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Sketches of Reforms and Reformers, of Great Britain and Ireland

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Title: Sketches of Reforms and Reformers, of Great Britain and Ireland

Author: Henry B. Stanton


        
Release date: March 11, 2012 [eBook #39104]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCHES OF REFORMS AND REFORMERS, OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND ***




Produced by Adrian Mastronardi, Julia Neufeld, The
Philatelic Digital Library Project at http://www.tpdlp.net
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned
images of public domain material from the Google Print
project.)





Transcriber's Note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics
(_italics_).

Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals.

       *       *       *       *       *

  SKETCHES

  REFORMS AND REFORMERS,

  OF

  GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND.

  BY HENRY B. STANTON.

  NEW YORK:
  PUBLISHED BY BAKER AND SCRIBNER,
  145 NASSAU ST. AND 36 PARK ROW,
  1850.

  Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1849, by
  HENRY B. STANTON,
  in the Clerk's office of the District Court of the United States,
  for the Southern District of New York.

  S. W. BENEDICT,
  Stereo. and Print., 16 Spruce St.




PREFACE.


This Book aims to give a summary view of the most important general
Reforms, which have been effected or attempted in Great Britain and
Ireland, from the period of the French revolution down to the present
time. Neither history nor biography has been attempted, but the work
aspires to be only what its title indicates--_Sketches_. Large parts of
it have recently appeared, from time to time, in the _National Era_, of
Washington; no expectation being then entertained that it would assume
any other form of publication. The present occasion has been embraced to
revise and reaerrange the whole, and by condensation and pruning off
repetitions, to make room for considerable additions to the list of
subjects discussed, and individuals noticed. It is even now incomplete,
many men and things, which deserve a place here, being left out--some
because I may underrate their relative importance--others because the
limits of this work will allow only of selections. Still, it is believed
that no important subject has been wholly omitted; though, on account of
the vast number of those worthy to be called Reformers, it has been
found impossible to make special mention of many able and excellent
individuals. Though it may contain errors of fact and opinion, yet, as
it is confined to those phases of events, and incidents in the lives of
persons, which history too seldom dwells upon, it may be found not
wholly valueless to those who would examine the most interesting and
instructive period in the recent annals of England.

The chronological plan of the work is, generally, to notice prominent
popular movements in their order of time, and, in connection with each,
to give sketches, more or less full, of persons who bore a leading part
in it. But such slight regard has been paid to chronological
arrangement, that each subject stands by itself, having only a general
connection with what precedes or follows it.

As to my statistics, I have occasionally been compelled to reach
conclusions much in the same manner as juries agree upon
verdicts--consult a dozen authorities, each one differing with all the
others--get the sum total of the whole, divide it by twelve, and adopt
the result.

This Book is submitted to the reader as an humble attempt to make some
of the Reformers of America better acquainted with some of the Reformers
of the Old World--to show that the Anglo-Saxon love of liberty, which
inspires so many hearts on both sides of the Atlantic, flows from the
same kindred fountain--to prove that, though when measured by her own
vaunted standards, Great Britain is one of the most oppressive and
despicable Governments on earth, her radical reformers constitute as
noble a band of democratic philanthropists as the world has ever
seen--to induce candid Americans to make just discriminations in their
estimate of "England and the English," and to draw distinctions between
the privileged orders of that country and a small, but increasing, and
even now powerful body of its people, who admire the free institutions
of the United States, and are laboring with heroic constancy, and a zeal
tempered with discretion, to secure for themselves and their
fellow-subjects the rights and privileges enjoyed by trans-Atlantic
republicans,--and, finally, to record my admiration of those rare and
true men, who, during the past half century, and while struggling
against difficulties and enduring persecutions, of which we have but the
faintest conceptions, have achieved so much for the cause of Humanity
and Freedom.

                                                           H. B. S.

SENECA FALLS, N. Y., October, 1849.




CONTENTS.


  CHAPTER I.

  Introductory--The "Condition of England" Question                  13

  CHAPTER II.

  British Cabinets from 1770 to 1830--Summary of the Efforts of
  the Reformers, from the War of 1793 to the Formation of the
  Grey Ministry in 1830                                              20

  CHAPTER III.

  Treason Trials of 1794--Societies for Reform--Constructive
  Treason--Horne
  Tooke--Mr. Erskine                                                 31

  CHAPTER IV.

  Constructive Treason--The Law of Libel and Sedition--The Dean
  of St. Asaph--The Rights of Juries--Erskine--Fox--Pitt             41

  CHAPTER V.

  The French Revolution--The Continental Policy of Mr. Pitt--The
  Policy of Mr. Fox and his Followers--The Continental
  Wars--Mr. Sheridan--Mr. Burke--Mr. Perceval                        51

  CHAPTER VI.

  Pitt's Continental Policy--Mr. Tierney--Mr. Whitbread--Lord
  Castlereagh--Lord Liverpool--Mr. Canning                          62

  CHAPTER VII.

  Abolition of the African Slave Trade--Granville
  Sharpe--Wilberforce--Pitt--Stephen--Macaulay--Brougham             76

  CHAPTER VIII.

  Law Reform--Jeremy Bentham--His Opinion of the Common Law--His
  "Felicity" Principle--His Universal Code--His Works--The
  Fruits of his Labors--His Talents and Character                    87

  CHAPTER IX.

  Law Reform--The Penal Code of England--Its Barbarity--The
  Death-Penalty--Sir Samuel Romilly--His Efforts to Abolish
  Capital Punishment--His Talents and Character                      98

  CHAPTER X.

  Law Reform--The Penal Code--Restriction of the Penalty of
  Death in 1823-4--Appointment of Commissioners to Reform the
  Civil Law in 1828-9--Sir James Mackintosh--Brougham--Robert
  Hall                                                              107

  CHAPTER XI.

  Religious Toleration--Eminent Nonconformists--The Puritans--Oliver
  Cromwell--The Pilgrims--The Corporation and Test
  Acts--Their Origin--Their Effects upon Dissenters and others--Their
  Virtual Abandonment and Final Repeal--The first Triumph
  of the Reformers                                                  117

  CHAPTER XII.

  Ireland--The Causes of its Debasement--Dublin--Mementoes of
  the Captivity of the Country--Movements toward Catholic
  Emancipation--Its Early Champions--Mr. Grattan--Mr.
  Plunkett--Reverend
  Sydney Smith                                                      125

  CHAPTER XIII.

  Catholic Emancipation--Antiquity and Power of the Papal
  Church--Treaty
  of Limerick--Catholic Penal Code of Ireland--Opinions
  of Penn, Montesquieu, Burke, and Blackstone, concerning
  it--Its Amelioration--Catholic Association of 1823--The
  Hour and the Man--Daniel O'Connell elected for Clare--Alarm
  in Downing Street--Duke of Wellington's Decision--Passage
  of the Emancipation Bill--Services of O'Connell and
  Shiel--The latter as an Orator                                    134

  CHAPTER XIV.

  Movements toward Parliamentary Reform--John Cartwright--The
  Father of Parliamentary Reform--His Account of the
  Trials of Hardy and Tooke--Lord Byron's Eulogium of him--His
  Opinions of the Slave Trade--The First English Advocate
  of the Ballot--His Conviction for Conspiracy--His Labors for
  Grecian and Mexican Independence--William Cobbett--His
  Character, Opinions, and Services--His Style of Writing--His
  Great Influence with the Middling and Lower Orders of England--Sir
  Francis Burdett--His Labors for Reform--His Recantation           147

  CHAPTER XV.

  Parliamentary Reform--Old House of Commons--Rotten Boroughs--Old
  Sarum--French Revolution of 1830--Rally for
  Reform--Wellington Resigns--Grey in Power--Ministerial
  Bill Defeated--New Parliament Summoned--Commons Pass
  the Bill--Brougham's Speech in Lords--Peers Throw out the
  Bill--Mrs. Partington--Riots--Again Bill Passed by Commons
  and again Defeated by Peers--Ministers Resign--Are Recalled--The
  Bill becomes a Law                                                164

  CHAPTER XVI.

  Henry Lord Brougham--His Life, Services and Character             176

  CHAPTER XVII.

  Charles, Earl Grey--Advocates Abolition of the Slave Trade--His
  Rise to Power--His Aid in Carrying the Reform Bill--Sydney
  Smith's Eulogy--His Two Great Measures, Parliamentary
  Reform and Abolition of Slavery--The Old and New
  Whigs--The "Coming Man"                                           193

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  Abolition of Negro Slavery--Canning's Resolutions of
  1823--Insurrection
  in Demerara--"Missionary Smith's Case"--Immediate
  Abolition--Elizabeth Heyrick--O'Connell--Brougham's
  Celebrated Speech of 1830--Insurrection and Anarchy in Jamaica,
  in 1832--William Knibb--Parliamentary Inquiry--Buxton--The
  Apprenticeship Adopted, August, 1833--Result
  of Complete Emancipation in Antigua--The Apprenticeship
  Doomed--The Colonies themselves Terminate it, August 1,
  1838                                                              199

  CHAPTER XIX.

  Notices of some Prominent Abolitionists--T. Fowell Buxton--Zachary
  Macaulay--Joseph Sturge--William Allen--James
  Cropper--Joseph and Samuel Gurney--George William Alexander--Thomas
  Pringle--Charles Stuart--John Scoble--George
  Thompson--Rev. Dr. Thomson--Rev. Dr. Wardlaw--Rev.
  Dr. Ritchie--Rev. Mr. James--Rev. Messrs. Hinton,
  Brock, Bevan, and Burnet                                          213

  CHAPTER XX

  British India--Clive and Hastings--East India Company--Its
  Oppressions and Extortions--Land Tax--Monopolies--Forced
  Labor and Purveyance--Taxes on Idolatry--Amount of Revenue
  Extorted--Slavery in India--Famine and Pestilence--The
  Courts--Rajah of Sattara--Abolition of Indian Slavery--British
  India Society--General Briggs--William Howitt--George
  Thompson as an Orator--Lord Brougham's Opinion--Mr.
  Thompson's Anti-Slavery Career--His Visit to India--His
  Defense of the Rajah--Advocates Corn-Law Repeal--Is
  Elected to Parliament                                             227

  CHAPTER XXI.

  Cheap Postage--Rowland Hill--His Plan Proposed in 1837--Comparison
  of the Old and New Systems--Joshua Leavitt--Money-Orders,
  Stamps, and Envelopes--The Free Delivery--London
  District Post--Mr. Hume--Unjust Treatment of Mr. Hill
  by the Government--The National Testimonial                       246

  CHAPTER XXII.

  Disruption of the State Church of Scotland--Its Causes--The
  Veto Act of the Assembly of 1834--Mr. Young Presented to
  the Church of Auchterarder--Is Vetoed by the Communicants
  and Rejected by the Presbytery--Resort to the Civil Courts--The
  Decision--Intrusionists and Non-Intrusionists--The Final
  Secession of 1843--The Free Church--Dr. Chalmers--Dr.
  Hill                                                              254

  CHAPTER XXIII.

  The Established Church of England--Its Revenues--Its Ecclesiastical
  Abuses--Its Sway over Political Parties--Rev. Dr. Phillpotts--Rev.
  Dr. Pusey--Rev. Mr. Noel--Anti-State Church
  Movement                                                          264

  CHAPTER XXIV.

  The Corn Laws--Their Character and Policy--Origin of the
  Anti-Corn-Law Movement--Adam Smith--Mr. Cobden--"Anti-Corn-Law
  Parliament"--Mr. Villier's Motion in the House
  of Commons in 1839--Formation of the League--Power of the
  Landlords--Lord John Russell's Motion in 1841--General
  Election of that Year--Mr. Cobden Returned to Parliament--Peel
  in Power--His Modification of the Corn Laws--Great
  Activity and Steady Progress of the League during the Years
  1842, '3, '4, and '5--Session of 1846--Sir Robert Peel and the
  Duke of Wellington--Repeal of the Corn Laws                       271

  CHAPTER XXV.

  Notice of Corn-Law Repealers--Mr. Cobden--Mr. Bright--Colonel
  Thompson--Mr. Villiers--Dr. Bowring--William J.
  Fox--Ebenezer Elliott--James Montgomery--Mr. Paulton--George
  Wilson--The Last Meeting of the League                            281

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  National Debt of Great Britain--Lavish Expenditures of the
  Government--Its Enormous Taxes--Will the Debt be Repudiated?--Will
  it Occasion a Revolution?--Plan of Mr. Ricardo to Pay the Debt--
  Mr. Hume's Efforts at Retrenchment                                290

  CHAPTER XXVII.

  Defects of the Reform Bill--Origin of Chartism--The "People's
  Charter" Promulgated in 1838--The Riots of 1839 and 1842--The
  Vengeance of the Government falls on O'Connor, Lovett,
  Collins, Vincent, J. B. O'Brien and Cooper--The Nonconformist
  Newspaper Established by Mr. Miall--Mr. Sturge--Organization
  of the Complete Suffrage Union--Character of the
  Chartists                                                         302

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  Chartists and Complete Suffragists--Feargus O'Connor--William
  Lovett--John Collins--Henry Vincent--Thomas Cooper--Edward
  Miall--Reverend Thomas Spencer                                    311

  CHAPTER XXIX.

  Ireland, her Condition and Prospects--The Causes of her
  Misery--The Remedies for the Evils which Afflict her              322

  CHAPTER XXX.

  Life, Services, and Character of Daniel O'Connell                 333

  CHAPTER XXXI.

  The Temperance Reformation--Father Mathew                         343

  CHAPTER XXXII.

  International Peace--European Military Establishments--British
  Establishment--Mr. Cobden--Peace Party in England--Peace
  Congress in Paris--Elihu Burritt--Charles Sumner                  346

  CHAPTER XXXIII.

  Mrs. Elizabeth Fry--Mrs. Amelia Opie--Lady Noel Byron--Miss
  Harriet Martineau--Mrs. Mary Howitt                               348

  CHAPTER XXXIV.

  The Literature of Freedom--The Liberal Literature of
  England--Periodicals--Edinburgh
  Review--Its Founders--Its Contributors--Its
  Standard and Style of Criticism--Its Influence--London
  Quarterly Review Started--Political Services of the
  Edinburgh--Its Ecclesiastical Tone--Sydney Smith--Decline
  of the Political Influence of the Edinburgh--Blackwood's
  Magazine--Tait's
  Magazine--Westminster Review--The Eclectic--The
  New Monthly--The Weekly Press--Cobbett's Register--Hunt's
  Examiner--Mr. Fonblanque--Mr. Landor--The
  Spectator--Douglas Jerrold--Punch--People's and Howitt's
  Journals--Mr. Howitt--Chambers' Journal--Penny Magazine
  and Cyclopedia                                                    359

  CHAPTER XXXV.

  The Liberal Literature of England--Poetry--Southey--Coleridge--
  Wordsworth--Burns--Rogers--Montgomery--Moore--Campbell--Herbert--
  Byron--Shelley--Keats--Hunt--Pringle--Nicoll--Peter--Barton--
  Hood--Procter--Tennyson--Milnes--Elliott--Horne--Mary
  Howitt--Eliza Cook--Mackay--Novels--Godwin--Holcroft--The
  Drama--Bage--Scott--Miss
  Edgeworth--Mrs. Opie--Miss Mitford--Mrs. Hall--Miss
  Martineau--Banim--Lever--Lover--Bulwer--Dickens--Essays--Jeffrey--
  Smith--Brougham--Mackintosh--Macaulay--Lamb--Hazlitt--Carlyle--
  Talfourd--Pamphlets--Holland
  House--French Literature and Louis Philippe                       374

  CHAPTER XXXVI.

  Conclusion                                                        392




REFORMS AND REFORMERS.




CHAPTER I.

     Introductory--The "Condition of England" Question.


The People of the United States must ever be interested in the history
of Great Britain. We have a common origin, and an identity of language;
we hold similar religious opinions, and draw the leading principles of
our civil institutions from the same sources. Reading the same historic
pages, and while recounting the words and deeds of orators and statesmen
who have dignified human nature, or the achievements of warriors who
have filled the world with their fame, we say, "these were _our_
forefathers." The sages and scholars of both nations teach the youth to
cherish the wisdom of Alfred, the deductions of Bacon, the discoveries
of Newton, the philosophy of Locke, the drama of Shakspeare, and the
song of Milton, as the heir-looms of the whole Anglo-Saxon family. The
ties of blood and lineage are strengthened by those of monetary interest
and reciprocal trade; while the channels of social intercourse are kept
open by the tides of emigration which flow unceasingly between us. And
such are the resources of each in arts, in arms, in literature, in
commerce, in manufactures, in the productions of the soil, and such
their advanced position in the science of government, and such the
ability and genius of their great men, that they must, for an indefinite
period, exert a controlling influence on the destiny of mankind.

Nor when viewed in less attractive aspects, can America be indifferent
to the condition and policy of her trans-Atlantic rival. She is
enterprising, ambitious, intriguing. Whitening the ocean with the sails
of her commerce, she sends her tradesmen wherever the marts of men teem
with traffic. Belting the earth with her colonies, dotting its surface
with her forts, anchoring her navies in all its harbors, she rules one
hundred and sixty millions of men, giving law, not only to cultivated
and refined States, but to dwarfed and hardy clans that shrivel and
freeze among the ices of the polar regions, and to swarthy and languid
myriads that repose in the orange groves or pant on the shrubless sands
of the tropics. With retained spies in half the courts and cabinets of
Christendom, she has for a century and a half caused or participated in
nearly all the wars of Europe, Asia, and Africa, while by her arrogance,
diplomacy, or gold, she has shaped the policy of the combatants to the
promotion of her own ends. Ancient Rome, whose name is the synonym of
resistless power and boundless conquest, could not, in the palmy days of
her Caesars, vie with Great Britain in the extent of her possessions and
the strength of her resources. Half a century ago, her great statesman,
sketching the resources of her territory, said, "The King of England, on
whose dominions the sun never sets." An American orator, of kindred
genius, unfolded the same idea in language which sparkles with the very
effervescence of poetic beauty, when he spoke of her as "that Power,
whose morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the
hours, encircles the earth daily with one continuous and unbroken strain
of the martial airs of England." In a word, she embodies, in her history
and policy, in large measure, all the virtues and vices of that
alternate blessing and scourge of mankind, THE ANGLO-SAXON RACE.

Britain, once a land of savage pagans, was, long after the Norman
Conquest, the abode of ignorance, superstition, and despotism. And
though for centuries past she has witnessed a steady advance in
knowledge, and civil and religious liberty--though her men of letters
have sent down to their posterity works that shall live till science,
philosophy and poetry are known no more--though her lawyers have
gradually worn off the rugged features of the feudal system, till the
common law of England has been adopted as the basis of our republican
code--though her spiritual Bastile, the State Church, long since yielded
to the attacks of non-conformity, and opened its gates to a qualified
toleration--though all that was vital and dangerous in the maxim, "the
King can do no wrong," fell with the head of Charles I, in 1649--yet it
is only within the last fifty years that she has discovered at work on
her institutions a class of innovators, designated as "REFORMERS."

Humanity will find ample materials for despair, when contemplating the
condition of the depressed classes in Great Britain and Ireland. But
philanthropy will find abundant sources of hope in studying the
character and deeds of their radical reformers. The past half century
has seen an uprising, not of "the middle class" only, but of the very
substratum of society, in a peaceful struggle for inherent rights. No
force has been employed, except the force of circumstances; and the
result has been eminently successful. This "middle class" (and the term
has great significance in England) discovered its strength during the
revolution under Hampden and Cromwell, and received an impulse then
which it has never lost. The nobility and gentry have too often silenced
the popular clamor by admitting its leaders to the rank and privileges
of "the higher orders." Still, concessions were made to the mass of
middle men, which stimulated them to demand, and strengthened them to
obtain more. But a truth, destined to be all-potent in the nineteenth
century, remained to be discovered, viz: the identity in interest of the
middle and lower classes. The lines which custom and prejudice had drawn
between them grew fainter and fainter as the day approached for the full
discovery of this truth. The earthquake shock of the French Revolution
overthrew a throne rooted to the soil by the growth of a thousand years.
Britain felt the crash. Scales fell from all eyes, and the people of the
realm discovered that subjects were clothed with Divine rights as well
as kings. Englishmen said so, in public addresses and resolutions, not
always expressed in courtly phrase, nor rounded off in the style of
rhetorical adulation so grateful to regal ears. The king, not having
duly profited by the lesson the American rebels had taught him, indicted
Hardy, Thelwall, Tooke, and their compatriots, for sedition and treason.
These men were the representatives of both the middle and lower classes.
Their constituents--THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND--combined for their mutual
safety against the common oppressor. The wall of partition was partially
broken down, and, from that hour to this, the struggle between Right and
Privilege, between the Subject and the Crown, has gone on, distinguished
by alternate defeat and victory, by heroic constancy and dastardly
treachery--noble martyrs dying, valiant combatants living to continue
the good fight.

_"The Condition of England" question_ (as the Parliamentary phrase runs)
was, a century ago, a matter of indifference to the masses. Lord
Castlereagh but uttered the adage of a hundred years when he said, "the
people have nothing to do with the laws, except to obey them."
Parliament was opened with a dull King's speech, to be followed by the
opening of the annual budget of the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
proposing to raise a loan for foreign wars, or a fund to sink the
interest of the public debt. An oracular response was given by the
Minister now and then to some query touching the relations of the
kingdom to continental Powers, or the resources of some newly-acquired
colony. An occasional bill was introduced to pamper the landlord
aristocracy, or to increase the resources of the clergy, and enforce the
collection of tithes in the manufacturing districts. Untitled manhood
was held "dog cheap;" and all legislation (excepting the throwing of a
bone now and then to the Cerberus of "vulgar clamor") looked to the
conservation of the privileged classes, the dignity of the nobility, the
wealth of the church, and the prerogatives of the Crown. How different
now! The representatives of THE PEOPLE have broken into the sacred
inclosure of "the Government," and new men, with new opinions, have
usurped the places of an ancient aristocracy, and its antiquated
principles. Now, "the Condition of England" question takes cognizance of
the rights and the wrongs of all, and involves searching examinations,
and hot and irreverent discussions, in and out of Parliament, of poor
laws, pension laws, game laws, corn laws, free trade, universal
education, unrestricted religious toleration, standing armies, floating
navies, Irish repeal, East and West India emancipation, colonial
independence, complete suffrage, the ballot, annual Parliaments, law
reform, land reform, entails, primogeniture, the life-tenure of judges,
an hereditary peerage, the House of Lords, the Bench of Bishops, the
Monarchy itself, with other matters of like import, about which the
trader and the farmer of Queen Anne's time knew but little, and never
dared to question above his breath, but which, in the days of Victoria,
are the common talk of the artisan and yeoman. Ay, more than this:
reforms not dreamed of in 1805, by Fox, the liberal, are proposed and
carried in 1845 by Peel, the conservative. "Oh, for the golden days of
good Queen Bess," when the common people paid their tithes and ate what
bread they could get, and left law-making to the Knights of the Shire
and the Peers of the Realm!

But he must superficially read history who supposes that the fruitful
Reforms, which now strike their roots so deep into British soil, and
throw their branches so high and wide over the land, were planted by
this century. Their seeds were sown long since, and watered with the
tears and fertilized by the blood of men as pure and brave as God ever
sent to bless and elevate our race. From the conquest of William the
Norman, down to the coronation of Victoria the Saxon, one fact stands
prominently on the page of English history, viz: that there has been a
gradual circumscribing of the powers of the nobles and the prerogatives
of the Crown, accompanied with a corresponding enlargement of the
liberties of the people. Omitting many, I will glance at some of the
more conspicuous landmarks in this highway of reform.

The mitigation of the rigors of the feudal system by William Rufus, the
son of the Conqueror, who established it.--The general institution of
trial by jury, in the succeeding reign of Henry II, and the granting of
freedom to the towns of the realm by royal charters.--Old King John, at
Runnymede, affixing his sign manual to MAGNA CHARTA, with trembling
hand, at the dictation of his haughty barons and their retainers. The
establishment of the House of Commons, about the middle of the
thirteenth century, thus giving the commercial men of the middle class a
voice in the Government.--Edward I, "the English Justinian," encouraging
the courts in those decisions which tended to restrain the feudal lords
and protect their vassals; and approving a statute which declared that
no tax or impost should be laid without the consent of the Lords and
Commons.--The introduction into England, in the latter part of the
fifteenth century, of the art of printing, and the consequent cheapness
of the price of books, and the diffusion of that knowledge which is
power.--The discovery of America, giving an impulse to British commerce,
and increasing the importance of the trading classes, by placing in
their hands those sinews of war which kings must have, or cease to make
conquests. The Reformation, introduced into England in 1534, unfettering
the conscience, and giving to the laity the Heaven-descended charter of
human rights--the Bible.--The Petition of Right--the British Declaration
of Independence--signed by Charles I, in 1628, by command of his
Parliament, which materially curbed the royal prerogative.--His headless
trunk on the scaffold at Whitehall, in 1649, when the aspiring blood of
a Stuart sank into the ground, to appease the republican wrath of
Deacon Praise-God Barebones and Captain Smite-them-hip-and-thigh Clapp,
and their brother Roundheads--teaching anointed tyrants that, though
kings can do no wrong, they can die like common felons.--The succeeding
Commonwealth, when a Huntingdonshire farmer swayed with more than regal
majesty the scepter which had so often dropped from the feebler hands of
the Plantagenets and Tudors. The passage of the _Habeas Corpus_ act, in
1678, in the reign of Charles II, who saved his head by surrendering his
veto. The Revolution of 1688, which deposed one line of kings and chose
another, prescribing to the elected monarch his coronation oath, and
exacting his ratification of the new Declaration of Rights.--The
American Revolution, with its Declaration of Independence, teaching the
House of Hanover the salutary truth, not only that "resistance to
tyrants is obedience to God," but it can be successful. These, and
cognate epochs in English history, which preceded those Modern Reforms
of which I am more particularly to speak, are links in that long chain
of events which gradually circumscribed the power of the princes and
nobles. Each was a concession to that old Anglo-Saxon spirit of liberty,
which demanded independence for the American Colonies, and is now
working out the freedom of the subjects of the Queen of Great Britain
and Ireland.

The object of the following chapters will be, to briefly sketch some of
these MODERN REFORMS, interspersed with notices of some of the prominent
actors in each.




CHAPTER II.

     British Cabinets from 1770 to 1830--Summary of the Efforts of the
     Reformers, from the War of 1793 to the Formation of the Grey
     Ministry in 1830.


Before specially considering any one prominent Reform in English
history, a general summary of events may be profitable. It will be _but_
a summary, preliminary to a more general discussion, and will be mainly
confined to the period between the French Revolution and the formation
of the Grey Ministry in 1830.

From 1770 to 1830, the Government of Great Britain was, with the
exception of a few months, swayed by the enemies of Reform. In the
former year, Lord North, a name odious to Americans, who had previously
led the Tories in the House of Commons, assumed the premiership. He
retained his place, his principles, and his power, twelve years. In
1782, a _quasi_ liberal ministry supplanted him, headed by Rockingham,
Fox, and Burke, which was dissolved in three months, by the death of the
former, when Fox, Burke, and their friends, refused to unite under
Shelburne, the succeeding Tory Premier, who sought new supporters,
giving young Pitt the seals of the Exchequer and the lead in the
Commons. Stung by mortification at their exclusion from office, Fox and
Burke united with North in forming the famous "Coalition," and in April,
1783, prostrated Shelburne. Thereupon, a new ministry was made up of
those disaffected Whig and Tory chiefs, Fox, Burke, the Duke of Portland
and Lord North being its leading spirits. This Coalition, which for
years damaged the fame of Fox, struggled for its unnatural existence
till the following December, when, failing to carry Mr. Fox's India
bill, it expired, dishonored and unregretted. Pitt, "the pilot that
weathered the storm," then took the helm of State, which he held
eighteen tempestuous years, and was succeeded, not supplanted, in 1801,
by the weak but amiable Mr. Addington. Lord Hawkesbury (the subsequent
Lord Liverpool) took the pen of Foreign Secretary; Eldon (Sir John
Scott) clutched the great seal of Chancery; and Perceval put on the gown
of Solicitor General. This ministry leaned on Pitt for support, and was
his puppet, having taken office to do what he was too proud to
perform--make peace with France. The war demon smoothed his wrinkled
front only for a short period, when his visage suddenly became grim, and
the ship of State was, in 1803, again plunged in the waves of a European
contest. The helm soon slipped from the feeble hands of Addington, and
"the pilot" was recalled to his old station, where he remained till
1806, when his lofty spirit sinking under the shock of the overthrow at
Austerlitz of the Continental Coalition against Napoleon, of which he
was the animating soul, he hid his mortified heart in a premature grave.

A liberal ministry, clustering around Lord Grenville and Mr. Fox, took
up the reins of power which had dropped from the relaxed hands of Pitt,
abolished the slave trade, attempted to ameliorate the condition of the
Catholics, encountered the bigotry of George III, failed, resigned, and
were succeeded by an ultra Tory administration, of which Perceval,
Liverpool, Eldon, Castlereagh, and Canning were the chief members. For
six years they followed in the footsteps of Pitt, fighting Napoleon
abroad and Reformers at home, propping up the thrones of continental
despots, and fortifying the prerogatives of the English crown, till, in
1812, Perceval, who was then Premier, fell before the pistol of a madman
in the lobby of the House of Commons. Simultaneously with putting the
crazy assassin to death, almost without the forms of a trial,
Liverpool, as Premier, and Castlereagh, as Foreign Secretary, came into
power, and, pursuing the policy of Pitt and Perceval, the same ministry,
with occasional modifications, retained its place until the death of
Liverpool, in 1827. Castlereagh, its life and soul, and the evil genius
of England, and the truckling tool of the Holy Alliance, perished by his
own hand in 1823, and was succeeded in the Foreign Department by
Canning, who infused a more liberal spirit into the Cabinet, especially
in the attitude of England towards the Alliance.

Such had been the advance of free principles amongst the body of the
people during the fifteen years of Liverpool's administration, that
George IV had great difficulty in forming a new ministry. Wellington and
Peel refused to become members if the friends of Catholic Emancipation
were admitted, and Canning refused to join if they were excluded. After
a long train of negotiations, the anger of the King exploded at the
stubbornness of the Iron Duke, and he gave Canning his royal hand to
kiss, with a _carte blanche_ for the enrolment of a ministry. He formed
a mixed Government, whose average quality was mollified Toryism. He
brought into the compound Robinson and Huskisson, his recent associates
in the Liverpool cabinet, whose liberal course on trade and finance,
during the last four years, foreshadowed the repeal of the corn laws and
the dawning of better days. Wellington and Peel spurned the
amalgamation, whilst Eldon, with the shedding of many tears and the
tearing of much hair, surrendered the great seal, which his strong hand
had grasped for twenty-six years, to the great detriment of suitors with
short purses, and the great profit of barristers with long wind. The
country expected much from the new administration. But whether well or
ill founded, its anticipations were extinguished in a few brief months
by the death of the brilliant genius who had inspired its hopes. When
the grave closed over Canning, Lord Gooderich (Mr. Robinson) organized
a piebald ministry, of such incongruous materials that it broke in
pieces almost in the very act of being set up. Wellington was then
summoned to the King's closet, and in January, 1828, became Premier,
giving the lead of the Commons to his favorite, Peel, he himself
undertaking to control the House of Peers, much according to the tactics
of the field of Waterloo. The Iron Duke, who was always adroit at a
retreat, and the supple commoner, both of whom had refused to join
Canning because he favored Catholic amelioration, now reluctantly
granted, because they dared not withhold, the repeal of the Corporation
and Test Acts, and the emancipation of the Catholics! The
Wellington-Peel Government struggled bravely till late in 1830, when the
tide of Parliamentary Reform, rising to a resistless hight, overwhelmed
them, and the first liberal ministry (excepting a few distracted months)
which England had witnessed for sixty-five years, was organized by Earl
Grey. Fortunate man! He now saw the seeds of that reform, which, forty
years before, in the fervor of youth, he sowed in Parliament, and had
steadily cultivated under contumely and reproach from that day till
this, about to yield an abundance which his matured and ennobled hand
was to garner in, whilst the people "shouted the Harvest Home."

Begging the reader's pardon for introducing this dry detail of names and
dates, it may be further noted, that in glancing over the dreary wastes
which stretch between the elevation of North and the downfall of
Wellington, but few verdant spots rise to relieve the reformer's eye.
From the commencement of the French war, in 1793, till the repeal of the
Corporation and Test Acts, in 1828, not a solitary important reform was
carried, except the abolition of the slave trade, and the British empire
exhibited a broad sea of rank Conservatism. But, though nothing was
_perfected_ in these thirty-five years, no period of British history
teems with events more gratifying to a hopeful and progressive humanity.
Foul and fetid as were the waters of the Dead Sea, they were constantly
lashed by a healthful and purifying agitation. These fruitless years
were the seed-time of a harvest to be reaped in better days; and all the
reforms which from 1828 till now have blessed and are blessing England
were never forgotten, but continually pressed upon the attention of
Parliament and the country, by a resolute band of men illustrious for
their talents and their services. In proof of this, a few rude
landmarks, before entering upon a more minute survey of this period, may
be worth the erecting.

The trials, at the Old Bailey, in 1794, of Tooke, Hardy, and their
associates, prosecuted for high treason for their words and acts as
members of a Society for Parliamentary Reform, were the first outbreak
of the wide-spread alarm at the prevalence of the political opinions
introduced into the kingdom by the French Revolution. The Government was
foiled; the prisoners were acquitted; Erskine, their advocate, won
unfading laurels; and the doctrine of "constructive treason" was forever
exploded in England.

The foreign policy of Pitt and his successors, which sent England on a
twenty-five years' crusade to fight the battles of Absolutism on the
continent, encountered the fiery logic of Fox, the dazzling declamation
of Sheridan, the analytical reasoning of Tierney, the dignified rebukes
of Grey, the sturdy sense of Whitbread, the scholastic arguments of
Horner, and the bold assaults of Burdett. And at a later period, when
Castlereagh humbled the power of England at the footstool of the Holy
Alliance, Brougham made the land echo with appeals to the Anglo-Saxon
love of liberty, till Canning, in 1823, protested against the acts of
the Allied Sovereigns, and in the following year declared in the House
of Commons, while the old chamber rung with plaudits, that ministers had
refused to become a party to a new Congress of the Allies.

In 1806-7, the slave trade fell under the united attacks of Wilberforce,
Fox, and Pitt; Clarkson, Sharpe, and other worthies, supplying the
ammunition for the assault. And the West India slave, long forgotten,
was remembered when Canning, in 1823, introduced resolutions that
immediate measures ought to be adopted by the planters to secure such a
gradual improvement in the slave's condition as might render safe his
ultimate admission to participation in the civil rights and privileges
of other classes of His Majesty's subjects; and addressed a
corresponding ministerial circular to the colonies.

In 1809, Romilly brought his eminent legal knowledge and graceful
eloquence to bear against the sanguinary criminal code which a dark age
had obtruded on the noonday of civilization. He subsequently exposed the
abuses of the Court of Chancery, which, under the tardy administration
of "that everlasting doubter," Lord Eldon, pressed heavily on the
country. He laid bare the absurd technicalities and verbosities which
blocked the avenues to the common law courts. Having removed some of
this rubbish, and softened a few of the asperities of the criminal code,
his benevolent heart sunk in the grave, when the philosophic and
classical Mackintosh resumed the work, and carrying a radical motion for
inquiry over the heads of ministers in 1819, pressed it nearer that
tolerable consummation which Brougham, Williams, and Denman reached at a
later day. The cause of law reform was powerfully aided by the closet
labors of that singular person, Jeremy Bentham, whose world-wide
researches and world-filling books, written in a style as consecutive
and tedious as the story of The House that Jack Built, discussed
everything pertaining to government, from the constitution of a kingdom
to the construction of a work-house.

The condition of Ireland and the relief of the Catholics occupied much
of the public attention during the period under review. The rebellion of
1798 turned all eyes towards that devoted island. The next year, Pitt
proposed the Legislative Union. It encountered the fierce epigrams of
Sheridan; and though it passed both Houses, it met with such vehement
opposition from the Irish Parliament, that it was abandoned till the
next year, when Pitt renewed the proposal. Grattan, the very soul of
Irish chivalry, rained down upon it a shower of invective from the West
side of the channel, and was seconded by the glittering oratory of
Sheridan and the calmer reasoning of Grey and Lord Holland on the East.
But Britain extended to Ireland the right hand of a Judas fellowship,
whilst with the left she bribed her to accept the proffered alliance. In
1807, Lord Grenville, who was ever a firm friend of religious liberty
and of Ireland, and Grey, in behalf of the Cabinet, proposed an
amelioration of the bigoted code which made the worship of God by the
Catholic a crime. They failed, and ministers resigned. The question of
Catholic relief was pressed to a division, in various forms, fourteen
times, without success, from 1805 to 1819. In the latter year, Grattan
moved that the House take into consideration the matter of Catholic
Emancipation, and failed by only two majority. In 1821, Plunkett,
distinguished for his attainments and virtues, and a model of eloquence,
whether standing at the Irish bar or in the British Senate, carried the
motion which Grattan lost, Peel strenuously resisting, by a majority of
six. He followed up his victory by pushing the Consolidation Bill (a
measure of amelioration only) through the Commons; but it was thrown out
by the Lords. Sparing further details for the present, suffice it to
say, that at intervals during this period, Sydney Smith, with his Peter
Plymley Letters, laughed to scorn the fears of high churchmen; a host of
pamphleteers of all sizes sifted the question to its very chaff, and
O'Connell and his "Associations" and "Unions," in spite of the
suspension of the _habeas corpus_ and the enactment of coercion bills,
agitated from the Giant's Causeway to Cape Clear, and ultimately wrung
from the fears of the oppressor what his sense of justice would not
give.

The Protestant dissenters, with a less rude hand, knocked at the doors
of Parliament, demanding the purification of the Established Church, and
the opening of its gates to Toleration. The rich clergy were compelled
by law to pay higher salaries to their poor curates--Hume's clumsy
abuse fell on the heads of the lazy prelates who made godliness
gain--and the "pickings and stealings," which the Establishment
tolerated in a long train of sanctimonious supernumeraries, were exposed
to the gaze of the uninitiated when Brougham carried his bill against
ministers, in 1819, for a board of commissioners to investigate the
abuses of public charities. The Corporation and Test Acts, which
enslaved the consciences of dissenters, were denounced by Fox and
Burdett, preparatory to their ultimate repeal (of which more anon) by
Lord John Russell's bill in 1828.

Nor was the importance of educating the masses forgotten. Not content
with aiding Romilly, Smith, Horner, Mackintosh, and Jeffrey, in
instructing the higher circles by frequent contributions to the
Edinburgh Review on domestic and European politics, Brougham wrote
rudimental tracts for the lower orders--lectured to Mechanics'
Institutes--contributed to Penny Magazines--and in 1820, after a speech
which exhibited perfect familiarity with the educational condition of
the unlettered masses, launched in Parliament his comprehensive scheme
for the instruction of the poor in England and Wales; thus proving that
_he_ was entitled to the eulogy he bestowed on another, as "the patron
of all the arts that humanize and elevate mankind."

Having seen this favorite scheme fairly afloat, this wonderful man
turned to far different employments. The misguided but injured Queen
Caroline landed in England in 1820, amidst the shoutings of the
populace. Ministers immediately brought in their bill of pains and
penalties; _i. e._, a bill to degrade and divorce the Queen, without
giving her the benefit of those ordinary forms of law which protect even
the confessed adulteress. She appointed Brougham her Attorney General.
In the midst of such a popular ferment as England has rarely seen, he
promptly seized the royal libertine in his harem, and while giving one
hand to the regulation of his new educational machine, with the other
dragged him into the open field of shame, and concentrated upon him the
scorn of Virtue and Humanity.

The corn laws were the subject of frequent debates and divisions.
Waiving till another occasion their more particular consideration, it
may here be stated, that the frequent recurrence of extreme agricultural
and commercial distress always brought with it into Parliament the
subject of the corn trade, provoking a discussion of the antagonistic
theories of protection and free trade, and challenging to the arena the
learning and experience of Burdett, Horner, Ricardo, Baring, Hume,
Huskisson, and Brougham. It was on these occasions that the latter used
to exhibit that close familiarity with the statistics of political
economy and of domestic and foreign trade, and of the laws of demand and
supply, which surprised even those acquainted with his exhaustless
versatility. His only match in this department was Huskisson, to whose
enlightened and steady advocacy of unrestricted commerce its friends are
greatly indebted. As early as 1823, this generally conservative
gentleman moved a set of resolutions providing for an annual and rapid
reduction of the duties on foreign corn, till the point of free trade
was attained.

Closely allied to this subject was that of budgets, sinking funds,
loans, civil lists, and army and navy expenditures, all summed up in the
word _taxes_. The means of paying the interest on the L600,000,000 debt
Pitt had run up in reenthroning the pauper Bourbons (not to speak of the
240 000,000 pounds before existing) was to be provided for. The current,
expenses of the Government clamored for large sums. Under this annual
load of taxation, a nation of Astors might have staggered. The liberal
party plead for economy and retrenchment in the army and the navy, in
the church and the state. Brougham, Ricardo, and other smaller
cipherers, applied the pruning knife to the prolific tree of taxation
and expenditure. But the chief annoyance of Ministers was Mr. Hume.
After he entered Parliament, all schemes for raising or appropriating
money encountered his scrutinizing eye and merciless _figurings_. With
no more eloquence than the multiplication table, he as rarely made
mistakes in his calculations. And whenever Mr. Vansittart, the
foggy-headed Chancellor of the Exchequer, appeared on the floor with his
money bills, his tormentor was sure to pin him to the wall by his
skillful use of the nine digits, which he followed up by crushing that
unfortunate gentleman between huge columns of statistics.

Parliamentary Reform, the enginery by which the people of England must
work out a bloodless revolution, was repeatedly agitated, and with
various results. Stormy debates, followed by divisions and defeats, did
not discourage Grey, Mackintosh, Brougham, Lambton, and Russell, within
doors, nor Tooke, Cartwright, Cobbett, Hunt, and a host of other good,
bad, and indifferent men without, from seeking enlarged suffrage and
equal representation. Nor did laws enacted to stop the circulation
amongst the working classes of cheap publications, by laying a tax on
them; and to put down reformatory societies, under the pretext of
prohibiting seditious meetings; and to seize arms found in the hands of
the lower orders, so that their assemblies might be dispersed at the
bayonet's point without fear of retaliation; nor the occasional
searching of a library and demolishing a press, and sending a writer or
lecturer to Botany Bay, deter the masses from demanding that "the
People's _House_ should be open to the People's _Representatives_."
Passing by many noteworthy occurrences, we find Birmingham, in 1819,
without a representative for its teeming thousands, while rotten
Grampound, with scarce an inhabitant, had two, adopting the bold measure
of electing "a Legislatorial Attorney" to represent it in the House of
Commons! The next year, a large and peaceable meeting of reformers at
Manchester is dispersed by cavalry, with loss of much precious blood.
The common people throughout the kingdom are deeply moved at this
spectacle--riots follow--troops shed more blood--Ministers denounce the
agitators--Burdett defends them--Brougham defies Ministers, and Lord
John Russell numbers the days of Grampound. The next session he moves to
disfranchise that rotten borough, which had been convicted of bribery,
and transfer its members to Leeds. He fails. The next session, Lambton
(Earl Durham) brings in a bill for a radical reform, and is defeated by
a scurvy trick of Ministers. Lord John renews the conflict with another
bill--the People's petitions press the tables of the House--Ministers
begin to give way--Grampound is disfranchised, and its members
transferred to York county, and the first nail is driven! In 1823, Lord
John leads on the attack by explaining a well-digested scheme of reform
in a luminous speech. Canning makes a conciliatory reply, and, in his
brilliant peroration, tells Russell he will yet succeed, but on his head
be the responsibility. Russell is beaten, but the minority is swelled by
the accession for the first time of several young members of the ancient
nobility. The same year, Castlereagh cuts his throat, and falls into a
grave which Englishmen will execrate till the crack of doom. The
"radicals" (a name which the reformers received when Birmingham elected
her attorney) take courage--Lord John beats ministers on an incidental
question--Old Sarum trembles for her ancient privileges--the French
monarchy is temporarily overthrown, and Earl Grey rises to power.

In this summary, which sets chronological order and historical symmetry
at defiance, I have only aimed to show that, from 1793 to 1830, the
fires on Freedom's Altar were kept burning by a band of worshipers, many
of whose names find few parallels in English history, whether we
consider the vigor of their understandings, the extent of their
knowledge, the splendor of their genius, the luster of their services,
and the fidelity and courage with which they followed the fortunes of
the liberal cause through thirty-seven years of opposition to Court
favor and Ministerial patronage.

A more particular notice of these events and persons will be pursued in
future chapters.




CHAPTER III

     Treason Trials of 1794--Societies for Reform--Constructive
     Treason--Horne Tooke--Mr. Erskine.


The first conflict between Englishmen and their rulers, to which I will
now more particularly refer, is the sedition and treason trials, near
the close of the last century; more especially alluding to the trials of
JOHN HORNE TOOKE, HARDY, THELWALL, and their associates, in 1794, for
high treason. The victories then achieved heralded those subsequent
reforms in Church and State which have so blessed the common people of
England. It was the crisis of British freedom. Though failure then would
not have uprooted the goodly tree, it would have blasted much of its
sweet fruit, and retarded its luxuriant growth. Maj. Cartwright, ("that
old heart of sedition," as Canning called him,) one of England's early
reformers, in a letter written at the time, said: "Had these trials
ended otherwise than they have, the system of proscription and terror,
which has for some time been growing in this country, would have been
completed and written in blood." The verdicts of "not guilty" not only
pronounced the acquittal of the prisoners, but proclaimed the right of
individuals and associations to examine and reprobate the acts of their
King and Parliament; to discuss the foundations of government, and
declare the rights of man and the wrongs of princes; and to arouse
public opinion to demand such changes in the laws as would secure the
liberties of the people. The crime charged against Tooke and his
associates was, endeavoring to excite a rebellion, overthrow the
monarchy, wage war on the king, and compass his death. Their real
offense was, belonging to "the London Corresponding Society" and "the
Society for Constitutional Information," better known as societies for
Parliamentary reform, in which they canvassed the nature of government,
the rights of the people, and the acts of their rulers, and specially
advocated a reform in the Parliamentary representation and the electoral
suffrage.

This was no new movement. Similar associations had existed for twenty
years. The Society of "the Friends of the People" numbered among its
members the imposing names of the Duke of Richmond, Pitt, Sheridan,
Whitbread, Grey, and other men of rank. They had held meetings,
published pamphlets, and petitioned Parliament. Discussions had taken
place in both Houses. In 1770, the great Chatham advocated a moderate
reform in the representation in the lower House. In 1776, Wilkes, the
favorite of the London populace, made an able speech on moving for leave
to bring in a radical bill to the same end. In 1783, Pitt, yielding to
the generous impulses of his youth, moved for a committee to inquire
into the same subject, and supported his motion in two eloquent
speeches. In 1790, Flood, the celebrated Irishman, spoke with fervor on
moving for a more equal representation in the Commons, and was replied
to by Wyndham and Pitt, (who had become frightened by the French
revolution,) and powerfully supported by Fox, then in the zenith of his
fame, and by Grey, just giving earnest of those talents which, forty
years after, carried the reform bill through the Lords. The discussion
of kindred topics in Parliament during the same periods stimulated the
popular party. The expulsion of Wilkes, the idol of the London mob, from
the Commons; the seizure of his papers and the imprisonment of his
person in the Tower for a seditious libel against the Tory Government;
his repeated reelection by his Middlesex constituency, and the votes of
the House declaring his seat still vacant; the consequent debates in
both Houses during the years 1768-'70 excited the populace to the verge
of rebellion, and challenged inquiry into the relative rights of the
people and their Parliament. The debates on the stamp act, the taxation
of the colonies, and the American war, covering fifteen years, enlisted
the best powers of Chatham, Burke, Fox, and Barre, and elicited from
those high sources radical declarations of the rights of man. The
denunciations of the test acts and of the Catholic penal code by Fox and
his followers, from 1786 to 1790, as subversive of the rights of
conscience, added fuel to the popular flame. All these agitations within
the walls of Parliament were but the remoter pulsations of the great
heart beating without--the faint shadows of that genius of reform,
which, till recently, has numbered its representatives by units and its
constituency by hundreds of thousands.

The political sea, ruffled by these winds, was soon to be tossed by
violent storms. The French revolution produced a profound sensation in
all classes of Englishmen. The fulminations of its _third estate_
against monarchy, and the democratic doctrines of Paine's Rights of Man,
(republished in England from the Parisian edition, and scattered far and
wide,) found a response in thousands of British hearts. The people felt
their grievances to be more intolerable than ever, and the example of
France emboldened them to demand redress in firmer tones. The London
Society for Constitutional Information, which had grown languid,
suddenly felt a revival of more than its original spirit, and kindred
associations sprang into existence all over the kingdom. Their orators
declaimed upon the rights of man, painted his wrongs, extolled the
merits of the people, and denounced the vices of bishops and nobles. The
oppressions of the middle and lower classes, (of both which the
societies were mainly composed,) by the privileged orders, afforded
ample materials for these appeals to the best and worst passions of
human nature.

The Government was alarmed. The events of France in 1792 had determined
the English Ministry to crush in the bud the revolution they pretended
they saw springing up at home. Their real object was to prostrate the
reformatory associations. Louis was deposed, and the Republic had
decreed fraternity and aid to the people of all nations in recovering
their liberties. Riots occurred in a few English manufacturing towns.
The King suddenly convened Parliament, and declared in his speech, that
conspiracies existed for overthrowing the Government, and that the
kingdom was on the eve of a revolution. In the debate on the King's
speech, the Minister said that seditious societies had been instituted,
under the plausible pretext of discussing constitutional questions, but
really to promote an insurrection of the people. Mr. Fox met the
assertions of King and Minister with a denial, whose language borders on
temerity. He declared, "there was not one fact stated in His Majesty's
speech which was not false--not one assertion or insinuation which was
not unfounded. The prominent feature in it was, that it was an
intolerable calumny on the people of Great Britain; an insinuation of so
gross and black a nature that it demanded the most rigorous inquiry and
the most severe punishment!" Bold words, these; not unlike those of
Cromwell, who declared "he would as soon put his sword through the heart
of the King as that of any other man."

But the Government was not to be arrested in its course by the bold
words of the Opposition leader. It continued to prosecute printers and
lecturers for seditious libels and speeches, fining, imprisoning,
cropping, branding, and transporting, at will. The progress of events in
France was precipitating the crisis. In 1793, Louis and his Queen were
guillotined, and the next year saw the Princess Elizabeth's head fall,
while the bloody star of Robespierre loomed in the ascendant. At these
scenes, the cheek of monarchical Europe turned pale. Pitt was alarmed.
Prosecutions for sedition did not reach the seat of the disease. Royal
proclamations did not silence the reformers. The constitutional
societies still met and debated. Early in the session of 1794, he
brought in bills to clothe the Government with extraordinary powers to
detect suspicious persons, (_i. e._ reformers,) and to suspend the
_habeas corpus_ act. After a furious contest, in which Fox, Grey, and
Sheridan, stood by the popular cause, the bills passed. The _habeas
corpus_ was suspended in May, 1794. The safeguard of English liberty
being prostrated, a fell blow was aimed at the societies, through the
persons of some of their leading members. Informations for high treason
were filed in May by the Attorney General (Sir John Scott--Lord Eldon)
against Tooke, Hardy, Thelwall, and nine others, and they were sent to
the Tower to await their trials. Both parties now prepared for a
death-struggle. The Ministers trusted for success to the power of the
Crown, the subserviency of the judges, and the wide-spread panic among
the higher classes. The common people, though alarmed at the strength of
this combination, relied upon the innocence of the accused persons; but,
at all events, (though the more timid erased their names from the roll
of the societies,) the mass resolved to make a stand for the freedom of
speech and the press, and the right of associating for a redress of
grievances, worthy of the exigency. From the papers of the London
Society, which had been seized, it appeared that the members
contemplated holding a National Convention to promote Parliamentary
reform; and this was regarded as a conspiracy to subvert the monarchy
and establish a republic!

I have stated the crime with which these men were charged. Indicted for
conspiring to subvert the monarchy, depose the King, and compass his
death, it was only pretended that they had uttered and published
seditious words with the intent to alter his Government; when, in fact,
they had only advocated radical reforms in the two Houses of Parliament.
The _existence_ of the constitutional societies and their _doings_ were
clearly legal. No doubt, many unguarded and some unwarranted expressions
about the King and Parliament had been used. But nothing had been said
or done which, on a fair construction, exposed the parties to a just
conviction of any crime. Most assuredly they were not guilty of high
treason; and as surely their words and deeds were tame and puerile,
compared with what the English press and people have since said and done
in the ear of Ministers and under the eye of Majesty. In short, they
were to be immolated on the judicial guillotine of "CONSTRUCTIVE
TREASON."

The character and station of the prisoners excited the interest of
different ranks of society. They had been shut up in the Tower six
months, closely confined, and all access to them by their friends
denied. Hardy was a shoemaker, and, with two or three others, was from
the upper strata of the lower orders. Kyd was a barrister; Holcroft, a
dramatic writer; Joyce, a minister; and Thelwall, a political lecturer.
These belonged to the middle class. JOHN HORNE TOOKE, the most
considerable person among them, held a debatable position in the higher
circles. He was a gentleman of limited aristocratic connections, and a
scholar of rare and varied learning. He had taken holy orders in his
youth, but had long ago left the altars of the church for the closet of
the student and the forum of the politician. He was the author of the
profound philosophical treatise on the English language, called "_The
Diversions of Purley_." Many then supposed him to be the author of
Junius. He had had a violent newspaper controversy, feigned or real,
with that writer, and had worsted him. He was the ablest pamphleteer and
debater among the ultra-liberals, and was ever ready, with his keen pen
and bold tongue, to contend with the scribes of the Government through
the press, or its orators on the rostrum, and he never gave cause to
either to congratulate themselves on the results of the encounter.
Nearly twenty years ago he had stood before the same tribunal, and
defended himself with consummate skill, and a courage bordering on
audacity, against a prosecution for publishing a defense of "the
American rebels" at the battle of Lexington. He and his associates were
now to make a stand for their lives.

The trials took place at the Old Bailey, in October and November, 1794,
and extended through several weeks. The prisoners were defended by
Erskine, whose name was a tower of strength, and Gibbs, the very
embodiment of legal knowledge, (Tooke aiding in his own case,) whilst
Scott, long-headed, learned, and unscrupulous, assisted by the Solicitor
General, prosecuted for the Crown. The hall and the passages leading to
it were densely thronged with persons of all ranks and conditions, eager
spectators of or participants in, the most memorable struggle which the
courts of the common law have witnessed. No overt _acts_ of any moment
could be proved against either of the accused, and the prosecution had
to rely mainly on ambiguous words and writings of doubtful import. The
whole power of the Court of the King, and the Judges of the King's
Court, was brought to bear upon the doomed prisoners, aided by the
multifarious lore and subtle reasoning of the Attorney General. Every
doubtful word was distorted, every ambiguous look transformed into
lurking treason. The rules of evidence were put to the rack, to admit
bits of letters and conversations, written and uttered by others than
the accused, and to hold them responsible for all that had been said and
done by every man who, at any time and anywhere, had belonged to the
societies, or taken part in their discussions. The friends of the
prisoners spoke with bated breath, as the trials proceeded; for they
knew, if the prosecution succeeded, a reign of terror had begun, in
which the King was to enact the Robespierre, and they were to be his
victims. But neither the ravings of the Court at Windsor, nor the
partialities of the Court at London, could suffice against the learning,
the logic, the skill, the vigilance, the eloquence, the courage, the
soul, which Erskine threw into his cause. He battled as if his own life
had been at hazard. He knew that twelve "good and true men" stood
between the lion and his prey. The Court ruled that if the jury
believed the discussions and writings of the prisoners, or of the
societies to which they belonged, tended to subvert the monarchy and
depose the King, or change the Constitution, they must find them guilty.
But Erskine maintained, with a power of argument which, for the moment,
shook the faith of the Court, that _for British subjects to utter their
sentiments, in_ ANY FORM, _concerning the Government of their country,
was not_ TREASON. So thought the jurors, (though the Court leaned
heavily to the side of the Crown,) and one after another these hunted
plebeians passed the terrible ordeal. The King lost; the People won.
They shouted their triumph so loud, that he heard it within his palace,
and the crowned lion growled, gnashed his royal teeth, and beat the bars
of his constitutional cage, till his anointed head throbbed with
anguish.

Hardy, whose case was extremely perilous, was first set to the bar. His
trial lasted nine days. Tooke's came next, and Thelwall's next; when the
prosecutors, frantic with rage and mortification at their signal
overthrow, abandoned the contest. When Tooke was acquitted, the joy of
the people knew no bounds. He was an old reformer, had ever been the
steady advocate of popular rights, and was the idol of the Radicals. He
had suffered much before in the common cause. His library had been
repeatedly ransacked for treasonable papers, his family insulted, and
his person again and again thrust into prison. And now they had seen him
stand for six days, battling with the Court which lowered upon him, and
bearing unruffled the taunts with which the Government witnesses had
poorly withstood his searching cross-examination, contending for a life
whose every pulsation had been given to the service of the people. When
the foreman pronounced the words, "Not Guilty," the arches of Old Bailey
rang with plaudits. After addressing a few words to the Court, he turned
to Scott, and said: "I hope, Mr. Attorney General, that this verdict
will be a warning to you not to attempt again to shed men's blood on
lame suspicions and doubtful inferences." He then thanked the jury with
much emotion for the life they had spared to him. The entire panel shed
tears--the very men who had been so obviously packed to convict him,
that at the opening of the trial Erskine said, "Mr. Tooke, they are
murdering you!" The populace bore the old patriot through the passages
to the street, where they sent up shout upon shout. It was a great day
for Reformers, and its anniversary is still celebrated by the Radicals
of England.

Erskine's speech for Hardy (whose case was very critical, and the first
one tried,) is one of the most splendid specimens of popular juridical
eloquence on record. Owing to the running contests on points of law and
evidence, constantly kept up while the trial went on, he lost his voice
the night before he was to address the jury. It returned to him in the
morning, and he was able to crowd seven hours full of such oratory as is
rarely heard in our day. He regarded Hardy's acquittal or conviction not
only as the turning point in the fate of his eleven associates, but as
settling the question whether constructive treason should for long years
track blood through the land, or its murderous steps be now brought to a
final stand. He made a superhuman effort for victory, and achieved it.
Profound as was his legal learning, eminent as were his reasoning
faculties, classical as was his taste, transcendent as were his
oratorical powers, all conspiring to place him not only at the head of
the English bar, but to rank him as the first advocate of modern times;
yet all were overshadowed by the inflexible courage and hearty zeal with
which he met this crisis of British freedom. With the combined power of
the King, his ministers, and his judges, arrayed against his clients and
against him as their representative, seeking their blood and his
degradation, he cowered not, but maintained the home-born rights of his
proscribed fellow-subjects with arguments so matchless, with eloquence
so glowing, with courage so heroic, with constancy so generous, that his
name will ever find a place in the hearts of all who prefer the rights
of man to the prerogatives of power. But more than all; he exploded the
doctrines of constructive treason, and established the law on the true
foundation, that there must be some overt _act_ to constitute guilt; and
he reinscribed upon the Constitution of England the obliterated
principle, that Englishmen may freely speak and publish their opinions
concerning the Government of their country without being guilty of
treason--a principle, under whose protecting shield they now utter their
complaints, their denunciations even, in the very ear of Majesty
itself.[1]

  [1] The text states only a _legal_ truth. Practically there yet remain
  great obstacles in the way of the free utterance of opinions hostile to
  the Government--as witness the recent prosecutions of O'Connell, Jones,
  &c.




CHAPTER IV

     Constructive Treason--The Law of Libel and Sedition--The Dean of
     St. Asaph--The Rights of Juries--Erskine--Fox--Pitt.


I took occasion in the last chapter to speak at some length of the
trials of Tooke, Hardy, and others, for high treason, in 1794, and of
the successful attack then made by Mr. ERSKINE on the doctrine of
constructive treason. Down to the period of these trials, the English
law of treason was infamous. Among other things, treason was defined to
be waging war against the King, or compassing and imagining his death,
or the overthrow of his Government. The law evidently contemplated the
doing of some _act_, designed and adapted to accomplish these ends. But
the construction of the courts had subverted this principle, and
declared the mere utterance of _words_ high treason. In the reign of
Edward IV, a citizen was executed for saying "he would make his son heir
of _the crown_;" meaning, as was supposed, that he would make him the
heir of his _inn_, called "the Crown." Another, whose favorite buck the
King had wantonly killed, was executed for saying, "he wished the buck,
horns and all, in the bowels of the man who counseled the King to kill
it." The court gravely held, that as the King had killed it of his own
accord, and so was his own counselor, this declaration was imagining the
King's death, and therefore treason! So it had been held, that using
words tending to overawe Parliament, and procure the repeal of a law,
was levying war on the King, and therefore treasonable. At length the
courts yielded to the doctrine that there must be some overt act to
constitute the crime. But they also held that, reducing words to
_writing_ was an overt act, even though they were never read or printed!
Peachum, a clergyman, was convicted of high treason for passages found
in a sermon which had never been preached. The immortal Algernon Sidney
was executed, and his blood attainted, for some unpublished papers found
in his closet, containing merely speculative opinions in favor of a
republican form of government. It was in allusion to this judicial
murder by the infamous Jeffries, and to the fact that the record of the
conviction had been destroyed, that Erskine, on the trial of Hardy,
uttered the splendid anathema against "those who took from the files the
sentence against Sidney, which should have been left on record to all
ages, that it might arise and blacken in the sight, like the handwriting
on the wall before the Eastern tyrant, to deter from outrages upon
justice." It has already been said that this peerless lawyer exploded
these dangerous doctrines, and made it safe for Englishmen to speak and
write freely against the King and Government, without exposure to a
conviction for treason.

But this is not the only salutary legal reform for which England is
indebted to his exertions. Pernicious as is the existing law of CRIMINAL
PROSECUTIONS FOR LIBELS AND SEDITIOUS WRITINGS in that country, it was
vastly worse till his strong arguments and scathing appeals had shaken
it to its foundations. A glance at the law. Any publication imputing bad
motives to King or Minister; or charging any branch of Government with
corruption, or a wish to infringe the liberties of the People; or which
cast ridicule upon the Established Church; and any writing, printing, or
speaking, which tended to excite the People to hatred or contempt of the
Government, or to change the laws in an improper manner, &c., were
seditious libels, for which fine, imprisonment, the pillory, &c., might
be imposed. Nor was the truth of the libel any defense. Admirable
snares, these, to entangle unwary reformers, and catch game for the
royal household! And these bad laws were worse administered. _The
juries had no power in their administration_--the only check in the
hands of the People. The court withheld from the jury the question
whether a writing was libelous or seditious, and permitted them only to
decide whether the prisoner had published it. In a word, if the jury
found that he _published_, they must convict; and then the judge growled
out the sentence. These trials were ready weapons for State prosecution
in the hands of a tyrannical King and Ministry, with pliant judges at
their beck; and in the latter half of the last century they were used
without stint or mercy. They struck down Wilkes, Tooke, Woodfall, Muir,
Palmer, Holt, Cartwright, and other liberals, for publications and
speeches in vindication of the People, which, at this day, would be held
harmless even in England. Some were heavily fined, others imprisoned or
transported, others set on the pillory, or cropped and branded, their
houses broken open and searched, their wives and daughters insulted,
their private papers rifled, their printing presses seized, their goods
confiscated, their names cast out as evil, and they might regard their
lot as fortunate if their prospects for life were not utterly ruined.
The treatment of Muir and Palmer, in 1793, was barbarous. Muir was a
respectable barrister, and Palmer a clergyman of eminent literary
attainments. They had merely addressed meetings and associations for
Parliamentary reform in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and reports of one or two
of their speeches had been printed. Muir was sentenced to transportation
for fourteen years, and Palmer for seven. They were shipped off to
Botany Bay with a cargo of common felons! Several other persons, for
attending a Reform Convention in Edinburgh the same year, shared a like
fate. These are trials which sunshine politicians of the liberal school
never contemplate, except to draw from them materials for rounding off
fine periods about freedom and the rights of man. But they endear the
sufferers to the struggling masses of their own time; and, in after
years, when the sons of the persecutors garnish their tombs, those who
then endure like trials swear by their memories and conjure with their
names.

The times of which I write were prolific of these State prosecutions.
Mr. Erskine was the ready counsel of the proscribed reformers then, as
Mr. Brougham was at a later period. His great effort on these trials was
to convince the court that the juries had the right to decide upon the
character of the publication in making up their verdicts; or, in legal
phrase, that they were "judges both of law and fact." In this effort, he
had many a fierce conflict with the judges, when, with his usual
courage, he braved their rebukes and challenged the execution of their
hinted threats to commit him for contempt. He always argued this point
fully to the court, in the presence of the jury; and such was his
mastery over the reason and the feelings, that he sometimes prevented a
conviction when he could not obtain an acquittal. It was in an affair of
this sort that he had a quarrel with Mr. Justice Buller, a judge who
coupled double the imperiousness of Mansfield with half his talents, and
whose frown, glowering out from under his huge wig, has silenced many a
barrister of more than common nerve. The respectable DEAN OF ST. ASAPH,
who breathed the mountain air of Wales, published a clever political
tract, under the guise of a dialogue between King George and a farmer.
Erskine went down to defend him. Buller presided at the trial. Erskine
argued his favorite topic with more than his accustomed ability. The
jury listened with absorbing attention; the judge with impatient
interruptions. He charged furiously against the Dean, and told the jury,
if they believed he published the tract, they must render a general
verdict of guilty. The words of reason and power of the great barrister,
and his piercing eyes, which riveted everything within their gaze, went
with them to their room. They returned a verdict in these words: "Guilty
of publishing only." The astonished judge ordered them out again, with
directions to render a general verdict of guilty. Erskine interposed,
and insisted upon their right to render such a verdict as they had. The
judge replied tartly, and the jury retired. Again they came in with the
same verdict. The judge reprimanded them, while Erskine insisted that
their verdict should be recorded. Buller retorted, explained his law to
the refractory panel, and sent them out. The third time they appeared
with the same verdict. The judge grew furious, and said, unless they
rendered a general verdict, he should order the clerk to enter it
"guilty." Erskine protested in strong terms. Buller ordered him to sit
down. Erskine said he would not sit down, nor would he allow the court
to record a verdict of guilty against his client, when the jury had
rendered no such verdict. Buller hinted at commitment. Erskine defied
him. The jury were frightened, and, in their panic, assented to a
general verdict of guilty.[2] Erskine excepted, and carried the case to
the full bench. But the day of triumph was at hand. So clearly had he in
his great arguments exposed the iniquity of the rule, (if, indeed, it
was law at all,) and so pertinaciously had he contested it on the trial
of the Dean, that Parliament passed a declaratory act soon after, (thus
admitting that Erskine was right,) giving jurors, in these prosecutions,
the power to render a verdict upon the whole offense charged, _i. e._,
making them "judges of the law as well as the fact."[3] I need not say
that, after this, prosecutions for seditious libels became less potent
and frequent weapons in the hands of royal and ministerial persecutors,
and reformers breathed freer.

  [2] This scene is given from memory--the report not being at hand.

  [3] A like contest early arose in this country. Congress passed an act
  similar to that of the English, in 1798. In the State of New York, the
  case of _People vs. Croswell_, for a libel on Jefferson, attracted great
  attention. It was tried in 1803. The judge charged the jury according to
  the old English law, and the defendant was convicted. It was carried
  before the full bench, and argued in 1804. The speech of Alexander
  Hamilton, for the defendant, was one of the ablest ever delivered in
  America. The court being equally divided in opinion, the Legislature,
  the next year, passed a declaratory act, giving to juries the right to
  determine the law and the fact. This is now the prevailing law of the
  country. Croswell's case is reported in 3d Johnson's Cases.

It does the heart good to contemplate talents like Erskine's devoted to
such purposes. To see the foremost lawyer of his time, in the midst of
wide-spread aristocratic clamor, and despite the fulminations of kings
and ministers and judges, take the side of humble men, who are denounced
as incendiaries, agrarians, levelers, French Jacobins, traitors, and
infidels, plotting to murder their sovereign, upheave his throne, and
prostrate the altars of the church, (and these are but a tithe of the
catalogue,) and for years perform prodigies of labor for poor clients
and poorer pay, thus blocking up the avenues to preferment in his
cherished profession, and all for the love he bears the common cause!
Such a spectacle should go somewhat to blunt the edge of those taunts so
constantly aimed at a profession which he adored and adorned, and which,
in every struggle for human rights, has furnished leaders to the popular
party among the bravest of the brave. The law, like every other
profession, has its scum and its vermin, and yields its share of
dishonest men. But they are dishonest not because they are lawyers, but
because they are scoundrels, and would have been so had they chosen to
be merchants, physicians, or horse-jockies. When reproaching the whole
legal fraternity as a "pack of licensed swindlers," it might be well to
remember that the most conspicuous rebels and martyrs of English
freedom, in the olden times, were lawyers--that Erskine, Emmet, Romilly,
Mackintosh, O'Connell, and Brougham, of later and milder days, were
lawyers; and that Jefferson, Adams, Otis, Sherman, Henry, and Hamilton,
with many other bold spirits who thundered and lightened during the
storm of the American revolution, were lawyers.

But we must leave Mr. Erskine by saying, that he possessed ability and
learning to maintain the boldest positions; eloquence for the most
thrilling appeals; imagination to sustain the loftiest flights. He was
graceful in action, melodious in elocution, and had an eye of whose
fascinating power jurors were often heard to speak. He was a wit and a
logician--a lawyer and a reformer--a man, cast in the noblest mold of
his species.

Mr. Erskine was powerfully sustained in his efforts for law reform by
the great liberal leader in the House of Commons. CHARLES JAMES FOX
deserves a conspicuous place among the early Reformers of England.
Entering Parliament in 1768, when just turned twenty-one, he rallied
under the banner of Mr. Burke, then the chief debater on the Whig side,
whose lead he followed through the doubtful contest on American
questions; and when victory, and peace, and independence, crowned their
efforts, the chief resigned the standard of opposition to the hands of
his younger and more robust lieutenant. Fox is called "the disciple of
Burke," and, after their unnatural estrangement, he gratefully said, "I
have learnt more from Burke alone than from all other men and authors."
He remained in the Commons till his death, in 1806; and though hampered
by aristocratic connections and the leadership of his party, his
generous nature and warm heart, through nearly forty years of
Parliamentary life carried his great talents to the liberal side. He
headed the forlorn hope of English freedom during the panic immediately
following the French revolution, and in the darkest and stormiest nights
of that gloomy period, his voice sounded clear and firm above the
tempest, hurling defiance at his foes, and bidding the few friends of
man and constitutional liberty who stood around him to be of good cheer,
for the day of their redemption was drawing on. His speech against the
stamp act, the taxation of the colonies, the American war, the test act,
the suspension of the _habeas corpus_, the treason and sedition bills,
the slave trade; and in favor of Parliamentary reform, religious
toleration, Catholic emancipation, the rights of juries, and of peace,
contain volumes of liberal principles which endear his name to the
friends of humanity in both hemispheres. As Erskine was the first
advocate that ever stood at the English bar, so Fox was the first
debater that ever appeared in its Commons. Burke wrote of him, after
their separation: "I knew him when he was nineteen; since which, he has
risen to be the most brilliant and accomplished debater the world ever
saw." His argumentative powers were of the highest order, and his wit,
his invective, and his appeals to the judgment and feelings unrivaled.
In the partisan warfare of extemporaneous debate, he bore down on his
antagonists with an energy which, when fully roused, bordered on
ferocity. But it was the ferocity of impassioned logic and intense
reasoning. Not content with once going over the ground in controversy,
he traveled it again and again, unfolding new arguments and adding
additional facts, till his searching and vigorous eloquence had
discovered and demolished every objection that lay in his track. The
very embodiment of the reasoning element in man, he saw through his
subject with rapid glances, grappled sturdily with all its strong
points, despised mere ornaments, rejected all bewildering flights of the
imagination, and shunned excursions into collateral fields which skirted
his line of argument. In these latter respects he was totally unlike his
great master. As his reasoning powers were cast in the most colossal
mold, so his heart was of the finest and noblest quality. Mackintosh has
justly said, that "he united in a most remarkable degree the seemingly
repugnant characters of the mildest of men and the most vehement of
orators." His appeals to magnanimity, to generosity, to integrity, to
justice, to mercy, thrilled the soul of Freedom, while the tide of
consuming lava which he poured on hypocrisy, meanness, dissimulation,
cruelty, and oppression, made the grovelers at the footstool of power
hide with fear and shame. He was a statesman of the broadest and most
liberal views. His capacious mind was stored with political knowledge;
he had deeply studied the institutions of ancient and modern States; and
no man better understood the general and constitutional history of his
own country, nor the delicate machinery which regulated its complicated
foreign and domestic affairs. As bold as a lion, he never cowered before
the King, his ministers, or his minions; but gloried in being the
mouthpiece of out-door Reformers, whose radical principles and humble
connections prevented their admission within the Parliamentary walls. He
repeated the coarse opinions of Cartwright and his companions, in a
place whose doors they were forbidden to darken, but in language worthy
of the classic scion of Holland House. He was of invaluable service to
the radical party, in gaining them favor with the aristocratic and
learned Whigs, because he could throw over their principles the shield
of argument, adorn them with the grace of scholarship, and dignify them
with the luster of birth and station. In this regard his conduct might
be profitably studied by his professed admirers on this side of the
Atlantic.

Mr. Fox was totally unlike his great rival. Pitt was stately, taciturn,
and of an austere temper. Fox was easy, social, and of a kindly
disposition. Pitt was tall and grave, and, entering the House carefully
dressed, walked proudly to the head of the Treasury bench, and took his
seat as dignified and dumb as a statue. Fox was burly and jovial,
entered the House in a slouched hat and with a careless air, and, as he
approached the Opposition benches, had a nod for this learned city
member, and a joke for that wealthy knight of the shire, and sat down,
as much at ease as if he were lounging in the back parlor of a country
inn. Pitt, as the adage runs, could "speak a King's speech off-hand," so
consecutive were his sentences; and his round, smooth periods delighted
the aristocracy of all parties. Fox made the Lords of the Treasury quail
as he declaimed in piercing tones against ministerial corruption, while
his friends shouted "hear! hear!" and applauded till the House shook.
Pitt's sentences were pompous and sonorous, and often "their sound
revealed their own hollowness." Fox uttered sturdy Anglo-Saxon sense;
every word pregnant with meaning. Pitt was a thorough business man, and
relied for success in debate upon careful preparation. Fox despised the
drudgery of the office, and relied upon his intuitive perceptions and
his robust strength. Pitt was the greater Secretary--Fox the greater
Commoner. Pitt's oratory was like the frozen stalactites and pyramids
which glitter around Niagara in mid-winter, stately, clear, and cold.
Fox's like the vehement waters which sweep over its brink, and roar and
boil in the abyss below. Pitt, in his great efforts, only erected
himself the more proudly, and uttered more full Johnsonian sentences,
sprinkling his dignified but monotonous "state-paper style" with pungent
sarcasms, speaking as one having authority, and commanding that it might
stand fast. Fox on such occasions reasoned from first principles,
denouncing where he could not persuade, and reeling under his great
thoughts, until his excited feelings rocked him, like the ocean in a
storm. Pitt displayed the most rhetoric, and his mellow voice charmed,
like the notes of an organ. Fox displayed the most argument, and his
shrill tones pierced like arrows. Pitt had an icy taste; Fox a fiery
logic. Pitt had art; Fox nature. Pitt was dignified, cool, cautious; Fox
manly, generous, brave. Pitt had a mind; Fox a soul. Pitt was a majestic
automaton; Fox a living man. Pitt was the Minister of the King; Fox the
Champion of the People. Both were the early advocates of Parliamentary
reform; but Pitt retreated, while Fox advanced; and both joined in
denouncing and abolishing the horrors of the middle passage. Both died
the same year, and they sleep side by side in Westminster Abbey, their
dust mingling with that of their mutual friend Wilberforce; while over
their tombs watches with eagle eye and extended arm the molded form of
Chatham.




CHAPTER V.

     The French Revolution--The Continental Policy of Mr. Pitt--The
     Policy of Mr. Fox and his Followers--The Continental Wars--Mr.
     Sheridan--Mr. Burke--Mr. Perceval.


In determining whether the policy which Pitt and his successors pursued
towards France, from 1792 to 1815, was wise for England and beneficial
to Europe, an American republican will remember that it was sustained by
the party which ever resisted all social and political improvement among
the people--that the enemies of change warred on the Directory, the
Consulate, the Empire--that the patrons of existing abuses restored the
Bourbons. Nor will he forget that this policy was steadily opposed by
the friends of enlightened progress and useful reform--the champions of
civil and religious freedom. The specious reasoning and showy
declamations of a score of Alisons will never destroy these facts.

France, equally with Great Britain, had the right to enjoy the
Government of its choice. But the latter, early in 1793, declined to
negotiate or correspond with the former, because it was a republic; and
refusing to receive the credentials of its minister, ordered him to quit
the kingdom. France, sustained by the law of nations, declared war
against the Power which had insulted her. Pitt asserted that the French
revolution had no sufficient cause in the nature of the Government or
the condition of the people, and was the offspring of a reckless spirit
of innovation. He avowed his determination to put down the republic,
restore the monarchy, and maintain the cause of legitimacy in Europe.
This avowal was met by the declaration of the liberal party, that the
true cause of the revolution was the undue restriction and limitation of
the rights and privileges of the people; and that, however it might be
perverted, its real object was to wrest from the Government what had
been unjustly withheld from its subjects. They demanded, therefore, that
the diplomatic representative of France should be received by the
ministry; and they resisted all interference with its internal affairs,
all attempts to suppress liberal movements in Europe, all efforts to
uphold its crumbling thrones. They plead for peace and an armed
neutrality. And, after Napoleon's schemes of conquest were disclosed,
they contended that England ought not to unite in a coalition for his
overthrow, so long as it was a battle among kings, but should wait till
_the people_ of the continent requested assistance; and even then, that
it ought not to be given till the rulers of the endangered States were
pledged to grant reasonable privileges to their subjects. On this
elevated ground did the liberal party take its stand. But Pitt,
representing only the monarchical and privileged orders, at the outset
of the conflict pledged the power and resources of England to the
accomplishment of his ends; and his policy was steadily followed, with
ruinous and mortifying results, until the European combination of
1814-15 finally crushed Napoleon at Waterloo, and restored the Bourbon
to his throne.

And what did England gain by her armies and fleets, her intrigues in
foreign cabinets and subsidies of men and money? True, Napoleon was
prostrated, But she had spent L600 000,000 in doing it. At the
commencement of the war, her debt was less than L240,000,000. At its
close, it had swelled to more than L840,000,000! Centuries of taxation
to restore the Bourbons to a throne which they cannot retain, and to
postpone for fifty years the general overthrow of monarchy in Europe!
The seventh descending son of the youngest Englishman alive will curse
the day that Pitt entered on this crusade against Destiny. When the
unnatural fever of the contest abated, the reaction, the retribution,
came. Peace had returned, but she was not accompanied by her
twin-sister, Plenty. English trade, commerce, manufactures, agriculture,
languished--laborers wandered through the provinces in search of
employment--the country sunk exhausted into the arms of bankruptcy. The
smoke of battle no longer blinding the eye, the people began to look
about and inquire, "What have we gained by all this outgush of blood and
treasure?" The wealthy saw before them ages of remorseless taxation--the
poor clamored in the streets for bread--all but the extreme privileged
classes regarded the result of the war as a triumph over themselves. At
peace with all the world, (almost the first time for three-fourths of a
century), the nation was the scene of internal discords more threatening
than foreign levy. Nothing but general lassitude, and the pressure of
misfortunes common to all, prevented a revolution.

This contest was injurious to England in another way. It so _possessed_
the public mind that there was little room left for domestic
improvement. Meanwhile, the cause of reform was turned out of doors. The
French Revolution was a God-send to Pitt and the Tories. Seizing upon
its early excesses, they conjured with them thirty years, frightening
the middling men from their propriety, and terrifying even the giant
soul of Burke. The "horrors of the French revolution" were thrown in the
face of every man who demanded reform. The clamors of the tired and
fleeced suitors in Lord Eldon's court were silenced by "the horrors of
the French revolution." Old Sarum and Grampound lengthened out their
"rotten" existence by supping on "the horrors of the French revolution."
Point to the festering corruption of the Church Establishment, and it
lifted up its holy hands at "the horrors of the French revolution." The
Catholics were persecuted, the Irish gibbeted, and printers transported,
to atone for "the horrors of the French revolution." The poor starved
in damp cellars, whilst the landlord fattened his protected soil with
"the horrors of the French revolution." In a word, these "horrors"
constituted the chief staple of Tory argument and declamation, and were
a conclusive answer to all who asked for cheap bread, religious
toleration, law reform, reduced taxes, and an enlarged suffrage.

The lessons of wisdom, so dearly purchased by this scheme of Continental
interference, have not been thrown away on a nation which spent so much
to gain so little. The second French revolution was followed by England
granting Parliamentary Reform, to prevent a revolution at home. The
third revolution, which prostrated a monarchy, and reared a republic in
a day, was promptly recognized and respected by England, whose Premier
declared that she heartily accorded to the people of France the right to
ordain for themselves such a system of Government as they might choose!
Men may prate eternally about the virtues of Louis XVI, the grasping
ambition of Napoleon, the far-seeing sagacity of Burke, and the wisdom
and firmness of Pitt, and it will still remain true, that the principles
thrown up with the fire and blood of the great French eruption will yet
work out the regeneration of Europe.

MR. SHERIDAN was as steady a supporter of freedom, and as inflexible an
opponent of Pitt, as a man of so volatile a temperament could well be.
This gentleman is best known on our side of the Atlantic as the author
of the comedy the "School for Scandal," and of a speech on the trial of
Warren Hastings. The comedy still holds a deservedly high place on the
stage. The speech, which once claimed a position at the head of English
forensic oratory, is no doubt much overrated. The intense interest
pervading the public mind in respect to the impeachment of the conqueror
and ruler of a hundred millions of the people of India--the august
character of the tribunal, the peers and judges of the realm--the
imposing talents of the committee by whom the Commons sent up the
articles of impeachment, consisting of Burke, Fox, North, Grey, Wyndham,
Sheridan, with other lights worthy to shine in such a constellation--the
romantic branch of Hastings's administration, the opening of which was
assigned to Sheridan--the gorgeous colors which he spread upon the
oriental canvas--the theatrical style in which he pronounced his oration
before a learned, fashionable, and sympathizing audience, all conspired
to give to his effort a temporary fame alike extraordinary and undeserved.
Nor was the immediate effect of his two days' coruscation diminished by
the tragical manner in which he contrived, at its close, to sink backward
into the arms of Burke, who, transported beyond measure, hugged him as
unaffectedly as if his generous and unsuspecting nature had not been duped
by a mere stage trick.

But though he occasionally used the clap-traps of the theater, Sheridan
was a debater to be shunned rather than encountered. Pitt dreaded him.
Lying in wait till the Minister had addressed the House, the Drury Lane
manager used to let fly at him such a cloud of stinging arrows, pointed
with sarcasm and poisoned with invective, that the stately Premier could
not conceal his mortification, nor hardly retain his seat till the storm
had passed away. No Parliamentarian ever inspired so much dread in his
opponents, and won so much applause from his friends, with so scanty a
stock of statesmanlike acquirements. His political knowledge was
gathered from the columns of the current newspapers and the discussions
in the club-rooms, and his literary stores were made up from the modern
poetry and drama of England. True, he was educated at Harrow, but he
threw aside Demosthenes and Cicero for Congreve and Vanburgh, and wrote
comedies when he should have studied mathematics. He never claimed to be
a statesman, and only aspired to be an orator. To shine as a dazzling
declaimer, he bent all the powers of his intense and elastic mind. He
attended debating clubs, and caught up the best sayings--practiced
attitudes and tones in the green-room--set down every keen thought which
occurred to him in a note-book--conned his lesson--then entered the
House, and rushing into the arena of debate with the bound and air of a
gladiator, won the reputation of being the readiest wit, the most
skillful off-hand disputant, and the most gorgeous orator of the day.
And it was the day of Burke, Pitt, Fox, Erskine, Grattan, and Wyndham!
Lord Chesterfield was not so very wrong when he told his son that, even
in Parliament, more depended upon the manner of saying a thing, than
upon the matter of which it was composed. Though his taste was formed on
the flashy model of the modern drama, and in the composition of his
numerous tropes and metaphors he did not always distinguish between
tinsel and gold, between painted glass and pure diamonds, yet he
generally succeeded in doing what he intended--producing a tremendous
sensation. His rockets set the hemisphere in a blaze; nor was he always
careful on whose head the sticks fell; for he spared neither friends nor
foes, if he must thereby lose a good hit.

Though Sheridan regarded the color of the husk more than the character
of the kernel, he uttered much that will perish only with the English
tongue. In an attack on Ministers, who were attempting to carry a bill
against the freedom of the press, he exclaimed, "Give them a corrupt
House of Lords; give them a venal House of Commons; give them a
tyrannical Prince; give them a truckling Court--and let me but have an
unfettered press, and I will defy them to encroach a hair's breadth upon
the liberties of England"--a passage worthy of Chatham. During the
treason trials, in 1794, he poured a torrent of ridicule upon the
proceedings, which did not a little toward restoring a panic-stricken
public to its senses. An extract will give an idea of his sarcasm. In
replying to Pitt, he said, "I own there was something in the case; quite
enough to disturb the virtuous sensibilities and loyal terrors of the
right honorable gentleman. But, so hardened is this side of the House,
that our fears did not much disturb us. On the first trial, one pike was
produced. This was, however, withdrawn. Then a terrific instrument was
talked of, for the annihilation of his Majesty's cavalry, which, upon
evidence, appeared to be a _te-totum_ in a window at Sheffield. But I
had forgot--there was also a camp in a back shop; an arsenal provided
with nine muskets; and an exchequer, containing exactly the same number
of pounds--no, let me be accurate, it was nine pounds and one bad
shilling. * * * * The alarm had been brought in with great pomp and
circumstance on a Saturday morning. At night, the Duke of Richmond
stationed himself, among other curiosities, at the Tower, and a great
municipal officer, the Lord Mayor, made an appalling discovery in the
East. He found out that there was in Cornhill a debating society, where
people went to buy treason at sixpence a head; where it was retailed to
them by inch of candle; and five minutes, measured by the glass, were
allowed to each traitor, to perform his part in overturning the State.
In Edinburgh an insurrection was planned; the soldiers were to be
corrupted: and this turned out to be--by giving each man sixpence for
porter. Now, what the scarcity of money and rations may be in that part
of the country, I cannot tell; but it does strike me that the system of
corruption has not been carried to any great extent. Then, too, numbers
were kept in pay; they were drilled in a dark room, by a sergeant in a
brown coat; and on a given signal they were to sally from a back
kitchen, and overturn the Constitution."

Though this celebrated orator was wayward in his pursuits, and
habitually intemperate, yet, from the time he entered Parliament in 1780
till his sun began to decline, he ever sustained the liberal cause, and
his rare talents bore with striking effect against the Continental
policy of Pitt, and in favor of Irish Regeneration, Parliamentary
Reform, the freedom of the press, and the rights of the people.

I have spoken of EDMUND BURKE, than whom, no man could afford a stronger
contrast to Sheridan. He had an original, daring genius, but it was
sustained by a broad and comprehensive judgment. His imagination was as
gorgeous as ever plumed the wing of eloquence, but it was enriched and
invigorated by learning vast and varied. Until his mind became
engrossed, not to say _possessed_ with the subject which occupied the
latter years of his great life, (the French revolution,) he was the
advocate and ornament of progressive freedom. He first led and then
followed Fox in all the lines of policy which the liberal party pursued
from 1765 to 1790, when they separated, and Burke became not so much the
advocate of Pitt and his Tories, as the opponent of France and its
Republicans; choosing thereafter, as he expressed it, to be a Whig,
"without coining to himself Whig principles from a French die, unknown
to the impress of our fathers in the Constitution." He left Parliament
in 1794, and died in 1797. During the last six years of his life he
seemed almost diseased by the excesses of the French revolution; and
whatever subject he surveyed, on whatever ground he looked, he appeared
to see naught but the convulsions of that tragedy. The vivid impressions
which he received he transferred to publications which glowed with his
fervid soul, and produced a prodigious sensation amongst the higher
orders of his countrymen. But take him all in all, his was the most
magnificent mind of modern England. If called to designate the most
remarkable name which adorns its later annals, to whose would we so
unhesitatingly point as to his? Is he not entitled to a place among the
five most extraordinary men which that kingdom has produced--Bacon,
Shakspeare, Newton, Milton, Burke? He possessed the multifarious
learning of our Adams, the intellectual grasp of our Marshall, the
metaphysical subtlety of our Edwards, the logical energy of our Webster,
the soaring imagination of our Wirt, the fervid glow of our Clay; and he
was the equal of each in his most cultivated field. As a Parliamentary
leader, he was inferior to Fox and Pitt. His essay-like style was not
adapted to so popular a body as the House of Commons. His speeches wore
the air of the academy rather than the forum; and much of his discourse
was too elaborate, too learned, too philosophical, too ornate, to be
appreciated by the general run of commonplace sort of men that drift
into the halls of legislation. During the thirty years he participated
in affairs, there fell from his lips and pen an amount of political
sagacity, far-seeing statesmanship, philosophical disquisition, and
oratorical display, all set off and adorned by an amplitude of learning,
a majesty of diction, and a brilliancy of imagery, the fourth of which
would have carried their author's name to posterity as one of the
remarkable men of his time. He who thinks this eulogium extravagant has
only to find its confirmation in the mines of intellectual wealth which
lie embedded in the sixteen volumes of the works he has given to his
country and the world, to his cotemporaries and to posterity. True,
there will be found, mingled with these strata of pure gold, veins of
impracticability, sophistry, prejudice, extravagance, and violence. His
later writings, and in many respects his most grand and beautiful, are
disfigured by a morbid dread of change, and obscured by a gloomy
distrust of the capacities of man for self-government; proving, that
though gifted with genius beyond most mortals, he was not endowed with
the Divine spirit of prophecy. But it is equally true, that while the
English language is read, the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke will
be classed with the richest treasures of the statesman, the philosopher,
and the scholar.

Next to the curse of a military chieftain attempting to adapt the
tactics of the camp to the regulations of the cabinet, is the nuisance
of a narrow-minded lawyer carrying the prim rules of the bar into the
councils of the State, and aiming to be a statesman when he is only
capable of being a pettifogger. On the downfall of the Grenville-Fox
ministry, MR. PERCEVAL took the leading place in his Majesty's
Government. He was a lawyer with a keen intellect, and a soul shriveled
by the most limited views and bigoted prejudices. When ruling England,
he looked upon her position in reference to Continental affairs, and
the part she was to perform in the drama of nations, much as he was wont
to regard the ten-pound case of a plaintiff whose brief and retainer he
held. He argued the great questions which nightly agitated the House of
Commons, and whose decisions were to affect not only his own time, but
coming ages, like a mere lawyer struggling for a verdict. His weapon was
sharp, and he applied its edge in the same way, whether analyzing the
title of James Jackson to a ten-acre lot in Kent, or of Louis XVIII to
the throne of France. He discussed a financial scheme in Parliament to
raise twenty millions sterling to carry on the war, just as he argued
the consideration of a twenty-pound note before a jury of Yorkshire
plowmen. Yet he was a good tactician; saw a _point_ readily and clearly,
though he saw nothing but a point; knew how to touch the prejudices of
bigots; was great at beating his opponents on small divisions; rarely
lost his temper under the severest provocations; was quick at a turn and
keen at a retort; and spoke in a lively, colloquial, straight-forward
style, which pleased the fat country gentlemen much better than the
classical allusions and ornate periods of Mr. Canning. He kept on the
even tenor of his way till assassinated by a madman in the lobby of the
House, in 1812.

And this is the man who shaped the financial policy of England during
six of the most eventful years of her existence, and whom she permitted
to plunge her into debt to the amount of L150,000,000! "How could this
be?" The answer is plain. Mr. Perceval stood firmly by the King and the
Bishops, flattering the prejudices of the one and the bigotry of the
other; and never flinched from eulogizing royalty, when the rude hand of
popular clamor drew the vail from the immoralities of the Prince Regent
and his brother of York. Then he was a thorough business man; never
alarmed "Church and State" by wandering, like Canning and Peel, out of
the beaten Tory track; and, so far from giving up a bad cause in the
worst of times, he raised his voice the more sternly as the storm of
public discontent whistled louder, and cheered his flagging comrades to
their daily round of degrading toil. Such a minister was fit to be
beloved by a bigoted king and his profligate heir.




CHAPTER VI.

     Pitt's Continental Policy--Mr. Tierney--Mr. Whitbread--Lord
     Castlereagh--Lord Liverpool--Mr. Canning.


In examining a little further among the statesmen who opposed the
continental policy of Mr. Pitt and his successors--though by no means
intending to notice all who thus distinguished themselves--a less
notorious person than Mr. Sheridan attracts the eye; but one who, when
we regard the solid, every-day qualities of the mind, greatly surpassed
the showy blandishments of that celebrated orator. I allude to Mr.
Tierney. Like Mr. Perceval, he was bred to the bar; but unlike him, he
was not a mere lawyer, nor was his comprehension hemmed in by narrow
prejudices, nor his soul shriveled by bigotry. Though his reputation in
this country is dim when compared with other luminaries that shone in
that Whig constellation in the dawn of the present century, yet it would
be difficult to name one who shed a more steady and useful light along
the path of the liberal party, during the first ten years of that
century--always excepting Mr. Fox. Mr. Tierney was foremost among the
reformers in the perilous times of the treason trials, in 1794--was a
prominent member of the society of "Friends of the People"--penned the
admirable petition to Parliament, in which that association demonstrated
the necessity and safety of an enlarged suffrage, and an equal
representation--and, having attained a highly respectable standing at
the bar, entered Parliament in 1796, the year before Fox and the heads
of the Opposition unwisely abandoned their attendance upon the House,
because they despaired of arresting the course of Pitt. Mr. T. was at
once brought into a prominent position. He took up the gauntlet, and
during two or three sessions was the main leader of the remnant of the
Whigs, who stood to their posts; and he showed himself competent to fill
the occasion thus opened to him. Night after night he headed the
diminished band, arraying the rigid reasoning powers and tireless
business habits which he brought from the bar, against the haughty
eloquence of Pitt and the dry arguments of Dundas, blunting the cold
sarcasms of the former with his inimitable humor, and thrusting his keen
analytical weapon between the loose joints of the latter's logical
harness. He was solicitor general of Mr. Addington's mixed
administration; but the dissolution of that compound soon relieved him
from a cramped position, whence he gladly escaped to the broader field
of untrammeled opposition. Here he did manful service in the popular
cause, effectually blocking up all avenues to advancement, both in the
comparatively secluded walks of the profession which he ornamented, and
the more rugged and conspicuous paths of politics, which he delighted to
tread. During a part of the dark night of the Continental Coalition, he
guided the helm of his party with a skill and vigilance which its more
renowned chiefs might have profitably imitated. His ability to master
the details, as well as trace the outlines, of a complicated subject,
(so essential to success at the bar,) induced his colleagues to devolve
upon him the labor of exposing those exhausting schemes of finance by
which Pitt and his successors drained the life-blood of England's
prosperity, and swelled a debt which the sale of its every rood of soil
could hardly discharge. Thus he acquired a knowledge of trade and
finance, second only to that of the later Mr. Huskisson. It is meet that
the unassuming talents and services of such a man, "faithful among the
faithless," should not be overlooked when naming the modern reformers of
England.

I have spoken of Mr. WHITBREAD. Some who have not looked into the
Parliamentary history of the times we are now glancing over, suppose him
to have been merely a great brewer, purchasing an obscure seat in the
House of Commons by his ill-gotten wealth, who held his tongue during
the session, and sold beer in vacation. But he possessed an intellect of
the most vigorous frame, which had been garnished by a complete
education, and liberalized by extensive foreign travel. He was the
companion and counselor of Fox, Erskine, Sheridan, Grey, Mackintosh,
Romilly, and Brougham--a frequent visitor at Holland House--a ready and
strong debater, always foremost in the conflicts of those violent
times--for a short period the trusted leader of his party in the
House--and in 1814, when the quarrel between the imprudent Caroline and
her lewd husband came to an open rupture, he was selected, with
Brougham, to be her confidential adviser and friend. Generous in the
diffusion of his vast wealth--gentle and kindly in his affections--the
warm friend of human freedom, and the sworn foe of oppression in all its
forms--he gave his entire powers to the cause of progress and reform,
and resisted, in all places, at all seasons, and when others quailed,
the foreign policy of Pitt, Perceval, and Castlereagh. The return of
Napoleon from Elba alarmed all classes of Englishmen, and for the moment
swept all parties from their moorings. An Address to the Throne for an
enlargement of the forces was immediately moved by Grenville in the
Lords, and Grattan in the Commons, (both Whigs,) and supported by a
large majority of the panic-struck Opposition. Whitbread stood firm;
and, though denounced as a traitor and a French Jacobin, made an able
speech in favor of his motion that England ought not to interfere for
the restoration of the Bourbons. Such a fact illustrates the inflexible
metal of the man, more than a column of panegyric. His political
principles approached the standard of democracy; and this, with his
plebeian extraction and rather blunt manners, gave him less favor with
some of the full-blooded patricians of his party than with their common
constituency. He died in 1815, and like Romilly and Castlereagh, fell by
his own hand.

Many worthy and not a few illustrious names might find a place here.
Grey, the dignified and uncompromising--Romilly, the sagacious and
humane--Mackintosh, the classical and ornate--Grattan, the chivalrous
and daring--Burdett, the manly and bold--Horner, the learned and
modest--Holland, the polished and generous--Brougham, the versatile and
strong--all of whom, with others scarcely less notable, sustained the
drooping cause of freedom against the policy of Pitt and his followers,
and kept alive the sacred fires, to break out brightly in happier times.
But, each may be noticed in other connections. We will now speak of
three statesmen of a different school.

LORD CASTLEREAGH was the life and soul of Pitt's continental policy
during the six years before Napoleon fell. Like Sheridan, he was an
Irishman. But, unlike him, he resisted every measure which promised to
bless his native country, with the skill of a magician and the venom of
a fiend. Ever ready to bribe, bully, or butcher, he plunged England
deeper and deeper into debt and into blood, and seemed to regret when
there was no more money to be squandered, and no more fighting to be
done. As the best atonement he could make for permitting her to come out
of the conflict with a free Government, and without being utterly
ruined, he went to the Congress of Vienna, and humbly begged leave to
lay her constitution and her honor at the feet of the allied despots
whom she had impoverished herself in sustaining against the arms of
France. It has been contended that Perceval was an honest bigot; at
least as honest as any man could be who performed so many bad deeds.
But, beyond all question, Castlereagh is one of the most atrocious and
despicable Englishmen of the nineteenth century. The name of no other
modern statesman is so cordially and so justly detested by the mass of
the people. With no more eloquence than a last year's almanac--utterly
incapable of cutting even a second-rate figure as a Parliamentary
debater--yet, because of his intimate acquaintance with the affairs of
that vast kingdom, his blunt sense, promptness in council, unflinching
courage, and his unfaltering attachment to the Throne, and his
unscrupulous execution of its decrees, he led the Tory party in the
Commons, and controlled the counsels of the King through eleven of the
most turbulent years in England's recent history. Though not the nominal
Premier, he was the real head of its ministry during the war with this
country, and in the times which preceded and followed the overthrow of
Bonaparte, and bore a leading share in the subsequent despotic
transactions which assumed the soft name of "the pacification of
Europe." At the Congress of Vienna he represented the Power which had
staked all, and nearly lost all, in restoring the Bourbons. This gave
him the right to demand, in her name, that the victories she had bought
or won should redound to the advancement of constitutional liberty. But
this cringing tool of anointed tyranny, so far from bearing himself in a
manner worthy of his great constituency, succumbed to the dictation of
Russia and Austria--aided them in forming the diabolical Holy Alliance,
that politico-military Inquisition for "the settlement of Europe"--and,
decked out in his blazing star and azure ribbon, seemed to take as
vulgar a satisfaction in being permitted to sit at the council-board of
these monarchs, as did Mr. Tittlebat Titmouse, when admitted to the
table of the Earl of Dreddlington. His subsequent course in endorsing
the military _surveillance_ which this Holy Inquisition exercised over
the people of Europe, encountered the tireless hostility of the liberal
party of England, whose leaders made the island ring with their
protests. At length, this bold, bad man, this "_ice-hearted dog_," as
Ebenezer Elliott called him, having opposed the abolition of the slave
trade, the amelioration of the criminal code, the modification of the
corn laws, Catholic emancipation, Parliamentary reform, and every other
social and political improvement, during twenty-five years, suddenly
finished a career which had been marked at every step by infamous deeds.
Immediately thereupon, Mr. Canning, who succeeded to his place as
Foreign Secretary, filed his protest against certain proceedings of the
Holy Alliance, and England withdrew from that conspiracy of royal
rogues.

Throughout the period just mentioned, LORD LIVERPOOL was the nominal
head of the Ministry. He was a very respectable nobleman, with a large
purse and few talents; an easy, good-for-nothing, James-Monroe sort of a
body, whom every Whig and Tory made a low bow to, but whom nobody feared
or cared for; a pilot that could steer the ship of state tolerably well
in quiet waters, but who quit the helm for the cabin the instant the sky
was overcast, or the waves raged. He was in office so long that he
became a sort of ministerial fixture--a kind of nucleus around which
more ambitious, showy, and potent materials gathered. People had become
so accustomed to see him at the head of affairs, where he did so little
as to offend no one, that they looked upon him as almost as necessary to
the working of the governmental machine as the King himself. This
commonplace man, under the successive names of Mr. Jenkinson, Lord
Hawkesbury, and Lord Liverpool, held important stations in the Cabinet
more than thirty years, nearly half of which he was Premier.

As has been remarked, MR. CANNING succeeded Lord Castlereagh as Foreign
Secretary in 1823, and Lord Liverpool as Premier in 1827. Like
Castlereagh, Canning was of Irish descent; but, unlike him, he had some
Irish blood in his veins. Like him, he sustained the continental policy
of Pitt; but, unlike him, he did not desire to degrade England, after
she had destroyed Napoleon. Like him, he exercised great sway in the
councils of the country; but, unlike him, it was not so much the
influence of mere official station, as the voluntary tribute paid to a
splendid and captivating genius. For thirty-five years, this remarkable
man participated in public affairs; and whatever opinion may be formed
of his statesmenship, he was undoubtedly the most brilliant orator (I
use the term in its best and in its restricted sense) which has appeared
in the House of Commons the present century.

Canning's father was a broken-down Irish barrister, who, having little
knowledge of law, and less practice, quit Ireland for London, where he
eked out a scanty existence by writing bad rhymes for the magazines, and
tolerable pamphlets for the politicians. He died the day George was a
year old--April 11, 1771. The mother, left penniless, listened to the
flatteries of Garrick, went upon the stage, tried to sustain first-rate
characters, failed, sunk silently into a secondary position, married a
drunken actor, who then had two or three wives, and who, after strolling
about the provinces a few years, died in a mad-house, when she married a
stage-smitten silk mercer, who had a little more money than her late
husband, and a rather better character. Failing in business soon after,
he tried the stage in company with his wife, where he speedily broke
down, and she continued for some years to figure in third-rate
characters at the minor theaters. In such company as would naturally
surround such guardians, the future Prime Minister of England spent the
first nine or ten years of his life. He had a respectable paternal uncle
in London--a merchant of some wealth. An old actor, by the name of
Moody, detected the glittering gem of genius in the unpromising lad,
went to this uncle, and urged him to take his nephew (whom he had never
seen) under his care. He complied, sent him to a grammar school, then to
Eton, and, dying, left the means of educating his ward at Oxford. Young
Canning shone conspicuously at the University, as a wit, an
elocutionist, and a poet, and contracted some aristocratic friendships
which served his turn in subsequent life, especially that with Mr.
Jenkinson, afterwards Lord Liverpool.

After he left the University, he became intimate with Sheridan, who knew
something of his mother and his own history, and by him was introduced
to Fox and other leading Whigs. Though impregnated with liberal
principles, his ambitious eye saw that Whigism was an obscured luminary,
and so he turned and worshiped the ascendant star of Pitt. Entering
Parliament in 1793, just at the bursting of the continental storm, he at
once took his seat on the Treasury benches, and soon became a polished
shaft in the quiver of the great anti-Gallican archer. In or out of
office, he followed the fortunes of Pitt and his successors, till he
quarreled and fought a duel with Castlereagh, in 1809, when they both
left the Cabinet, and Canning remained under a cloud till 1814, when he
was banished as minister to the Court of Lisbon. From this time, he
never had the full confidence of the old school Tories, though he was
their most brilliant advocate in Parliament, and generally shared office
with them, and sustained their measures. After Castlereagh died, Mr.
Canning drew closely around him the more liberal Tories--such as Lords
Melbourne, Palmerston, Glenelg--and made up, in conjunction with Mr.
Huskisson, a "third party," called "Canningites," who, through the
auspices of Brougham, in 1827, formed a _quasi_ coalition with the
Whigs. After the death of their chief, many of his followers went
completely over to the Whigs, aided Earl Grey in carrying the reform
bill, took office under him, and subsequently, in an evil hour, became
the leaders of that party.

With the exception of giving a hearty support to the abolition of the
slave trade, and advocating the cause of Catholic emancipation, Mr.
Canning sustained the worst Tory measures from his entrance into
Parliament to the death of Castlereagh--a period of thirty
years--bringing to bear against the People's cause all the resources of
his classical learning, vivid wit, vigorous reasoning, captivating
manners, and unrivaled oratory. Undoubtedly, he despised the truckling
course of Castlereagh towards the Holy Alliance; and, either because he
wished to escape from "a false position," or because his colleagues
desired to cripple his influence, he was just about to go out to India
as Governor General, when the suicide of Castlereagh altered his
destination, and he exchanged a subordinate foreign station for the
chief control of that department of affairs. Immediately, England took a
nobler position toward the continental alliance in which she had been
entangled by his wily predecessor. The new Secretary protested against
the interference of the Allied Sovereigns with the popular movements in
Spain, and early the next year (1824) stated in his place that Ministers
had refused to become parties to another Congress. This was the longest
stride toward progress for thirty years, and well might the House of
Commons ring with enthusiastic plaudits. This was promptly followed by
the virtual recognition of the independence of the new South American
Republics--another blow at the Holy Military Inquisition. Calling Mr.
Robinson to his aid as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Mr. Huskisson as
President of the Board of Trade, the reoerganized ministry (good, easy
Lord Liverpool being its nominal head) adopted a more liberal policy in
commerce and finance, which, coupled with its course in foreign affairs,
drew to it a large share of confidence in the middle classes, and
softened the asperities of the Opposition. During the four years that
Canning controlled Liverpool's ministry, taxes were reduced, several
restrictions removed from trade, the endless delays in chancery inquired
into, the death penalty curtailed, resolutions passed looking toward
slave emancipation, the corn laws slightly modified, and a bill for the
relief of the Catholics was carried in the Commons, but thrown out by
the Lords. Liverpool died early in 1827. After a quarrel with Wellington
and Peel, Canning, in May of that year, reached the culminating point of
his ambition, the Premiership of England. But, at the end of four months
of vexed and troublesome rule, he died, much lamented by the people, who
were expecting good things from his administration.

Viewed from one point of observation, Mr. Canning's later policy was
favorable to the cause of reform; but, in another aspect, it may be
doubted whether his half-way measures were not, in the long run,
detrimental to that cause. He was raised up to save the Tory party, if
they would have consented to be saved by him; for, had he lived, he
would have continued gradually to yield to the advancing spirit of the
age, and kept them in power many years. But their distrust of him after
the peace of 1815 crippled his genius, mortified his pride, and
determined him in due time to rend the party which would not permit him
to rule. Through the aid of his personal adherents, his "third party,"
he did for the Tories in 1826-7, what Peel did for them twenty years
later--yielded to liberal opinions--split the party in twain--and formed
a _quasi_ coalition with his ancient opponents. Though by this means
some measures, such as Catholic emancipation and Parliamentary reform,
were sooner carried (though only to a partial extent) than they
otherwise might have been, yet it is hardly to be doubted that the
liberal cause is now more depressed than it would have been, had no such
coalition been formed and no such resulting concessions made. Though the
secession of the Canningites weakened the Tories, the accession diluted
the Whigs. It ultimately gave them such leaders as Melbourne and
Palmerston--men who, down to 1828, had been among the most strenuous
opponents of reform--men who have made Whigism popular at Court, by
arraying it in purple and fine linen, and other soft clothing--who have
stripped it of its rugged aspect, and decked it in the high-bred airs
which it wore in the days of the elder Georges and the Walpoles, when a
few noble families controlled its affairs. But, on the other hand, Mr.
Canning broke the power of old-fashioned John Bull Toryism--the
remorseless, insolent, _statu-quo_ Toryism of French revolutionary
times--and introduced the more complying, civil, progressive Toryism,
which emancipates Catholics and repeals corn laws.

Mr. Canning was like Mr. Fox in one respect. Each introduced a new era
in his party. The aristocratic Whigism of the last century, to which I
have alluded, is graphically hit off by Brougham, when he says the heads
of the few great families who controlled the party "never could be made
to understand how a feeble motion, prefaced by a feeble speech, if made
by an elderly lord and seconded by a younger one, could fail to satisfy
the country and shake the Ministry!" Fox, the Jefferson of English
liberalism, opened the door for men without ancestry or wealth to enter
the party, and find the place to which their talents assigned them,
whether at its head or its foot. He introduced the Whigism of the type
of Grey, Brougham, Romilly, Russell, and the Edinburgh Review. It has
served its day and generation, and has become so like modified,
_Canningized_ Toryism, that the chief distinction between them is in the
different modes of spelling their names. Within the last twenty years,
the people of England have advanced a century, while the Whig leaders
have not kept pace even with the calendar. English liberalism looks with
longing eye for "the coming man;" and when he appears, he will be as far
in advance of the Palmerstons and Russells of to-day, as they are before
the Pitts and the Percevals of past times.

To return to Mr. Canning. During the last five years of his life, he
occupied a sort of middle-ground between the ancient and the modern
_regime_; or, rather, was the connecting-link between the old and the
new order of things. Having served under Pitt in his youth, he formed an
alliance with the disciples of Fox in his maturity. Having advocated the
complete destruction of the Irish Parliament in 1799 and 1800, he
proposed a qualified emancipation of its Catholics in 1823 and 1827.
Having sustained the European coalition for the overthrow of Napoleon,
he repudiated its legitimate offspring, the Holy Alliance. Having
drained England of her wealth to nourish and maintain absolutism on the
continent, he shrunk from permitting her to pluck the fruit of her own
culture. In these latter years, he might have been properly called
either a liberal Tory or a Conservative Whig. He was the friend of
Catholic emancipation; but though public sentiment was not ripe enough
during his administration to accomplish this reform, his efforts tended
to bring it to that maturity which, soon after his death, enabled this
proscribed sect to gather the fruit from that tree of religious
toleration which his hand had aided to plant in the breast of English
Protestantism. But, on the vital subject of Parliamentary reform, he
would yield nothing. It was in reference to this that he had his famous
quarrel with Brougham, who, by the bye, was for many years the pitted
antagonist of Canning. The point in controversy was the disfranchisement
of a rotten borough, which had been convicted of bribery. Both girded
themselves for the contest. Never was the rugged intensity of the one,
nor the polished strength of the other, more conspicuous than on that
occasion. Brougham's attack was compared to the concave _speculum_, in
which every ray was concentrated with focal intensity, and poured in a
burning stream upon his shrinking victim. Canning's, to the convex
mirror, which scattered the rays, and showered them down upon his foe
with blinding fervor.

Turning from the statesman to the orator, we find him occupying a place
equaled by few of his cotemporaries; surpassed by none. He was the
Cicero of the British Senate; and, using the term _oratory_ in its
precise sense, he shines unrivaled among the English statesmen of our
day. He is an admirable refutation of the somewhat popular error, that a
_reasoner_ must necessarily be as dull and uninteresting as the Rev. Dr.
Dryasdust--that wit, raillery, vivid illustration, and suggestive
allusions, are incompatible with sound argument--that to be convincing,
one must be stupid--that logic consists in a lifeless skeleton of
consecutive syllogisms, divested of the flesh, blood, and marrow of
eloquence--and that the profundity of a speech is to be measured by the
depth of the slumbers into which it precipitates the auditory. It is
thus that many a man has gained the reputation of being a great
reasoner, when he was only a great bore; or been accounted wiser than
his more vivacious associates, because he wore a stolid visage and held
his tongue--completely putting to rout the venerable maxim of "nothing
venture, nothing have."

Though few public speakers of his time dealt more with the lighter
graces of oratory--wit, fancy, epigram, anecdote, historical
illustration, and classical allusion--so, few excelled him in the
clearness of his statements, the solidity of his arguments, and the
skill with which he brought all his resources to bear upon the point to
be reached, and the power with which he pressed it home to the
conviction of his hearers. A burst of laughter from all sides, excited
by his infectious wit, or a round of applause from his friends when some
galling sarcasm pierced the mailed harness of the Opposition, relieved
the tedium of a currency debate, intolerably dull in most hands, but
which he, by mingling figures of speech with the figures of the budget,
always made interesting, and thus kept his party in good humor while he
drove these wearisome topics through the thick skulls of knights of the
shire and country squires, of which material the Tories were largely
made up. Throwing around the path where he led his auditors a profusion
of flowers, gathered in all climes and refreshing to all tastes, he was
ever carrying forward the heavy chain of argument, delighting while he
convinced, and amusing that he might convert.

But these rare qualities produced their drawbacks. So skillful a master
of so bewitching an art could not be sparing in the exhibition of his
peculiar powers. His pleasantry and by-play, when handling momentous
questions, offended graver men, who could not believe that so much
levity was consistent with sincerity. He excited the jealousy of plainer
understandings, who saw things as clearly as he, but could not set them
in so transparent a light. His coruscations were not only glittering,
but they often dazzled and confounded less ornate minds. His sarcasms
stung his enemies to madness; and, not content merely to drive his
opponents to the wall, he hurled them there with such force, that they
rebounded into the arena, to become in turn the assailants; and his
friends found that a brilliant attack led on by him often resulted in a
counter assault, which summoned to the rescue all the forces of his
party. And more than this, his port and bearing left the impression upon
most minds that a consummate artist was acting a part, and not a sincere
man speaking from the heart. His obscure origin, (obscure for one who
aspired to be a Tory Premier,) and his early coquetry with the Whigs,
affixed to him the epithet of "an adventurer;" and he never shook off
the epithet, nor effaced the impression that it was fitly bestowed. The
people of England, whether he was Treasurer of the Navy, Foreign
Secretary, Prime Minister, or Parliamentary orator, never wholly escaped
from the suspicion that the son was following the profession of the
mother, but had chosen the chapel of St. Stephen's rather than the
theater of Drury Lane, for the display of his genius.

Turning from the orator to the man, we find much to delight the eye.
George Canning never forgot the humble mother that bore him. So soon as
his resources would permit, he made ample provision for her support; and
for years after he entered Parliament, and even when a foreign
ambassador, he wrote her a weekly epistle, breathing the kindliest
affection. Though he could never elevate her tastes and associations
above the connections of her youth, he used to throw aside the cares of
office, that he might visit her, and the humble cousins with whom she
dwelt, at Bath; and there, when in the zenith of his fame, would walk
out with his plebeian relatives, and receive the homage of the lordly
visitants at that fashionable resort, in their company. This marks him a
noble man. He delighted in literary pursuits--would drop the pen when
preparing a diplomatic dispatch, to talk over the classics with his
university acquaintances--was a brilliant essayist, and wrote Latin and
English verses with grace and beauty.




CHAPTER VII.

     Abolition of the African Slave Trade--Granville
     Sharpe--Wilberforce--Pitt--Stephen--Macaulay--Brougham.


In tracing the foreign policy of Pitt, we have been led beyond the
period of the great philanthropic achievement of 1806-7--the Abolition
of the African Slave Trade. I shall not trace the origin and growth of
this traffic, nor describe its horrors, nor detail the measures, in and
out of Parliament, which led to its legal prohibition. They are familiar
to those who will be likely to read this chapter.

THOMAS CLARKSON was the father of the movement for the abolition of the
slave trade, and, consequently, for the destruction of negro slavery
itself, of which it is but an incident. The circumstances which turned
his attention to it are novel. In 1785, he was a senior bachelor of arts
of St. John's College, Cambridge. The vice chancellor, impressed with
the iniquity of the slave trade, announced to the seniors as a subject
for a Latin dissertation, (I translate it,) "Is it right to make slaves
of others against their will?" He little thought of the far-reaching
consequences of this proposal. Young Clarkson, having secured the Latin
prize the previous year, was anxious to obtain it again. He went to
London, and procured all the books relating to the subject he could
find. His sensitive mind was shocked beyond measure at the horrors of
"the middle passage," which they disclosed. Sleep often left his pillow,
while digesting the materials for his essay; and during its preparation
he resolved to devote his life to the destruction of so appalling an
evil. Noble resolution! Little did the young philanthropist then imagine
that he should live, not only to see this trade abolished by Great
Britain, and declared piracy by all Christian Powers, but to witness the
abolition of slavery itself in those islands of the West, around which
his warm sympathies clustered; that he should see the humanity of the
world roused in arms to put down the crime of chattelizing mankind; and
should himself, after a lapse of fifty-five years, preside, "the
observed of all observers," in the metropolis of England, at a large
Convention assembled from the four quarters of the globe, to devise
means to achieve a final victory in this war upon the "wild and guilty
phantasy, that man can hold property in man." But, I anticipate.
Clarkson finished his essay, won the prize, and, true to his vow,
commenced, friendless and without resources, the work of abolition. He
translated and enlarged his essay, and committing it to press, started
on a pilgrimage through the kingdom, in search of facts to illustrate
the character of the traffic, and friends to aid him in its destruction.
A singular instance of his patient zeal may be stated. He was anxious to
ascertain whether slaves were _kidnapped_ by the traders in the interior
of Africa. He was told by a gentleman, that about a year before, he had
conversed with a common sailor, who had made several excursions up the
African rivers, in pursuit of slaves, and presumed he could inform him
on this subject. He knew not the sailor's name, nor his residence, nor
where he sailed from, and could only say, that when he saw him he
belonged on board some man-of-war in ordinary. Clarkson started on the
forlorn hope of finding this sailor. He successively visited Deptford,
Woolwich, Chatham, Sheerness, Portsmouth, and Plymouth--boarding, during
the tour, which occupied several weeks, 317 ships, and examining several
thousand persons. I give the result in his own words: "At length, I
arrived at the place of my last hope, (Plymouth.) On my first day's
expedition I boarded forty vessels, but found no one who had been on the
coast of Africa in the slave trade. One or two had been there in King's
ships, but they had never been on shore. Things wore now drawing to a
close; and my heart began to beat. I was restless and uneasy during the
night. The next morning I felt agitated between the alternate pressure
of hope and fear; and in this state I entered my boat. The fifty-seventh
vessel I boarded was the Melampus frigate. One person belonging to it,
on examining him in the captain's cabin, said he had been two voyages to
Africa; and I had not long conversed with him before I found, to my
inexpressible joy, that he was the man." This long-sought witness
confirmed his suspicions in regard to kidnapping. In 1786, Clarkson
published a tract, embodying a summary of the various information he had
obtained, and in June 1787, organized, in London, the first committee
for the abolition of the slave trade, and was appointed its secretary
and agent. When visiting this patriarch of humanity, at Playford Hall,
in 1840, he showed me the records of this committee. There were the
original entries, in his own handwriting, made more than fifty-three
years before; and he was alive to read them to me, accompanied by many
lively anecdotes of the early friends whose names and deeds were there
recorded. In 1787, he had his first interview with Mr. Wilberforce, and
found a ready access to the heart of that great and good man. In 1788,
he published his important work, "The Impolicy of the Slave Trade." The
next year he visited France, to enlist the friends of liberty in that
country in favor of his scheme. He had interviews with Mirabeau, Neckar,
and others. He was denounced as a spy, and came near being seized. Owing
to the revolutionary storm then rising over the kingdom, he accomplished
little by this tour, except to present copies of his printed works to
the King, and obtain promises from Mirabeau and Neckar to call public
attention to the subject when the agitations of the period had subsided.
These promises were soon engulfed in the earthquake which shook, not
only France, but Europe to its center.

Previous to 1788, such progress had been made in public sentiment and
feeling in England, through the indefatigable labors of Clarkson and the
committee he had founded, that it was determined to bring the subject of
Abolition before Parliament. Mr. Wilberforce was selected to open the
question; but, owing to his ill health, Mr. Pitt, on the 9th of May,
1788, moved that the House do resolve to take into consideration the
state of the slave trade early in the next session. In 1790, Wilberforce
introduced a proposition for the total abolition of the traffic, and
sustained it with eminent ability, Pitt, Fox, and Burke giving him their
support. The West India interest took fire, insisting that the trade was
sanctioned by the Bible, and its abolition would ruin the commerce of
London, Bristol, Liverpool, and other large marts. The session of 1792
saw the tables of both Houses loaded with influential petitions.
Wilberforce led off, as usual, followed closely by Fox and Pitt. Dundas,
"the right hand of Pitt," opposed the measure, and was scathed by Fox in
reply. In the Lords, the Duke of Clarence denounced Wilberforce as a
"meddling fanatic," who ought to be expelled from Parliament. But the
object of his censure lived to see his royal traducer, as King William
IV, sign a bill appropriating L20,000,000 for the abolition of slavery
in the West India islands! Omitting details, suffice it to say, that the
friends of Abolition pressed its consideration upon the public attention
from year to year, with increasing fervor, Clarkson being the out-door
manager, and Wilberforce the Parliamentary, (always sustained by Pitt
and Fox,) till, on the downfall of Pitt, and the coming in of a liberal
administration, with Fox for its leader, in 1806, a condemnatory vote
was obtained, which, in the next year, was followed by the total
abolition of the trade.

I will not stop to state why this measure, since adopted from time to
time by all Christian nations, has not fulfilled the expectations of its
friends; nor why the number of victims of the slave trade in our day is
double that of the time when Clarkson commenced his labors. In a word,
so long as the existence of slavery makes a demand for fresh "cargoes of
human agony," so long wretches will be found to brave heaven, earth, and
hell, to furnish the supply. But the failure to attain complete success
should not lessen our admiration of those early toils, which, like an
oasis in the wide desert of human selfishness, refresh the eye of all
who recognize the common brotherhood of man.

Mr. Clarkson was greatly aided in his labors by GRANVILLE SHARPE. This
singular person had already become known for his advocacy of the rights
of negro slaves when Clarkson commenced his work. He was born of humble
parents, in 1735. He had a mind peculiarly fond of probing everything to
the bottom. While an apprentice, a controversy with a Socinian led him
to study Greek, that he might read the New Testament in the original. A
dispute with a Jew induced him to obtain a knowledge of Hebrew. In 1767,
his interference in behalf of a West India slave, whose master, then in
London, had whipped him nearly to death, cost him a lawsuit. He must be
beaten, if the master could hold his slave in England. Eminent counsel
told him he must fail, for the right of the master was not invalidated
by bringing his slave to England. Repudiating this advice, Sharpe, with
his usual diligence and bent of mind, devoted himself to the study of
the law, preparatory to his own defense. The "law's delay" gave him
ample time to explore the subject to its foundations. He published a
tract "On the injustice and dangerous tendency of tolerating slavery, or
even of admitting the least claim to property in the persons of men, in
England." His rare authorities and profound reasoning converted to his
views many leading members of the bar. After a delay of two years, the
plaintiff abandoned the case, paying Sharpe heavy costs. While further
prosecuting his legal researches, he had another affair of a similar
kind, in which he was partially successful. By this time, though
comparatively an obscure man, he was better read in the law of slavery,
and the restrictions upon the system in England, than any barrister or
jurist in Westminster Hall. In 1772 came on the hearing, before Lord
Mansfield, in the matter of the negro Somersett, a West India slave, who
claimed his freedom on the ground that his master had brought him into
England. The ablest counsel were employed on both sides; the case was
argued twice or thrice, and was under consideration several months.
Sharpe took deep interest in the issue, frequently conferred with
Somersett's counsel, and wrote in his behalf for the newspapers. At
length, on the 22d of June, 1772, Mansfield, with great reluctance, (for
he leaned to the side of the slaveholder,) pronounced the celebrated
judgment, that slavery, being contrary to natural law, was of so odious
a nature that nothing but positive law could support it, and that every
slave, on touching English soil, became free, and "therefore the man
must be discharged!" This rule has ever since been recognized as law in
all climes where England bears sway, and is so regarded in America and
most of the civilized States of the world. For three-fourths of a
century it has pursued the Evil Spirit of slavery with uplifted weapon,
ready to cleave it to the earth the moment it passed the boundaries of
its own odious and unnatural law; and in our day it stands like the
flaming sword of Paradise, turning every way, to guard the tree of
Liberty. For the early announcement of this far-reaching and
deep-sounding principle, the world is indebted to the labors of one who
commenced his career as a humble London apprentice. Having fought the
good fight of Abolition with Clarkson and Wilberforce, and gained
considerable distinction by his philanthropic deeds and writings,
numbering Sir William Jones among his intimate friends, he died in 1813.
A monument, with suitable devices and inscriptions, was erected to his
memory in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey, to mark the public
sense of his merits.

MR. WILBERFORCE has not been over-estimated, but, in my judgment, he
has been mis-estimated. Entitled to less relative praise for his
Abolition services than is generally bestowed, he is worthy of a higher
position as a statesman and orator than is usually assigned to him. This
common error is readily accounted for. The commanding place he so long
occupied, as the Parliamentary leader in this Reform, rendered him more
conspicuous at home, and especially abroad, than any of his coadjutors,
though no man was more ready than he to acknowledge that his services
were meager, compared with those of some of his less noted colaborers.
So, on the other hand, such is the luster of Mr. Wilberforce's undoubted
achievements in the Abolition cause, that to the public eye they have
thrown into the shade his very superior talents in other and more
general aspects. He would have stood in the front rank of Parliamentary
orators, (and those were the days of Burke, Fox, Pitt, Erskine, Wyndham,
and Sheridan,) had he never thrown a halo round his name by consecrating
his powers to humanity. Thoroughly educated, and furnished with general
information, his eloquence was of a high order--fervid, instructive,
persuasive; his diction classical and elegant; his voice musical and
bland; and though his figure was diminutive, and not graceful, his
countenance was remarkably expressive. He possessed a lively
imagination, a keen sense of the ludicrous, a ready wit, and powers of
sarcasm which Pitt might envy. These latter, however, he kept in
subjection, mainly from his strong religious susceptibilities and kindly
spirit, which impelled him to avoid giving pain, choosing to disarm
personal assailants by winning appeals to their calmer judgments. On one
occasion, after being repeatedly and coarsely alluded to, as "the
honorable and very religious member," he turned upon his antagonist, and
poured upon him a torrent of contempt, sarcasm, and rebuke, which
astonished the House, not more for the ability it displayed, than that
so great a master of indignant declamation should so rarely resort to
its use. These intellectual elements combined with the spotless purity
and winning beauty of his character, to give him great weight in the
House, and contributed not a little to sustain the general policy of Mr.
Pitt, whose supporter he usually was, though he ever maintained a
position of comparative political independence. He had much personal
influence over that minister, whose repeated offers to take office under
his Administration he steadily declined. He retired from Parliament in
1824. His last public appearance was in 1830, when, on motion of his old
friend Clarkson, he took the chair at a large meeting of delegates, in
London, assembled to promote the abolition of slavery in the West
Indies.

MR. PITT'S advocacy of Abolition is now believed to have been
hollow-hearted--a mere trick to gain popular applause in unwonted
quarters, and retain his hold upon Wilberforce. During the twenty years
which this question agitated Parliament and the country, Pitt, with the
exception of two or three, reigned supreme, and never failed to carry
any scheme he set his heart upon. At the wave of his hand, he could have
driven from the House half the members, who steadily voted against
Abolition, whilst with a dash of his pen he could have swept from the
offices of the kingdom every occupant who dared oppose his will on this
measure. By his personal advocacy of it, he lost nothing, and gained
much.

We turn with more pleasure to contemplate for a moment the services of
two very different coadjutors of Wilberforce and Clarkson--James Stephen
and Zachary Macaulay. It has already been said that the more imposing
character of Mr. Wilberforce's services threw into the shade those of
many not less worthy colaborers. Of these, Messrs. Stephen and Macaulay
were among the most eminent.

MR. STEPHEN was a barrister. On being called to the bar, he emigrated to
St. Kitts, and attained such distinction in the colonial courts as to be
called "the Erskine of the West Indies." Impaired health induced his
return to England in 1794, where he urged his way to a respectable
standing in Westminster Hall. Soon after his return, he procured an
introduction to Wilberforce, and immediately entered, with
characteristic zeal, into the great work to which the former had devoted
his powers. He was prepared for this from the fact, that such was his
abhorrence of slavery, that he never owned a slave during his protracted
residence in the West Indies. He subsequently married the sister of Mr.
Wilberforce. He consecrated his vigorous pen to the cause of Abolition,
and contributed much to create that public sentiment which demanded the
abrogation of the traffic. At the solicitation of Mr. Perceval, he
entered Parliament in 1808, where he remained seven or eight years.
Always conscientious in the discharge of his political duties, he
refused to support the administration which followed that of Perceval,
in consequence of their neglect to promote a measure, which he had
anxiously pressed upon them, for the registration of slaves in the West
Indies. He soon after resigned his seat, and devoted himself more
exclusively to the duties of a master in chancery, to which office he
had been appointed in 1811, and which he held twenty years. He was the
means of introducing several reforms in the practice of the court of
chancery, though by so doing he essentially lessened his own emoluments.
As an instance of his disinterestedness, it may be mentioned that he
forbade his clerk to take the ordinary gratuities, and remunerated him
for his loss out of his own pocket to the amount of about L800 a year.
What time he could spare from his official duties was devoted to the
abolition of the slave trade by foreign States, and of slavery in the
West Indies. Besides numerous pamphlets, occasional speeches, and an
extensive correspondence on these subjects, he published an admirable
legal work, entitled, "Slavery of the British West India Colonies
Delineated," the plan of which has apparently been followed by Judge
Stroud, of Philadelphia, in a work of equal ability, on American
slavery. Mr. Stephen descended to his honored grave in 1832, at the
advanced age of 75.

MR. MACAULAY is the father of the brilliant essayist and historian whose
writings are so well known in this country. And it is high praise to say
that, as a writer, he is the worthy progenitor of such a descendant;
for, though his publications fall short in beauty and splendor of those
of his celebrated son, they are equal to his in logical acumen and
argumentative power. Though younger in years than Stephen, Macaulay's
services in the abolition of the slave trade were equal to his, while
those in the cause of West India emancipation far transcended his.

The Life of Wilberforce, published by his sons, in 1838, was thought to
have done injustice to the early labors of Clarkson in the abolition of
the slave trade. An unpleasant controversy at once arose, as to the
relative merits of these philanthropists, and especially in reference to
their agency in promoting the abolition. An anecdote was told to me in
London respecting the matter, which illustrates one of the
idiosyncrasies in the mental constitution of another early and steadfast
Abolitionist--HENRY BROUGHAM--who, though young at the period of the
abolition, had, while traveling on the continent, assisted Wilberforce
by pursuing various inquiries in Holland, Germany, Poland, and other
countries, in regard to the traffic. Some of the particulars of the
story are forgotten, but enough are remembered for the present purpose.
Soon after the appearance of the Life, the friends of Clarkson caused a
book to be prepared, vindicating his services and claims, to which
Brougham agreed to furnish an introduction. The body of the work was in
press before the ex-chancellor, pressed with multifarious labors, had
prepared his paper. The committee having the matter in charge waited
upon him, and stated that the publication was delayed for want of his
introduction; that country booksellers and anti-slavery societies were
impatient to have their orders filled, &c. Brougham told them he had not
written a line of it, but would have it completed by a given day of the
same week. At the appointed time the committee called, and he read the
paper. What was their mortification to find incorporated into the middle
of it a ferocious attack on Daniel O'Connell, the very man upon whom
they were relying to help carry through the Commons the bill then
pending for the abolition of the apprenticeship in the West Indies, and
with whom they had had an interview on the subject that very morning.
Here was a dilemma! They expostulated with Brougham; explained the
ruinous consequences to the cause, of their sanctioning such an attack
on O'Connell; and while they did not wish to interfere with the
controversy between him and O'Connell, assured him that for them to
issue such a publication at that crisis might seal the fate of the
apprenticeship bill--nor could they send out the work without his
introduction, without disappointing the public. After rather an exciting
interview, Brougham dismissed them by peremptorily declaring, "they must
take it as it was, or not at all." They left in despair. The next day,
one of the committee called, to see if something could not be done to
get over the difficulty, when lo, his lordship handed him the paper with
the offensive passage omitted. The secret of the alteration was this:
The night after the first interview, Brougham went down to the House of
Peers, and "pitching into" the debate, castigated some half dozen of the
lords spiritual and temporal to his heart's content, and, having thus
worked off "the slough of his passion," returned home in a calmer mood,
and blotted the obnoxious paragraph from his Introduction.




CHAPTER VIII.

     Law Reform--Jeremy Bentham--His Opinion of the Common Law--His
     "Felicity" Principle--His Universal Code--His Works--The Fruits of
     his Labors--His Talents and Character.


The father of Modern Law Reform was JEREMY BENTHAM. This singular person
has been often sneered at by Americans, who knew nothing of him or his
writings, except that he lived somewhere in Europe, and was called "a
visionary foreign philosopher" by the North American Review. He was the
constant theme of ridicule for a large class of Englishmen, who only
cared to know that he was said to be an eccentric old man, who shunned
the world, admitted his guests to dine one at a time, wore an uncouth
garb, was an abominable sloven, turned wooden bowls on a lathe and run
in his garden for exercise, relieved the tedium of study by playing now
on a fiddle and then on an organ, heated his house by steam, slept in a
sack, looked very much like Ben. Franklin, did not believe in rotten
boroughs or rotten creeds, did believe in free trade in corn and money,
thought the common law the perfection of absurdity, Lord Eldon's court a
libel on equity, and wrote codes for all creation to use in the
twenty-ninth century.

Mr. Bentham was one of the most remarkable men that has appeared in our
age. He was born in 1747, and was descended from a race of attorneys. At
the age of five, the family called him "the philosopher;" at eight he
played well on the violin, on which he afterwards became a proficient;
and at thirteen went to Oxford, where he excited admiration and wonder
by his acute observations, logical skill, and precision of language.
When he took his degree, he was esteemed the first reasoner and
philosophical critic in the University. He was at Oxford when Wesley and
the "Methodists" were expelled, and his generous soul took up arms
against this tyranny. This induced him to examine the thirty-nine
articles of the Church, one by one; and when it became necessary for him
to subscribe them, long was the struggle before Bentham could bring his
hand to do it. He has left on record a rebuke of this test, which ought
to consign it to universal condemnation. At Oxford, he attended the law
lectures of Blackstone, (being the substance of his Commentaries,) and
his clear mind detected the fallacies in his reasoning, and his humane
and honest spirit revolted at many of his eulogiums on the Common Law of
England.

The Bar, to which he was admitted in 1772, opened a brilliant prospect
before him. His precise and acute method of drafting equity and law
pleadings was much extolled, and his refusal to receive the usual fees
excited no less attention. A sharp solicitor swelled a swindling bill of
costs in a case in which Bentham had succeeded--he protested--"Quirk"
told him it was made up according to the rules, and he would lose caste
if he altered it. Bentham was disgusted, resolved to quit the
profession, and spend his life in "endeavoring," as he expressed it, "to
put an end to the system, rather than profit by it." To the grasping
pertinacity of this solicitor, the world is indebted for the sixty
years' labor of Jeremy Bentham in the cause of law reform. Soon after
this, he published his first work, "A Fragment on Government; being an
examination of what is delivered on that subject in Blackstone's
Commentaries." He then visited Paris, where he became intimate with
Brissot, through whose agency, and without his knowledge, he was
subsequently made a citizen of the French Republic, and elected a member
of the second National Assembly.

His father died in 1792, leaving him a moderate fortune, which enabled
him entirely to abandon his profession, and devote himself to the
preparation of those works on Law and Government which have celebrated
his name in the Four Quarters of the Globe. During the truce of Amiens,
he again visited Paris, accompanied by Sir Samuel Romilly, where he
found himself famous. M. Dumont was then publishing his works in French.
Of his "_Traites de Legislation Civile et Penale_," in 3 vols., about
4,000 copies were sold in Paris. At this time, there happened to be
three vacancies in the French Institute, one of which was reserved for
Bonaparte. Bentham was chosen to fill one of the vacancies. From
elective affinity, no less than through the agency of Romilly, he soon
after became intimate with the young men, known as "the Edinburgh
Reviewers," Brougham, Jeffrey, Smith, Horner, Mackintosh, and their
associates, and from that time was the Mentor of that galaxy of talent
on the subject of Law Reform.

When Bentham was admitted to the bar, he found the English law, its
principles and its practice, entrenched behind the interests of powerful
classes, and embedded in the prejudices of all. Though called the
perfection of reason, to his penetrating eye it was the offspring of a
barbarous age, and, though a noble production for the times that gave it
birth, had obtruded into the light of an infinitely milder and more
liberal civilization the harsh features which stamped its origin. To him
it was the patchwork of fifteen centuries--a chaos of good and evil--an
edifice exhibiting the architecture of the ancient Briton, the Gaul, the
Goth, the Dane, the Saxon, and the Norman, all jumbled together, and to
which, in order to render it tenantable, modern hands had made numerous
additions and improvements, till the whole had become a huge, shapeless,
and bewildering pile. He saw that it contained masses of material to aid
in the erection of a new edifice, adapted to the enlarged wants and
cultivated tastes of the present age. And he entered upon the
elucidation of his plans for a judicial structure worthy of the noon of
the nineteenth century. He was the first man who sat down to the task of
exposing the defects of the English law. Heretofore, its students and
ministers had been content to sift its principles from a chaotic mass of
statutes and decisions, and collect and arrange the perplexing details
of its form of procedure. Commencing at the bottom, he worked up through
all its ramifications, bringing everything to the test of expediency,
and inquiring whether the parts were homogeneous with the whole, and
whether the whole was suited to the wants of existing society, and the
promotion of human well-being. Probably not intending, when he started,
to do more than improve the system by amending it, he soon aimed at its
complete reconstruction, branching out into an exhausting discussion of
the principles on which all human laws should be based, nor stopping
till he had surveyed the nature of Government in its widest relations.

The test-principle of his system may be explained briefly thus: The only
proper end of the social union is, the attainment of the maximum of the
aggregate of happiness; and the attainment of this maximum of the
aggregate of happiness is by the attainment of the maximum of individual
happiness. The standard for determining whether a law is right or wrong,
is its conduciveness to the maximum of the aggregate of happiness, by
conducing to the maximum of individual happiness. This was known in his
day, and in ours, as "the greatest-happiness principle," or "the
principle of felicity"--which latter term he much preferred to that by
which it is more commonly known, "the doctrine of utility." This was the
keystone of Bentham's system. With this principle in his hand, he
traversed the entire field of legislation, dividing it into two great
parts--internal law, and international law. Internal law included the
legislation which concerns a single State or community; international,
that which regulates the intercourse of different States with each
other. His chief attention was devoted to preparing a code of internal
law under the Greek name of _Pannomion_, (the whole law.) This he
divided into four parts--the constitutional, the civil, the penal, and
the administrative. The _constitutional_ defined the supreme authority,
and the mode of executing its will. The _civil_ defined the rights of
persons and of property, and was termed the "right-conferring code." The
_penal_ defined offenses and their punishments, and was termed "the
wrong-repressing code." The _administrative_ defined the mode of
executing the whole body of the laws, and was termed "the code of
procedure." Some of these codes he run out into details. Others he left
unfinished. They all bore the stamp of great research, learning, and
symmetry, and were supported by vigorous reasoning, and elucidated by a
comprehensive genius. Many a _codifier_ of our day has been indebted,
directly or indirectly, to these labors of Jeremy Bentham, to an extent
of which he was perhaps not aware.

His system struck at the very root of the English law. Of course, such a
"wild enthusiast," such a "reckless innovator," was laughed at,
misrepresented, and abused. Not a single tile or crumbling pillar of
"the perfection of reason" must be touched. The rubbish that blocked up
the avenues leading to it, the dust which choked its passages, must not
be removed. Venerable for its age, hallowed as the legacy of our
ancestors, the work of wise men and dead men, it must be worshiped at a
distance and let alone. All classes deified it, and denounced such as
would sneeze at its consecrated dust. The king as he placed the golden
round on his anointed head, and the noble as he gazed on his stars and
ribbons--the fat bishop as he pocketed his tithes, and the lean
dissenter as he paid them--the judge in his scarlet robes, and the
barrister in his wig of horsehair--the merchant as he paid his onerous
duties to the government, and the yeoman as he liquidated the ruinous
rents of his landlord--the clodhopper as he took his shilling for twelve
hours of exhausting toil, and the culprit as he hung on a cross-tree for
killing the hare which poached on his beans--all, high-born and
low-born, patrician and plebeian, rich and poor, wise and foolish, were
ready to make oath that the common law of England was the perfection of
reason, and to swear at Jeremy Bentham for doubting it. If Bentham had
done nothing more than dispel this delusion, he would deserve the thanks
of the millions in both hemispheres who submit to the sway of the common
law; and this he did most effectually.

Bentham brought to his work reasoning faculties which did not so much
probe subjects to the bottom as begin there, and work upwards to their
surface--a patience which no amount of drudgery could weary--a taste
whose light reading was Bacon and Beccaria--a memory retentive as
tablets of brass--a boldness which shrunk from looking no institution in
the face, and questioning its pretensions to utility and its claims to
homage--an honesty which never averted the eye from conclusions
legitimately born of sound premises--a conscience which followed truth
wherever it led. Lord Brougham, who knew him intimately, has happily
said: "In him were blended, to a degree perhaps unequaled in any other
philosopher, the love and appreciation of general principles, with the
avidity for minute details; the power of embracing and following out
general views, with the capacity for pursuing each one of numberless
particular facts." He was an adept in numerous modern languages, as
French, Italian, Spanish, and German, and he extended his linguistical
knowledge into the Swedish, Russian, and other northern tongues. These
acquisitions facilitated his study of the history of all countries and
times, with whose philosophy, legislation and jurisprudence he was
acquainted beyond most men.

His numerous writings all bore some relation to his "Felicity"
principle, and the topics discussed were almost as multifarious as human
exigency and action. Including his larger pamphlets, they must number
some fifty volumes. They chiefly relate to Government, law, and
jurisprudence; but he also wrote extensively on morals, politics, and
ecclesiastical establishments. Nor did science wholly escape his
searching pen, for he treated of chemistry and anatomy. He wrote against
Blackstone's Commentaries, and attacked Burke's plan for economical
reform. He wrote on prison discipline and penal colonies, and
illustrated the anti-Christian tendency of oaths. He advocated free
schools, and denounced church establishments. He attacked rotten
boroughs, and drafted plans for work-houses. He vindicated free trade,
and showed the impolicy of the usury laws. He prepared a constitutional
code to be used by any State, and drew up a reform bill for the House of
Commons. He wrote separate volumes or pamphlets on bankruptcy, poor
laws, primogeniture, escheats, taxation, jails, Scotch reform, the
French judiciary, the criminal code of Spain, juries, evidence, rewards
and punishments, oaths, parliamentary law, English reform, education,
Church-of-Englandism, &c., &c., &c. He wrote for or offered codes to
France, Spain, Greece, Russia, and the South American States--sent a
letter to each Governor of the United States, proposing to prepare for
them an entire code of laws--was intimate personally or by
correspondence with Howard, Lafayette, Wilberforce, the Emperor
Alexander, Napoleon, Brissot, Mirabeau, Neckar, Benezet, Franklin,
Jefferson, Bolivar, Jean Baptiste Say, Toussaint L'Ouverture, and in
fact with most of the men of his times, who were celebrated in any part
of the world for their services in the cause of liberty, humanity and
reform.

Of course no man, unless endowed with all the wisdom of the ancients and
the moderns, could write so much on such a variety of subjects, without
committing to paper a good deal of nonsense. Yet he wrote no page but
contains some profound thoughts, whilst many of his volumes are replete
with wisdom. And if any one mortal man could have written codes for all
the nations on earth, that man was Jeremy Bentham.

His defects were partly the result of his peculiar mind, and partly of
those idiosyncrasies which germinate in all speculators who mingle
little with men and things. Bold and original to a fault, he rather
suspected that an old thing was necessarily a bad thing. His exhaustless
patience, and fondness for abstractions and theorizing, which grew by
what they fed on, led him to carry everything out, out, out, till he
sometimes trenched on absurdity or sunk in obscurity. In vulgar phrase,
he was prone to "run a thing into the ground." He mixed so little with
the world, and had such limited experience in the every-day business of
life, that he often forgot that his codes must be executed by and upon
mortal men. He lived fifty years in the house immortalized as the
dwelling-place of Milton, in the very heart of London; and yet
nine-tenths of the inhabitants, about whom he was thinking, and writing,
and printing for half a century, never knew that he lived at all. Habits
induced by this recluse life, were not improved by his being the head
and oracle of a school, whose immoderate puffings, which he must hear,
were not counterbalanced by denunciations from without, to which he
never listened. He tried to reduce everything to a system, and wrote as
if the human mind were a curious little wheel, to be put into a vast
engine, which, when regulated according to his system, would run without
jarring or friction. He made too little allowance for the
individualities, eccentricities, _crooked-stickednesses_ of mankind. But
in this he did not differ from many other philosophers--men wiser and
better than their generation--men so far beyond and above their times,
that they look like dwarfs to their cotemporaries.

Then, he undertook so much that he left a great deal incomplete; so
that, in many of his works, while he has finished one side of a subject,
he seems not to have touched or seen the other side. His style,
especially in his latter years, was rough, involved, uncongenial; often
obscure from its very verbosity; and, when clear, fatiguing the reader
by so thoroughly exhausting the subject as to leave nothing for him to
do but read. He called his style of reasoning "the _exhaustive_ mode,"
and he crowded it full of crabbed words of his own invention. He wrote
many of his works in French, and they were given to the world by Dumont,
a Genevan. Hazlitt has wittily said: "His works have been translated
into French; they ought to be translated into English." Sydney Smith,
when reviewing his "Book of Fallacies," remarks, in his quaint way,
"Whether it is necessary there should be a middleman between the
cultivator and the possessor, learned economists have doubted; but
neither gods, men, nor booksellers, can doubt the necessity of a
middleman between Mr. Bentham and the public.* * The mass of readers
will choose to become acquainted with him through the medium of Reviews,
after that eminent philosopher has been washed, trimmed, shaved, and
forced into clean linen."

Bentham invented the words _Codify_ and _Codification_, now in such
general use. But let it not be supposed that he was guilty of the
absurdity of imagining that the entire laws of a Commonwealth could be
compressed into a single volume; nor of that other absurdity, that the
laws can be written so plain that the meanest capacity can understand
them fully, and apply them, without mistakes, to all the varieties of
human rights and wrongs, and the ever-shifting vagaries and exigencies
of society. He never had wit enough to see how it was, that what never
could be true in regard to any other science or species of writing, must
be true in regard to jurisprudence and legislation. He left that
discovery for penny-a-liners, who believe all the law the world needs
can be printed between the yellow covers of a twenty-page pamphlet.

Bentham labored without any apparent success at home for years. He was
famous in France, and appreciated in Russia, before he was known in
England. At length, his reiterated blows made an impression. He won
converts in high places, and they became his "middlemen" with the
public. Brougham and Smith spread out his great ideas in attractive
colors on the pages of the Edinburgh, and they sparkled in brilliant
speeches from Romilly and Mackintosh on the floor of Parliament. One
after another, the champions for the inviolability of the ancient system
were prostrated, till reasonable men admitted that, whether or not
Jeremy Bentham was right, the common law was certainly wrong, and must
be materially altered. Though he took no part in actual legislation, his
was the master mind that set other minds in motion; his genius, the
secret spring that operated a vast reformatory machine. He did not live
to see his whole system adopted, (and would not, had he lived till the
millennium,) but he saw parts of it incorporated into the jurisprudence
of his country, whilst other parts were postponed rather than rejected.
He saw the fruits of his labors in the amelioration of a sanguinary
criminal code, and especially in the abridgment of the death penalty--in
the improvement of the poor laws and penitentiaries, and the kindlier
treatment of prisoners--in the softening of the harsher features of
imprisonment for debt, of the bankrupt laws, and the general law of
debtor and creditor--in lopping off some excrescences in chancery, and
cutting down costs and simplifying the modes of procedure in other
courts--in the abolition of tests, and the emancipation of the
Catholics--in the greater freedom of trade, the enlargement of the
suffrage, and the partial equalization of representation in
Parliament--in the appointment of commissioners to revise the whole mass
of statute law, and reduce it to a uniform code--and, more than all, in
the conviction, penetrating a multitude of intelligent minds, that a
large portion of the English law, as administered, so far from being the
perfection of reason, was a disgrace to the human understanding, and the
homage paid to it a degrading idolatry.

Nor did he see these fruits in England alone. As he labored for the
world, so he saw the products of his toil in both hemispheres. France
and Russia published his writings, and they were read in Germany and
Switzerland. His works were circulated at Calcutta and the Cape of Good
Hope; at New York, and New South Wales; in the Canadas, and the
Republics of South America. This country profits by his culture in the
simplification of its laws, and their revision and codification in many
of its States--in the comparative humanity of its criminal codes and
prison discipline--and especially in the recent sweeping reforms in the
practice of its courts in three or four States, and the abolition of the
monopoly of the legal profession--a monopoly worthless to those whom it
protected, and galling to those whom it excluded. By no means do I
intend to say, that to him we are solely indebted for these reforms. But
his hand planted the tree whose fruit is now being gathered. His chief
glory is the emancipation of the Anglo-Saxon mind from a blind idolatry
of the English common law; and for this he deserves unmeasured praise.

Mr. Bentham was kind, cheerful, simple-hearted, witty, and greatly
beloved by his friends. Frank, so frank that he was bluff, he refused a
costly present from the Emperor of Russia, lest he should be tempted to
praise when he ought to blame. A great husbander of moments, he took air
and exercise while entertaining ordinary visitors; and, when conversing
on his favorite themes with such as Romilly and Brougham, kept his
secretaries busy in noting down their remarks. The ridicule and abuse of
which he was the subject rarely reached its aim, for he avoided personal
controversies, discussing principles, and not men. He died in 1832, in
the 85th year of his age; and gave a singular evidence of his attachment
to his principles, by bequeathing his body to the surgeon's knife, for
the advancement of medical science.




CHAPTER IX.

     Law Reform--The Penal Code of England--Its Barbarity--The
     Death-Penalty--Sir Samuel Romilly--His Efforts to Abolish Capital
     Punishment--His Talents and Character.


The earliest mouth piece of Jeremy Bentham in Parliament, and his
"middleman" with the public, was Sir SAMUEL ROMILLY. This accomplished
lawyer, from the period he entered Parliament, in 1806, till his death,
in 1818, directed his main efforts to Law Reform; especially the
amelioration of the Penal Code, and the diminution of the number of
capital offenses.

The present criminal code of England is a disgrace to civilization. When
Romilly commenced his labors, it would have disgraced barbarism.
Blackstone had said in his Commentaries, (and it was substantially true
in 1806,) "Among the variety of actions which men are liable daily to
commit, no less than one hundred and sixty are declared by act of
Parliament to be felonies, without benefit of clergy; or, in other
words, to be worthy of instant death." I will specify a few items in
this bloody catalogue. Treason, murder, arson, and rape, were of course
capital crimes. So was counterfeiting coin; refusing to take the oath of
allegiance under various circumstances; falsifying judicial records;
taking a reward for restoring stolen goods, when accessory with the
thief; obstructing the service of legal process; hunting in the night
disguised; writing threatening letters, to extort money; pulling down
turnpike gates; assembling to produce riots, and not dispersing at the
order of a magistrate; transporting wool or sheep twice out of the
kingdom; smuggling; fraudulent bankruptcies; marrying a couple except in
"a church," without the license of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and
making false entries in relation thereto in a marriage register;
wandering as gipsies thirty days; burglary, in the night; stealing, from
the person, property above the value of twelve pence, or, from a
dwelling-house, above five shillings, or a vessel above forty shillings;
stealing fish, hares, and conies; robbing on the highway to the value of
a farthing; forgery in all its multiplied forms; sundry mere trespasses
to personal property, such as tearing down fences, opening fish-ponds,
destroying trees in parks and gardens, maiming cattle--and the list
might be swelled through a chapter.

The legal mode of inflicting punishment, in many of these cases, was
equally barbarous with the penalties. Not content with killing the
wretch, he might be dragged to the place of execution at the heels of
horses; or emboweled while alive; or burnt to death; or beheaded,
quartered, and the parts nailed up in conspicuous places; or his
skeleton left to rot on the gallows; or his hands and ears cut off, and
his nostrils slit; or be branded on the cheek or hand, before execution.
And down to the reign of William III, counsel were not allowed to
prisoners, even in cases of high treason, when the whole power of the
Government was brought to crush them; and it was not till the recent
reign of William IV, that, in other capital cases, counsel for the
accused were allowed to do more than state points of law to the court.

Such a Penal Code would disgrace the Fejee Islands. Yet, it was, in its
main features, the law of England in 1806; and, notwithstanding the
lucubrations of Bentham, the dashing essays of Brougham, and the lucid
speeches of Romilly and Mackintosh, sustained by the protests and the
petitions of churchmen and dissenters, Catholics and Quakers, it
remained the law, with slight modifications, till the reign of George
IV; and much of it is law to this day! And this code could be eulogized
by the classical Blackstone; whilst Paley, the archdeacon, could
congratulate the readers of his Moral Philosophy on the fact, that
torture to extort confessions had been excluded "from the mild and
cautious system of penal jurisprudence established in this country!"
Such mildness _is_ a "caution!" The same author, alluding to those who
might happen to be convicted and hung through mistake, counsels their
surviving friends not to repine, but "rather to reflect that he who
falls by a mistaken sentence, may be considered as falling for his
country."

No one will suppose that such laws, the offspring of the dark ages,
could be enforced against all offenders after the sunrise of the
nineteenth century. Still, capital convictions under them were
frightfully numerous. The statistics of English criminal jurisprudence
afford abundant illustrations of the doctrines, that the severity of the
law does not diminish crime, and that the certainty rather than the
severity of punishment is the surest preventive. These doctrines had
been maintained with great power by Lord Bacon, by Stiernhook, the
Swedish Blackstone, by Blackstone himself, by the Marquis of Beccaria,
by Voltaire, by Montesquieu, by Bentham; and even Paley had admitted
their truth. Romilly enforced them in Parliament; and it may be safely
affirmed, that the history of crime proves nothing if it does not
establish their truth. Larcenies, burglaries, robberies, and forgeries,
had increased in England during the eighteenth century, much beyond the
advance of population and commerce, notwithstanding the severity of the
law and its frequent execution. But these obvious facts were assigned to
other causes than defects in the penal code, and these doctrines were
scouted as the dogmas of visionary enthusiasts, by nearly the whole of
the bench, the bar, and the leading influences in Church and State, at
the dawn of the present century. They admitted that the unvarying
execution of the law would be barbarous; but insisted that its
frightful penalties ought to be suspended over the heads of offenders,
to deter from crime; whilst they trusted to indirect modes of softening
its rigors. So, judges undertook to bend the law to suit the merits of
particular cases; and the humanity of juries, outrunning the injunctions
of their oaths, opened the door of escape in cases of peculiar severity.
The latter would frequently find that the value of the property stolen
did not reach the capital point; as, that a shilling piece was worth but
eleven pence farthing; or a crown, but four shillings and sixpence; or
goods for which the thief had asked L8, and refused L6, were worth but
thirty-nine shillings; thus stultifying their senses to save a life
which the law clamored to sacrifice.

Another evil resulting from the severity of the English code, was felt,
not only in that country, but has reached us and our times, and will
afflict us so long as we are governed by the common law. Merciful
judges, during the trial of offenders for minor crimes punishable with
death, would lend a greedy ear to the ingenious cavils and absurd quirks
of counsel, and quash the indictment--or refine away the plain words of
a statute, so as to exclude the offense from its operation--anything to
save the life of a fellow-creature whose crime deserved a ten days'
commitment to the House of Correction. And we are now reaping the fruits
of this; for, be it known to the uninitiated, that all these cavils,
refinings, quibbles, quirks, and quiddities, are recorded in books, and
have come down to us as authoritative parts of "the perfection of human
reason," making convenient holes for sturdy rogues, with the help of
sharp-pointed lawyers, to creep through the meshes of our comparatively
mild criminal code.

Sir SAMUEL ROMILLY found the penal law of England thus sanguinary on the
statute book; thus abused in its administration by the courts; thus
entrenched behind the authority of judges, lawyers, statesmen, and
divines, when he commenced the humane but apparently hopeless task of
softening its penalties to the milder civilization of the present age.
He brought to this work professional eminence the most exalted, talents
of the rarest order, learning varied and accurate, eloquence captivating
and powerful, and a zeal and courage surpassed only by the benevolent
warmth of his heart. Having previously secured some reforms in the civil
law, he carried a bill, in 1808, repealing the capital part of the act
against stealing property of above twelve-pence value. This horrid law
had existed more than a thousand years, and probably in a thousand cases
in which it had been executed, the hangman's rope cost more than the
stolen property for which a life was forfeited. Even then Romilly could
induce the legislature to fix the death-limit no higher than L15. This
and another repealing act had slipped through Parliament in a very quiet
way, without exciting the attention of the country. In 1809, Romilly
proposed two bills, repealing the laws making it capital to steal to the
value of above five shillings from a shop, or forty from a
dwelling-house. He sustained them by a speech, which exhibited great
research into the statistics of crime, comprehensive views of the
philosophy of rewards and punishments, lofty appeals to humanity, and a
just appreciation of the benevolent and liberal tendencies of the times.
Both bills failed. But the friends of the halter had become alarmed at
these reiterated attempts to restrict the death-penalty. The
gallows-toad, touched by the spear of Ithuriel, started up a devil. It
was the first time the mask had been torn from the penal code of
England, and its visage, grim and bloody, exposed to the public eye. The
excitement caused by this attempt to narrow the scaffold is at this day
incredible. The chancellor in his robes, and the bishop in his lawn; the
barrister in his silk gown, and the attorney in his threadbare coat; the
reviewer in the aristocratic quarterly, and the obscure pamphleteer in
Grub street; all entered the lists to crush the disciple of Jeremy
Bentham, and demolish his dangerous heresies. If Romilly had attacked
the monarchy itself, or declared that the horse-hair wig of the
Archbishop of Canterbury was not a part of the British Constitution, he
could hardly have produced more indignation among judges and hangmen;
more consternation among the old women of both sexes. Jack Ketch was no
longer to hang men for stealing a cast-off coat or petticoat worth five
shillings and six pence, and what would become of England! Sir Samuel
published a pamphlet containing the substance of his great speech, with
additional statistics, which Brougham made the basis of an able essay in
the Edinburgh. The pamphlet and the essay produced a profound impression
upon liberal and humane minds throughout the country.

But, for two years, he was able to accomplish nothing in Parliament. In
1811, he took advantage of some favoring circumstances to carry a law
abolishing capital punishment in the cases of soldiers and sailors found
begging, without having testimonials of their discharge from the
service. Grateful country; to consent not to hang a sailor, who lost his
arm at Trafalgar, or a wooden-legged soldier who stormed Badajos, for
begging a loaf of bread! Through the seven following years, though
Romilly and his coadjutors thundered on the floor of the Commons, and
lightened from the pages of the Edinburgh, and rained down pamphlets
upon the country, charged with appalling facts, unanswerable arguments,
and glowing appeals to the heart of the nation, they fell on the
iron-mail of the Tory party only to rebound in their own faces; and this
great man having bequeathed the prosecution of the work to Mackintosh,
sunk into his grave, in 1818, without seeing one lineament of relenting
in the grim visage of the Penal Code.

But, not alone to reforms in the criminal code did this excellent man
give his hand. He probed the Court of Chancery, and hove up to the sun
some of the abuses which festered under the stagnant administration of
Eldon--exposed the huge masses of rubbish which so blocked up the common
law courts, that the difficulty of suitors to get in was only surpassed
by the impossibility of their getting out; and though the reforms which
he proposed were very moderate, and aimed only at glaring defects, they
encountered the same bigoted attachment to ancient abuses which assailed
him in the other field of his exertions. Lord Eldon especially construed
every insinuation that the system of Equity was not perfect, into a
personal attack on its head. He regarded a peep into his court as Jack
Ketch did a side-glance at the gallows, and repelled every insinuation
that he was not competent to do for men's property what Jack did for
their lives--suspend animation by stopping the circulation.

Nor was it law reform alone which enlisted the sympathies of Romilly. As
Solicitor General he brought in the bill for the abolition of the slave
trade, in 1806-7; and in 1814, when the European treaty of Peace,
negotiated by Castlereagh on the part of England, and which provided for
the revival of the traffic by France, came before Parliament, he led the
friends of humanity to the attack upon that article of it in a speech of
the loftiest rebuke, breathing the purest philanthropy and attired in
the richest garb of eloquence. His eulogium on Wilberforce and Clarkson
was beautiful, and his appeal to the former, as he turned and addressed
him personally, thrilling.

Romilly's mind was cast in the rarest mold, and his heart was attuned to
the liveliest emotions. He could master the understanding with his
reason, and sway the will by his persuasion. He frowned down meanness
with the dignity of a judge sentencing a culprit, and his sarcasm was
too keen to be often provoked. Standing at the head of the Equity bar,
his professional attainments covered the widest field, and were only
equaled by the extensive practice to which they were applied. His
character was beautifully pure, and he was the delight, almost the idol,
of his intimate friends. Yet, his modesty always held him back from
assuming in the courts and the Commons the place that was assigned to
him by the universal homage of his party, and the all but unanimous
verdict of his opponents.

Romilly was the grandson of a French mechanic, who, with his wife, fled
to England, on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His father married
the daughter of a refugee, and Samuel was, therefore, of pure French
blood. He was born in 1757. His father, who was a watchmaker, articled
him to a commercial house, the death of whose head soon threw him back
into his father's shop, where he kept the books for two or three years.
During this time, he marked out for himself, and pursued with avidity
and success, a course of classical study. Leaving the shop, he entered
as an apprentice the office of one of the clerks in chancery, and for
several years devoted all the leisure hours he could snatch from the
drudgery of business, to the cultivation of general literature. Arriving
at his majority, he studied law, and was called to the bar at the age of
twenty-five--an admirable specimen of "a self-made man"--the only sort
of MAN, by the bye, that is made. The following anecdote shows how his
sensitive mind was, in mere childhood, bent toward the work which
engrossed his mature years. He says: "A dreadful impression was made on
me by relations of murders and acts of cruelty. The prints which I found
in the Lives of the Martyrs, and the Newgate Calendar, have cost me many
sleepless nights. My dreams, too, were disturbed by the hideous images
which haunted my imagination by day. I thought myself present at
executions, murders, and scenes

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