaiming:--

"Well, I never! Did you ever? I never did."

"Never did what?" the clown was to ask me, when my reply was to be:--

"I could only disclose that before a Royal Commission"--alluding to a
political artifice then coming into vogue in Parliament When a Minister
did not know what to say to a popular demand, or found it inconvenient
to say it if he did know, he would suggest a Commission to inquire into
it, as is done to this day.

Then the clown would demand, "What is the good of a Royal Commission?"
when the answer would be: "Every good in the world to a Ministry, for
before the Commission agreed as to the answer to be given, the public
would forget what the question was." Under this diversion of the
audience, no one noticed that no answer was given to the original
question put to the jester. Whether I could have succeeded in this
walk was never decided. It was found that I lacked the loud, radiant,
explosive voice necessary for circus effects, and I ceased to dream of
distinction there.

I suppose, like many others who could not well write anything, I thought
poetry might be my latent--very latent--faculty. So I began. For all I
knew, my genius, if I had any, might lie that way. To "body forth things
unknown," which I was told poets did, must be delightful. To "build
castles in the air"--as my means did not enable me to pay ground
rent--was at least an economical project. So I began with a question, as
new Members of Parliament do, until they discover something to say. My
first production, which I hoped would be mistaken for a poem, was in the
form of a "Question to a Pedestrian":--

     "Saw you my Lilian pass this way?
     You would know her by the ray
     Of light which doth attend her.

     Her eye such fire of passion hath,
     That none who meet her ever pass,
     But they some message send her."

The critics said to me, as they said to Keats, to whom I bore no other
resemblance, "This sort of thing will never do. It is an imitation
of Shenstone, or of one of the Shepherd and Shepherdess School of the
Elizabethan era"--of whom I knew nothing. So I was lost to the Muses,
who, however, never missed me.

But my career was not ended. I was told there might be an opening for me
in criticism, especially of poetry, as there were many persons great in
the critical line, who could not write a verse themselves--and yet lived
to become a terror to all who could. My first effort in this direction
was upon the book of a young poet whom I knew personally. Not venturing
upon longer pieces at first, I selected two sonnets--as the author,
Emslie Duncan, called them. The opening was very striking, and was thus
expressed:--

     "Great God: What is it that I see?
     A figure shrimping in the sea."

How natural is the exclamation, I began. The poet invokes the Deity on
the threshold of a great surprise. Luther did the same in his famous
hymn beginning--

     "Great God! What do mine eyes behold!"

Our sonneteer may be said to have borrowed the exclamation from Luther.*
But we have no doubt the exclamation of our poet is purely original.
He next demands an interpretation of his vision. It is early morning,
though the poet does not mention it (great poets are suggestive, and
stoop not to detail). An evasive grey mist spreads everywhere, like the
new fiscal policy of the Bentinckian type (then in the air), obscuring
the landmarks of long-time safety. Still there is one object visible.
The poet's eye in "fine frenzy rolling" sees something. He is not sure
of the personality that confronts him, and with agnostic precaution
worthy of Huxley, he declines to say what it is--until he knows--and so
contents himself with telling the reader it is a "figure" out shrimping.
The scene is most impressive. As amateurs say, when they do not
understand a picture they are praising, "It grows upon you." So this
marvellous sonnet grows upon the

     * The opening of Luther's fine hymn:--

          "Great God! What do mine eyes behold!
          The end of things created"--

     which long imposed on my imagination and does so still.

reader. If there be not imagination and profundity here, we do not know
where to look for it.

Next our poet returns to town, and in White-chapel meets with the statue
of a lady attired only in a blouse. Notwithstanding his astonishment he
varies his abjuration, and exclaims--

     "Judge ye gods, of my surprise,
     A lady naked in her chemise!"

This is unquestionably very fine. True, there is some contradiction in
nudity and attire; but splendid contradiction is an eternal element of
poetry. What would Milton's "Paradise Lost" be without it? The reader
cannot tell whether the surprise of the poet is at the lady or her
drapery. There is no use in asking a great poet what he meant in writing
his brilliant lines. If as candid as Browning, he would answer as
Browning did, that "he had not the slightest idea what he meant."
Nothing remains for us but to congratulate the public on the advent of a
new poet who is equally great on subjects of land or sea.

There is a good deal of reviewing done on this principle, and
reputations made by this sort of writing as fully without foundation,
and I looked forward to further employment.

The editor to whom I sent these primal specimens of my new vocation
seemed undecided what to do with them--throw them into his waste-paper
basket or submit them to his readers. I assured him I had seen a number
of criticisms less restrained than mine, on performances quite as
slender as the sonnets I had described. With kindly consideration, lest
he might be repressing a rising genius in me, he asked me to give my
opinion upon a charming little poem by Longfellow--to commend, as he
hoped I could, as a new edition in which he was interested was about to
be published.

The object of the poet, I found, was to awaken certain young ladies,
whose only fault consisted in getting up late in the morning. The lines
addressed to them, if I rightly remember, began thus:--

     "Awake! Arise! and greet the day.
     Angels are knocking at the door.
     They are in haste and may not stay,
     And once departed come no more."

This verse reminds the readers of Omar Khayyam. Two ideas in it are his,
and the terms used are his; but I resisted this temptation to imitate
those popular critics, whose aim is not to discover the graces of a new
poet, but his plagiarisms, and to show that everybody reproduces the
ideas of everybody else, and prove that--

     "Nothing is, and all things seem
     And we the shadows of a dream"--

and of old, antediluvian dreams. Disdaining this royal road to critical
renown, I commenced by praising the enchanting invocation of the poet,
who when the ladies heard it would leap out of bed and dress. I observed
that to the reader who did not look below the surface--did not "read
between the lines," is the favourite phrase--the poem presented some
mysteries of diction. Instead of appearing as the angel in Leigh Hunt's
"Abou Ben Adhem" did, who diffused himself in the room like a vision,
these peripatetic visitants presented themselves like celestial postmen
"knocking at the door." Then why were they out so early themselves?
Had they more calls to make than they could well accomplish in the time
allowed them? Why were they "in haste"? No wonder mankind lack repose
if angels are in a hurry. The Kingdom of the Blest is supposed to be
the land of rest Manifestly these morning angels had to be back by a
stipulated time, and like a tax-collector could make no second call.
Apparently Longfellow's angels are like Mr. Stead's favourite spirit
Julia. They are harassed with appointments, commissions, and cares.
It is of no use being a spirit if you cannot move about with regal
leisureliness, such as was displayed by the first Shah of Persia who
visited us. The writer has seen nothing like it in any European monarch.
While in the lines now in question supernatural misgivings of angelic
perturbation are awakened. But as an example of poetry, irrespective of
its meaning and suggestions, every reader will covet a new edition of
the American poet, and no library could be complete without a copy upon
its shelves.

I had visited the poet at his Cambridge home, and was proud of the
opportunity of adding ever so small an addition to the pyramid of regard
raised to his memory.

The editor looked dubious on reading this review, and said the higher
criticism might be entertaining in theology, but the higher criticism
of poetry, which dealt with its meaning, was a different thing and
might not be well taken. In vain I suggested that a poet ought to mean
something, as Byron did, whose fascination is still real, and there was
pathos and beauty, tragedy, tenderness and courtesy enough in the
world to employ more poets than we have on hand. I received no more
commissions in the way of criticisms, and had to think of some other
vocation.

Some of the happiest evenings of younger days were spent in the rooms of
university students. It was pleasant to be near persons who dwelt in the
kingdom of knowledge, who could wander at will on the mountain tops
of science and literature, and have glimpses of unknown lands of light
which I might never see. Who has seen London under the reign of the sun,
after a sullen, fitful season, knows how wondrous is the transformation.
Like the sheen of the gods the glittering rays descend, dispelling and
absorbing the sombre clouds. A radiance rests on turret and roof. Then
hidden creatures that crawl or fly come forth and put on golden tints.
The cheerless poor emerge from their fireless chambers with the grateful
emotions of sun worshippers.

How like is all this to the change which comes over the realm of
ignorance! Light does not change vegetation more than the light of
knowledge changes the realm of the mind. The thirsty crevices of thought
drink in, as it were, the refreshing beams. Once conscious of the
liberty and power which comes of knowing--ignorance itself becomes
eager, impatient--covetous of information. Faculties unsuspected
disclose themselves. Qualities undreamed-of appear. So it came to be my
choice to enter the field of instruction. It seemed to me a great
thing to endow any, however few, in any way, however humble, with the
cheeriness and strength of ideas. True, I began to teach what I did not
know--or knew but partially--yet not without personal advantage, since
no one knows anything well until he has tried to teach it to another.
The dullest pupil will make his master sensible of defects in his own
explanation. Formerly, the dulness of a learner was supposed to discover
the necessity of a cane, whereas all it proved was incapacity or
unwillingness to take trouble--on the part of the teacher. The result
was that I wrote several elementary books of instruction. All owed their
existence, or whatever success attended them, to the experience of the
class-room.

All things have an end, as many observant people know, and before long
I turned my attention to journalism. I had read somewhere a saying of
Aristotle--"Now I mean to speak conformably to the truth." That seems
every man's duty--if he speaks at all. Anyhow, Aristotle's words
appeared to constitute a good rule for a journalist I had never heard or
never heeded the injunction of Byron:--

     "Let him who speaks beware
     Of whom, of what, and when, and where."

The Aristotelian rule I had adopted soon brought me into difficulties,
probably from want of skill in applying it. It was in propagandist
journalism that I had ventured, which I mention for the purpose of
saying that it is not, as many suppose, a profitable profession. It is
excellent discipline, but it is not thought much of by your banker. Its
securities are never saleable on the Stock Exchange. Nevertheless, the
Press has its undying attraction. It is the fame-maker. Without it noble
words, as well as noble deeds, would die. Day by day there descend from
the Press ideas in fertilising showers, falling on the parched and
arid plains of life, which in due season become verdant and variegated.
Difficulties try men's souls, but true ideas expand them. And they have
done so. Literature is a much brighter thing than it was when I first
began to meddle or "muddle" in it, as Lord Salisbury would say.

Nothing was thought classical then that was not dull No definition of
importance was found to be utterly unintelligible until a University man
had explained it. All is different now--let us hope.

Instances of the progress of literary opinion are perhaps more
instructive and better worth remembering. In 1850, when George Henry
Lewes and Thornton Hunt included my name in their published list of
contributors to the _Leader_, it cost the proprietors, I had reason to
know, L2,000. It set the Rev. Dr. Jelf, of King's College, on fire,
and caused an orthodox spasm of a serious kind in Charles Kingsley and
Professor Maurice, as witness their letters of that day.

One journal projected by me in 1850 is still v issued--_Public Opinion_.
Mr. W. H. Ashurst asked me to devise a paper I thought the most needed.
As Peel had said, "England was governed by opinion," I suggested that
this opinion should be collected. I wrote the prospectus of the new
journal, specifying that each article quoted should be prefixed by a
few words, within brackets, setting forth what principles, party, or
interest it represented--whether English or foreign. Mr. Ashurst put the
prospectus into the hands of Robert Buchanan, father of the late Robert
Buchanan, and the earlier issues followed the plan I had defined. The
object was to collect intelligent and responsible opinion.

In 1866 the _Contemporary Review_ announced that it would "represent
the best minds of the time on all contemporary questions, free from
narrowness, bigotry, and sectarianism." It professed "to represent those
who are not afraid of modern thought, in its varied aspects and demands,
and scorn to defend their faith by mere reticence, or by the artifices
commonly acquiesced in." This manifesto of 1866 far surpassed in
liberality any profession then known in the evangelical world. It was at
the time a bold pronouncement. When it is considered that Samuel Morley
was the most influential of the supporters of the _Contemporary_,
it shows that intellectual Nonconformity was abreast of the age--as
Nonconformity never was before.

In 1877 I was taken by Thomas Woolner, the sculptor, to dine at Mr.
Alfred Tennyson's (Lord Tennyson later). I believe my invitation was
owing to Mrs. Tennyson's desire to make inquiries of me concerning
the advantages of Co-operation in rural districts, in which, like the
Countess of Warwick, she was interested. The Poet Laureate gave me a
glass of sack, the royal beverage of poets, of more exquisite flavour
than I had tasted before. I did not wonder that it was conducive to
noble verse--where the faculty of it was present Mr. Knowles, now Sir
James, founder of the _Nineteenth Century and After_, was of the party,
and the new review--then projected--being mentioned, it came to pass
that my name was put down among possible contributors. The _Nineteenth
Century_ proposed to go further, and include a still wider range
of subjects, with free discussion on personal responsibility. Its
prospectus said "it would go on lines absolutely impartial and
unsectarian." The Prefatory Poem, written by Tennyson twenty-seven
years ago, which may not be in the memory of many now, was this:--

     "Those that of late had fleeted far and fast,
     To touch all shores, now leaving to the skill
     Of others their old craft, seaworthy still,
     Have chartered this; where, mindful of the past,
     Our true co-mates regather round the mast;
     Of diverse tongues, but with a common will,
     Here in this roaming moor of daffodil
     And crocus, to put forth and brave the blast.
     For some, descending from the sacred peak
     Of hoar, high-templed Faith, have leagued again
     Their lot with ours to rove the world about,
     And some are wilder comrades, sworn to seek
     If any golden harbour be for men
     In seas of Death and sunless gulfs of Doubt."

Tennyson, with all his genius, never quite emerged from the theologic
caves of the conventicle. The sea of pure reason he took to be "the sea
of Death." Doubt was a "sunless gulf." He did not know that "Doubt" is
a translucent valley, where the light of Truth first reveals the
deformities of error--hidden by theological mists. The line containing
the words "wilder comrades" was understood to include me. Out of the
"One Hundred Contributors," whose names were published in the
_Athenaeum_ (February 10, 1877), there were only-six:--Professor Huxley,
Professor Tyndall, Professor Clifford, George Henry Lewes, myself,
and possibly Frederic Harrison, to whom the phrase could apply. If the
remaining ninety-four had any insurgency of opinion in them, it was
not then apparent to the public, who are prone to prefer a vacuum to
an insurgent idea. New ideas of moment have always been on hand in the
_Nineteenth_ if not of the "wilder" kind.

After issuing fifty volumes of the _Nineteenth Century Review_, the
editor published a list of all his contributors, with the titles of
the articles written by them, introduced by these brief but memorable
words:--

"More than a quarter of a century's experience has sufficiently tested
the practical efficacy of the principle upon which the _Nineteenth
Century_ was founded, of free public discussion by writers invariably
signing their own names.

"The success which has attended and continues to attend the faithful
adherence to this principle, proves that it is not only right but
acceptable, and warrants the hope that it may extend its influence
over periodical literature, until unsigned contributions become quite
exceptional.

"No man can make an anonymous speech with his tongue, and no brave man
should desire to make one with his pen, but, having the courage of his
opinions, should be ready to face personally all the consequences of all
his utterances. Anonymous letters are everywhere justly discredited in
private life, and the tone of public life would be raised in proportion
to the disappearance of their equivalent--anonymous articles--from
public controversy."

Than the foregoing, I know of no more admirable argument against
anonymity in literature. There is nothing more unfair in controversy
than permitting writers, wearing a mask, to attack or make replies to
those who give their names--being thereby enabled to be accusative or
imputative without responsibility. There is, of course another side to
this question. Persons of superior and relevant information, unwilling
to appear personally, are thereby excluded from a hearing--which is so
far a public loss.

But this evil is small compared with the vividness and care which would
be exercised if every writer felt that his reputation went with the
work which bore his name. Besides, how much slovenly thinking, which is
slovenly expressed--vexing the public ear and depraving the taste and
understanding of the reader--would never appear if the writer had to
append his signature to his production? Of course, there is good writing
done anonymously, but power and originality, if present, are never
rewarded by fame, and no one knows who to thank for the light and
pleasure nameless writers have given. The example of the _Nineteenth
Century and After_ is a public advantage.




CHAPTER V. GEORGE ELIOT AND GEORGE HENRY LEWES

[Illustration: Lewes]

More than acquaintanceship, I had affectionate regard for George Henry
Lewes and George Eliot. Lewes included me in the public list of writers
and contributors to the _Leader_--the first recognition of the kind I
received, and being accorded when I had only an outcast name, both in
law and literature, I have never ceased to prize it.

George Eliot's friendship, on other grounds I have had reason to value,
and when I found a vacant place at the head of their graves which lie
side by side, I bought it, that my ashes should repose there, should I
die in England.

On occasions which arose, I had vindicated both, as I knew well
the personal circumstances of their lives. When in America I found
statements made concerning them which no editor of honour should have
published without knowledge of the facts upon which they purported to be
founded, nor should he have given publicity to dishonouring statements
without the signature of a known and responsible person. On the first
opportunity I spoke with Lewes's eldest son, and asked authority to
contradict them. He thought the calumnies beneath contempt, that they
sprang up in theological soil and that they would wither of themselves,
if not fertilised by disturbance. I know of no instance of purity and
generosity greater than that displayed by George Eliot in her relation
with Mr. Lewes. Edgar Allan Poe was subject to graver defamation, widely
believed for years, which was afterwards shown to be entirely devoid of
truth. George Eliot's personal reputation will hereafter be seen to be
just and luminous.

For myself, I never could see what conventional opinion had to do with a
personal union founded in affection, by which nobody was wronged, nobody
distressed, and in which protection was accorded and generous provision
made for the present and future interest of every one concerned.
Conventional opinion, not even in its ethical aspects, could establish
higher relations than existed in their case. There are thousands of
marriages tolerated conventionally and ecclesiastically approved, in
every way less estimable and less honourable than the distinguished
union, upon which society without justification affected to frown.

Interest in social and political liberty was an abiding feature in
George Eliot's mind. When Garibaldi was at the Crystal Palace, she asked
me to sit by her and elucidate incidents which arose.

On the publication of my first volume of the History of Co-operation, I
received the following letter from Mr. Lewes:--

     "The Elms, Rickmansworth,

     "Aug. 15, 1875.

     "My   dear   Holyoake,--Mrs.   Lewes   wishes me to thank
     you for sending her your book, which she is reading aloud to
     me every evening, much to our pleasure and profit.    The
     light firm touch and quiet   epigram   would   make   the
     dullest  subject readable; and this subject is _not_ dull.
     We only regret   that   you  did   not   enter more fully
     into working details.    Perhaps they will come in the next
     volume.

     "Ever yours truly,

     "G. H. Lewes."

The second volume of the work mentioned supplied to her the details she
wished.

In 1877 I visited New Lanark and saw the stately rooms built by Robert
Owen, of which I sent an account to the Times. The most complete
appliances of instruction known in Europe down to 1820 are all there,
as in Mr. Owen's days. A description of them may be read in the second
volume of the "History of Co-operation" referred to. When George Eliot
saw the letter she said, "the thought of the Ruins of Education there
described filled her with sadness." I made an offer to buy the neglected
and decaying relics, which was declined. I wrote to Lord Playfair, whose
influence might procure the purchase. I endeavoured to induce the
South Kensington Museum authorities to secure them for the benefit of
educationists, but they had no funds to use for that purpose.

Some women, not distinguished for personal beauty when young, become
handsome and queenly later in life. This was so with Harriet Martineau.
George Eliot did not come up to Herbert Spencer's conception of personal
charm. One day when she was living at Godstone, she drove to the station
to meet Mr. Lewes. He and I were travelling together at the time, and he
caused the train to be delayed a few minutes that I might go down into
the valley to meet his wife. I had not seen George Eliot for some years,
and was astonished at the stately grace she had acquired.

One who knew how to state a principle describes the characteristic
conviction of George Eliot, from which she never departed, and which had
abiding interest for me.

"She held as a solemn conviction--the result of a lifetime of
observation--that in proportion as the thoughts of men and women are
removed from the earth on which they live, are diverted from their
own mutual relations and responsibilities, of which they alone know
anything, to an invisible world, which can alone be apprehended by
belief, they are led to neglect their duty to each other, to squander
their strength in vain speculations, which can result in no profit to
themselves or their fellow-creatures, which diminish their capacity for
strenuous and worthy action during a span of life, brief, indeed, but
whose consequences will extend to remote posterity."*

     * _Congregationalist_ April, 1881, p. 297.
       Bray's Autobiography.




CHAPTER VI. WHEN BIRMINGHAM WAS A TOWN

When Birmingham was a town it had a national reputation for Liberalism.
At present I prefer to call myself a "townsman" rather than a "citizen."
The old pride of owning to being a Birmingham man is merged into the
admission of being born in Warwickshire. Some of the political scenes in
its town days may be instructive to its present-day citizens.

The famous Birmingham Political Union of 1832 was "hung up like a clean
gun" on G. F. Muntz's suggestion and never taken down. Many years later
a new Union was projected. Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was in the chair. I
was on the platform, and the only person present who was a member of the
former Union. I had no opportunity of speaking--nor indeed had anybody,
save movers and seconders of motions. There was nothing radical
about the proceedings. Nobody's opinion was asked. No opportunity of
discussion was given. The meeting was a mere instrument for registering
the business of the chair. The impression that afternoon made upon me
has never left me. Nothing afterwards surprised me in the performances
of the "quick-change artiste" of the Parliamentary music-hall.

Mr. John Morley wrote an article in the _Fortnightly_ on Mr.
Chamberlain, which first gave him a position before the public. Not even
in Birmingham could any one see adequate justification for it. But Mr.
Morley proved right, and had discerned a capacity which had not then
unfolded itself.

About that time Mr. Chamberlain made some remark on Mr. Disraeli in the
Birmingham Town Council, which did not amount to much. Mr. Disraeli did
the municipal speaker the honour to call him to account. Had any one in
like case called Mr. Disraeli to account he would have said in his airy
and evasive way: "Every public speaker is liable to the misconstruction
of unheeding and ill-hearing reporters, and he could not be expected to
answer for them." Mr. Chamberlain gave no sign of any such adroitness
which was ready to his hand, but wrote what read like an abject apology.
He did not dare to say to Mr. Disraeli "What I have said I have said."

Mr. Jesse Collings was one of the minor merchants of Birmingham. He came
originally from Exeter, and was held in great respect for his earnest
Liberalism, and for promoting the education of the people--though he was
himself a sectarian pure and simple, with little, if any, secularity
in him. When he came to be Mayor, the Tories of Birmingham--who had not
then and never had any man of mark or genius among them--were capable of
outrage. It was the only art they knew. When Mr. Collings presided one
day at a public meeting in the town hall, they drew an ass's head on a
large sheet of pasteboard, and hung it over the clock in front of the
chair labelled--the "Portrait of the Mayor." For two hours they made all
business impossible by shouting "Mr. Mayor, look at your portrait." At
length the Mayor took courage and ordered the Chief Constable--Major
Bond--to remove the picture placard and the ringleader of the
disturbance. This was construed as an insult, which Mr. Kynersley, the
principal Tory magistrate, supported. I was one who urged Mr. Collings
to apply to the bench for a case, that it might be determined in the
higher courts whether a mayor had legal power to preserve order at a
public meeting. The case was refused by Mr. Kynersley. This was the
treatment of the Right Honourable Jesse Collings for being a Liberal. Is
there a stranger sight in England than seeing this Liberal mayor dressed
in Tory livery, fetching and carrying in Parliament for the intolerant
party which treated him with such ostentatious indignity? What must be
his sense of humiliation under his new convictions? Equally tragic and
unforeseen must be the humiliation of the Tory party in Parliament who
used to boast of their pride, their dignity, and self-respect at having
to accept as a leader the great "caucus-monger," as they called Mr.
Chamberlain, who was the object of their epithets and hatred during so
many sessions. The tragedy of political convictions can no further go.
Far be it from me to deny that Mr. Collings and Mr. Chamberlain have not
honest reasons for their strange professions, though I do not
understand them. Like gravitation, I admit the fact, though its cause
is inscrutable. In politics motives are as though they were not. They
cannot be taken into account. If alleged, they admit of no proof.
Resentment rages among the partisans of the accused and the tendency
of their principles, which it is alone instructive to discuss, is lost
sight of. It is common for partisans to disparage those who have left
their ranks--forgetting that conviction depends upon evidence. Those who
leave a party may be as honest as those who remain. Whoever has rendered
aid to liberty and gone over to the other side should be honoured
for what he has done. He who has once stood upon the side of humanity
deserves more respectful treatment than he who never took the part of
the right. Mr. Collings and Mr. Chamberlain rendered important service
to the cause of public progress, and their abandonment of it was a loss.
For the rest, the career of Joseph Chamberlain, like that of Joseph
Cowen, has its explanation in the passion for paramountcy.




CHAPTER VII. THE TENTH OF APRIL, 1848--ITS INCREDIBILITIES

It is not easy to determine which of many historic incidents of interest
should take precedence. The 10th of April, known as the day of Chartist
Terror--still spoken of in hysterical accents--will do, as it shows the
wild way with which sober, staid men can write history. I was out that
day with the Chartists, and well know how different the facts were from
what is believed to be the peril of the metropolis on that day. I have
long regarded it as one of the "bygones" having instruction in them.

The French have their 9th Thermidor (July 27, 1794), when the Reign
of Terror ended, and their 18th Brumaire (November 9, 1799), when the
Napoleonic Terror began, and the English have their 10th of April, 1848,
when a million special constables were out staff in hand, to prevent a
National Petition of the people being presented to the House of Commons.
Yet no conspiracy existed--nor even had the police fabricated a plot (as
they often did in those days)--no disorder had been threatened, not a
man was armed; the only imaginable enemy was the Chartist Convention
of less than two hundred persons. The most distinguished of the Special
Constables was Louis Napoleon, who four years later became known as the
assassin of French liberty, and whose career is one of the infamies of
Imperialism.

The 10th of April, 1848, has for more than half a century held a place
in public memory. The extraordinary hallucination concerning it has
become historic, and passes as authentic. Canon Charles Kingsley was the
chief illusionist in this matter. He wrote: "On the 10th of April,
the Government _had_ to fill London with troops, and put the Duke of
Wellington in command, who barricaded the bridges and Downing Street,
and other public buildings."* Nobody "had" to do what Kings-ley relates.
Nine years had elapsed since any one had taken the field against the
Government, and that was in a Welsh town 147 miles away. John Frost and
his tiny band of followers were the insurgents. All were put down
in twenty minutes by a few soldiers. Frost came to London in 1839 to
consult James Watson, Henry Hetherington, Richard Moore, William Lovett,
and other responsible Chartists, whom he most trusted. They besought
Frost to abandon his idea of an attack upon Newport, as no one would
support him. There were no arms in London on April, 1848, no persons
were drilled, no war organisation existed, and no intention of rising
anywhere. The Government knew it, for they had spies everywhere. They
knew it as well or better in 1848 than in 1839. For nine years John
Frost had then been in penal servitude, and no one had attempted to
imitate him. Nor had he any followers in London in 1848. At his trial
no noblemen, no aristocratic ladies, crowded the court to cheer him by
their sympathy, or mitigate his sentence by their influence--as they did
when Dr. Jameson and others were on trial for their wanton and murderous
raid on the Government of South Africa. Such is the difference between
the insurgency of poverty seeking redress, and the insurgency of wealthy
insolence seeking its further aggrandisement There was absolutely
nothing in the field against the Duke of Wellington in London but a
waggon, on which a monster petition was piled.

     * Introduction to "Alton Locke," by Thomas Hughes.

Politically speaking, London has seen no tamer day than the 10th of
April, 1848. There was less ground for alarm than when a Lord Mayor s
procession passes through the city. The procession of actual Chartists,
able to leave their work to join it, could never have amounted to four
thousand. There was not a single weapon among them, nor any intention of
using it had they possessed it. There was only one weapon known to be in
London, in the hands of the Chartists, and that was a Colonel Macerone's
spear, fabricated in 1830, to assist in carrying the first Reform Bill.
That was hidden up a chimney in 3, Queen's Head Passage, Paternoster
Row. It came into my possession, and I have often shown it to members of
the Government to convince them what risks Society ran in Wellington's
days--and are exposed to still.

The Chartists had held a Convention in London the week before the 10th,
and were unable to obtain any place of meeting except a small social
institution in John Street, Tottenham Court Road, which could not seat
150 persons at the Convention table. The hall was lent to them by the
most pacific body of politicians in London--the followers of Robert
Owen. Yet Mr. Thomas Hughes adopted and authenticated Kingsley's
incredible belief, that the country was in danger of these earnest but
entirely impotent Chartist petitioners; and Mr. Hughes actually quotes
believingly in his introduction to "Alton Locke" a statement that: "The
Duke of Wellington declared in the House of Lords that no great society
had ever suffered as London had during the proceeding, while the Home
Secretary telegraphed to all the chief magistrates of the kingdom the
joyful news that the peace had been kept in London."*

     * Prefatory Memoir of Kingsley's Works, by Thomas Hughes,
       p. 13.

Never did the craziest despotic Government in Europe engage in such a
political imposture. It was pitiable that the Duke of Wellington should
have had no more self-respect than to compromise his great career
by fortifying London against an imaginary enemy. The Government had
plentiful information and must have known the truth--the contrary of
what they alleged.

It may be said in extenuation of these affected Ministerial terrors,
that the Parisian revolution of that year had communicated unrest to
the people of England. It had inspired them with pleasure, but not with
insurgency, for which they were as uninclined as they were unprepared,
and none knew this better than the Duke of Wellington. The Parisian
population had seen military service. They understood the use of arms,
had them, and knew how to settle their differences at the barricade.
London had never seen a barricade. The people were all unused to arms,
and were without the means or the knowledge to storm a police station.
Yet, according to Canon Kingsley, Wellington told the Government "that
no capital had gone through such days as England had on the 10th of
April," when no man was struck--no man was killed--no riot took
place anywhere. It would seem that ignorance, rashness, wildness, and
irresponsible language are by no means peculiar to the working classes.
We must cease to wonder at the Duke of Wellington when an accredited
publicist like Judge Thomas Hughes, who was educated at Rugby, could
tell the world himself that "It is only by an effort that one can
realise the strain to which the nation was subjected."

On that awful day, nobody was reported as found looking into a shop
window with a predatory glare in his eyes, and no account came up from
the provinces that a single Chartist was observed to peep over a hedge
in a menacing manner.

I was out on the 10th of April. On Sunday, the night before, I was the
lecturer at John Street The audience was composed largely of delegates
to the dreadful Convention that so perturbed the "Iron Duke."

My advice to them, published at the time, was to "Beware of the police,"
and not to strike again if they were struck. Many of them, I knew, were
willing to die for their country, if that would save it. They would
serve it much better by dying without resistance, than dying with it. If
any were killed whilst walking in the procession their comrades should
move quietly on. Nothing would tell more strongly on public opinion than
such heroic observance of order. Hetherington, one of the bravest who
walked in the ranks, told me he would do it. The Government, by their
ostentatious provocation, in garrisoning the Bank with soldiers,
crowding Somerset House with them, parading troops on Clerkenwell Green,
had brought, it is computed, more than two millions of persons into the
streets. The conclusion to which the Chartist leaders came, was that
the Government wanted to create a conflict, shoot down a number of the
people, and then proclaim to Europe that they had "saved Society,"
by murder, as one of their chief special constables did soon after in
Paris.

As I had been personally associated with all the chief Chartists, in
prison and out, from the beginning of the movement, I can speak with
some knowledge of them on that day.

On the morning of the 10th of April, Mr. C. D. Collet, the well-informed
Secretary of the People's Charter Union, myself, Richard Moore, and
others, organised a band of forty persons, who were to distribute
themselves over London, note-book and pencil in hand, in the character
of reporters. The police took kindly to us, and gave us good positions
of advantage, where we could see everything that took place thereabouts,
and even protected us from being incommoded. We were there to watch the
police, not the people, as the disorder, if there were any, would come
from them. My station was in Bridge Street, Blackfriars, where a row
of constables was drawn up. I found a coarse, plethoric alderman, going
from man to man, saying only three words: "Strike hard to-day."

The people behaved admirably. Not a blow was struck which gave a
colourable ground for outrage on the part of the police. In justice to
the police, it ought to be said, neither did they incite disorder.

At night the Home Secretary spent the money of the State, in
telegraphing to all the mayors in the land "the day had passed off
quietly," thus creating a false terror everywhere that London had been
in danger--danger of the Government's creating.

The Bull Ring Riots in Birmingham in 1839, when I was resident there,
were created entirely by the magistrates, who introduced a hundred
London policemen into the town, which led to the loss of life and
property.

I and others on the deputation to Mr. Walpole told him at the time, when
the railings were broken down in Hyde Park, that if he made a show of
soldiers and policemen, people were sure to be killed. At the peril
of his own reputation, he kept them out of sight, and no disorder took
place, though violent members of the Government tried to destroy
Mr. Walpole for his wise and noble forbearance. Dean Stubbs, in his
interesting book on Charles Kingsley, says (p. 97): "On the 10th
of April, 1848, a revolution was threatened in England. One hundred
thousand _armed men_ were to meet on Kennington Common and thence
to march on Westminster, and there to compel, by physical force, if
necessary, the acceptance of the People's Charter by the Houses of
Parliament." Could such a lunatical statement be written by any one,
and his friends not procure a magistrate's order for his removal to the
nearest asylum? How were the "hundred thousand" to get the arms into
London--if they had them. Whence were they to procure them? Where could
they store them, seeing that at that time there was not a single place
of Chartist meeting that was not known to be in debt, unless its rent
was paid by the charity of some well-to-do sympathiser? What were
muskets or pikes to do against the stone walls of the Houses of
Parliament or the Bank? How were cannon to be drawn from the centre
of London to Kennington Common with ample service of powder and shot?
Marvellous is the history which Churchmen can write!

The utterly groundless and incredible representations of the "10th
April," which Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes published, as we have
seen, were to my amazement resuscitated as late as 1902 for the historic
instruction of the students of the Working Mens College in Great Ormond
Street, London, by Mr. R. P. Lichfield, vice-principal of the college,
who for forty-seven years has rendered it important service, for which
all friends of education for workmen are grateful. Yet in his address to
the students (October 1, 1902), he tells them that in 1848 "the wave
of democracy which swept over Europe gave fresh impetus to the Chartist
agitation. On the memorable 10th of April it looked as if we were to
have a revolutionary outbreak on the Parisian pattern. This we were
saved from, partly by an army of volunteers, special constables, partly
by the Duke of Wellington's discreet placing of his troops.... The
attempt to overawe Parliament by a 'physical force' demonstration was a
fiasco." The world knows a good deal of historians who draw upon their
imagination for their facts, but here is a responsible teacher, drawing
upon his terrors of fifty years ago, for statements which nobody
believes now or believed then, who knew the facts. The Duke of
Wellington's great name in war imposed upon amateur politicians. The
Duke--contrary to his reputation for military veracity--readily lent
himself to the Government of that day, that they might figure before the
country as the deliverers of England, from the nation-shaking assault
of a miscellaneous crowd of penniless and unarmed combatants, who had
neither cannon nor commissariat. Everybody was aware that the knowledge
of the Iron Duke, outside war, was very limited, and his political
credulity was unbounded. At the end of the Peninsular War he wrote to
the Government of that day, informing them "the bankers of Paris were
furnishing large sums to Revolutionists in England." Only old residents
in Bedlam would believe that. There were no leaders of Revolutionists in
England, to whom the money could be assigned or consigned, and bankers
were the last persons in the world to subscribe money for a wild,
speculative, and uncertain enterprise. No spy of Pitt, or Sid-mouth,
would have sent home so insane a report, from fear of instant dismissal
from their sinister employment.

This is but a sample of the airy, false, and fictionary foundation on
which the Legend of the Tenth of April was built. These incidents of
historic perversion, though bygones of half a century ago, are worth
remembering.




CHAPTER VIII. THE CHARTISTS OF FICTION

The Chartists have made as much noise in the world as they knew how--yet
to the generation of to-day they are ambiguous. They have had no
historian. Carlyle went to look at them in prison, and defamed them with
that bitterness and contempt he had for partisans who lacked the sense
of submission to the dictates of those superior persons who knew what
was best for everybody, of whose aspirations they knew nothing, and for
whose needs they had no sympathy. Chartism, however, has won conspicuous
treatment in fiction. What it was in fact, is a very different thing.
There is the Church Chartist by Canon Kingsley, and the Positivist
Chartist by George Eliot, drawn by two famous artists. The pictures are
hung upon the line in the great gallery of literature. So brilliant
is the work of Kingsley that it has imposed on so accomplished a
connoisseur as Dean Stubbs, who, in his life of the fervid Rector of
Eversley, has taken it for a painting from real life. I present the
Church Chartist first.

In my time I have seen much good done by Christians with a view to
extend their faith. Some few, like Samuel Morley, who excelled all
lay Dissenters I have known in the manly sense of the dignity and
independence of Nonconformity, would do generous things from the
humaneness of their own minds alone. Some Quakers and Unitarians have
had this quality. Others, Churchmen, Roman Catholics, and orthodox
Christians, I have known to mitigate privation for the "Lord's sake,"
not for humanity's sake. This was to some extent the case of the Rev.
Frederick Denison Maurice, Canon Kingsley, and their noble colleagues,
Edward Vansittart Neale, Judge Thomas Hughes, and J. M. Ludlow.
They became Christian Socialists not so much because they cared for
Socialism, as Maurice owned his "object was not to Socialise society,
but to Christianise Socialism." Startled by the dislike and even
resentment against Christianity expressed by men of poverty and
intelligence at being asked to adopt a belief which brought them no
relief, Maurice, Kingsley, and their associates concluded that privation
was the cause of alienation from the Church. In like manner Dissenters
thought that it was the bad condition of industrial life which
kept working people from chapel. None realised that alienation from
Christianity had its seat in the understanding--in intellectual
dissatisfaction with the tenets of Theology. The absentees from church
and chapel alleged that no relief came of belief, and never had since
the days when manna fell in the Jewish wilderness, and loaves and fishes
were miraculously plentiful on the hills of Galilee. There was no sense
or profit in adopting a faith which had been unproductive for nearly
2,000 years. It had taken the slave, the serf, and the hired worker
a long time to see this. But at last experience had told upon the
thoughtful. But the theologians neither in the dominant, nor dominated
camps perceived it.

Very generous is Kingsley's sympathy, in "Alton Locke," with the lot of
working people, but he believed that when the rebellious shoemaker fully
realises that good priests would mitigate the lot of those who labour
in workshops or in fields and mines, he will become reconciled to the
Thirty-nine Articles. Alton Locke is a Church Chartist--not one of the
Chartists of real life whom I knew, who were current in Kingsley's days,
who signed the famous document which Place drew and Roebuck revised.
They had principles. They did not seek paternal government of friendly
Churchmen, nor of Positivists, nor that nobly organised kind of
passive competence which Mr. Ruskin meditated for the people. The real
Chartists--like the Co-operators--sought self-government for the people
by the people. The alienation of the people from church and chapel was
not founded on lack of spiritual patronage, or thirst for it, but from
intellectual dissatisfaction with theological tenets.

Christians, from the Vatican to the Primitive Methodist conventicle,
are all so persuaded of the infallibility of their interpretation of the
Scriptures, and are so convinced of the perfect sufficiency of their
tenets for the needs of all the world, that they regard difference of
opinion as springing from wilful misunderstanding, or from the "evil
heart at enmity with God"--a mad doctrine beneath the notice of the
average lunatic. Natural variety of intellect, the infinite hosts of
personal views, and the infinitude of individual experience--which
silently create new convictions--are not taken into account, and
conscientious dissent seems to the antediluvian theologian an
impossibility. Even the most liberal of eminent Unitarians in England,
W. J. Fox, regarded, what we now know as the Agnostic--hesitation to
declare as true that which the declarer does not know to be so--as a
species of mental disease.

That Kingsley lived in a refracting medium, in which the straightest
facts appeared bent when placed in it, was evident when he wrote:
"Heaven defend us from the Manchester School, for of all narrow,
conceited, hypocritical, and atheistic schemes of the universe the
Cobden and Bright one is exactly the worst." There was no reason why
Kingsley should be a Chartist, since he had all he wanted secured, and
had contempt in his heart for Chartist tenets. He wrote: "The Bible
gives the dawn of the glorious future, such as no universal suffrage,
free trade, communism, organisation of labour, or any other Morrison
pill measure can give." He exulted in the existence of the forces which
made against the people. He exclaimed: "As long as the Throne, the House
of Lords, and the Press are what I thank God they are!" he was grateful.
The state of things which existed, it was the object of Chartism to
change.

These rampant ideas of Kingsley were far from being Chartist sentiments.
At a meeting in Castle Street, London, the Rev. Charles Kingsley and Mr.
Thomas Hughes were present, working men comprising the audience, an old
grey-headed Chartist, of a Republican way of thinking, whose experience
of monarchy was limited to his share of taxation for its support,
hissed at the introduction of the Queen's name. Mr. Hughes, then a young
athlete, turned upon the old Six Points politician and said: "Any one
who hissed at the Queen's name would have to reckon with him"--meaning
that he would knock him down, or put him out of the meeting. If, at a
Chartist meeting, one athletic leader had similarly threatened an old
grey-headed Royalist who hissed some Republican name, it would have been
described, in all respectable papers, as "a ruffianly proceeding." The
Hughes incident showed Christian Socialist sympathy with Chartism was
not of an enthusiastic character. At other times Mr. Hughes had nobler
moods, but he, like Kingsley, had few qualifications for delineating
Chartists.

Judge Hughes, like Canon Kingsley and his Christian Socialist
colleagues, saw everything in the light of Theology. He saw nothing else
by itself. He relates "the appearance of a little grey, shrivelled man
at the grave of Mr. Maurice at the cemetery at Hampstead, one of the
staff of the leading Chartist newspaper," as a proof of his conversion.
This was gratitude, not conversion. Had I not been at the Bolton
Co-operative Congress at the time, I should have been at the same grave.
When the news came of Maurice's death, it did not occur to his friend,
Mr. Neale, that the Congress would pass a resolution in honour of
Maurice. I suggested it to him, and he said to me, "You had better draw
up the resolution," which I did, and moved it. It was unanimously and
gratefully passed. Though I was foremost to express the respect of
working men, and the sense of obligation they were under, for Maurice's
great services to Co-operation, and his establishment of the Working
Men's College, it did not imply that I had come to accept the
Thirty-nine Articles. Relevant appreciation, real gratitude, and
admiration, do not imply coincidence of opinion on other and alien
questions.

How little the creator of Alton Locke was a Chartist, or a sympathiser
with Chartism, was seen when he described "Mr. Julian Harney and Feargus
O'Connor and the rest of the smoke of the pit." Kingsley said "his only
quarrel with the Charter was that it did not go far enough." All his
meaning was that it should have comprised social, instead of political
reform, which was what all who were opposed to political freedom said.
This only meant that he wanted Chartists to take up social, and drop
political reform. This appears in the passage in which he said, "The
Charter disappointed me bitterly when I read it. It seemed a harmless
cry enough, but a poor, bald, constitution-mongering cry as ever I
heard. The French cry of organisation of labour is worth a thousand of
it."* Organisation of labour is a great thing, but it is not political
equality or liberty. Kingsley's Chartist had no political soul.

There is noble sympathy with labour, and there are passages which should
always be read with honour in "Alton Locke." But the book is written in
derision of Chartism and Liberal politics. Alton Locke himself was like
his creator. Kingsley's acts were the acts of a friend, his arguments
the arguments of an enemy; and Alton Locke, despite the noble personal
qualities with which he is endowed, was a confused political traitor,
who bartered the Kingdom of Man for the Kingdom of Heaven, when he might
have stood by both.

     * Prefatory Memoir, by T. Hughes, p. 16.

So much for the Church Chartist. Now turn to the Positivist Chartist,
and see whether there be any backbone of political emancipation in
him, or whether his vertebra is of jelly, like Alton Locke's. To the
Positivist Chartist is given the stronger name of "Radical."

One of the remarkable volumes George Eliot gave to the world bears the
name of "Felix Holt, the Radical." But when she comes to delineate the
Radical, he turns out to be a Positivist--of good quality of his kind,
but still not a Radical.

As Canon Kingsley drew the Church Chartist, so George Eliot drew the
Positivist Radical. Neither drew the selected hero as he was, but as
each thought he ought to be.

A Radical is one who goes to the root of things. He deals with evils
having a political origin, which he intends to remove by political
means. Radicals were far older than the Chartists. Radicalism was a
force in reform before Chartism began. The Radical more or less evolves
his creed by observation of the condition of things surrounding him; the
Chartist had his creed ready made for him. The Chartist may be said to
begin with political effects, the Radical with political causes. Anyhow,
the Radical was always supposed to know what he was, and why he was
what he was. Felix Holt was not built that way. George Eliot had greater
power of penetrating into character than Kingsley, but she made the same
mistake in Felix Holt that Kingsley made in Alton Locke. Felix Holt is
a revolutionist from indignation. His social insurgency is based on
resentment at injustice. Very noble is that form of dissatisfaction,
but political independence is not his inspiration. Freedom, equality
of public rights, are not in his mind. His disquiet is not owing to
the political inability of his fellows to control their own fortunes.
Content comes to Felix when the compassion of others ameliorates or
extinguishes the social evils from which his fellows suffer. He is
the Chartist of Positivism without a throb of indignation at political
subjection. That may be Positivism, but it is not Radicalism.

Felix Holt discloses his character in his remark that "the Radical
question was how to give every man a man's share in life. But I think
that is to expect voting to do more towards it than I do."

"A man's share in life" was the Baboeuf doctrine of Communism, which
English Radicals never had. Holt's depreciation of the power of voting
was the argument of the benevolent but beguiling Tory. It was part
of the Carlylean contempt of a ten-thousandth part of a voice in the
"national palava." This meant distrust, not only of the suffrage, but of
Parliament itself. When both are gone, despotism becomes supreme. When
Felix Holt talked so, he had ceased to be a Radical--if he ever was one.

The power of voting has changed the status and dignity of working
men--not much yet, but more will come. Hampered and incomplete as the
suffrage is, it has put the workers on the way to obtain what they want,
though they are a little puzzled which turning to take now they are on
the road.

Felix Holt continues: "I want the working men to have power.... and I
can see plainly enough that our all having power will do little towards
it at present.... If we have false expectations about men's characters,
we are very much like the idiot who thinks he can carry milk in a can
without a bottom. In my opinion the notions about what mere voting will
do, are very much that sort" Felix declares that all the "scheme about
voting and districts and annual parliaments [all points of the Charter]
will not give working men what they want."*

     * See "Felix Holt, the Radical," vol i. pp. 265-266,
     Blackwood's edition of George Eliot

Felix has much more to say in disparagement of political aspiration
which is like reading one of Lord Salisbury's speeches when he was Lord
Cranborne, but without the bitterness and contempt by which we knew the
genuine Salisbury mind. The Eliot spirit is better--the argument more
sympathetic, but the purport is the same. It means: "Leave politics
alone. You will find all the redress that is good for you elsewhere."

This, if true, is not Radicalism which sought to help itself, and not
rise by compassion. Radicals may have expected too much from political
reform--they may have thought political power to be an end instead of a
means whereby better public conditions can be obtained, by which social
effort could better be compassed, and its projects carried out. It
is true that social condition can be improved by men of purpose and
character under despotism, but this does not prove that despotism is
desirable, since it can make itself at will an effectual obstacle
to progress, and as a rule does so. The policy of seeking the best
political condition in which social progress can be made, is Radicalism.
The policy of contentment with things as they are, seeking social
condition apart from politics, is Socialism, as it has been understood
in England. "Felix Holt," like "Alton Locke," abounds in noble
sentiments, exalts the character of working men, vindicates their social
claims with eloquence. But Felix Holt was no more a Radical than Alton
Locke was a Chartist. Alton Locke is against Chartism. Felix Holt is
against Radicalism. Sir Leslie Stephen has written the most fascinating
estimate of the writings and genius of George Eliot that has been
produced. He has interesting things to say of Felix Holt, but it does
not occur to him to say what he was so well able to say, whether he
was a Radical or not--or if one, of what species. Therefore it has been
necessary to place before the reader the evidence which will enable him
to decide the question for himself.

In reference to this chapter, Mr. J. M. Ludlow wrote to me, saying:

["That you above all men should find fault with Kingsley or any one else
for setting social above political reform, I own, amazes me. But it is
not true in any sense of the words that Kingsley wanted Chartists to
'take up social and drop political reform.' In his first letter to
Thomas Cooper (Life, vol. i. p. 182), he expressly says: 'I would shed
the last drop of my blood for the social and _political_ emancipation
of the people.' [The italics are mine.] Again, you misquote General
Maurice's (not Mr. Maurice's) words, when you say that 'Maurice owned
that his object was not to socialise society, but to Christianise
Socialism.' General Maurice's words are: 'Beyond all doubt he dreaded
becoming the head of a _party_ of Christian Socialists. His great wish
was to Christianise Socialism, not to Christian-socialise the universe'
(Life, vol. ii. p. 47).

"Your story about the 'old grey-headed Chartist' and T. Hughes does not
tally altogether with the statement in Mr. Maurice's Life (vol. ii. p.
13), but as I do not recollect being present (nor, I believe, were you)
on the occasion, I cannot say which is right. I should have thought that
an 'old greyheaded Chartist' would have had more courtesy as well as
more sense than to hiss the Queen."

Mr. Ludlow's letter throws a flood of light on the mistakes of Canon
Kingsley and his colleagues. Mr. Ludlow "is amazed that I above all men
should blame any man for setting social above political reform." It is
now some fifty years since Mr. Ludlow first did me the honour to notice
what I wrote or said. Yet I think he never knew me to subordinate
political to social reform. I always thought it base to teach men to
barter political freedom for social benefits. The leaders of early
co-operation in the days before Mr. Ludlow knew it--being like Robert
Owen, mostly of a Tory way of thinking--deprecated political reform,
and thought its pursuit unnecessary, as their social remedy would do
everything for the people. I always dissented from this doctrine and
resented it, as the politician, if you do not watch him, will come some
day and throw the savings of a century into a sea of imperial blood. Mr.
Ludlow quotes a letter from Kingsley to Thomas Cooper, in which he says
he "would shed the last drop of his blood for the social and political
emancipation of the people." What! for the "smoke of the pit"? as he
described the agitation for the Charter. What! "shed his blood" for a
"Morrison pill measure"--shed the last drop of his blood" for a poor,
bald, constitution-mongering cry as ever he heard"? I agree that this is
extraordinary political enthusiasm. Still it was no proof that Kingsley
was a Chartist, and that was my point. General Maurice's version of his
father's saying that "his object was not to socialise society," shows
that Maurice cared no more for Socialism (which at that time meant
co-operative communism) than Kingsley cared for Chartism. Both meant
well to the people in a theological--not a political way. The old
grey-headed Chartist hissed the Queen's office, not herself. Republicans
ever made that distinction.]




CHAPTER IX. THE OLD POSTILLION

Besides Church Chartists and Positivist Chartists, there were Tory
Chartists, of whom I add an account, and a list of those among them who
were paid in the days of their hired activity. But the business of this
chapter is with the Old Postillion, the founder of the real Chartists,
who taught them and who knew them all.

Of course I mean Francis Place, who was always ready to mount and drive
the coach of the leaders of the people. Though he took that modest and
useful position, it was he who determined the route, made the map of
the country, and fixed the destination of the journey. Joseph Parkes
himself, known as "The People's Attorney-General," first addressed Place
as the "Old Postillion."* James Watson, a working-class politician (whom
Place could always trust), wrote of him at his death as the "English
Franklin,"** a very good title, having regard to the strength of the
common-sense characteristics of Place.

     *Wallas's "Life of Place," p. 346. Longmans, Green & Co., 1898.

     **Reasoner, No. 409, vol. xvi., March 28 1854.

One advantage (there were not many) of my imprisonment which I have
never ceased to value, was that it led to my acquaintance with Place.
From him I learned many things of great use to me in after life.
One thing he said to me was: "A man who is always running after his
character seldom has a character worth the chase." Some far-seeing
qualification was generally present in what he said. For a man who is
"always" vindicating himself becomes tiresome and ineffectual. Yet
now and then, sooner or later, and often better later then sooner, a
personal explanation may be useful. Printed actionable imputations
were made against Cobbett of which no notice was taken--so far as I
knew--which created in many minds an ineffaceable personal prejudice
against him.

Once imputations were published concerning me which justified
contradiction. It came to pass that they were certified as true by
a person of mark. Then I proposed to show that the allegations were
untrue. Whereupon I was assured it would be to my disadvantage with
many with whom I stood well, which meant that should I prove I was not
a rascal I should lose many of my best friends, which shows the curious
perplexities of personal explanation. Nevertheless, I made it.* Mr.
Place told me that in the course of his career as defender of the
people, "he had been charged with every crime known to the Newgate
Calendar save wilful murder." A needless reservation, for that would
have been believed. He let them pass, merely keeping a record of the
accusations to see if their variety included any originality. There was
one charge brought against him which to this day prejudices many against
him. The one thought to be most overwhelming was that he was a "tailor"
at Charing Cross. After that, argument against the principles he
maintained was deemed superfluous; as though following a trade of
utility disqualified a man's opinions on public affairs; while one who
did nothing, and whose life and ideas were useless to mankind, might be
listened to with deference.

     *"Warpath of Opinion."

In 1849 _Chambers's Journal_ published an article on the "Reaction of
Philanthropy," against which I made vehement objection in an article in
the _Spirit of the Age_, of which _Chambers's Journal_ took, for them,
the unusual course of replying. The _Spirit of the Age_ coming under
Place's notice, he sent me the following letter, which I cite exactly as
it was expressed, in his quaint, vigorous and candid way:--

"Brompton Square,

"March 3, 1849.

"Master Holyoake,--I have read your paper of observations on a paper
written by Chambers, and dislike it very much. You assume an evil
disposition in Chambers, and have laid yourself open to the same
imputation. This dispute now consists of three of us, you and I and
Chambers--all three of us, in vulgar parlance, being philanthropists. I
have not read Chambers, but expect to find, from what you have said and
quoted, that he, like yourself, has been led by his feelings, and not by
his understanding, and has therefore written a mischievous paper. I will
read this paper and decide for myself. Knowledge is not wisdom. The most
conspicuous proof of this is the conduct of Lord Brougham. He knows
many things, more, indeed, than most men, but is altogether incapable
of combining all that relates to any one case, i.e., understanding it
thoroughly, and he therefore never exhausts any subject, as a man of a
more enlarged understanding would do. This, too, is your case. I think I
may say that not any one of your reasonings is as perfect as it ought to
be, and if I were in a condition to do so, I would make this quite plain
to you by carrying out your defective _notions_--reasonings, if you like
the term better.

"It will, I am sure, be admitted, at least as far as your thinking can
go, that neither yourself, nor Chambers, nor myself, would intentionally
write a word for the purpose of misleading, much less injuring the
working people; yet your paper must, as far as it may be known to them,
not only have that tendency, but a much worse one; that of depraving
them, by teaching them, in their public capacity, to seek revenge, to
an extent which, could it pervade the whole mass, must lead to slaughter
among the human race--the beasts of prey called mankind; for such they
have ever been since they have had existence, and such as they must
remain for an indefinite time, if not for ever. Their ever being
anything else is with me a forlorn hope, while yet, as I can do no
better, I continue in my course of life to act as if I really had a
strong hope of immense improvement for the good of all.--Yours, really
and truly,

"Francis Place."

There was value in Mr. Place's friendship. He was able to measure the
minds of those with whom he came in contact, and for those for whom he
cared he would do the service of showing to them the limits within which
they were working. It was thus he took trouble to be useful to those who
could never requite him, by putting strong, wise thoughts before them.

Elsewhere* I have related how Place on one occasion--when all London was
excited, and the Duke of Wellington indignant and repellant--went on a
deputation to him, and was dismissed with the ominous words:

    *"Sixty Years," vol. i. chap. 40.

"You seem to have heads on your shoulders; take care you keep them
there." The courage of seeking this interview, at which Place was the
chief speaker, is well shown in the experience of George Petrie, who
was known to Place. Petrie was an intelligent soldier, who served
under Wellington in the Peninsular War, and was wounded in several
engagements. It often happened that the commissary was in arrears to the
troops with their rations, but when the supply arrived the arrears were
faithfully served out to the soldiers. On one of these occasions, when
some days' rations were due, Corporal Petrie was absent on duty when the
rations were served out, and on his return he found himself without his
arrears. To a half-starved soldier this was a serious disappointment,
and Petrie applied to the quartermaster, to the adjutant, and to the
captain of his company, but without effect, until he arrived at the
commanding officer of his regiment Being as unsuccessful as he had been
with the other officers, and becoming hungrier by delay, he requested
permission to make his complaint to the Commander-in-Chief (Lord
Wellington), which was granted. Upon being introduced he found his
lordship seated at a table perusing some documents. "Well," said the
Commander, without raising his eyes from the papers before him, "what
does this man want?" "He is come to appeal to your lordship about
his rations," replied the officer in attendance; whereupon the
Commander-in-Chief, without asking or permitting a single word of
explanation from the injured soldier, without discovering (as he ought
in common justice to have done) whether the soldier had a real grievance
for the redress of which he had sought the protection of the head of the
army, Wellington hurriedly exclaimed, "Take the fellow away and give him
a d----d good flogging!" Petrie, naturally indignant and a determined
man, lay in wait two nights to shoot Wellington, who escaped by taking
one night a different route, and on another being closely accompanied by
his staff. The facts were published in 1836. Petrie's appeal shows
that the Duke was not a pleasant person for Mr. Place to call upon. No
biography or book about Wellington has anything to say of his sympathy
with men who died in making his fame. He took the same care of his men,
and no more, that he did of his muskets, which it must be owned is more
than many employers do, who take more care of their machinery than of
the workers. Wellington kept his men dry, but he had no more feeling for
them than he had for their carbines. Petrie's story will be instructive
to men who shout for war without knowing what the soldier's fate is.
They were told by Tennyson "not to ask the reason why." Their business
is to die without inquiring whether they are murderers or patriots, or
what treatment will befall them in the ranks. If they do they may expect
some form of the Petrie treatment.

To Place, the experience of social reformers was as valuable as that
of politicians. Social life gives its character to public life, and the
politician is most to be valued whose measures tend to exalt the
daily life of the people. Near the end of his days Place addressed
the following (his last) letter to Robert Owen, with whom he had been
acquainted since 1813:--

"21, Brompton Square,

"March 26, 1847.

"Dear Owen,--It is some years since you and I had a conversation, and it
is time we had one. Will you call upon me, or shall I call upon you? I
go out but little, having an asthmatic complaint, which at times treats
me sadly, and from which I am never wholly free. Worst of all, I have
an affection of the brain, which will not permit me either to read or
write, and when these two complaints co-operate I am something worse
than good for nothing. You are, I conclude, in a much better state than
I am, although you are not much younger, yet the doctors tell me that
after having lived through seventy years without illness, I have
nothing to complain of in the usual circumstances of old age now that I
approximate to eighty.--

"Yours truly,

"Francis Place."


From a condition of absolute penuriousness, he raised himself to the
position of master tailor, from which, at the age of forty-five, he
was able to retire upon an income of L1,1000. Shrewd, hard-headed,
painstaking, vigilant and prudent as he was, he found, when more than
sixty, that L650 of his income was irrevocably lost He had put a large
part of his capital into house property, and left the investment of
it to an incompetent or dishonest solicitor.* The fate befel him which
afterwards befel Cobden, Thomas Bayley Potter, and some others.

Why did Place let his prudence sleep? Why, in his walks with Jeremy
Bentham,** did he not turn his steps to the sites of his investments,
and judge for himself their value? His absorbed interest in public
affairs is the only explanation. Yet he had often warned others that
such engrossment, however honourable, should be limited, and not
suffered to endanger necessary personal security.

On the death of Place in 1854, at the age of eighty-two, the _Spectator_
and the _Reasoner_ expressed a hope that a life of Place would be
written as one of supreme utility to the great class which he had served
so conspicuously.

Happily this was done, forty-four years after, in 1898,*** by Mr. Graham
Wallas. When he mentioned to me his intention of writing a biography
of Place, I told him where, in the Manuscript Department of the British
Museum, he would find virgin material in Place's own compact and
clear hand. By research there and elsewhere, Mr. Wallas has produced
a valuable and remarkable book, of which there is no similar one so
instructive to a working-class politician.

     * See Wallas's "Life of Place," p. 329.

     ** See "Sixty Years," vol. i. p. 215.

     *** "Life of Francis Place," by Graham Wallas, M.A.
     Longmans, Green & Co.

The most notable of all the insurgent publicists Place inspired and
counselled, Richard Carlile, an impassable defender of a Free Press,
whom pitiless power in the darkest days of its supremacy could not
subdue, thus wrote of Place: "Though by circumstances (meaning those of
nine years' imprisonment) separated from the immediate acquaintance of
Mr. Place for several years past, I can, by experience of eighteen
and the well-founded report of forty years, pronounce him a prodigy
of useful, resolute, consistent political exertion and indefatigable
labour, which evidently continues unabated to this day.... Francis
Place, by his assistant labours and advice given to the members of the
House of Commons, has produced more effect in that House than any man
who was ever a member."*

     * See article on the "Real Nobility of the Human Character,"
     by A. P. (i.e., Richard Carlile) in the _Monthly Magazine_,
     May 1835. p. 454.

This testimony from one who bore the heat and burden of the day with
Place, agrees with all recorded of him. Carlile wrote in 1835, and the
public work Place was engaged in then he continued until his death in
1854, at which time he was chairman of the Committee for Repealing Taxes
on Knowledge. The Old Postillion was on the saddle to the last.




CHAPTER X. MEETING BREAKERS--LIST OF THOSE PAID FOR DOING IT

The enfranchisement of the working class, for which Place worked
so unceasingly, could not come--in the ordinary course of things
English--until the middle class had succeeded in their contest with
their feudal masters. By the possession of the vote in 1832, the middle
class became a rival power to the aristocracy; and that power would be
greatly augmented if the middle class should favour the extension of the
franchise to the working class, as many of them were naturally inclined
to do. The Tory policy then was to sow animosity between the middle and
the working classes, which might prevent them acting together. Their
method was to suggest that the middle class, having obtained what they
wanted, cared nothing for the people, notwithstanding that Hume, Leader,
Roebuck, Grote, Mill, Cobden, and Bright, were the great champions of
the franchise for the people, who incurred labour, peril, and obloquy
for them.

Temple Leader said: "Do not be too sure workmen will not turn against
you, do what you may for them. If sheep had votes they would give them
all to the butcher"--as we have seen them do in this generation. The
Tories had spite against the Whigs, who gave the people the first Reform
Bill. Disraeli began to denounce the Whigs, and he soon found ostensible
leaders of the people to help. Chartist speakers were bribed to take up
the cry. The Irish in England, who thought their chances lay in English
difficulty, willingly preached distrust of the middle class, and their
eloquent tongues gave them ascendency among the Chartists, many of
whom honestly believed that spite was a mode of progress, and under the
impression that passion was patriotism, they took money to express it.
The Liberal portion of the middle class had long contributed to the
support of workmen's political societies. But when they found their own
meetings broken up by Chartists, and their Tory adversaries aided at
elections, their subscriptions decreased, and a new charge of hostility
to the working class was founded on that.

This chapter is a statement, not a plea. Considering the superior
information and means of the middle class, they have not shown
themselves so solicitous for the political claims of Labour as they
ought--having regard to their own interests alone. Nor have the Labour
class shown that regard for the rights of the middle class, by which
Labour could have furthered its own advantages. Friendliness between
them is the interest of both.

Who would have thought that if you scratched a Chartist you would find
a Tory agent under his skin? Yet so it proved with many of them. George
Julian Harney was a Republican. In early Chartist days he wore on
Winlaton platforms a Red Cap of Liberty, after the manner of Marat,
and called himself "L'Ami du Peuple," after Marat's famous "Journal of
Blood." Yet he was not the Friend of the People, in the sense we all
thought. He went to America with the reputation of a fiery patriot. It
procured for him a welcome from the Liberals of Boston, and he was given
a clerkship in the State House soon after his arrival. He might have
grown grey in England before a place would have been given him in any
Government department here.* To my astonishment Harney soon began to
write home disparagements of the American people and their Government,
such as we were familiar with from aristocratic pens. When the Bulgarian
massacres were stirring the indignation of English Liberals, he sent
me a pamphlet he had written, in the spirit of Disraeli's "Coffee House
Babble" speech. I wrote to him, saying "it read like the production of
a full-blown Tory." He resented the imputation--when all the time it was
true. He had cast off his Liberal garments, and was naked, and ashamed.
Afterwards he cast off the shame. When I was in Boston, in 1879,
American Liberals expressed to me their disappointment that Mr. Harney
neither associated with them nor lent them any assistance in their
societies, such as they had expected when they welcomed him to their
shores. Yet to the end of his days I remained his personal friend, in
consideration of services in agitations in which we had worked together.
I had helped him when he issued _The Republic_ and had written words in
honour of his first wife, a Mauchline beauty of the Amazon type, whose
heroism was notable. In times of danger she would say to her husband,
"Do what you think to be your duty, and never mind me."

     * Sam Bamford, who wrote the "Pass of Death," when Canning
     died, was old before we accorded him a seat in a cellar in
     Somerset House, copying papers at a few shillings a week. It
     was all his Parliamentary friends could procure for him.

I first knew Harney at the time of the Bull Ring Riots in Birmingham in
1839. He was "wanted" by the authorities. I alone knew where he lodged.
He knew he was safe in my hands, and we never ceased to trust each
other. I never change my friendship for a colleague because he changes
his opinions; but I never carry my friendship so far as to change my
convictions for his.

Happily it is now thought a scandal to say that Chartist politicians
took money from Tories to break up Liberal meetings. This shows there
is a feeling against it. But they did take it Thomas Cooper, as well
as Ernest Jones, the two poets of Chartism, were themselves in this
disastrous business.

When Thomas Cooper came to London he went, as most Chartists of note
did, to see Francis Place. After some conversation Place asked, "Why
did you take money to prevent Liberal meetings being held?" Cooper
vehemently denied it. Place then showed him a cheque which Sir Thomas
Easthope, the banker, had cashed for him. Place said, "You had L109,
so much in gold, so much in silver, and so much in copper, for the
convenience of paying minor patriots." Years after Cooper in his Life
expressed regret that he had denied receiving Tory money.

Mr. Bright, in the House of Commons, June 5th, 1846, told the honourable
member, Mr. Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, that those parties with whom he
was found at public meetings out of doors had been the greatest enemies
of the repeal of the Corn Laws. (Cries of "Name!")

In answer to the cries of "Name" (says a leading article of the _League_
newspaper), we will mention a few only of the most prominent and active
of these:--Feargus O'Connor, Leach, McDowall, Pitkeithly, Nightingale,
O'Brien, Marsden, Bairstow, Cooper, Harney--some of whom, to our
knowledge, and as we are ready to prove, were well paid for their
opposition to the Free Traders. Nor would it be difficult to show
where the money came from. Let one fact suffice. In June, 1841, on
the occasion of a great open-air Anti-Corn Law meeting being held in
Stevenson Square, Manchester (in answer to the taunt of the Duke of
Richmond that no public meeting could be held against the Corn Laws),
the monopolists made a great effort to upset the meeting. Every Chartist
leader of any notoriety was brought to Manchester from places as distant
as Leicester and Sunderland. The most prominent leader and fugleman of
the opposition was Mr. Charles Wilkins, Dr. Sleigh and he moving and
seconding the amendment to the Free Trade resolution. On that very
morning Mr. Wilkins cashed a cheque for L150, drawn by the Duke of
Buckingham at Jones and Lloyd's Bank. At that meeting of 10,000 working
men the Chartists were driven off the ground. Blows being exchanged
and blood spilt in the fray, the aim of the Chartist party to create
confusion was so far gained; and the moral effect of the demonstration
was effectually marred. For more than three years at the beginning
of the agitation every public meeting called by the Free Traders was
subjected to outrages of a similar kind by the followers of O'Connor.*

     * The _League_ newspaper, No. 142, vol. iii. p. 625.

A short time ago Mr. Chamberlain made a point of declaring that the
working classes were against Free Trade in Cobden's days. The only
portion of the working class known to oppose Free Trade were the
Chartists. Why they did so, Mr. Chamberlain ought to know. If he does
not, he may learn the reason in these pages. The list of the payments
made to them was published, when it could have been contradicted if
untrue. But no disproof was ever attempted. Even "Honest Tom Duncombe,"
as the Chartists affectionately called him, was known to be in the pay
of the French Emperor, of sinister renown, as documents found in the
Tuileries showed. The Chartists, who became the hired agents of Tory
hostility, did more to delay and discredit the Charter and to create
distrust of the cause of Labour than all outside enemies put together.

Those who censure the middle class for indifference to the Parliamentary
claims of Labour, should bear in mind the provocation they received.
Their meetings were frustrated for years after the Anti-Corn Law
agitation was ended.

In the light of what we know it seems hypocrisy in the Tories to speak
of Chartists with the horror and disdain which they displayed, when all
the while the Chartists were doing their work. It seems also ingratitude
that when questions were raised in Parliament of mitigating the
condition of Chartist prisoners, the Tories never raised a single voice
in their favour.

We know there were Tory Chartists, because they took money from the
Tories to promote their interests. We know it also by the sign that
while they denounced the Whigs they were always silent about the Tories.
Now the Whigs are practically dropped and Liberals are denounced, there
is the same tell-tale silence as to the Tories. Now we see a party
arise so virtuous, philosophic and impartial that no party suits their
fastidious taste, and they will have nothing to do with Liberals or
Tories. When they speak, Liberals are referred to as very unsatisfactory
persons, but no objections are made to Tories. The reticence is still
instructive.

So be it. In art, every man to his taste; in politics, every man
according to his conscience. I only describe species. There is a science
of political horticulture, and it is only by knowing the nature of the
plant that any one can tell what flower or fruit to expect. Yet
there are politicians who go mooning about looking for nectarines on
crab-apple trees. The Old Postillion made no such mistake.




CHAPTER XI. TROUBLE WITH HER MAJESTY


I.

References are continually made in the Press to certain events recorded
in this chapter founded upon statements made by myself, but lacking
details and without the official substantiating documents. The original
summonses and other legal instruments were preserved, and copies of
them are given herein. Reports only would be incredible to the new
generation, and it is necessary to publish them to give authenticity to
the narrative of what really took place.

It seems better to say "Trouble with Her Majesty" than Trouble with
the Queen, "Majesty" being more official than personal. The three
indictments to be recorded in this narrative all took place in the
Victorian reign. It seems a disadvantage of the monarchical system that
the name of the head of the reigning House should be attached to all
proceedings, great or petty, noble or mean, honourable or infamous. It
assumes the personal cognisance and interference in everything by the
occupant of the Throne. It is the same in the theological system, where
the Deity is assumed to personally cause or permit whatever takes place
in this inexplicable universe. If the glory of the mountain be his, the
devastation of the inhabitants of the valley by a volcano is also his
act. The Church is beginning, not too soon, to discourage this theory.
The curate rescued from a wreck who reported to Archbishop Whately that
he had been "providentially" saved, was asked by the logical prelate,
"Do you intend to say that the lost have been 'providentially' drowned?"
Thus blasphemy is made one of the wings of religion--just as sedition
becomes a wing of loyalty, when discreditable incidents are represented
as the personal acts of the Crown. Lawyers know that the King or
Queen is not directly answerable, but by acute legal fiction, odious
responsibility is transferred to others. But the people always think
that he or she, in whose name a thing is done, is answerable for it,
and theologians all teach that everything, even rascality, occurs by the
will of God.

References to my indebtedness to the Exchequer of L600,000 of fines
incurred by publishing unstamped newspapers, seem to readers of to-day a
factless tradition. This is not so, as will appear from the warrants and
notices of prosecution which follow, copied from the original documents
in my possession, which have never until now been published.

Early in 1855, I received the following message from Her Majesty, in the
18th year of her reign:--

"Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, to George Jacob Holyoake,
greeting. We command and strictly injoin you that (all excuses apart)
you appear before the Barons of our Exchequer at Westminster, on the
thirty-first day of January instant, To answer us concerning certain
Articles then and there on our behalf to be objected against you. And
this in no wise omit under the penalty of One Hundred Pounds, which we
shall cause to be levied to our use upon your Goods and Chattels, Lands
and Tenements, if you neglect this our present command. Witness, Sir
Frederick Pollock, Knight, at Westminster, the eleventh day of January,
in the eighteenth Year of our Reign.

"By the Barons.

"H. W. Vincent, Q.R."

Mr. George Jacob Holyoake,--You are served with this Process to the
intent that you may by your Attorney, according to the practice of the
Court, appear in Her Majesty's Court of Exchequer, at the return thereof
in order to your defence in this prosecution.

"Mr. George Jacob Holyoake.

"At the suit of Her Majesty's Attorney-General,

"By Information.

"Folio 9--1855.

"Joseph Timm," Solicitor of the Inland Revenue,

"Somerset House, London.

"Folio 9--55-

"Inland Revenue, Somerset House.

"Solicitors' Department.

"The Attorney-General against George Jacob Holyoake.

"The penalties sought to be recovered by this prosecution are several of
L20 each, which the defendant has incurred by publishing certain
newspapers called _War Chronicle_ and _The War Fly Sheet_ on unstamped
paper."


As I had published 30,000 copies, the penalties incurred were L600,000.

These alarming documents were accompanied by intimation as to the
question at issue, and the penalties to be recovered. My solicitors,
Messrs. Ashurst, Waller and Morris, No. 6, Old Jewry, put in an
appearance for me, but on the repeal of the duty shortly after,
a hearing was never entered upon, and the penalties have not been
collected. How they came to be incurred in respect of the _War
Chronicles_ the reader may see in "Sixty Years," vol. i. p. 287.

No intimation was ever given to me--there is no courtesy, I believe, in
law--that these intimidating summonses were withdrawn. I had no defence
against the charge. I could not deny, nor did I intend to deny, that I
had knowingly and wilfully published the said papers. In justification
I could only allege that I had acted, as I believed, in the public
interest, which, I was told, was no legal answer. The law, which ought
to be clear and plain, was, I knew, full of quirks and surprises; and,
for all I knew, or know to this day, the payment of the fines incurred
might be demanded of me. It was communicated to the then Chancellor of
the Exchequer (Mr. Gladstone) that in case of the full demand being made
upon me, I should be under the necessity of asking him to take it in
weekly instalments, as I had not the whole amount by me.

The position of an "unstamped" debtor was not, in those days, a light
one. My house in Fleet Street could be entered by officers of the Inland
Revenue; every person in it, printers, assistants in the shop, and any
one found upon the premises could be arrested. The stock of books could
be seized, and blacksmiths set to break up all presses and destroy all
type, as was done to Henry Hetherington; and for many weeks I made
daily preparations for arrest.

The _St. James's Gazette_ (April 13, 1901) referred to the fines of
L600,000 incurred by me. What I really owed was a much larger sum,
had the Government been exacting. Previously to the _War Chronicle_
liability, I had published the _Reasoner_ twelve years, of which the
average number issued may have exceeded 2,000 weekly, or 104,000 a
year--every copy of which, containing news and being unstamped, rendered
me liable to a fine of L20 each copy. Now 104,000 x 12 x L20 exceeded
more millions of indebtedness than I like to set down. Any arithmetical
reader can ascertain the amount for himself. A friend in the Inland
Revenue Office first made the calculation for me, which astonished me
very much, as it did him. Had the whole sum been recoverable it might
have saved the Budget of a Chancellor of the Exchequer struggling with a
deficit.

The Government were frequently asked to prosecute me. It was not from
any tenderness to me that they did not. It was their reluctance to give
publicity to the _Reasoner_ that caused them to refrain. It was the
advocacy of unusual opinion which gave me this immunity.

The _St. James's Gazette_ asked me: "Is it justifiable for a good
citizen to break a law because he believes it to be wrong?" I answered
"No! unless the public good seems to require it, and that he who breaks
the law is prepared to take the consequences." I never evaded the
consequences, nor complained of them when they came.

If every one who breaks a law first satisfies himself that public
interest justifies it, and he is ready to meet the penalty, only bad
laws would be broken. It is also the duty of a citizen to find out
whether there is any practical way open for procuring the repeal of
a bad law before breaking it. Respect for law, under representative
government, in which the law-breaker has a share, is a cardinal duty of
a citizen.

On my violation of the law in the matter of the _War Chronicles_ Mr.
Gladstone (the Chancellor of the Exchequer) said to a deputation, that
he knew "my object was not to break the law, but to try the law."

The impulsive and the ambitious of repute may overlook this
consideration, but as I sought neither distinction nor martyrdom, I
acted as I did because no other course was open, and no other person
would take this.


II.

In the year following the prosecution in the Court of Exchequer, Her
Majesty gave me further trouble in discharge of the odious duty imposed
upon her as collector of debts for the Church. As few know to-day how
hateful this impost was, it will be informing to see how the clerical
case was officially stated to me. It began as follows:--

"Mr. George Jacob Holyoake,--Take Notice that in and by certain Rates or
Assessments made by virtue of and for the purposes mentioned in the Act
of Parliament passed in the 4th Year of the Reign of her late Majesty
Queen Ann, Cap. 27, intituled, 'An Act for settling the Impropriate
Tythes of the Parish of Saint Bridgett, alias Bride's, London,' You are
assessed in respect of the Houses, Shops, Warehouses, Cellars, Stables,
Tofts, Grounds, or other Tenements or Hereditaments, within the said
Parish occupied by you, in four several Sums amounting to One pound four
shillings and eightpence for four several Quarters of a Year commencing
at the Feast of The Birth of our Lord Christ, 1854, and ending at the
same Feast in the Year 1855, and that such assessments are made on a
Rental of L74. Dated this 22nd day of May, 1856.

"John William Thomas,

"Collector of the said Rates."


These ecclesiastical cormorants took a hungry survey of every place
containing property on which they could lay hands. After the Rathcormac
massacre, where two sons of the widow Ryan were shot by the soldiers,
employed by the Church in collecting its rates--how appropriate and
consoling it must be to a bereaved mother to read that the rates
commenced to be due at "The Feast of the Birth of our Lord Christ!" Yet
there are people who go about promoting prosecutions for blasphemy, and
with a holy partiality leave untouched outrages like these. The summons
sent to me speaks of the "late Queen Ann," who had been dead 140 years.
Her name being spelt "Ann" shows that she had been dead long enough to
lose the final "e" of her name. The rent of the Fleet Street house was
L74, L400 having been paid for the lease. Each time there came on
the scene the local agent of the Church, who delivered an interesting
intimation as follows:--

"Mr. George Jacob Holyoake,--I do hereby demand payment of One pound
four shillings and eightpence, due from you for Rates made in pursuance
of the Act of Parliament passed in the 4th Year of the Reign of her
late Majesty Queen Ann, Cap. 17, intituled, 'An Act for settling the
Impropriate Tythes of the Parish of Saint Bridgett, alias Brides,
London.' And take notice that unless the same be paid to me within Four
Days next after the demand thereof hereby made, I shall Distrain your
Goods and Chattels, and sell and dispose thereof, and out of the Monies
arising thereby pay the said Sum of Money, and the Costs allowed by the
Acts of Parliament in that case made and provided.

"Dated this 22nd day of May, 1856.

"John William Thomas,

"Collector of the said Rates."


The predatory Vicar of St. Bride's, for whose advantage the contemplated
seizure was being made, remained in the background, praying for my soul
while he picked my pocket, as I regarded his action.

After two or three seizures of property, I sent to the vicar payment
"in kind"--the form in which the payment of tithe was originally
contributed. The chief produce of my farm in Fleet Street consisted
in volumes of the _Reasoner_. I sent the vicar three volumes, which
exceeded in value his demand. He troubled me no more.

The last citation relates to a trial in which Lord Chief Justice
Coleridge was concerned, and Henry Thomas Buckle made a splendid defence
of a poor well-sinker who was afraid of killing the world.


III.


In a Cornish village in 1857 small patch advertisements broke out like
small-pox, of which the following is a copy:--

"BLASPHEMY.

"Any person who has seen a man writing Blasphemous sentences
on Gates or other places in the neighbourhood of Liskeard, is requested
to communicate immediately with Messrs. Pedler and Grylls, Liskeard, or
with the Rev. R. Hobhouse, St. Ive Rectory."

Whether the perturbed Rector of St Ive found out anything, or whether
ashamed, as he might well be, at being mixed up in so miserable a
business, he retired from it, and the Rev. Paul Bush appeared in his
place as a spiritual detective on the pounce, and a poor, eccentric
well-sinker, one Thomas Pooley, was accused of writing in chalk
incoherent words in a hand only intelligible to the all-construing eyes
of the policeman of the Church, who caused to be issued the following
ponderous summons in her Majesty's name:--

"To Thomas Pooley, of the Borough of Liskeard in the County of Cornwall,
Labourer.

"Cornwall to wit, Whereas Information and Complaint (a) hath this day
been laid before the undersigned, one of Her Majesty's Justices of the
Peace in and (b) for the said County of Cornwall by The Reverend Paul
Bush of the Parish of Duloe, in the said County, for that you the said
Thomas Pooley on the twenty-second of May last at the Parish of Duloe,
in the said County, did unlawfully and wilfully compose, write and
publish a certain scandalous, impious, blasphemous and profane Libel of
and concerning the Holy Scriptures and the Christian Religion, and for
having blasphemously spoken against God and profanely scoffed at the
Holy Scripture, and exposed it to contempt and ridicule, and also for
having spoken against Christianity and the established religion.

"These are therefore to command you in Her Majesty's name, to be
and appear on Wednesday the 1st day of July next at 10 o'clock in the
Forenoon, at Treean Gate in the Parish of Lanewath in the said County,
before such said Justices of the Peace for the County as may then
be there, to answer to the said Information and Complaint, and to be
further dealt with according to Law.

"Given under my hand and Seal this 27th day of June, in the year of
our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven, at Liskeard in the
County aforesaid.

"James Glencross."


Notes on the summons were:--"(a) If upon Oath insert 'On Oath.' (b)
Erase the words in italic when summons is issued by Justice acting out
of jurisdiction in which he resides."

There is more untruth and holy malevolence in this summons than Pooley
was ever known to be guilty of in all his life. Mr. Bush charges Mr.
Pooley with "wilfully composing" the words complained of. Everybody
in the parish knew that he had not the mental coherence to "compose"
anything. He had neither spoken against God--for he was a believer in
Him--nor was he a preacher either in pulpit or on street corner. Nor
did he "speak" about God, except when he was being stripped in gaol. His
"scoffing against the Holy Scriptures" merely meant that he was incensed
against priests. The charge that he had published a "scandalous,
impious, blasphemous, and profane libel" was simply the reckless,
false, professional language of the clergyman and lawyer who drew up
the summons, which would be counted unscrupulous and venomous in other
persons. In this summons we have the same profanation of the Queen's
name as we have already seen. How can a monarch expect his office or
character to be held in esteem who permits his or her name to be cited
for the purposes of any bigot who has spite in his heart and falsehood
on his lips? People cease to respect a monarch who has no respect for
himself.

There was more of the evil spirit of untruth in the charges in the
summons than in all Mr. Pooley's vague and honest anger. I went down to
Duloe to see Mr. Bush, and found him residing in a spacious house, with
a pleasant outlook of roads and fields before it, while poor Pooley
lived in wells. Why should one so well-placed as the Rev. Paul Bush
conspire to procure twenty-one months' imprisonment for this friendless,
half-demented parishioner? Very likely Mr. Bush was by nature a
kind-hearted clergyman in whom theology generated--

"Words, Which turned the milk of kindness into curds."

At the trial Pooley, who was entirely undefended received a sentence
of twenty-one months' imprisonment. The son of the judge, Sir John Duke
Coleridge, who prosecuted, said, "It was not the prosecution of
opinion in any sense, but society was to be protected from outrage and
indecency." If so, six weeks' imprisonment was more than sufficient in a
case in which there was no wantonness and only half-insane conviction in
it Mr. Thomas Henry Buckle, the famous historian of Civilisation, wrote
in _Fraser_ an indignant and generous denunciation of the sentence, and
those concerned in it. It was the last great letter of a philosopher in
defence of the mental liberty of a poor man, and no equal to it appeared
in the century. I published an account of Pooley's case, which Buckle
saw. Sir John Duke (who afterwards became Lord Chief Justice Coleridge)
had behaved, as prosecuting counsel, better than I knew, as I
admitted when I did know it. Still, the sentence (twenty-one months'
imprisonment) will always stand on record as atrocious, apart from the
irresponsible condition of the offender. The words said to be "spoken,"
and which were made a count in his indictment, were mere exclamations,
provoked by the irritation of gaolers, which the prisoner had neither
means nor intent of publishing. A barrister in court was struck by the
signs of insanity in Pooley, unnoticed by the preoccupied eyes of the
judge and his son.

Pooley, as we have said, was a well-sinker, a tall, strongly-built man
of honest aspect and of good courage and fidelity, who had descended
into a deep well and rescued his master from death. Though not a
philosopher, Pooley, like some who were, was a wild sort of Pantheist.
He thought this world to be an organism, and believed it to be alive;
and such was the tenderness and reverence of his devotion that nothing
could persuade him to dig a well beyond a certain depth, lest he should
wound the heart of the world.

Some years later Lord Coleridge informed me that he did not press the
case against Pooley, and that he had no idea he was of uncertain mind,
nor did his father suspect it. I thought it was impossible they could be
unaware of it, as it was well known to all Liskeard. In justice to Lord
Coleridge's father, I ought to say, that when he subsequently became
aware of Pooley's condition of mind, he at once consented to his
liberation, and Pooley was taken home, after four months' imprisonment,
in the carriage of the governor of the gaol, who had sympathy for him.
Sir William Molesworth and Sir Erskine Perry were, after Mr. Buckle,
the chief instruments of his liberation. The facts I have related of the
Coleridges were not known to me when I first saw Mr. Buckle, who wrote
upon the information I gave him. Pooley was a resolute man, who had
self-respect and would not wear the prison dress. When it was put upon
him he tore it to shreds, and he was left naked in the dark cell in
which he was confined. He would have been made quite mad had he not been
released when he was.


IV.

The last case in which I supply documentary evidence is that concerning
the limelight placed on the Clock Tower at Westminster. No member of
Parliament had thought of it, nor should I, had I not needed it for my
own convenience. I was then secretary to Mr. (afterwards Sir) Joseph
Cowen. When he wished to take part in a division he would ask me to
ascertain whether the House was sitting. In those days there were two
lamp-posts in Palace Yard with three lights each, which were kept in
while the "House was sitting," but when the "House was up" two of the
lights were extinguished. There was no other sign, and I had often
to ride from Redcliffe Square, Brompton, to Palace Yard before the
signal-light could be seen. The limelight had just been perfected, and
it occurred to me that if an effective light was placed on the
Clock Tower it would be conspicuous for miles around, and members of
Parliament, dining in the suburbs, could learn by that sign when the
House was sitting and its absence would indicate that the House was
up. I wrote to Lord John Manners, giving reasons of Parliamentary
convenience for the institution of such a light Lord John was then First
Commissioner of Works. The following is a copy of the letter directed to
be sent to me:--

"Office of Works, 12, Whitehall Place, S.W." It is requested that any
answer to this letter may be directed to The Private Secretary to the
First Commissioner of H.M. Works.

"8--1--68.

"Sir,--I am desired by Lord John Manners to acknowledge with
thanks the receipt of your letter, and suggestions.

"Your faithful servant,

"H. Stuart Wortlev.

"G. J. Holyoake, Esq."


Nothing was done during Lord John Manners' reign as Commissioner of
Works, but when Mr. A. S. Ayrton became Commissioner of the Board,
he found the letter in the archives of the office, and had the light
erected.




CHAPTER XII. UNFORESEEN QUALITIES IN PUBLIC MEN


I.

Without noticing unexpected qualities now and then, and remembering
them, many are needlessly discouraged in purposes of improvement. The
two Bramwells, the judge and his brother Frederick, were both men of
great parts. This narrative relates to the Judge, who could do mischief
at will--and did it. It was Baron Bramwell who protected the bribers of
Berwick. It is to judges of his political proclivities, to whom bribers
look still for countenance. Young men of to-day enjoy advantages unknown
to their forefathers, and the new generation are mostly ignorant how
their good fortune, which Liberalism brought them, came to them--and
they make no inquiry. Not only have they no pride in sustaining the
political traditions of their family, but their base ambition is to give
the influence of the position they have attained to that party who
put every impediment in the way of their ever emerging from social and
industrial obscurity--a condition from which they did not deserve to be
rescued.

Political reformers used to complain of bribery at elections, by which a
few wealthy political adventurers tempted the baser sort of citizens to
sell the liberties of the nation to them. Tories, by the law of their
being, seek authority by which the majority of them intend the control
of public affairs for their own advantage. They supply money for
corruption, intending to refund themselves by place and profit when the
resources of the State come under their manipulation. Even judges
of their party accord them legal security in their political
nefariousness.

When the Liberals of Newcastle-on-Tyne claimed that Parliament should
terminate electoral bribery, Lord John Russell said the law was already
against it, and that the Newcastle applicants to the House of Commons
should put bribery down at their own door, meaning in Berwick-on-Tweed,
notorious for it Lord John had never tried to do this, or he would not
have advised the attempt His counsel at the time seemed reasonable, and
what came of it was shown in a petition from the Northern Reform Union,
sent to Parliament (1859), which set forth as follows:--

That the petitioners were members of a society named "The Northern
Reform Union," which was instituted for the purpose of obtaining a
further Reform of the Representation of the People of these Realms in
Parliament, and for the purpose of vindicating that purity and freedom
of election which is essential to a true representative system. Amongst
other steps with a view to these purposes, the said petitioners were
induced to institute inquiries into certain corrupt practices, alleged
to have taken place in the election of a member for the town of
Berwick-upon-Tweed.

The result of these inquiries was, that the petitioners were induced,
as a matter of public duty, to prosecute certain electors of the town
of Berwick-upon-Tweed for the offence of offering bribes at the election
aforesaid. The prosecution was instituted under the provision of the Act
of 1854, known as "The Corrupt Practices Prevention Act," when one or
more of the persons upon whom writs were served in accordance with the
provisions of the Act, made affidavit that to the best of their belief,
Mr. Richard Bagnall Reed, the secretary of the Northern Reform Union
and the nominal prosecutor in these cases, was not of ability to pay the
costs of suit in case of nonsuit, and applied through their counsel
to Sir G. W. Bramwell, one of the Barons of Her Majesty's Court of
Exchequer, to make order that security should be lodged for payment
of the costs in these actions if proceeded with. A report of the
particulars of this application was published in a newspaper printed at
Newcasde under the title of the _Northern Daily Express_, which report
is verbatim, as follows:--

"London, _December_ 16, 1859.

"Actions have been commenced, at the suit of Mr. R. B. Reed, the
secretary of the Northern Reform Union, against several persons
suspected of bribery at the last Berwick election. The actions are
founded on the 5th Section of 'The Corrupt Practices Prevention Act,
1854,' which provides that 'any one who shall be guilty of using any
undue influence at any Parliamentary election shall not only be guilty
of a misdemeanour, but shall also be liable to forfeit the sum of fifty
pounds to any person who shall sue for the same, together with full
costs of suit.'

"An application was made at chambers before the Hon. Mr. Baron B ram
well, on the part of the defendants in the above actions, for an order
that the plaintiff should give security for costs.

"Mr. Chitty appeared in support of the application.

"Mr. Rutherford appeared on behalf of the secretary of the Northern
Reform Union to oppose the granting of the order.

"Mr. Chitty founded his application on an affidavit, which stated
that Mr. Reed was not the real plaintiff in the action; he was only
instigated by the Northern Reform Union, who were the real plaintiffs.
A copy of the _Northern Daily Express_ was annexed as an exhibit to the
affidavit, and a passage was read from it relating to the proceedings of
the Northern Reform Union. Mr. Chitty cited cases to prove that where a
plaintiff in an action was for the benefit of third parties, he is bound
to give security for costs; and he endeavoured to show that in the event
of the action being decided in the defendant's favour, it would be in
vain to look to the plaintiff for costs.

"Mr. Baron Bramwell hereupon made the following extraordinary remark:
'This Northern Reform Union is a purity society. It consists of
patriots, and surely these gentlemen will only be too eager to give
any security that may be desired, if it were merely to show their
high-mindedness and integrity.'

"Mr. Rutherford said that his Lordship, on looking into the case, would
find that the application now made was a vexatious proceeding to throw
obstacles in the way of the plaintiff. Mr. Reed was the secretary of the
Union, and the proper person to sue. The Union must sue in the name of
some one, and who so proper as their secretary? The authorities that
had been cited on the other side did not touch the case, because the
plaintiff was suing for penalties, which, if recovered, would be for his
own benefit. It mattered not at whose instigation he was suing. He was
suing for a penalty, which the Act of Parliament gave him the right to
sue for.

"Mr. Baron Bramwell: 'What is the plaintiffs position? Is he a man of
substance?'

"Mr. Rutherford: 'He is, I am told, a gentleman of a respectable
position. But that is not the question; it appears clearly from the
authorities that in penal actions the courts have refused to order
security, even in cases where the common informer was a person of great
poverty. In one case Mr. Justice Bayley says, "Many _qui tam_ actions
have been brought by men who were worth nothing, but there is no
instance of their being compelled to give security for costs. It might
happen that the penalties had been incurred, but their recovery would be
defeated by requiring such a security."'

"Mr. Baron Bramwell here observed: 'There is great force in that Men of
property are not likely to trouble themselves about such things. I think
I cannot make the order. Cannot some agreement be come to between the
parties? Mr. Chitty, will you name any other member of the Union to
be substituted as plaintiff instead of Mr. Reed? Some one must be
plaintiff; and the same argument you have used against Mr. Reed would
apply to any one else.'

"A long discussion here ensued.

"Mr. Rutherford said he could not, without the consent of his clients,
agree to substitute another person as plaintiff. The Act would become a
dead letter if the judges allowed obstacles to be thrown in the way of
carrying it out. There was no ground at all for this application, and
if his Lordship granted it, it was impossible to conceive under what
circumstances a similar application would be refused.

"Mr. Chitty insisted that his clients would not be able to recover their
costs if the action were decided in their favour. It was a very hard
thing to be compelled to defend an action at the suit of invisible
personages. His Lordship had said that 'purity principles were all very
fine.'

"Mr. Baron Bramwell: 'No doubt they are. It is very easy to go about
professing integrity. To commence actions against people for penalties
when the plaintiff cannot pay the costs, is a cheap way of becoming
a patriot--cheap and, I think, nasty. I find that the Act gives me
a discretion. The affidavits made by the defendants have not been
answered. I shall make the order.'

"The order was made accordingly.

"The petitioners were informed and believed that the report quoted was
substantially and literally correct. It was reprinted and commented upon
by various other journals, and no attempt to question its accuracy was
made, either on the part of the learned judge or of any other person.

"The petitioners were persuaded that the language asserted to have been
used by the learned judge on this occasion cannot be deemed by, nor
appear to Parliament either befitting the station of him who used it,
or just towards the suitors in this prosecution, who were taking legal
steps, under a sense of public duty, to put a stop to practices which
tend to corrupt the source of all law.

"The petitioners submitted that the order made on this occasion is
contrary to all precedent, and inconsistent with the intention and
enactments of the said Corrupt Practices Act, which by Section 13
expressly limits the obligation on the plaintiff to find security for
costs to those cases only where he may seek to recover, by order of the
judge, the costs of prosecution for offences against the Act.

"The petitioners urged that they did not deserve to have their motives
and characters thus questioned and sneered away, nor did they think that
such language as that imputed to Baron Bramwell can tend to add to that
respect for the law and those who administer it which the petitioners
trusted may never be lost amongst Englishmen.

"On the contrary, such language appeared to the petitioners calculated
to cause the people to believe that a complicity with such practices
exists amongst the administrators of the law; subversive at once of
justice and of the representative portion of the Legislature.

"The petitioners, therefore, prayed the honourable House of Commons to
take such steps as might appear to it most fitting, to bring the matter
under the notice of Her Majesty and her advisers in such a mode as may
prevent a repetition of the same."

This remarkable petition, which may be read in the records of the House,
bore the signatures of the following persons:--

     Thomas Doubleday,
     James Eadie,
     James Watson,
     James Hay,
     Jos. Cowen, jun.,
     Robert Sutherland,
     Thomas Gregson,
     Thomas Allen,
     Jos. Barlow,
     Thomas Spotswood, jun.,
     John Emerson,
     Robert Ramsay,
     William Douglas,
     James Reed, and thirty-three others.

The character of Baron Bramwells remarks--the impediments he must
well know he was putting in the way of any prosecution for bribery in
Berwick; the words by which he sought to intimidate the prosecutors
by holding them up to public ridicule--the language of the petition
appropriately characterised. Baron Bramwell could not be ignorant of
the great expense which had been incurred in taking legal proceedings
against the persons accused of bribery and in collecting evidence long
after the time when the acts of bribery occurred. Such evidence is
expensive to collect at the time, and much costlier at a later stage.
After obtaining witnesses it was necessary to protect them from being
spirited away at the time of the trial--no uncommon occurrence in these
cases. Many hundreds of pounds must have been spent before the case
reached the stage when Baron Bramwell was appealed to by the accused to
put obstacles in the way of the charges against them being tried. The
penalties recoverable under the Act would not have covered a tenth part
of these costs. Those who appealed to Baron Bramwell for protection knew
perfectly well, as all Durham and Northumberland knew, that any costs
they might be able to claim against Mr. Reed would be met. Baron
Bramwell, by the remarks he uttered and the order he made, aided and
abetted the bribery, and protected those who committed it. The Baron's
observation that "men of property would not be likely to trouble
themselves" to put the Act in force against electoral corruption, was
true and significant. The "men of property" were they who profited
by it; and if any man of property had justice and patriotic spirit
sufficient to prosecute bribers, he was certain to incur annoyance and
loss, and subject himself to offensive comments such as Baron Bramwell
made. It was the duty of a judge, to whom the Act gave discretion, to
use it in favour of public purity, and not to favour public corruption.
Though no other judge behaved so flagrantly ill as Baron Bramwell, there
were few who could be trusted to render justice to Reformers.

The Tory judge, Baron Bramwell, sneered away all chance of a just
verdict, and Mr. Joseph Cowens noble effort to vindicate electoral
purity cost him L2,000 and whatever obloquy and derision the venomous
tongue of the judge could heap upon him.

Let men beware of principles which render corruption congenial--and let
them honour the memory of those who made heroic sacrifices for electoral
integrity.

*****

It is happily exceptional when political partisanship perverts the sense
of justice in a judge. Sometimes the sense of truth, characteristic of
Liberalism (for it is not worth while being a Liberal unless it implies
the ascendency of truth) is perverted by political exigency or obscured
by excitement. An instance of this occurred where it was little
expected.


II.

Mr. J. Humffreys Parry drew up the legal part of my defence at
Gloucester in 1842. He was then a young law student, living in lodgings
at (what was then) No. 5, Gray's Inn Road, near Theobalds' Road. His
grandfather was editor of the Cambro-Briton, and one of the founders, in
1820, of the Cymmrodorion Society. But we knew nothing of this. We only
knew young Humffreys as a stalwart, energetic platform speaker. Radical,
bold, and impetuous, but so manifestly sincere, that it atoned for
his somewhat gaseous style of speaking. Like O'Connell, he acquired
eventually two styles. Parry's legal style became Demosthenic in
its terseness. For the research and care he took to prepare my legal
defences, he ought, even at that stage of his career, to have received
twenty guineas, but for it he received nothing, nor asked for anything.
When he became Mr. Serjeant Parry he abandoned his platform style
altogether, for one of uncoloured vigour, which gave him ascendency
at the Bar. Had he lived a few years longer than he did he would have
become one of our judges. His son--known as Judge Parry--was shot by a
suitor, while presiding at a Manchester court, but not shot fatally. He
is still known with distinction as a judge, as an author, and dramatic
critic. Thus three generations of Parrys have been notable.

Years ago propagandists of new opinion were often assisted by Mr. Robert
Mackay, author of a powerful work on the "Progress of the Intellect." A
silent, unobtrusive man, Mr. Mackay would be seen at times at meetings
or lectures, but never taking any public part He seemed to shrink back
when addressed, and was as reserved as an affrighted man. In his quiet
way, of his own initiative, he took much trouble to promote the opening
of the National Gallery on Sundays, and went personally to men of note
in law, science, and art, to solicit their signatures to a memorial in
favour of opening public treasures on Sundays for the refinement of the
poor, that being the only day when they had a leisure hour to see them.
Among others, Mr. Mackay called on Mr. Serjeant Parry, who signed the
memorial. Later the Serjeant was a Parliamentary candidate for Finsbury.
Some super-fervid free Sunday advocate went to electoral meetings,
asking Mr. Parry whether he would vote for the opening of the National
Gallery. There are always "fool-friends" of progress, who are ever ready
to ruin it by their Pauline zeal of doing things in season and out of
season. It was well known to all concerned that he would vote for an
"Open Door" of art. But if the constituency knew it, it would cost him
the votes of most of the Puritan portion of the electors. Forgetful,
at the moment, of the incident that he had signed the memorial, the
candidate denied that he had. One morning when due in court, he had
hurriedly signed his name to some documents brought before him,
among them the memorial sent in by Mr. Mackay. Whereupon this modest,
retiring, shrinking, impalpable gentleman went into turbulent meetings,
vindictively parading the actual memorial to confront the candidate.
This proceeding cost Mr. Parry his election. It was a warning to
public men against signing a liberal document which might be needlessly
obtruded against them at a critical conjuncture. Thus the Sunday League
lost a Parliamentary defender, who, from persuasion of the righteousness
and rightfulness of its objects, would have stood by it The word of Mr.
Mackay would have been quite sufficient to vindicate the honour of the
League, had he waited till the election was over. But the unexpected
thing was to see Mr. Mackay--who had never spoken at a meeting
before--appearing at crowded and tumultuous assemblies, where a strong
and resolute man might have hesitated to present himself.

The answer of Mr. Serjeant Parry in question was given without
premeditation; it was evident to the audience that it was made under the
inspiration of an after-dinner speech, when robust barristers, in
those days, were liable to airiness or eccentricity of statement.
Being pursued vindictively, he became too indignant to give the obvious
explanation of the inadvertency of his denial of his signature.


III.

There are saints of the Church and saints of humanity; Lord Shaftesbury
was a saint of both churches. There are two kinds of Conservatives, as I
have elsewhere said.* One class seek power for personal aggrandisement;
another, and better class, covet it as a means of doing good. Lord
Shaftesbury belonged to this class. Through not making this distinction,
the whole Conservative body are made answerable for the actions of a
part Discrimination is as just in politics as in morals.

     * "Life of Joseph Rayner Stephens, Preacher and Political
     Orator."

Lord Shaftesbury was a nobleman of two natures. In politics he would
withhold power from workmen. In humanity he would withhold nothing
from them which could do them good. In theology he knew no measure. Of
Professor Seeley's book, "Ecce Homo," he said it was "vomited from the
mouth of hell." Surely something ought to be pardoned to a writer who
made Satan sick. At an earlier day such language had handed the luckless
Professor over to Torquemada. Yet Lord Shaftesbury was so courteous,
tender, and friendly to Nonconformists, that he laid more foundation
stones of Dissenting chapels than any other peer or patron. Should
England one day be counted among extinct civilisations, and some
explorers arrive to excavate its ruins, they will come upon so many
stones deposited by Lord Shaftesbury and bearing his name, that report
will be made of the discovery of the king of the last dynasty. Whatever
contradictions biographers may have to record of the character of Lord
Shaftesbury, everything will be forgiven him in consideration of his
noble exertions on behalf of factory children. He sought to improve the
condition of women in mines and collieries. Public health,
emigration, ragged-schools, penny banks, drinking-fountains, and
model lodging-houses were subjects of his generous solicitude. Lord
Shaftesbury was one of the earliest of slum visitors. He was essentially
and exclusively a social reformer. He took no part in political
amelioration. He believed that working people only clamoured for
political enfranchisement because they were ill-used and uncomfortable.
He saw no further. Their desire for independence never occurred to
him. His sympathy with co-operators was on moral grounds. It was quite
unforeseen by any, and had little acceptance in his day, that he should
advise, that the agencies for planting Christianity among heathen
nations should include the secular missionary, who must precede the
Christian teacher to prepare the soil of the soul by social amelioration
before the seeds of Christianity could take root Like Faraday, Lord
Shaftesbury had a dual mind. Faraday reasoned like a Sandemanian on
questions of faith and like a philosopher on questions of science.
In like manner Lord Shaftesbury was a sectarian in piety and a
latitudinarian in humanity.




CHAPTER XIII. THE COBDEN SCHOOL

[Illustration: Cobden]

There never was a "Manchester School," though a volume has been
published upon it. It never had professor nor special tenets. Manchester
stands for Free Trade and nothing more. Its three great leaders--Thomas
Thomasson, Richard Cobden, and John Bright--were also for Peace,
Retrenchment, and Reform, for the extension of the suffrage, and the
repeal of the taxes upon knowledge, because they were essential to the
popularity and maintenance of Free Trade. But Manchester took no special
interest, save in Free Trade, which was a local manufacturing necessity,
as well as a national one.

Mr. John Morley uses the term "Manchester School," as embodying the
personal convictions of the great Free Trade leaders. Manchester did
a great thing in adopting, adhering to, and enforcing Free Trade. That
itself is a noble distinction.

The advocacy of Thomasson, Cobden, and Bright included principles
loftier and wider than Manchester. The "Manchester School" is but a term
of courtesy used for convenience of reference, far less definite than
the "School of Bentham." The "School of Cobden" is intelligible, as
covering a larger area of thought than Manchester. As to Cobden, no
one can presume to give any new estimate of him, after John Morley has
written his Life. Therefore I confine myself to such personal incidents
as came under my own observation.

Once, when I had the pleasure to be a guest of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain
at Highbury, Mr. John Morley was present Conversation in the library
turning upon Cobden, I remarked that he had introduced more immorality
into politics than any other public man in my time. "How?" asked
Mr. Morley, with a quick, questioning look. I answered, "By advising
electors to vote for any candidate, irrespective of his politics, who
would vote for the repeal of the Corn Laws." This was in effect saying,
"Vote for the devil, provided the devil will vote for you," who, even
if he keeps faith with you, is a dangerous ally to put in power. In
a speech to the council of the Anti-Corn Law League in Manchester in
September, 1842, Mr. Cobden said: "We are no political body. We have
refused to be bought by the Tories;* we have kept aloof from the Whigs,
and we will not join partnership with either Radicals or Chartists;**
but we hold out our hand, ready to give it to all who are ready to
advocate the total repeal of the Corn and Provision Laws."

     * Would the Tories have bought them? What could they have
     done with them?

     * Neither Radicals nor Chartists asked them. Both parties
     conditionally opposed the Corn Law Repealers. Thomasson held
     that the repeal of the Corn Laws could precede the Charter.
     The Chartists contended that the Corn Laws could not be
     repealed until the people had universal suffrage. Thomasson
     was right.

This doctrine, sanctioned by Cobden's illustrious name, has demoralised
politics and placed every Prime Minister at the mercy of every
conscientious party strong enough to defeat him by an unscrupulous
conspiracy in Caves, or at the poll. The Independent Labour Party
founded their Ishmaelitish policy (of _more_ than aloofness) upon this
contagious Manchester speech--leaving out the friendly condition of
"readiness to give their hands" to any who advocate the interests of
Labour, which is their professed reason of being. Women who seek the
political emancipation of their sex adopt the policy of voting for
Tories, and Mr. Woodall, in their name, risked the wrecking of a Liberal
Government if it did not accede to their claim. Mr. Cobden, in inviting
electors to vote for Conservatives who were against the Corn Laws,
would have established Tory ascendancy in the land. Considering that
the stricken condition of the people was through their food being taxed,
Toryism might be a lesser evil than the denial of Free Trade. Cobden
might reasonably be of opinion that no party can do so much harm as
starvation, and therefore felt justified in possibly destroying the
Liberal party to save the people. But he should have qualified his
policy by restricting it to extreme cases, where the arrest of a
progressive Government is a lesser peril than refusing a particular
and paramount claim. Without such qualification Cobden's precedent
proclaimed a policy of selfishness which fights for its own hand against
the general interest of the State. This is the charge which Liberals
bring against the aristocracy. It is the policy of Self which makes the
multiplication of parties a public danger. Such unqualified advocacy
of reforms carries with it an element of national hostility. Justifying
himself by the example of Cobden, we have seen the publican going for
the bung, and the teetotaler for the teapot The anti-vaccinator will
risk poisoning the nation by Toryism in order to arrest the lancet; as
certain workmen will destroy Liberalism in the interest of Labour. Thus,
generally speaking, every party is for its own hand and none for the
State.

The great French Revolution, which promised the emancipation of
Europe, was destroyed by the determination of each party to obtain the
ascendancy of its own theories, at the peril of the Republic.

The Society for Repealing the Taxes upon Knowledge met in many places.
When Francis Place was chairman we met in Essex Street. At one time
we met in the rooms of the secretary, Mr. C. D. Collet, in Great Coram
Street, within a door or two of the house where a girl was killed, for
which a Dutch clergyman was arrested, and falsely and ignominiously
imprisoned for a time. Bright and Cobden attended committee meetings in
Great Coram Street.

One day when Cobden came, he walked to the House of Commons after the
meeting, through falling snow, in the quiet, meditative way peculiar
to him. As I had some duties in the House of Commons in those days, I
followed him, curious to see what streets he would go through, wondering
as I went along, at the disinterested and unnoted services so great a
man, of European fame, rendered to the interests of the working people.
Mistaken Chartists were denouncing Cobden, Bright, and Milner-Gibson
as Whigs--as mere middle-class advocates--these libelled leaders were
generously and disinterestedly labouring to confer upon the working
class the enfranchisement of the Press--although they knew full well
it would put larger means of assailing them into the hands of their
defamers. Why should Mr. Cobden walk through the snow to put new power
in their hands--save from nobleness of nature, which helped others,
irrespective of any advantage to himself--irrespective even of their
goodwill? He not only personally attended committees, as Bright and
Gibson also did, but often sent us letters explaining principle or
policy which implied constant thought upon the movement as well as
labour for it.

The "pale-faced manufacturer" was a champion of the industrial classes,
which he foresaw would come into the field, which were thought then good
enough for paying taxes, but who were to be kept out of the pale of the
governing classes.

Thus I conceived and retained a personal affection for Cobden,
notwithstanding his aversion for some views he supposed me to hold.

When it was advised that I should appear at the London Tavern to oppose
Mr. Peter Borthwick's design of setting up a separate society for the
repeal of the paper duty, which would divide the forces for the repeal
of the whole of the taxes upon knowledge, Bright hesitated as to the
propriety of sending me on that mission. "What I am thinking of," said
Bright, "is whether we shall not be taken as seeking the repeal of the
Thirty-nine Articles instead of the taxes on knowledge." Cobden was more
fearless in things intellectual. I was deputed to speak at the Borthwick
meeting.

Though Cobden's mind was engrossed in public affairs, public affairs
were never master of him. He always possessed himself.

Sir Alexander Burne's despatches were long withheld, and when produced,
at Mr. Blight's instigation, they were found to be so mutilated
that they were spoken of as the "forged" despatches. It was of that
transaction that Cobden said, "Palmerston was so impartial, that he
had no bias, not even towards the truth," showing that he could speak
epigrams that cut into a reputation.

One night Mr. Cobden brought to me in the Bill Room of the House of
Commons a blind young man, whom he said he wished to introduce to me. It
was Mr. Henry Fawcett, of whom he said great things might be expected
in the future. Mr. Cobden had procured for Mr. Fawcett an order for the
Speaker's Gallery. He was waiting for admission, as the doorkeeper told
him there was no room. Amid all the chatter and bustle of the Lobby, Mr.
Fawcett's ears were up that staircase, and he said, "I hear footsteps
coming down," which meant there was a vacant seat, and Mr. Fawcett was
admitted. No one else had heard the descending feet. It was that night
that Mr. Cobden told me, in answer to a question put to him, that he
"believed, had it not been for the occurrence of the Irish famine, all
the vast educative efforts of the Anti-Corn Law League would not have
effected the repeal of the Corn Laws at that time." Nevertheless,
the great propagandist activity of the League was the main element of
success. The Anti-Corn Law agitation of the League was a triumph of
argument aided by calamity. Subsequendy Mr. Fawcett became a professor,
and an authority on political economy. At Social Science meetings,
wherever or whenever I asked him to aid the Co-operative question of
Co-partnership--by defining it in debate, as public ideas were confused
about it--he would always find or make occasion to do so.

In order that Co-operation should be represented at his funeral, I
travelled across country through the early morning fog, from Leicester
to Trumpington, where he was buried. I found in the churchyard my
early friend, Sir Michael Foster, who had like regard for the dead
Postmaster-General. I was the only person known to be connected with the
Co-operative movement who was present at his grave that day.

How well Cobden could take care of himself appeared in a matter in which
my friend, Thornton Hunt, to my great regret, was in the wrong. The
_Times_ had published defamatory imputations on Mr. Cobden, who took
the editor, Mr. Delane, by the throat and held him with a grasp of such
vigour that when he died the marks of Cobdens fingers were upon the neck
of his reputation. The _Daily Telegraph_, of which Mr. Thornton Hunt
was consulting editor, published comments in defence of the _Times_ on
Cobdens letter to Delane, but refused to insert Cobden's letter of self
defence. Mr. Hunt, who had real regard for Cobden, wrote to assure him
of it, and gave as the reason for declining to insert his letter, his
fear lest it should damage his reputation. It was the same as saying to
Cobden, "Our readers have a great regard for you, but if you should
prove you are not a knave, you will sink in their estimation." The
ineffable meanness and audacity of this inspired Mr. Cobden with a
contemptuous indignation, and he told Mr. Hunt there was only one favour
he could do him, and that was not to take his reputation under his
repellent patronage.

Apart from instances such as the perfidy to Cobden, Mr. Delane was a
great editor, determining the fluctuating policy of the _Times_ (the
policy of the ascendancy of prevailing opinion, right or wrong),
selecting leading articles and defining the lines to be taken by the
writers. Robert Lowe (afterwards Lord Sherbrooke) received directions
which might themselves be printed as leaders in brief. As it was Mr.
Lowe's custom to throw Mr. Delane's letters into his paper basket, they
came into the hands of his butterman, who, having practical curiosity,
took them to Mr. James Beal, who, upon the advice of Mr. Bright, sent
them back to Mr. Lowe. All who saw the letters were surprised at the
fidelity of the articles as they appeared in the _Times_ to Mr. Delane's
preconceived comprehensive, explicit, and well-defined tenor.

It was a favourite story told against Cobden by his adversaries, that
when he visited the Central Illinois Railway, the company gave free
tickets to residents near each station, that the seeming crowd of
travellers might impose on Cobden to report well on its prospects.

It is what sharp business Americans might be supposed to do. But it did
not impose on the popular traveller, whom many naturally strove to see.
The chief of the company was candid to him* Mr. Morley has made clear
that what did influence Cobden was the prospect of advancing the welfare
of emigrants abroad.

At the Great Exhibition of 1851 a belief arose that international
commerce would increase. A friend of mine, Mr. Allsop, like Cobden, lost
a large fortune by premature enthusiasm. Mr. Cobden's was a like error,
but a generous one.

On the night of Cobden's last speech in Rochdale, I was one of the
audience in the great Mill Room in which he spoke. He sent to me a note
from the platform. It was the last I received from him. I was that night
more conscious than ever before of his wonderful self-possession in
speaking. He held up as it were, in the air, a chief sentence as he
spoke it, and supplied, before he left it, the qualification he saw it
needed, or the amplification he saw it required, so that malignity could
not pervert it, nor ignorance misunderstand it. After making the longest
speech of his life to the largest audience he had ever met in one room,
he was taken to the house of a friend, where he was kept standing on
the cold marble hearth in a fireless room, while his friends greeted
him until late that November night. To a man of Cobden's temperament
standing is painful after mental exhaustion. A cold followed the
fireless reception. I knew in Birmingham a speaker of great promise,
Mr. J. H. Chamberlain (unrelated to Mr. Joseph Chamberlain) who was
surrounded by his friends after a long and brilliant lecture, and when
at last he sat down, he died.

I was in Lavington Churchyard when Cobden was buried. On our walk from
the station there, Mr. Gladstone, who was before me, turned round to
shake hands with a friend. I saw at once that he was a Lancashire man,
which had never struck me before. He shook hands from the shoulder,
which I had observed Lancashire men did. In the churchyard I lingered
behind, and stood within a clump of trees overlooking the grave. When
Mr. Bright, who had left the other mourners, came there himself, I
moved noiselessly away. He remained alone, looking down on the last
resting-place of his star-bright colleague in counsel and in fight.

Cobden excelled among politicians of the people in enthusiasm of the
intellect. He regarded strong, lucid argument as the omnipotent force of
progress. When one morning the news came, "_Cobden is dead_" it was felt
in every workshop in the land that a great power for peace and industry
was lost to the nation. His disciples have grown with succeeding years,
and if he be regarded as the founder of a school, no nobler one exists
among politicians. He laid the foundations of Free Trade, not only
for Manchester, but for the world. As Mr. Morley tells us in his great
"Life," Mr. Gladstone "ranked the introduction of cheap postage for
letters, documents, patterns, and printed matter, and the abolition
of all taxes on printed matter as in the catalogue of Free Trade
legislation." "These great measures," says Mr. Morley, "may well take
their place beside the abolition of prohibitions and protective duties,
the simplifying of revenue laws, and the repeal of the Navigation Act"
These were all Cobden's ideals. Most of them he called into being, and
he was the principal enchanter who gave them a local habitation and a
name.

As with the "Manchester School," so with the term "Manchester men," it
is used with a geographical indefiniteness; as when we speak of any one
belonging to a shire instead of a town. Hence Cobden, who was a
Midhurst man, and Bright, who was a Rochdale man, are taken as typical
"Manchester men." As few readers have any definite idea of what a
"Manchester man" of the nobler sort individually is, I give a brief
biography of one of the most influential of them, who might be regarded
as the founder of the Cobden School.

Thomas Thomasson [1808-1876], manufacturer and political economist,
born at Turton, near Bolton, December 6, 1808, came of a Quaker family
settled in Westmoreland (1672). His grandfather came from Edgeworth,
near Bolton, about the middle of the seventeenth century, where he owned
a small landed estate, and built a house known as "Thomasson's Fold."
He gave the site for the Friends' Meeting House and burial ground
at Edgeworth. Mr. Thomasson's father, John, was born in 1776. He was
manager of the Old Mill, Eagley Bridge, Bolton, having also a share
in the business, and subsequently became a cotton spinner on his own
account. His son, Thomas Thomasson, the subject of this notice, erected
No. 1 Mill in Bolton in 1841, at a time of great depression in trade,
and great distress in the town--a fact which was mentioned by the Prime
Minister (Sir R. Peel) in the House of Commons as evidence that persons
did not hesitate to employ their capital in the further extension of the
cotton trade, notwithstanding its condition. Thomas Thomasson married
a daughter of John Pennington, of Hindley, a Liverpool merchant. Though
brought up a member of the Society of Friends, Thomasson attended the
Bolton Parish Church, his wife being a Churchwoman. But in 1855 he
heard the clergyman preach on the propriety of the Crimean War, which
he thought so un-Christian that he never went to church again. By
his vigorous speeches he gave the impression that he knew more of the
political economy of trade and commerce than any other manufacturer of
his time. Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden may be said to have learned from
him. When Mr. Bright went out to deliver his first speech at a public
meeting, he went to Mr. Thomasson on his way to take his opinion upon
what he had in his mind to say. At Thomasson's decease Mr. Bright bore
testimony to his remarkable capacity as a man of business, saying, "He
will be greatly missed by many who have been accustomed to apply to him
for advice and help." He was not merely an eminent manufacturer, he was
distinguished for his interest in public affairs. He assisted by money,
counsel, and personal exertions in securing the incorporation of Bolton.
He consented to join the first Council and was at the head of the poll,
considering it his duty to take part in promoting the improvements he
had advocated. He remained a member of the Council over eighteen years.
Under the old government it was usual to call out armed police, or the
military, for comparatively trifling disturbances, which greatly excited
Thomasson's indignation. He was a vigorous advocate for the town being
supplied with cheap gas and cheap water, which involved watchfulness and
advocacy extending over several years. He was foremost in insisting on
the sanitary improvements of the town, and that the inspector should
proceed against those who suffered nuisances on their premises. He gave
the instance of "a family living in a cellar, outside of which there was
a cesspool, the contents of which oozed through the walls and collected
under the bed." L300 being left towards the formation of an industrial
school, Thomasson gave L200 more that it might be put into operation. On
one occasion, when he was much opposed to the views of the Council,
he resigned rather than frustrate a compromise in which he could not
concur, but which others thought beneficial. He promoted petitions in
favour of Decimal Coinage, and refused to join in a petition against
the Income Tax, deeming direct taxation the best. For some time he was a
member of the Board of Guardians, but resigned because he "could not
sit and see men slaughtered by a stroke of the pen," alluding to what
he considered the illiberal manner in which relief was dispensed.
He promoted the estab

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