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Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century

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Title: Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century

Author: James Richard Joy


        
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #5876]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

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Credits: This eBook was produced by Ryan Ramseyer


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TEN ENGLISHMEN OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ***




This eBook was produced by Ryan Ramseyer.




TEN ENGLISHMEN OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

By James Richard Joy

1902






To
My Daughter
Helen
With Her Father's Love






PREFACE





The object of this work is to set forth with as much clearness as
possible the more important facts in the history of England in
the nineteenth century. We have chosen to do this through the
medium of biography, in the belief that the lives of a few
representative men would present better opportunities for
interesting and effective treatment than an historical narrative,
which must have been encumbered by a mass of detail not capable
of effective disposition within the limited space at our command.
An introductory chapter serves to give a general view of the
course of events and to show the relations of the men and
movements which are afterward presented in more detail.

With but one exception our "Ten Englishmen" are men in public
life, political or military. Artists, authors, preachers, and
scholars were purposely left out of the account, because they are
to receive prominence in other parts of the course for which this
volume was written. The exception was made in the case of George
Stephenson, because the revolution in transportation, due to his
improvement of the locomotive engine, has had such a powerful
influence upon the industrial development of the nation.

In bringing these great personages before the reader our
intention has been quite as much historical as biographical. Each
name is linked with some conspicuous problem in statesmanship,
and the endeavor has been to set forth the work as well as the
workman. It is hoped that the library notes appended to each
chapter will be of assistance to the earnest student, in
supplementing the meager outlines of this volume with the
abundance of personal detail and wealth of dramatic incident
which give life and action to history.

The appendix should not be overlooked. Its selections from
authentic speeches, letters, dispatches, and other writings bring
the reader into touch with the men who made England great.

One word more. Our "Ten" are not necessarily "THE Ten." They are
the men whose lives lay in line with the writer's plan. If they
serve to accentuate the leading features of the history we are
not disposed to argue with those who would present other
candidates for the honor of inclusion in the list.


     James Richard Joy



     Plainfield, N.J., June 4, 1902.





INTRODUCTION





ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY


The opening of the nineteenth century found England in the midst
of a great foreign war, which for almost a generation absorbed
the thought and energy of the nation, and postponed for the time
the vital questions of economic and political reform which
clamored for settlement.


THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON


The war began in 1793, when the French nation, having overturned
its ancient throne, and revolutionized its social and political
institutions, set out on a democratic crusade for "Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity," which involved it in a conflict with
the governments of Europe. William Pitt, who had been Prime
Minister of George III. since 1783, had twice banded the European
states against the French republican armies; but while the
English fleets remained masters of the seas, the enthusiasm of
the French soldiers, and the genius of their young generals, had
thus far proved too strong for the mercenary battalions of
despotism. In the closing month of the year 1800, Pitt's "Second
Coalition" had been shattered by the defeat of the Allies at
Hohenlinden. The Peace of Amiens which shortly ensued (March,
1802, to May, 1803) was but a delusion. England greeted it with
joy and hope, but soon discovered its unreality. From the renewal
of hostilities, in May, 1803, until the final triumph of the
allies, in 1815, the war resolved itself into a struggle between
Napoleon and England. This young Corsican lieutenant had raised
himself by sheer force of genius and unscrupulous ambition to
absolute power. His scheme for the subjugation of Europe beat
down every obstacle except the steady and unbending opposition of
England. Pitt, who had withdrawn from the government because of
the stupid King's refusal to honor his Minister's pledges of
equal rights to the Irish Catholics, was recalled by the
universal voice ot the nation to organize the resistance.
Napoleon had assembled immense armaments upon the Channel coast
of France for a descent on England, and had created a vast
flotilla to transport the force to Kent. Great Britain trembled
with excited apprehension. Three hundred thousand volunteers
offered their services to the government. But, as often in the
past, Britain's best defense was her wooden walls, and the
sagacity, seamanship, and valor of her sailors, who out-
manoeuvered the combined fleets of France and Spain, crushed
their power at Trafalgar (October, 1805), and secured the Channel
against the invader. Pitt's gold had called into existence a
third coalition (England, Russia. Austria, and Sweden), only to
see Napoleon hurl it to the ground on the field of Austerlitz
(December, 1805). England's isolation seemed as complete as the
Emperor's victory. Russia, Austria, and Prussia made humiliating
peace with the victor, who carved his conquests into new states
and kingdoms. Pitt, who, at the news of Austerlitz, had pointed
to the map of Europe with the words "Roll up that map, there will
be no use for it these ten years," survived the calamity scarcely
a month.

Unable to meet, as yet, the English troops in battle on the land
as he had met and defeated those of the Continent, and unequal to
England on the seas, Napoleon devised a more insidious plan of
campaign. Believing that a "nation of shop-keepers" might be
attacked through its trade, he issued from the Prussian capital,
in 1806, the famous Berlin Decree, which was the first note of
that "Continental System," which was intended to close the ports
of Europe to British goods. The British government met this
boycott by its "Orders in Council," which placed a blockade upon
French ports, and authorized the capture of neutral vessels
endeavoring to trade with them. This inconclusive commercial
warfare lasted several years, but was far from being successful
in its object of ruining England. Indeed, it is said that the
most stringent enforcement of the "Decrees" and "Orders" did not
prevent the Napoleonic armies from wearing uniforms of English
cloth and carrying English steel in their scabbards.

England first began to make head against the French conqueror
when that far-sighted minister George Canning sent Sir Arthur
Wellesley to Portugal to take command of the British forces in
the Peninsula. Wellesley had recently returned from India, where
he had achieved a brilliant reputation for thoroughness of
organization, precision of manoeuver, and unvarying success,
qualities which at that time were lamentably rare among British
generals. In Portugal first, and later in Spain, the sterling
qualities of the new commander steadily gained ground for
England, driving out the French marshals, and carrying this
Peninsular War to a triumphant conclusion by the invasion of
France (1814). Created Duke of Wellington for his successes in
the Peninsula, Wellesley held command of the allied forces on the
Belgian frontier when, on the 18th of June, 1815, they met and
routed the French at Waterloo. That day made Napoleon an exile,
and "the Iron Duke" the idol of the English lands in which he
continued to be the most conspicuous personage for nearly half a
century.


THE RESETTLEMENT OF EUROPE


Waterloo brought England into new relations with the nations of
Europe. The Congress of Vienna, in which the victors endeavored
to restore the damage wrought by the Corsican intruder, added
Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, Malta, and a few less important
islands, to the growing colonial empire of Great Britain. The
Holy Alliance, which had been suggested by the Czar in 1815, at
the friendly meeting of the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian
sovereigns at Paris, was in theory a compact between these
powerful rulers--"an intimate union on the basis of morality and
religion"--but it soon degenerated into an unholy league for the
mutual protection of these three despotic dynasties against the
dormant forces of constitutional liberty, which began to stir
again in every European state as soon as the Napoleonic specter
had been laid. The French Revolution had given currency to
opinions which no congress of sovereigns could wholly repress,
and now the policy of the "Alliance," to strangle all
constitutional aspirations and rivet the chains of Bourbonism
upon limbs that had once known the bliss of freedom, led to
fierce intellectual revolt, and sometimes to physical violence.
England had made common cause with Turk and Christian, Kaiser and
King, against Napoleon, and for a time her statesmen viewed with
complacency the Holy Alliance, so reassuring in its name and so
pure in its professions; but when it became evident that this
mighty league was to be thrown against every liberty-loving
people in the Old World and the New, George Canning broke the
irksome bond, and put the land of parliaments and constitutional
liberty in its rightful place as the friend of freedom and the
foe to the oppressor. It was the spirit if not the voice of
Canning which was powerful to save Portugal from the Bourbon, to
recognize the independence of the revolted American colonies of
Spain, and to restrain the enemies of freedom from handing
insurgent Greece back to the Turk. His predecessors had been
accustomed to sink the interests and desires of England in regard
for what the continental power called "the good of Europe." He
was the first statesman of his generation who dared to take an
independent position on "European" questions--"to write
'England,'" as he phrased it, "where it had been the custom to
write 'Europe.'" The policy which he inaugurated marks a turning-
point in the history of British foreign affairs.


Catholic Emancipation


George IV., who had been regent since his father's illness in
1812, reigned in his own name from 1820 to 1830, though his voice
in the affairs of state was small indeed. His Ministers,
Liverpool, Canning, Goderich, and Wellington, were confronted by
serious problems of domestic policy which had sprung up during
the long period of foreign wars and partly in direct consequence
of those disturbing conditions. The one recurrent question which
found definite settlement in this reign was that of Catholic
emancipation. The penal laws against Roman Catholics had
disgraced the English statute-books for two centuries. On the
first of January, 1801, the Legislative Union of Great Britain
and Ireland had gone into effect under the name of the United
Kingdom. The Irish Parliament, which had met in Dublin since
1782, went out of existence, and in the place of "Home Rule"
Ireland was represented in both houses of the Imperial Parliament
at Westminster. Pitt had promised the numerous Catholics of
Ireland that the laws which made them ineligible to represent
their country in Parliament should be repealed, and had abandoned
office in disgust when George III. refused to sanction his
project of Catholic emancipation. In 1807 the Whig ministry
espoused the same cause, and in turn resigned because of the
opposition of the Crown. In Daniel O'Connell the cause at length
found a spokesman whose eloquence, wit, and talent for
"agitation" soon combined his Irish partisans into "The Catholic
Association." Working in conjunction with the Whigs of England,
O'Connell's followers formed a body which could not be neglected.
Soon after Canning's untimely death the Duke of Wellington had
taken office. He was a Tory, with all the prejudices of that
political faith deepened by his birth and training as an Irish
Protestant, but the agitation had reached such proportions that
he saw in it a menace of civil war, to avoid which he was willing
to abandon his most cherished opinions on the Catholic question.
Accordingly, in 1829, the Iron Duke faced about and brought in
the bill which, becoming a law by Whig and Canningite votes,
admitted Roman Catholics to Parliament, and to civil rights only
a little short of complete. But instead of removing the Irish
question from politics, it was only prepared for more strenuous
presentation in a new guise, for O'Connell was returned to
Parliament at the head of some fifty Catholic members to agitate
for Irish independence.


RAILWAYS


The perfection of the steam locomotive and the inception and
marvelous development of the system of steam railway
transportation marked the second quarter of the century. The name
of the Stephensons, father and son, is inseparably connected with
this work which has affected so deeply the economic and social
life of the nation, and has contributed in a thousand indirect
ways to the expansion and consolidation of the empire. It has
been said that in 1825 the traveler from London to Rome went no
faster than the courier of the Caesars, eighteen hundred years
before. Thanks to George Stephenson's inventive genius, the
traveler of today consumes scarcely more time between London and
Peking.


THE REFORM OF PARLIAMENT


The reform of Parliament was the next question to come up for
settlement. In 1830 representation in the House of Commons still
remained upon a basis which had been established centuries
before. Meantime the distribution of the voting population had
been totally transformed. The most populous shires had no more
seats than the least of all. There were decayed boroughs which
had dwindled in population until but a handful of voters
remained, yet these "rotten" boroughs retained their right to
choose one or more members of Parliament, while the great modern
manufacturing towns and seaports were totally unrepresented. The
agitation for parliamentary reform, which rose in the middle of
the eighteenth century, was directed against the sale of seats in
the rotten boroughs, and the shameless bribery. As early as 1770
Lord Chatham had predicted reform or revolution. His son, the
younger Pitt, had proposed remedies, but the deluge which
overwhelmed the government of France in the closing years of the
century stiffened English conservatism for a century against any
radical political change. Meanwhile the rapid industrial
expansion of the kingdom, with its unprecedented increase of
population, and the sudden growth of insignificant hamlets into
teeming factory towns, had emphasized the injustice of existing
arrangements. Earl Grey, who had been an advocate of reform for
forty years, and Lord John Russell, who had championed the cause
for a decade, were united in the Whig ministry which succeeded
Wellington in 1830. Supported by a tremendous popular demand
which seemed to stir the nation to its depths they brought in
their first bill in 1831. It prevailed in the Commons by a bare
majority, but the Tory House of Lords threw it out. This action
by the privileged class was a signal for an indignant outburst
from the nation. The "Radicals," as the advanced Whigs were
already beginning to be called, did not conceal their lack of
respect for the Upper House, and used revolutionary threats
against it as a relic of mediaevalism which should no longer be
tolerated in a free state. But the time had passed when the peers
could flout an aroused nation. When the Third Reform Bill was
ready for passage, the ministers secured the King's promise to
frustrate the opposition of the Lords by filling up the House
with new peers created expressly to vote for reform. The threat
sufficed. Wellington and the most stern and unbending Tories
absented themselves from the decisive division, and allowed the
Reform Bill to become a law in June, 1832.


ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS


Great things were expected of the first Parliament which was
chosen on the basis of the new law. The seats gained by the
disfranchisement of the small and corrupt boroughs were
distributed to new constituencies in London, Liverpool,
Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle, and the other modern
cities. The more populous counties were subdivided into
districts, and the divisions received additional representation.
The franchise had also been extended and based upon a moderate
property qualification. The result was, that the center of
political power passed from the nobility and landed gentry, with
whom it had resided for centuries, and came to the farmers and
shop-keepers, the so-called middle class, lying between the
ancient aristocracy of birth and landed possessions and the still
unenfranchised masses of mill operatives and agricultural
laborers. That the new Parliament would show a new temper and be
dominated by new ideas was but natural. But those who inferred
from the bitterness of the struggle for reform that the nation
was on the verge of an abyss into which the Lords and the Crown
should shortly topple, greatly deceived themselves.


THE POOR LAWS


The reformed Parliaments devoted themselves to certain long-
deferred and intensely practical reforms which were social and
economic in their nature, leaving the constitution alone for the
next twenty years. In these Parliaments and ministries for the
next forty years the Whig party usually had the upper hand. In
1834 Parliament revolutionized the system of public relief to the
needy which had existed for fifty years, to the extreme
demoralization of the poorer working-classes and the frustration
of really benevolent purpose. The old law had assumed that each
parish owed every native a living. A sliding scale was
accordingly provided by which, as the rate of wages declined, the
parish should pay to the workman enough to bring his receipts up
to the standard amount. Employers took advantage of this system
cut wages to a minimum, the parish making up the difference.
Another mischievous clause increased the pauper's dole in
proportion to the number of his children, with the direct result
of early and improvident marriages. To put it bluntly, children
were bred for the bounty. The number of persons receiving parish
aid was enormously increased. The self-respect of the poor was
destroyed, and the poor-rate became a burden of millions of
pounds annually upon the treasury. The act of 1834 put an end to
these abuses by restricting outdoor relief to the aged and
destitute, and requiring all other paupers to go to the union
workhouse. Within two years the poor-rate was diminished fully
one-third.


ABOLITION OF SLAVERY


In 1834 slavery was abolished throughout the British dominions.
The earnest labors of the Abolitionists, Clarkson, Wilberforce,
Macaulay, and others, had secured the abolition of the slave
trade thirty years before (1807), but the united opposition of
the colonial planters to a reform which would deprive them of the
services of their chattel laborers postponed the consummation of
the humanitarian measure. The reformed Parliament proved less
sensitive to the planters' arguments. It destroyed the system
forever, making a cash compensation to the owners.

A third question, on which Earl Grey's ministry took high moral
ground, was a redress of another of the ancient wrongs of
Ireland. The Church of England was by law established in that
most distressful country, and the people, though mostly Roman
Catholics, were under the necessity of paying tithes for the
support of a church which they detested, and which indeed, in a
large part of the island, had no existence except for purposes of
taxation. The Irish protest, as has often been the case, took the
form of violence and outrage, the so-called "Tithe War," which
postponed rather than hastened the redress of their grievance.
But in 1835 the ministry of Lord Melbourne relieved the peasants
of this part of their many burdens.


ACCESSION OF VICTORIA


The name of Lord Melbourne has been kept green not only by the
Australasian metropolis, but by the fact that it was his duty as
Prime Minister to announce to the Princess Alexandrina Victoria
the fact--to her so momentous--that her uncle, William IV., was
dead (June 20, 1837), and that she, a girl of eighteen, was Queen
of England. Victoria, as she was known thenceforward, lived to
see the dawn of the twentieth century, to witness the enormous
development of the British empire in population, wealth, and
power, and it is perhaps not too much to say, to win all hearts
among her subjects by the simplicity, purity, and strength of her
character. Had she displayed the stubborn stupidity of her
grandfather, George III., or the immorality of some of his sons,
it is not rash to believe that the tide of radicalism might have
thrown down all barriers and swept away the throne on the flood
of democracy. By grace of character she was a model
constitutional sovereign, and her benign reign, the longest in
English annals, contributed more than the policy of any of her
ministers to make the monarchy popular and permanent.

The first decade of the Victorian era witnessed three great
agitations, two of which ended in fiasco and the third in a
triumph which wrought tremendous changes in the kingdom.
"Chartism," "Repeal," and "Free Trade" were the three topics on
which the thought of multitudes was engaged.

CHARTISM


Chartism was the name applied to the agitation in favor of a
statement of principles called "The People's Charter." The six
points of Chartism were: (l) annual Parliaments, (2) salaries for
members, (3) universal suffrage, (4) vole by ballot, (5)
abolition of property qualification for membership in the House
of Commons, and (6) equal electoral districts. The demand came
from the workingmen, who were dissatisfied because the Reform
Bill of 1832 had stopped short of their political stratum. The
Chartists copied the method of agitation which O'Connell had
employed in extorting Catholic emancipation. Monster meetings,
mile-long petitions, copious effusions of printer's ink and
oratory, and a National Charter Association were a part of the
machinery. In 1848, when the prevalent hard times increased the
restless discontent of the masses, the movement culminated in a
vast assembly on Kennington Common. A respectful half-million
were to march to Westminster and lay their demands, the six
points backed by six million signatures, before the Commons. The
year 1848 was one of widespread discontent, the revolution year
of the century, and the authorities took pains to guard the peace
of London with especial care, even Wellington being called into
service to direct the military. But nine-tenths of the mob failed
to put in appearance, and the monster petition turned out to be a
monstrous and clumsy fraud. Nothing came of it at the moment. The
return of better times took the heart out of the agitation, and
the progress of orderly political development gradually
incorporated three of the Chartist points in the law of the land
without seriously affecting the constitution.


O'CONNELL AND REPEAL


The second popular war cry was "Repeal." In this agitation, again
O'Connell's was the chief personage, and his eloquence the chief
factor. It was in effect another phase of the Irish demand for
Home Rule. Since the first day of the new century Ireland had
been, for legislative purposes, a part of the United Kingdom. It
was the act which had established this "Legislative Union" and
abolished the Irish Parliament which O'Connell was determined to
repeal. All that monster meetings, soul-moving oratory, secret
associations, printer's ink, could do to influence the government
by parliamentary manoeuver, demonstration of popular feeling,
intimidation, and threats of insurrection was done. As a member
of Parliament, and the dictator to his "tail" of half a hundred
Irish members, the silver-tongued "Irish tribune" exerted a
considerable political power so long as parties were somewhat
evenly divided so as to make his support desirable. But when, in
1841, the Tories came back into office under Sir Robert Peel,
backed by a strong majority, this influence declined. The arrest
of O'Connell, in 1843, for treasonable utterances, discredited
him with his following, which soon fell apart-the more determined
section to carry Ireland's cause to the extreme of violent
outbreak, the milder partisans to await a more opportune moment
to press their agitation for Home Rule.


THE REPEAL OF THE CORN LAWS


The names of Sir Robert Peel and Richard Cobden are indissolubly
connected with the legislation which repealed the "Corn Laws" and
placed English commerce upon the basis of free trade--Cobden as
the theorist and untiring agitator, whose splendid talents were
unsparingly devoted to preparing public opinion for the economic
revolution, and Peel as the protectionist Prime Minister, who was
open-minded enough to become convinced of his error in persisting
in the policy in which he had been trained. The necessity for a
change of commercial policy grew out of the altered conditions in
the nation. The agricultural England of the eighteenth century
had in a generation been transformed into a hive of manufacturing
industry. The rapid adoption of steam power and improved
machinery in England on the one hand, and the paralysis of
industry on the Continent during the Napoleonic wars, had wrought
the change, while the commercial marine, guarded by her powerful
navy, had brought the carrying trade of the world under her flag.
The weakest point in the English system was the protective
tariff, which lay heaviest on imports of grain--or "corn," to use
the insular term. The Corn Laws were a body of legislation
enacted from time to time by Parliaments which were controlled by
the great land-owning interests. The land-owner, whose income was
derived chiefly from rents upon agricultural lands, consistently
favored a scale of tariffs which would maintain the price of
cereal grains at the highest figure. At the close of the great
war (1815) the nation was confronted with business disaster. "War
prices" for grain fell rapidly, the markets were stocked with
more manufactured goods than impoverished Europe could absorb,
while the English labor market was glutted by the influx of
several hundred thousand able-bodied soldiers and sailors in
quest of industrial employment. As early as 1821 Mr. Huskisson, a
cabinet colleague of Mr. Canning, had endeavored to lighten the
burden of British manufactures by reducing the import duties upon
the raw material used by the English looms. He was for getting at
the root of the matter and disposing of the Corn Laws, so as to
provide "free food" as well as "free raw materials," but his Tory
companions believed that such legislation would vote the bread
out of their own mouths. In 1838 an Anti-Corn Law Association was
formed at Manchester. Under the direction of Richard Cobden, a
young and successful manufacturer, who had become the most ardent
of free traders, a league of similar clubs was organized
throughout the country, and through it an agitation unsurpassed
in the history of politics was prosecuted until its object was
attained. In Parliament he became one of the most effective
orators, and the chief target of his argument was Peel, the
leader of the protectionists. In 1845-46 a more powerful argument
than Cobden's was thrown into the scale. The failure of the Irish
potato crop, the sole food supply of that unhappy island, "forced
Peel's hand." In the face of two-thirds of his own party, in
opposition to his own life-long political creed, he gave notice
as Prime Minister that he should introduce a bill for the
immediate reduction and ultimate repeal of the laws which were
responsible for the high price of food. He had become a convert
to free trade, and was ready to carry it into practice. The young
Disraeli as the representative of the Protectionist element of
his party, lashed the premier in the speech which first gave him
a following in the Parliament that he was soon to control. But
enough Peelites followed their leader into the camp of the free
traders to carry the bill. The Corn Laws disappeared from the
statute-book.


HUMANITARIAN LEGISLATION


The sudden and enormous expansion of English industry in the
early part of the century brought special hardship to several
classes in the community. The substitution of the factory system
for cottage industry destroyed home life for thousands of
families, and the pressure of poverty and the greed of
manufacturers ground the poor mill operatives between the upper
and nether millstones. To Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of
Shaftesbury, more than to any other is due the persistent
investigation and disclosure which aroused the public mind to the
prevailing conditions in mine and factory where hours of labor
were excessive, and where women and children were subjected to
degrading tasks and brutal treatment. The Factory Law and kindred
legislation since 1830 are the fruits of the beneficent and
untiring labors of the Earl.


PALMERSTON AND FOREIGN RELATIONS


The era which had been marked by such political, social, and
economic reforms and agitations came to a close in the middle of
the century. The Whigs came into power in Parliament in 1846 for
a long term. Foreign affairs supplied the most notable topics for
the next twenty years. The foreign minister during much of this
time was Lord Palmerston. He it was who piloted the nation
without disaster through the rocks of 1848-51, when thrones were
toppling in every European kingdom, and England was being
appealed to for help against despot and democrat.


THE EASTERN QUESTION


The "Eastern Question" now came up. The Czar of Russia, an object
of suspicion to England, because of his rivalry with her for the
possession of India, endeavored to secure from the Sultan of
Turkey official recognition of his government as the legitimate
protector of Christians in the Ottoman empire. Such a
responsibility would have afforded many opportunities for
interfering in Turkish affairs. France opposed the demand, and
Palmerston placed England on the side of Napoleon III., against
the Czar, who had invaded Turkey in pursuance of his design to
annex a large part of her European provinces, and advance his
position toward Constantinople. The Crimean War which followed
(1854-56) at least checked Russia for the time. It was the only
European war in which England had borne arms since Waterloo. But
in Asia and Africa the Queen's troops had found almost continual
employment along the frontiers of the now vastly extended empire.
In 1857 Persia had to be chastised for edging toward India by way
of the Afghan possessions. Russia had been at the Shah's elbow.
In 1856, and repeatedly until 1860, the British fleets were
battering open the ports of China and extorting trade
concessions. But the most memorable war in the imperial history
of these years was within the borders of the empire, though in a
distant land. This was the Sepoy Rebellion or Indian mutiny of
1857.


THE GREAT SEPOY MUTINY


The British possessions in India had been more than doubled in
extent since the opening of the century. In 1833 the trade
monopoly of the East India Company had been broken, but its civil
and military servants continued to administer the government.
Their ability was displayed especially in the rapidity with which
they were extending British authority over the native states when
the outbreak came. A conspiracy was laid among the Sepoys, the
native soldiers in the regiments of "John Company." as the great
corporation was called in Asia. To their private grievances was
added the false report that the company intended to force them
into Christianity by serving out to them cartridges which would
defile them, neat's tallow for the Hindoo venerator of the sacred
cow, and hog's lard for the Mohammedan hater of swine! In May,
1857, the mutiny burst into flame. The Sepoys slaughtered their
officers and many other Europeans, and restored the heir of the
ancient race of kings to the throne of his fathers at Delhi. Here
and there, at Cawnpore and Lucknow, a few British troops defended
themselves and the refugees against the hordes of bloodthirsty
rebels. The "Massacre of Cawnpore" and "the Relief of Lucknow,"
phrases which have passed into history, suggest the fate of the
two beleaguered garrisons. The rebellion was over in a twelve-
month, smothered in its own blood. Close upon its suppression
came the death of the East India Company, abolished by act of
Parliament in 1858. Since that year the crown has ruled the
Indian realm through a Secretary of State for India, residing in
London, and a Viceroy holding court at Calcutta. From the defeat
of the mutineers, in 1859, to his own death, in 1865, Lord
Palmerston managed to save the nation from being embroiled to the
fighting-point in the perpetual quarrels of Europe. Italy fought
and won her liberty from the Austrian; Poland rose against the
Russian; Denmark had her damaging Schleswig-Holstein War with
Prussia and Austria. English sympathies were strongly enlisted in
all these troubles, but Palmerston would not allow her to proceed
to the point of breaking the peace. From 1861 to 1865, while the
Civil War was being fought out in America, his government was
prompt to recognize the belligerent status of the Confederacy,
and to favor the South by allowing privateers like the "Alabama"
to be built and manned in English ports. But the actual break
with Mr. Lincoln's government did not come, and the old Whig
statesman lived to see the South overpowered.

Through the middle reaches of the century the political power in
England remained for the most part in the hands of the Whig,
latterly called Liberal, ministries. The impulse for reform--
political, economic, and social--had spent itself before 1850,
and the older statesmen who guided the public policies had no
sympathy with the demands for radical legislation, church
disestablishment, universal suffrage, and what not, which came up
from many parts of the nation. With the death of Palmerston, and
the retirement of Russell, a new era was inaugurated, and new
actors stepped to the front of the stage.


GLADSTONE AND DISRAELI


At the head of the Liberals was William Ewart Gladstone, who in
his younger days had followed his master, Peel, out of the old
Tory lines into the camp of the free traders, and had been
Russell's chief lieutenant, and Palmerston's financial minister
for the last half-dozen years. He was a man of splendid
intellectual power, sterling morality, an adept at parliamentary
management, a shrewd financier, and held a deep conviction that
it was the part of statesmanship to embody in law what he
conceived to be the proper demands of the nation. His opponent
for a generation was Benjamin Disraeli, the young Jewish
novelist, who had first won a following in the House of Commons
by voicing the venom of the old-line protectionist Tories against
the recreant Peel. Versatile, shifty, brilliant, this adventurous
politician made himself indispensable to the Conservatives, and
overcame by political moves which were little short of genius,
the leadership of the opposition. Indeed, he may be said to have
transformed Conservatism, giving it a new rallying cry, and
inscribing great achievements upon its banner.


LIBERAL REFORMS


"Whenever that man gets my place we shall have strange doings,"
Palmerston had said toward the end of his life, alluding to the
open-minded Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Gladstone, and had
he remained on earth for another generation, he would indeed have
seen much done by his erstwhile followers under Gladstone's
direction which he would have accounted passing strange.
Admitting the democratic principle that the state owed it to
itself to provide every man's child with an education, Gladstone
inaugurated (1870) a beneficent system of free public schools. An
old popular grievance, the viva voce method of voting at
parliamentary elections, was done away and the secret ballot
substituted (1872), a change which struck a heavy blow at the
prevalent bribery and intimidation. He corrected one of the worst
abuses in the army by abolishing the purchase system, under which
a junior officer was accustomed to buy his promotion by
compensating his seniors, a practice which had closed the higher
grades to men of small means. The extension of the suffrage to
the agricultural laborers was finally reached by his Reform Bill
of 1884, the last class being thus admitted to the body politic.


THE CAUSE OF IRELAND


But it was to the grievances of Ireland that Gladstone bent the
readiest ear, and it was upon that reef that his political career
made shipwreck at the last. In his first ministry he undertook
and carried the disestablishment of the Irish Church, by which
the Irish Catholics were relieved of an odious burden. His Irish
Land Act of 1870 aimed to give the tenant-farmer certain valuable
rights in the land which he rented. The result was rather to
redouble the cry against "landlordism," with its corollary of
agrarian crime. A second Land Act (1881) provided a land court
for adjusting rents. Instead of quieting the disorders this
indulgent legislation was the signal for a fresh outburst of
crime. The Irish Land League was organized to secure the
abolition of landlordism, and when the Irish leader, Charles
Stewart Parnell, was imprisoned he exhorted the tenants to cease
paying rent altogether until the government should grant all
their demands. The Liberals were forced for the moment to use
strong measures to restore order to Ireland, but the Home Rule
party in Parliament, skillfully led by Mr. Parnell, continued to
embarrass legislation and obstruct the ordinary functions of
government. In April, 1886, Mr, Gladstone, having become Prime
Minister for the third time, asked Parliament to grant home rule
to Ireland through an Irish Parliament sitting at Dublin. Parnell
and his following supported the measure, but the Liberal party
was rent in twain. Lord Hartington, Joseph Chamberlain, John
Bright, and others of less note, deserted their old chief. Enough
of these "Liberal Unionists" seceded to defeat the bill. In
August, 1892, the aged Liberal chieftain again carried the
elections and took the seals of office for the fourth time. Home
Rule was again the principal plank in his platform, and all the
energies of the "Grand Old Man" were mustered to carry a new law
differing somewhat from the bill of 1886. Though it passed the
Commons (301 to 267) it was thrown out by the Lords by 419 to 41,
and his successor, Lord Rosebery, had no mind to renew the
contest.

The Gladstonian foreign policy was such as might have been
expected from a leader whose motto was "Peace, Retrenchment, and
Reform." It was never aggressive, and in the opinion of many, it
was lacking in the assertion of British rights. Thus, in 1871,
when Russia refused to be bound longer by the treaty stipulations
forbidding her to maintain a war fleet on the Euxine, Mr.
Gladstone did not hold her to her engagement. In England it was
thought to be a sign of weakness in his government to allow the
"Alabama" and "San Juan Boundary" questions to be settled by
arbitrators instead of by diplomacy or a show of force. In 1881,
when the Boers of the Transvaal had worsted the British at Majuba
Hill, they received from Gladstone an honorable peace instead of
extermination. The abandonment of the Egyptian Soudan, in 1883,
which carried with it the massacre of General Gordon, at
Khartoum, was perhaps the heaviest load that the Gladstonian
foreign policy ever had to bear.


DISRAELI AND IMPERIALISM


Foreign affairs were the field of Disraeli's most brilliant
exploits. "He had two ruling ideas," says the historian Oman,
"the first was the conception of England as an imperial world-
power, interested in European politics, but still more interested
in the maintenance and development of her vast colonial and
Indian empire. This is the notion which friends and enemies now
using the word in different senses call 'imperialism.' The second
ruling thought in Disraeli's mind was the conviction that the
Conservative party ought to step forward as rival to the Liberal
party in commanding the sympathies and allegiance of the masses."
In pursuance of this second idea he took the "leap in the dark,"
in 1867, carrying a reform bill which was but little short of
democratic in its extension of the right to vote. This was
followed up by legislation favoring the English tenant-farmers,
and improving the condition of workingmen in towns. Even after
Disraeli's death, Lord Salisbury continued his domestic policy,
instituting local government by means of county councils in 1888,
making the schools free in 1891, and refunding the national debt
in 1888.

It was a great day for the British empire when Disraeli's
telegram to the hard-pressed Khedive of Egypt, in 1875, bought
for England the controlling interest in the Suez canal, the
water-gate to India. It was a bold stroke of Disraeli's also
which, at the close of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78,
compelled the victor to take his paw from the throat of his
victim and submit the treaty to a congress of the powers at
Berlin, where its terms were modified and England was admitted to
its benefits. The Second Afghan War (1878-80), and the Zulu War
(1878-79), and the Boer War, which brought little glory to
Britain, were the direct result of the Prime Minister's desire to
extend the empire and strengthen its frontiers. It may have been
theatrical, but it was certainly impressive to the assembled
princes of India when Lord Lytton, the Viceroy, proclaimed
Victoria Empress of India in Delhi, the old capital of the
Moguls, on January 1, 1877. And though Disraeli (raised to the
peerage as Lord Beaconsfield) was in his grave, his spirit
dominated the pageantry of 1887 and 1897, when every nation and
tribe and kindred and people of the Greater Britain sent
representatives to London to celebrate the jubilee and diamond
jubilee of the Empress-Queen, to whose aggrandizement he had
contributed so effectively.


AFTER A HUNDRED YEARS


The century closes upon another England than that which was
struggling against Napoleon at its dawn. Instead of the "right
little tight little island," a compact and self-contained nation,
it is now the head of an empire comparable in extent and
population with no other since the Rome of Augustus. Canada,
Federal Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa form a Greater
Britain, while the subject lands and islands dot the globe. The
problem which confronts the English at the end of the century is
not whether they can hold their own against a foreign power as in
the days of Waterloo, but whether all these British commonwealths
can be made to work together in some sort of federal union, or
whether the present ties are to dissolve or snap asunder and
girdle the globe with independent states like the American
republic, where each may be free to develop under its peculiar
conditions the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race.



QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1.  How was England situated at the opening of the nineteenth
century?
2.  What did the names Hohenlinden, Trafalgar, and Austerlitz
mean to England?
3.  Sum up briefly the career of Wellesley.
4.  How did Canning's policy mark a turning-point in British
foreign affairs?
5.  What was the result of the Catholic agitation?
6.  How did the locomotive influence England's empire?
7.  How was Parliament changed by the Reform Bill?
8.  What changes in the Poor Laws were at once undertaken?
9.  What action regarding slavery and Irish taxation?
10. What was the Chartist agitation?
11. Describe the agitation for "repeal."
12. Why did the Corn Laws become intolerable?
13. What reforms were wrought through the influence of the Earl
of Shaftesbury?
14. Through what foreign complications did England pass under
Palmerston?
15. What important abuses were corrected under Gladstone's
leadership?
16. Describe his dealings with the Irish question.
17. How were certain great foreign matters dealt with by his
government?
18. What brilliant foreign achievements were accomplished by
Disraeli?
19. What is England's problem in the twentieth century?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HISTORY OF ENGLAND DURING THE THIRTY YEARS' PEACE. By Harriet
Martineau.
HISTORY OF ENGLAND SINCE 1815.     By Spencer Walpole.
THE HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES.      By Justin McCarthy.
ENGLAND IN THE XIXTH CENTURY.      By Elizabeth Wormely Latimer.
THE GREVILLE MEMOIRS.              Edited by Henry Reeve.
HISTORY OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT.  By R. G. Gammage.
THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA.       Edited by T. Humphrey Ward.
HISTORY OF ENGLAND.                By W. N. Molesworth.





II

WELLINGTON, AND THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON

[ARTHUR WELLESLEY, Duke of Wellington, born in Ireland, 1769;
died Walmer Castle, September 14, 1852; educated at Eton and at
Angers; entered Seventy-third Regiment as ensign, 1787; purchased
lieutenant-colonelcy of Thirty-third Regiment, 1793; served in
Holland expedition, 1794-95; 1796, in India with his regiment;
1803, major-general, commands in Mahratta War, victory at Assaye;
1805,in England; 1806, member of Parliament; 1807, Secretary for
Ireland; 1808, in Portugal; 1809-13, chief in command in
Peninsula, clears Portugal and Spain of the French; 1814, English
Ambassador at Paris; 1815, defeats Napoleon at Waterloo; 1815,
commander-in-chief of allied army in France; 1818, master-general
of the ordnance; 1822, represents England at Congress of Verona;
1828-30, Prime Minister; 1829, grants Catholic emancipation;
1834-35, Foreign Secretary; 1841, commander-in-chief. Buried in
St. Paul's Cathedral.]

In February, 1792, William Pitt, Prime Minister of George III.,
unfolding his annual budget in the House of Commons, declared,
"Unquestionably there never was a time in the history of this
country when, from the situation of Europe, we might more
reasonably expect fifteen years of peace, than at the present
moment." Yet within a twelvemonth after this utterance,
apparently sincere, France and England were plunged into a war
which lasted, with but one brief intermission, until 1815. It
embroiled in succession nearly every nation in Europe. In France
it provided a theater for the genius of Napoleon, who after
conquering in turn the best soldiers of the continent, was to
meet his match in the Duke of Wellington on the field of
Waterloo.

The first period of the war mainly antedates the century which we
are considering. In 1793 the Convention, the revolutionary body
which had taken the place of the overturned French monarchy,
declared war on Holland and England. Pitt was still at the head
of King George III.'s ministry, and the conduct of the war
devolved upon him. Her insular position and powerful fleet
rendered England safe from invasion, but her active participation
in the military operations upon the continent was limited in
measure and distressing in outcome. The expeditions which she
landed in the Netherlands were shockingly inadequate in numbers,
and led by high-born generals without knowledge, talent, or
experience. It is little wonder that they accomplished nothing
except to feed the French contempt for English arms.

Successive coalitions were formed by the energetic Pitt with
Prussia, Austria, and other nations to check the advance of the
republican armies in which, after 1795, the figure of Napoleon
Bonaparte leaped into prominence. His victories disintegrated
these alliances, which had been cemented with English gold. At
the same time his victories so strengthened his personal hold
upon the army and the nation that he was able to make himself
absolute master of France.

The Peace of Amiens (March, 1802, to May, 1803) afforded the only
breathing space in all these twenty-two years of warfare.
Napoleon, now first consul, was soon to change that republican
mask for the honest and ambitious title of emperor. The
hollowness of the peace soon became evident. Under its cloak
French ships were building and French armies mustering in the
channel ports for the invasion of England. The character of the
strife had now radically changed. At the outset, ten years
before, England had joined hands with the continental monarchies
to check the spread of the liberal ideas which the French
republican armies were carrying on their bayonets in a species of
crusade in the name of liberty. But with the accession of
Bonaparte to the throne of the Bourbons, England was plunged into
a struggle for existence. Napoleon himself said that peace could
never prevail in Europe so long as England had the power to
disturb it, and all parties in England were resolved to combat to
the last the establishment of a vast and menacing military
despotism beyond the Straits of Dover.

The genius of Admiral Nelson preserved the command of the narrow
seas for England, and forced the Emperor to abandon his project
of invasion which had aroused the English nation to unprecedented
military activity. Pitt's subsidies had again set the continental
armaments in motion, but Napoleon's brilliant dash into Germany
brought these to naught in the battle of Austerlitz, which
destroyed the Third Coalition and brought Austria to terms. It
was this news that the great Prime Minister of George III. took
so to heart. He survived the disaster but a few weeks. But the
ministry of "All the Talents" took up his task with no thought of
abandoning the struggle. The death of Fox soon broke up this
administration, but those of Portland, Perceval, and Liverpool,
which followed, were as dogged in their resolution to spend the
last pound, and the last man, if need were, in ridding Europe of
the conqueror whose existence England had now come to regard as a
threat against her national independence.

As his conquests added state after state to the territory in
which his word was law, Napoleon developed new tactics against
England. He conceived it practicable to crush that commercial and
manufacturing power by excluding her goods from the markets of
Europe. This "continental system" was inaugurated in November,
1806, by the Berlin Decree which closed the ports of Europe to
British vessels, and declared a paper blockade against the
British Isles. This policy he forced upon nation after nation, to
which his conquests extended. England retaliated by the "Orders
in Council," which declared a blockade against the French ports,
and authorized the seizure of neutral vessels found trading with
them. By a naval raid in September, 1807, the British swooped
down on Denmark and carried off the Danish fleet to keep that
weapon from falling into the Emperor's hands. Two months later,
in anticipation of a British descent, French armies seized
Portugal and entered Spain.

Up to the entrance of the French into the Spanish Peninsula, the
protracted hostilities had brought little advantage to the
British arms except on the sea. It was the Peninsular War,
precipitated by this fresh encroachment of Napoleon, which first
gave a laurel to the English arms and prepared Wellington for
Waterloo. Napoleon and the soldier who was to overthrow him were
born in the same year. The babe whom the world was to know as the
Duke of Wellington was christened in Dublin in May, 1769, by the
name of Arthur Wesley. (In 1798 the older spelling of the family
name, Wellesley, was resumed.) He was descended from English
ancestors long resident in Ireland, and was himself the fourth
son of the Earl of Mornington. The death of the Earl when Arthur
was but twelve years old left the family in slender
circumstances. Richard, the eldest son and successor to the
title, had achieved high university honors, but Arthur was a slow
student of everything save music and mathematics. After a brief
residence at Eton he entered a higher institution at Angers, in
France. His mother thought him worth nothing better than "food
for powder," and at eighteen he obtained a commission as ensign
in the Seventy-sixth Regiment of British Foot. Family influence
and the purchase of his "steps" soon made him a lieutenant-
colonel (1793) of the Thirty-third Foot. He had already been
three years a member of the Irish House of Commons where,
however, he did not distinguish himself.

England was now at war with France, and Colonel Arthur
Wellesley's first foreign service was in 1794, when his regiment
was sent to the support of the Duke of York, who was near the end
of his ignominious campaign in the Low Countries. In March, 1795,
he was back in England, disgusted with the incompetency of his
superiors. Of the value of this experience he afterward said,
"Why, I learned what one ought not to do, and that is always
something." At the time, however, he was less philosophical, and
after consulting with his wise elder brother as to the future
possibilities of distinction in military life, he applied for a
civil office under the Lord Lieutenant of England.

Instead of droning out his life in a treasury clerkship,
Wellesley found a more strenuous career abroad. In the autumn of
1795 his regiment was ordered to India, where he arrived in
February, 1797. A year later his already famous brother Richard,
Lord Mornington, came out as Governor-general. The brothers were
sincerely devoted to each other, and co-operated cordially in the
important operations which followed. The English possessions in
India were then limited to the coast regions, the kings and
princes of the states of the interior being variously bound to
the East india Company by treaty engagements. The news of the
victorious progress of the French arms in Europe lost nothing by
repetition in the bazaars of Hindustan, and emissaries of France
were not wanting to stir the native princes against England.
Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt in 1798 revealed his intention to
attack England through her Indian realm. In February, 1799, the
Governor-general declared war against Tippoo, Sultan of Mysore, a
powerful prince, who had been plotting in the French interest.
The younger Wellesley had contributed much to the efficient
organization of the army which was to invade the Sultan's
territory, and after the fall of Seringapatam he distinguished
himself by his firm and orderly administration of the conquered
domain. In 1802, the year of the Peace of Amiens, he was made a
major-general. When the news of the treaty with France reached
him, his opinion was emphatically expressed: "It establishes the
French power over Europe, and when we shall have disarmed we
shall have no security except in our own abjectness." The
conquest of Mysore left only the Mahratta confederacy undominated
by British authority. These states, a vast domain in western and
central India, having quarreled among themselves, applied to the
British for aid. General Wellesley secured the close alliance of
one party, and as commander-in-chief, took the field against the
others. On the 23rd of September, 1803, he found himself with
seven thousand five hundred men in the presence of the Mahratta
host of fifty thousand men with one hundred and twenty-eight
guns. Retreat was difficult, speedy reinforcement impossible. The
young major-general determined an attack immediately, and
handling his little army with great skill and intrepid courage,
he routed the enemy in the great victory of Assaye, which broke
the Mahratta power. For his exploits he received the thanks of
King and Parliament, and was dubbed a Knight of the Bath.

General Sir Arthur Wellesley returned to England in 1805, after
seven years absence in India. On his way he touched at the Isle
of St. Helena, and took note of its beautiful scenery and
salubrious climate. Doubtless the impression then made was
recalled ten years later, when it became necessary to select a
safe residence for his defeated foe. To one who expressed
surprise that a man of his solid achievement should receive but a
subordinate post as that to which he was assigned on his return
to England, General Wellesley said, "I am NIM MUK WALLAH, as we
say in the East. I have eaten of the King's salt and therefore I
conceive it to be my duty to serve with zeal and cheerfulness
when and wherever the King or his government may think fit to
employ me." This expression explains his lifelong attitude toward
the crown. He considered himself its "retained servant."

It was two years before his talents were properly utilized.
Meanwhile he was member of Parliament and secretary to the Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland. The Peninsular War was his opportunity.
Napoleon had sent Marshal Junot to Lisbon with an army to seize
the country and force it into his continental system, the royal
family retiring to Brazil as he advanced. At almost the same
time, by a series of conscienceless machinations, he had
compelled the King of Spain to abdicate, and had occupied Madrid
and the fortresses of the northern provinces. In spite of popular
risings against the French, Napoleon made his brother Joseph King
of Spain. At once revolt flamed out among the common people, and
the insurrection spread through both kingdoms, and was accepted
in England as an invitation to come to their relief.

Pitt had foreseen amid the shadows of the defeat of Austerlitz
that the Iberian Peninsula might be the final field of resistance
to Napoleon, and now events had brought his successors to the
same view. It was accessible by England's ocean highway, its
people were high-spirited, and impatient of foreign domination,
and a successful campaign there would threaten the French flank.
In June, 1808, an expedition was dispatched to the aid of the
Spanish and Portuguese insurrectionists, and the command was
given to Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Wellesley. The night
before he left London he said to the friend who interrupted his
reverie, "Why, I am thinking of the French. . . . 'Tis enough to
make one thoughtful. But no matter; my die is cast. They may
overwhelm me, but I don't think they will out-manueuver me. . . .
I suspect all the continental armies were more than half-beaten
before the battle was begun. I at least will not be beaten
beforehand."

The qualities which fitted this officer for the heavy work in
hand were those which had been developed and tested in India. He
was, first of all, a worker of surpassing industry and the
closest application. Where others were brilliant, he was
thorough. No commander ever left less to chance or to the
inspiration of the moment. He prepared for his campaigns by
subjecting his troops to the most thorough drill and by providing
them properly with all the munitions of war. His troops were
shaped by incessant care and pains into a perfect weapon, the use
of which he perfectly understood. Further than this, his
experience in India, where conditions had made him the
responsible administrator of vast native states, made him the
right man to conduct a campaign in the peninsula, where, between
the French and the Nationalists, civil administration had fallen
into great disorder, and where all sorts of extraordinary tasks
devolved upon the British representative. His management of his
uncertain allies, the guerrilla chiefs, and his relations with
the revolutionary "juntas" called for qualities as rare as those
which defeated one after another of Napoleon's marshals and
finally worsted the great captain himself. Thoroughness of
preparation, the ability to see things as they are, to wait
patiently, decide promptly, and act with energy--these are
perhaps simple military virtues, but they bring success, and they
were in high degree the possession of the young Indian officer,
who was now to undertake a difficult campaign in a foreign
country. The event proved that with such qualities a general may
compass the most difficult tasks, though he may be "cold" in
temperament, and incapable of kindling in the breasts of his men
that passionate personal devotion which some hold to be the true
test of a great soldier.

Wellesley disembarked his expeditionary force in August, at
Mondego Bay, a hundred miles north of Lisbon, which Junot held
with twelve thousand men. Junot advanced to meet the English, and
at Vimiero Wellesley met and defeated the first of Napoleon's
marshals. Before the close of the day the arrival of a superior
officer terminated Wellesley's command. He had, however,
inflicted such a blow that Junot was glad to sign a convention
which permitted him to evacuate the kingdom. Wellesley returned
to England.

In the spring of 1809 Wellesley was back in Lisbon. He had
persuaded the government that Portugal could be defended and made
the base of operations which should eventually clear the entire
peninsula of the French. They had intrusted the chief command to
him, and now left him free for four years to press his campaigns
to the Spanish capital, and thence to the Pyrenees and beyond
upon the very soil of France itself.

He was watched by two French armies. Soult was at Oporto in the
north, and Victor far up the Tagus Valley, between him and
Madrid. By an unexpected movement, having surprised Soult and
sent him headlong beyond the frontier, Wellesley crossed the
border in quest of Victor. The armies clashed at Talavera, in the
last days of June, in one of the most stubbornly contested
engagements of the war. The English kept possession of the field,
and, though Joseph Bonaparte congratulated his soldiers upon the
glory of the "victory," he knew in his heart, as his greater
brother told him to his face, that the battle was a French
defeat.

Conditions were not yet suited for an advance into Spain, where
the French were gathering in enormous force, with instructions
from Napoleon to "advance upon the English, pursue them without
cessation, beat them, and fling them into the sea." To insure his
forces against the execution of this mandate Wellesley
constructed a crescent of earthworks about Lisbon, "the lines of
Torres Vedras," within which he might take refuge, and under
cover of which, as a last resort, his forces might be safely re-
embarked for retreat. The veteran Massena was selected by the
Emperor to drive the English out of Portugal. As he advanced, in
the summer of 1810, Wellesley retired before him, and just when
the pursuer believed the game was his, he was confronted by the
impregnable lines of Torres Vedras, whose position and strength
was all unsuspected. All winter Massena hovered about the hole,
but the fox was safe in his earth, and in the spring the old
hound again turned his face toward Spain, with the English on his
trail.

For another year the English general, who, in honor of Talavera,
had been raised to the peerage as Viscount Wellington, was
engaged in reducing the French garrisons, and forming into useful
auxiliary troops the raw Portuguese who had risen against the
invader. The capture of the fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo (January,
1812) opened the road to Spain. So important was this point that
the captor was rewarded for it with an English earldom, a Spanish
dukedom, and a Portuguese marquisate. In early summer
Wellington's army took the offensive on Spanish soil. Marshal
Marmont's army at Salamanca in the north was his first objective.
The clash came on the 22nd of July. On the second day of the
battle of Salamanca the English infantry crushed the weakened
center of Marmont's line, the marshal was wounded, his army
hurriedly retreated. On the 12th of August the English were in
Madrid. The Bonaparte King fled from his capital, whose citizens,
intoxicated with joy, crowded around the English general, hung on
his stirrups, touched his clothes, and throwing themselves on the
earth, blessed him aloud as the friend of Spain!

The work of deliverance was by no means complete. Wellington's
army was small, and the support of the Spanish auxiliaries was
not to be counted upon. Though the Emperor was in Russia, some of
his best marshals and a powerful army were opposed to the English
in Spain. It was only the most skilful management, in which
caution and audacity were blended, that brought Wellington safely
out of his dangerous position in Spain, and allowed him to retire
to winter quarters on the Portuguese frontier. The effect of the
campaign upon the Spaniards had been to give him the chief
command of the national forces. England realizing that the
general whose coming had been so long awaited was found at last,
made Wellington a marquis, and voted him the thanks of the Lords
and Commons and one hundred thousand pounds, besides sending him
the reinforcements of cavalry which he needed for his broad plan
of operations for the next campaign.

The winter of 1812-13, which Wellington devoted to his
comprehensive preparations, saw the disastrous retreat of
Napoleon from the snows of Russia. From that blow he never
recovered, and thenceforward he could do little to support his
eagles in the peninsula. The recall of Soult further weakened the
resistance. In May, Wellington bade farewell to Portugal and
recrossed the Spanish frontier, advancing on Madrid from the
northwest. The King and his army retired toward France.
Wellington overtook them at Vittoria (June 21) and fought them,
capturing their guns, baggage, and Spanish plunder, though Joseph
and the main French army escaped northward through the passes of
the Pyrenees.

Soult came posthaste from Dresden to resume command. He found the
army of Spain encamped on French soil, led it through the passes
again, but the English could not be dislodged. In October an
English general for the first time since Napoleon came to power
stood on French soil at the head of an invading army. Soult,
forced away from Bayonne, fell back on Toulouse, where Wellington
dealt him another blow on April 14, 1814. That blow was the last.
Just one week earlier Napoleon, driven back from the Rhine to
Paris by the allied armies on the northeast, had abdicated the
throne which had cost so much blood and treasure.

Wellington visited Paris and Madrid, and then returned to London.
Five years earlier he had left England as Sir Arthur Wellesley;
he came back Duke of Wellington. His own remark upon his
campaigns contrasts strangely with the spirit of the Frenchman,
whose best generals he had out-manoeuvered and overwhelmed. He
was "a conqueror without ambition," he said. "All the world knew
that I desired nothing but to beat the French out of Spain and
then go home to my own country, leaving the Spaniards to manage
theirs as they pleased." England lavished honors upon the hero of
the Peninsular War. Parliament thanked him, granted him four
hundred thousand pounds. He carried the sword of state on the
occasion of the peace celebration in St. Paul's Cathedral. London
banqueted him in Guildhall.

For a summer and a winter the Duke represented England at Paris
and Vienna where the states of Europe were wrangling over the
restoration of the continent to its antebellum condition. When
Napoleon escaped from Elba and was welcomed to Paris by his
former marshals, Europe turned to Wellington to deliver her from
the new peril. On the 25th of March, 1815, Austria, Russia,
Prussia, and Great Britain formed the Quadruple Alliance, binding
themselves to maintain the treaty recently signed at Paris, and
not to lay down arms until "Buonaparte should be placed
absolutely beyond possibility of exciting disturbance and
renewing his attempts to possess himself of the supreme power in
France."

The Duke arrived at Brussels on the 4th of April to take command
of the allied army. Instead of the grand armies of the Quadruple
Alliance he found a composite force of some twenty-five thousand
English, Dutch, Belgians, Brunswickers, and Hanoverians. The
Prussians had thirty thousand men within co-operating distance.
In comparison with the thoroughly disciplined army which he had
developed and wielded so skilfully in the peninsula this force
cut a sorry figure. The field-marshal's bitterest complaint was
that his government had not even provided him with the admirable
staff which five years of service had made so familiar with his
methods and desires. On the very verge of the campaign he wrote,
"I have an infamous army, very weak and ill equipped, and a very
inexperienced staff." While the armies of Austria and Russia were
advancing upon France the Emperor was setting an enormous force
in the field. It was his purpose to fall upon the army on the
Belgian frontier before the other allies could enter France. For
the invasion of Belgium he selected one hundred and twenty-five
thousand men. Prince Blucher, commanding the Prussians, now had
as many men, while Wellington, his ally, commanded some ninety-
three thousand, of whom barely one-third were British. Five-
sixths of the British infantry had never been under fire.

Napoleon's plan was to thrust his army between Blucher and
Wellington and defeat them in succession. On the evening of June
15th, news was brought to the Duke at Brussels that the enemy had
passed the frontier and were engaging the Prussian outposts. He
at once gave the necessary orders for the advance, and after
midnight showed himself at the now famous ball of the Duchess of
Richmond. At eleven the next forenoon he was at QuatreBras, where
his army was engaged in beating off an attack by Marshal Ney,
while Blucher was being pounded by Napoleon a few miles to the
eastward at Ligny. Both the allies retreated, but instead of
separating as Napoleon hoped and believed, they retired along
converging lines, the English to Waterloo, the Prussians to
Wavre, the positions being connected by a roadway. Through the
rain of Saturday, June 17th, Wellington disposed his sixty-nine
thousand men and one hundred and fifty-six guns on both sides of
the Brussels highway, along which Napoleon advanced on the morrow
with seventy-two thousand men and two hundred and forty cannon.
The action opened near noon on the 18th, the French making a vain
effort to carry the Château of Hougomont on the British right.
Next an army corps was hurled at the center, only to be stopped
by Wellington's cavalry with appalling loss. In the afternoon the
Emperor delivered a series of cavalry attacks upon the allied
center. Twelve thousand horsemen thundered up the gentle slope
past the English guns, only to break against the bayonet-hedged
squares of the infantry. At the end of eight hours' fighting the
French center had advanced to within sixty yards of the British
position, but the line still held, and Blucher's Prussians were
rapidly coming up on the right flank. Marshal Grouchy having
failed to prevent this fatal manoeuver, Napoleon shot his last
bolt, sending Ney with the Old Guard against the British right.
But "the bravest of the brave had fought his last battle," and as
his ten battalions were flung back in disorder, Wellington gave
the word to his whole line to advance. The rush of his reserves
of horse scattered the remnants of the tired and disheartened
host. The wreck of the grand army drifted back over the border,
and the dispirited Emperor, having risked everything in one bold
experiment and lost, hastened to Paris, and after a vain attempt
to rally the nation once more about his standard, abandoned hope
and sought refuge on board the "Bellerophon," British man-of-war
(July 15, 1815). At nine o'clock in the evening of the memorable
day of Waterloo, Blucher and Wellington met. The grizzled
Prussian kissed the grave Englishman on both cheeks in the
exuberance of his joy. Without the timely support of his Germans,
that day might have had another ending.

Waterloo was the last act of the Napoleonic struggle. The Emperor
went into exile at St. Helena to fret against his prison bars and
curse his keepers. Wellington had already exhausted his country's
sources of honor. All that Parliament could do was to present the
fine estate of Strathfieldsaye to him and his heirs on condition
of presenting a French tri-color flag to the sovereign at Windsor
on each anniversary of the 18th of June.

Wellington was above all a soldier, but for the remaining thirty-
six years of his lifetime his country had little employment for
the sword. Yet the esteem in which he was held, not only for his
military achievements, but for his honesty and common sense, made
him a conspicuous figure in public affairs for most of his long
life. After Waterloo he remained in France, where his moderation
saved Paris from the vengeance of the continental commanders. Of
the allied army of occupation which remained in France until
1818, Wellington was commander-in-chief. As head of the
commission which passed upon the foreign claims for damages
arising from the protracted wars, his fairness again saved France
from her rapacious creditors.

His work on the continent done, Wellington returned to England to
enter the public service as a member of Lord Liverpool's cabinet.
In 1822 he was sent to represent Great Britain at the Congress of
the Powers at Verona, where he frustrated Russia's intention of
interfering in the affairs of Spain. In 1826 he was sent to
Russia on a special mission from Canning to secure the consent of
the new Czar to English intervention in behalf of the insurgent
Greeks. On the death of the King's brother, the Duke of York, he
became commander-in-chief of the army. Disagreement with Canning
led him to withdraw from that premier's cabinet in April, 1827,
but in the following January (1828), he himself became Prime
Minister, with Robert Peel as Home Secretary. With all his Tory
loyalty to the Church his administration broke its ancient
monopoly. In 1828 he allowed the Test and Corporation Acts to
pass, opening the way for Protestant dissenters to hold civil and
military office. In 1829 he concluded that relief of the Roman
Catholics of Ireland from their political disabilities could no
longer be postponed. Peel had been even more reluctant than his
chief--a native of Ireland--to reach this decision, but the
growing power of the "Catholic Association," the popular
organization which the agitator O'Connell had called into
existence, compelled immediate action. The King was reluctantly
brought to see the expediency of the act, which, when proposed by
Pitt a generation before, had so stiffened the neck of his
father, George III. Perhaps no minister whose prestige was less
than that of the hero of Waterloo could have won the consent of
the Hanoverian monarch, whose dynasty had been brought to England
for the defense of the Protestant faith. The bill for the
emancipation of the Catholics slid easily through the Commons,
though the stiff old Tories who had counted Wellington as of
their number voted solidly against it. Even the Lords failed to
make the expected resistance, and accepted the measure by a vote
of two to one despite the known preference of the court and
clergy, and a bombardment of Protestant petitions. One peer had
thus predicted the result to Macaulay, who was in doubt as to how
the Duke would explain the bill and justify his change of front:
"0, that will be simple enough. He'll say, 'My Lords! Attention!
Right about face! Quick march!' and the thing will be done." King
George tried to slip out of his pledges, but the Iron Duke held
him fast, and the 13th of April, 1829, the act became a law. It
is the chief monument of the Wellington administration.

Against the next great question, the reform of Parliament, he set
himself resolutely, expressing his opposition in such
unmistakable terms as to forfeit at once his office and his
popularity. The London mob stoned his windows, but could not
change his attitude toward legislation which he thought
pernicious to the welfare of his country. He carried on his
opposition when the reform bills began to come up from the
Commons into the Peers' chamber. On the 18th of June, 1832, the
seventeenth anniversary of Waterloo, he was pelted with stones
and dirt by a yelling mob in the streets of London, and only
saved from rougher handling by two old soldiers who walked at his
stirrups and held back the ruffians until the police came to the
rescue. The Reform Bill had already become a law, Wellington and
his irreconcilable friends, perceiving the futility of further
obstruction, absenting themselves from the chamber rather than
vote contrary to their consciences. Even after the reformed
Parliament had come into existence this arch aristocrat could see
nothing but evil in the outlook. He complained that the House of
Commons "had swallowed up all the power of the state," and he was
not far wrong. Still his loyalty to the crown, and his
determination that the government should be upheld kept him from
merely factious opposition and made him a useful servant of the
nation. The leader of the majority in the House of Lords, he
declined to use his position to thwart the purposes of the
popular House. "I do not choose," he said, in 1834, when the Poor
Law Bill was up, "I do not choose to be the person to excite a
quarrel between the two Houses of Parliament. The quarrel will
occur in its time; and the House of Lords will probably be
overwhelmed. But it shall not be owing to any action of mine." It
was in this year that a singular occurrence showed his unique
place in the confidence of King and nation. In November the King
dismissed the Melbourne ministry and called on the Duke to form
another. The latter perceived that no Tory but Peel could manage
the Commons, but Peel was then traveling on the Continent. The
Duke accordingly undertook to carry on the government alone until
that leader's return. And for five weeks he was the cabinet,
holding all the high offices--Treasury, Home, Foreign, and
Colonial--himself, so as not to embarrass his successor by making
appointments. The Whigs raised a great outcry against this one-
man power, but the people rather admired the industry of the
veteran who rose at six o'clock in the morning and went the
rounds of the departments performing the routine duties with the
greatest industry and fidelity and steadily refusing to use his
enormous power and patronage for personal or factional rule. Sir
Herbert Maxwell, the Duke's latest biographer, has attempted to
describe the Duke's political creed by coining a term. He was not
"an impracticable Tory," as the Reformers would name him, nor yet
a mere "Tory opportunist," as sterner Tories would have it. "He
was a possiblist rather than an opportunist, prepared to resist
change as long as possible, but to give way rather than throw the
power into the hands of those (Radicals) who, he honestly
believed, would wreck the realm."

Wellington was foreign secretary in Peel's first cabinet (1834-
35), and commander-in-chief in the second (1841-46). His lifelong
political theory is well exemplified by his words when notified
by the Prime Minister, in November, 1845, of his intention to
suspend the Corn Laws, an act most offensive to his party and
social class. "My only object in public life is to support Sir
Robert Peel's administration of the government for the Queen. A
good government for the country is more important than Corn
Laws." In much the same words the aged leader addressed the House
of Lords in behalf of Peel's Corn Bill, and though bitterly
opposed to the measure, they accepted his guidance and gave the
bill their assent. In 1848 there were many who believed that the
country was on the brink of a revolution. The Chartist agitation
was culminating in the presentation of the great petition to
Parliament, and half a million men were to escort it from
Kennington to Westminster. Wellington was nearing his seventy-
ninth birthday, but the government turned to him to organize the
defense of the capital against mob violence. The old warrior-
blood warmed in his veins, and he amazed the ministers by the
clearness of his plans and the energy and decision with which he
carried them out. Though the affair passed off without
disturbance, being at all times under police control, so thorough
were the Duke's preparations as to have made a successful
revolution impossible.

To his latest year the Duke continued to attend the sessions of
the Lords, and his opinions were listened to with respectful
attention. It was fitting that his last speech there should have
been in a military debate, and that in urging the value of
militia organization, he should have drawn upon his experience
with the raw Hanoverian levies in the Waterloo campaign. This was
in the summer of 1852. On the evening of the 13th of the
following September he retired in his usual condition of health.
The next morning he was seized with sudden illness and did not
live the day out.

Enough has been said in this brief sketch of his public career to
show that the Duke of Wellington, though among the greatest of
English soldiers, cannot rank high among English statesmen,
although he served his country in the highest offices. If read in
detail the record of his career in the Cabinet and in the House
of Lords would confirm the reader in the opinion that his only
sure title to greatness rests in his military career. It has
often been said that, had he died in the moment of victory as did
Nelson, it would have been happier for his fame. But it must not
be forgotten that the years of his political action were those in
which England was passing through the stages of a social and
political revolution, in which the democracy was rising to power
and the landed aristocracy was losing prestige and privilege.
That this revolution was accomplished without such a convulsion
as marked this struggle in other European kingdoms may have been
due, in some degree at least, to the fact that the leader of the
aristocratic Party was held in honor by the masses of the nation.
Moments of exasperation there were when the bitterness of popular
feeling against the obstructionists in the House of Lords vented
itself upon the Duke, but the prevailing feeling toward him was
one of pride in his military achievements and confidence in his
honesty. As McCarthy has well said, "His victories belonged to
the past. They were but tradition, even to middle-aged persons in
the Duke's later years. But he was regarded still as the
embodiment of the national heroism and success--a modern St.
George in a tightly buttoned frock coat and white trousers!"



QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1.  What share had England taken in the French struggle
previous to 1802?
2.  What did the Peace of Amiens prove to be?
3.  In what ways and with what success did England struggle
against Napoleon up to the Peninsular War?
4.  Describe the early life of Wellesley.
5.  What military experience did lie gain in India?
6.  What policy did Napoleon pursue in Spain and Portugal?
7.  What qualities fitted Wellesley to command the Peninsular
Campaign?
8.  Describe Wellington's campaigns up to 1813?
9.  How was the Peninsular War finally closed?
10. Describe the struggle at Waterloo.
11. What important acts relative to church questions were
enacted under Wellington's ministry?
12. What was his attitude toward the Reform Bill?
13. What curious instance of "one-man power" did he illustrate
in 1834?
14. How was his character shown in his position regarding the
Corn Laws?
15. How does he rank among great English leaders?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIFE OF WELLINGTON.            By W. Herbert Maxwell.
HISTORY OF THE PENINSULAR WAR. By Sir William F. P. Napier.
SELECTED DESPATCHES OF THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON. Edited by S. J.
Owen.
THE CAMPAIGN OF WATERLOO.      By John C. Ropes,
The best recent "Life of Wellington" is by Sir Herbert Maxwell. 2
vols. London. The great "History of the Peninsular War" is by Sir
Wm. Napier.





III

GEORGE CANNING AND EUROPEAN AFFAIRS

[GEORGE CANNING, born, London, April II, 1770; died, London,
August 8, 1827; educated at Eton and Oxford; Member of
Parliament, 1793; 1797, editor of Anti-Jacobin periodical; 1807-
09, Secretary for Foreign Affairs; 1809, duel with Castlereagh;
1814-16, Ambassador at Lisbon; 1817-20, President of India Board;
1822, appointed Governor-General of India; 1822-27, Minister for
Foreign Affairs; 1827, Prime Minister and First Lord of the
Treasury. Buried in Westminster Abbey.]

During the first twenty years of the nineteenth century Great
Britain, though possessing the most liberal constitution of any
of the powers, was the consistent ally of the absolute monarchies
of Europe. Strange as the situation at first appears, it is not
difficult to trace the causes which produced it.

For the explanation of most of the phenomena of European history
in the first half of the century the student must turn back to
the French Revolution. The social and political ideas which were
at the bottom of that great upheaval were in part suggested by
the success of free institutions in constitutional England, where
parliamentary government had been highly developed while France
lay bound by her Bourbon despots. A large body of Englishmen
numbering some of the greatest names in politics and literature
sympathized deeply with the earlier manifestations of the
revolutionary spirit.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven"

sang Wordsworth, whose youthful enthusiasm over that dawn was
soon chilled by the crimes which were committed in the name of
Liberty--the slaughter of the royal pair, the reign of the
guillotine, and the enthronement of reason in the place of God.
The tide of opinion in England was turned by these scenes of
lawless license, and when, in 1793, the revolutionary government
of France offered its armed aid to all oppressed peoples,
England, led by William Pitt, joined Austria and Prussia in a war
to suppress the dangerous republic, and restore the Bourbon
dynasty to its ancient throne. Seven successive coalitions were
thus formed by English diplomacy between 1793 and 1815 to meet
the changing phases of the struggle which, after 1803, had ceased
to be monarchy against democracy and had become a universal war
for self-preservation from Napoleon, the military genius who had
made himself the dictator of revolutionary France. When the great
war seemed to have come to an end, in 1814-15, and Napoleon was
finally caged at St. Helena, England found herself naturally
taking a principal part in re-establishing the Bourbon Louis
XVIII. on the throne of France. She had stood with the other
powers so long against a common foe that she continued to stand
with them now in undoing, as far as might be, the work which the
disturbing and renovating conqueror had wrought in the kingdoms
which he had overrun. Not only were the old boundaries generally
restored and the exiled monarchs brought back to replace the
upstart Bonaparte kings, but the constitutional freedom which the
French arms had introduced in many parts of Europe was annulled
wherever possible. The Congress of Vienna, in which the allied
powers formulated their policy, did its best to turn back the
shadow twenty years on the dial of progress, and England either
joined in the effort or stood by consenting to the death of so
many newly won liberties.

When the allied sovereigns were met in Napoleon's capital after
Waterloo, the Czar of Russia conceived a thought which seemed to
him to be an inspiration. In the ecstasy of the hour of
deliverance from the sword which had been the nightmare of the
continent for a generation Alexander proposed to his fellow
potentates a covenant binding them to be governed by the
principles of Christian justice and charity in their dealings
with their own subjects and in their mutual relations. Sincere
and pious as the Czar undoubtedly was, this agreement, which was
accepted by the other monarchs, excepting George IV. of England,
did not produce the results which one might suppose from its
name, the Holy Alliance. It was used not only to stifle the
spirit of liberty in western Europe, but its baleful influence
was felt in Italy, Spain, and Greece. In effect it was a trades-
union in which the allied crowned-heads undertook to stifle
popular liberty wherever it showed signs of life. When Alexander
explained his proposal to the English commissioners at Paris they
could scarcely keep a straight face at its absurdity. Yet though
England refused to become a member of the Holy Alliance, she did
allow herself for a period of several years to be ruled by its
decisions, or at least to allow them to be enforced without a
protest.

Such in brief was the chain of events which associated the
foreign policy of England with that of the Holy Alliance. The
brilliant statesman who broke away from this foreign policy and
led England out upon a line of independent action was George
Canning.

The future Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister was born in
London, April II, 1770. His father was an Englishman from the
north of Ireland, who had read law, but failed to get clients,
and had succeeded at nothing, from pamphleteering to selling
wine. He died on his babe's first birthday. The widow married an
actor and essayed a stage career. What would have become of
little George had he remained in his mother's company is an
interesting speculation. An actor called the attention of his
uncle, a London banker, to the probability that the lad was on
the high road to the gallows--to which in those days more than
one road led. This uncle, Stratford Canning, assumed the
responsibility of the child's education, sent him to Eton and
later to Oxford. At the former he distinguished himself by his
witty contributions to "The Microcosm'--most famous of school-boy
periodicals--and at the University where he was graduated, B.A.,
in 1791 he won some distinction in literature and oratory, taking
the University prize with his Latin poem. At Oxford he passed
through the "blissful dawn" of which Wordsworth sang, and was an
enthusiastic admirer of the French Revolution of 1789 and of the
British Whigs who supported it--Fox, Sheridan, and their sort. He
came up to London as the tide was turning, and his own opinion
was among the first to change. Pitt, the Prime Minister, had been
apprised of his talent, sent for him, and had him "chosen" to the
House of Commons, a simple matter in those unregenerate days,
when the Tory chieftains had their pockets full of boroughs.

Pitt gave Canning a minor government office--he was not yet
thirty years of age--and treated him almost as a son, the young
man reciprocating the regard with a really filial devotion. He
was ambitious for advancement, and discontented with his slow
promotion. In 1797, in company with other choice spirits, he
began the publication of The Anti-Jacobin, a weekly periodical
which for nearly a year held up to merciless ridicule that
section of the British public which still countenanced the ruling
ideas of the French Revolution. When the King's refusal to yield
on the question of Catholic emancipation (1801) compelled Pitt to
resign, Canning went out of office with him. Addington, the
stupid mediocrity who succeeded Pitt, provoked Canning's pen to
fresh lampoons, some of them long remembered for their savage
personalities.

When Pitt resumed the premiership, in 1804, to direct the new
struggle with Napoleon, he again bestowed office upon Canning,
and when he died, in 1806, Canning became the leader of the group
of Pittites who endeavored to perpetuate his ideas. In 1807 he
entered the cabinet in the important capacity of Foreign
Secretary.

As Foreign Secretary under the spiritless premiership of the Duke
of Portland, Canning was allowed free hand. The two years and a
half during which he directed the foreign office were marked by a
succession of moves which gave a new aspect to the contest with
Napoleon.

Canning entered upon his duties just as the Fourth Coalition was
being hammered to pieces, on the same anvil which had destroyed
the others. By the Treaty of Tilsit (July, 1807), Napoleon
prepared to unite the northern nations in his war on British
commerce. Hearing or divining his purpose to further this project
by seizing the fleet of Denmark, Canning dispatched an armed
force to Copenhagen with a demand for the surrender of the Danish
ships. The order was executed, and the Danish vessels were
brought back to England, though at the cost of a bombardment of
the Danish capital. The French Emperor's eye was fastened on the
fleet of Portugal as another auxiliary, and when the Regent
refused to accede to his request, Napoleon dispatched Marshal
Junot to drive him from his kingdom and hold its ports and
fortresses against England.

England now stood almost alone, and Napoleon hoped to complete
her ruinous isolation by destroying her trade with Europe. His
"Continental System," which was to make the continent
commercially independent of Great Britain, was foreshadowed in
his Berlin Decrees. Fresh decrees were now met by fresh Orders in
Council, "shutting out from the continent all vessels which had
not touched at a British port." It was Canning whose genius
caught at the strategic possibilities of a war in the peninsula
(Spain-Portugal) as a practical opening on the French flank for a
final blow at the Napoleonic power. Napoleon's interference in
the government of Spain by dethroning its monarchs and giving the
crown to his brother Joseph had exasperated that proud nation and
provoked the spirited people to arm against the intruder. The
Portuguese were scarcely less bitter against the French
conqueror. Canning perceived the possibility of gaining a
foothold in these kingdoms, which were easily accessible by sea,
and by utilizing the spirit and resources of the aroused nations
to consolidate a power there which would threaten France itself,
whose borders the great soldier had thus far kept inviolate. How
ably Sir Arthur Wellesley fulfilled Mr. Canning's desire the life
of Wellington has already shown.

The Peninsular Campaign was scarcely under way when Canning and
Castlereagh, the War Secretary, quarreled and the former resigned
from the cabinet. Yet from his place in the House the ex-minister
continued manfully to uphold the general who was doing England's
work in Spain. There was need of all the support his genius could
contribute to this task, for parliament was slow to grasp the
deep purpose of the campaign, was impatient for results, and
prone to grumble at the bill of expense. Yet in the end Canning
enjoyed the satisfaction of pointing to the complete verification
of his hopes. He might have been Foreign Minister in the
Liverpool ministry at its outset (1812) had he been willing to
acquiesce in the leadership of Castlereagh in the House of
Commons. This would have given him the direction of English
policy in those critical years in which the Napoleonic empire was
broken up and European affairs rearranged by the powers at
Vienna. He lived to regret this as the greatest error of his
career. He was sufficiently humbled after four years to join the
government forces as president of the India board, resigning in
1820. In 1821, when on the point of going out to India, of which
he had been appointed governor-general, his prospects suddenly
changed. On the death of his rival, Castlereagh, Canning became
Foreign Secretary and leader of the Commons. The prize which he
had long schemed to secure, and had finally given up, suddenly
fell into his hand. Canning's mind could not but revert to the
lost opportunity of 1812. Not in a century would the Foreign
Minister again have a world to set in order. He wrote to a
friend, "Ten years have made a world of difference, and have made
a very different sort of world to bustle in than that which I
should have found in 1812. For fame it is a squeezed orange, but
for public good there is something to do, and I shall try--but it
must be cautiously-- to do it. You know my politics well enough
to know what I mean when I say that for 'Europe' I shall be
desirous now and then to read 'England.'" The closing sentence
was the keynote of his policy. For years it had been customary
for representatives of the powers to treat all important matters
as "European questions," and England had become habituated to a
diplomacy which kept English interests in the background for the
sake of the commonweal of Europe--Europe and the Holy Alliance
being synonymous. "When Castlereagh," said Canning, "got among
princes and sovereigns at Vienna, he thought he could not be too
fine and complaisant."

When Canning began to represent England in her relations with
foreign countries, he found the Holy Alliance in full vigor. In
fact, the Czar, Kaiser, and King had just met at Laybach (1821)
and issued a manifesto declaring that "useful and necessary
changes in legislation and in the administration of states could
only emanate from the free will and from the intelligent and
well-weighed convictions of those whom God has made responsible
for power. Penetrated with this eternal truth, the sovereigns
have not hesitated to proclaim it with frankness and vigor. They
have declared that, in respecting the rights and independence of
legitimate power, they regarded as legally null and disavowed by
the principles which constituted the public right of Europe, all
pretended reforms operated by revolt and open hostilities." In
plain terms the three monarchs, claiming to rule by divine
right, reasserted their determination to interfere in the
private affairs of any state to suppress movements which seemed
to their majesties to be revolutionary. The powers had already
acted according to this program in Piedmont and Naples, and were
preparing to interfere in behalf of the Bourbons in Spain, the
Spaniards in the revolted American republics, and the Turks in
Greece when Canning came to power. To the Congress of Verona,
where these and other questions were to be considered by the
powers, Canning sent Wellington to speak for England. In
accordance with his instructions the duke stood for non-
intervention. Europe had no business to restore the Bourbon to
the throne from which the nation had thrust him; on the same
principle Greece must be allowed to fight out her own cause with
the Turk; as for the Spanish-American colonies, why they were
already lost to Spain, and England had recognized them as
independent states. France undertook to do alone for the Spanish
monarch what the Holy Alliance wished to do in the name of
Europe. In this England acquiesced, but Russia's attempt to
second the French in their Spanish project by military support
was stopped by Canning's threat that such an act would only
result in England's making the Spanish cause her own. "The
admission of the jurisdiction of the Holy Alliance over Europe
was a course which he deemed it vital at almost any cost to
prevent," says Hill. "The time for Areopagus and the like of
that," as Canning put it, "has gone by." And again, "What should
we have thought of interference from foreign Europe when King
John granted Magna Charta, or of an interposition in the quarrel
between Charles I. and his Parliament?" To bring his colleagues
around to his view, Canning showed them that the interference of
the Holy Alliance in the affairs of Ireland might be justified
upon the same grounds on which the argument for intervention in
Spain was based. The King, never too fond of the brilliant
commoner, whose presence in the ministry he considered scarcely
less than a personal affront, had the temerity to criticise the
policy which was so obnoxious to his fellow crowned heads. He
thought that the English recognition of Spanish-American
independence was as wicked as the French alliance in 1778 with
the insurgent English colonists under Washington. Canning's
recognition of Spanish-American independence was a sagacious
stroke. It not only gave strength to his contention that peoples
had a right to decide for themselves who should rule them,
without consulting the despots of Europe, but its timeliness was
masterly. Glorifying his own course in one of his most famous
Parliamentary orations, in December, 1826, he explained why he
had not joined the Spaniards in making armed resistance to the
French invasion. He said: "Is the Spain of the present day, the
Spain of which the statesmen of the time and William and Anne
were so much afraid? Is it, indeed, the nation whose puissance
was expected to shake England from her sphere? No, sir, it was
quite another Spain--it was the Spain within the limits of whose
empire the sun never set; it was Spain with the Indies which
excited the jealousies and alarmed the imaginations of our
ancestors. . . . If France conquered Spain, was it necessary in
order to avoid the consequences of that occupation that we
should blockade Cadiz? No, I looked another way: I sought the
material of compensation in another hemisphere. Contemplating
Spain such as our ancestors had known her, I resolved that, if
France had Spain, it should not be Spain with the Indies. I
called the New World into existence to redress the balance of
the Old!"

Greece began her struggle for independence in 1821. The heroism
which her people displayed in their unequal battle with the
Turks attracted the attention and sympathy of many persons all
over the world, especially those who saw in the modern Greek the
representative of the race which had once been the intellectual
leader of Europe. The powers of the Holy Alliance, however, were
inclined to regard the outbreak with coldness, seeing in it a
fresh manifestation of the then growing disposition of European
peoples to rise against the tyranny of their anointed kings.
England held aloof from their conferences in regard to the
matter, trusting to their discordant interests to break up their
concert of action, since the Russian czar, as the head of the
Greek faith, might be counted upon in the long run to befriend
the Greeks, especially as such a step would carry the Russian
influence into the Balkan Peninsula and mark a full stride
toward Constantinople, then as now the goal of Russian ambition.
Canning employed Wellington to negotiate an agreement at St.
Petersburg for the rescue of Greece. Ultimately England, Russia,
and France signed a protocol which was to establish Greece as a
self-governing state, tributary to the Porte, but free in
matters of commerce and religion. In 1827 the three powers
demanded an armistice looking toward a treaty settlement, and
threatened to use force to compel a cessation of hostilities. The
Porte defied the powers, and his fleet having fired upon the
allied vessels, the battle of Navarino was precipitated in
October, 1827. The result was the expulsion of the Turks from
the country, and the early establishment of the complete
independence of the kingdom of Greece. Canning did not live to
see the consummation of his hopes in Greece. His health, which
had for several years been much enfeebled, gave way completely,
and on August 8, 1827, he died, at the age of fifty-seven. He
had then for six months held the highest office in the gift of
the nation.

In February, 1827, the illness of Lord Liverpool had made it
necessary to reorganize the cabinet and choose a new Prime
Minister. After much hesitation the King sent for Canning. Most
of his former colleagues declined to serve under him because he
was a professed pro-Catholic, and they were still of the opinion
that the Protestant constitution of England would be endangered
if the Irish demand for Roman Catholic emancipation should be
granted. Others were found to take the place of Wellington, Peel,
Eldon, and the other Tory leaders, and the Canning ministry got
under way, only to be abruptly halted at the grave. The remains
of the Prime Minister were deposited in Westminster Abbey, where
a statue by Chantry recalls his manly form and expressive
countenance.

Even in so slight a sketch as the foregoing, some characteristics
of the man stand forth. Canning's wit, while its mordancy cost
him many friends, distinguishes him among English statesmen. The
talent which had stood him in good stead as boy-editor of "The
Microcosm" at Eton, and which is to be seen in the slings and
arrows of "The Anti-Jacobin," he never quite lost. His pen was
always ready to dash off a scrap of lampooning verse, and
flashes of wit and extended passages of humor enlivened the
brilliant orations by means of which he explained and defended
his policies in Parliament. As an orator his speeches were of
exquisite polish, and the voice, gesture, countenance and entire
bodily presence of the speaker contributed to their tremendous
effect. There were not wanting those who criticised his oratory
as savoring more of the stage than the rostrum, but such persons
were aristocratic political opponents who would not let the
world forget that this man whose genius outshone them all was
the son of a third-rate actress. Be it said to Canning's credit
that he did not forget his mother, but made her comfort in her
declining days the object of his solicitous care.

Mr. Hill, whose study of Canning has been of great assistance in
the preparation of these pages, thus goes to the heart of his
foreign policy: "The principle which made Canning the antagonist
of the propaganda of French principles in Europe during the
early part of his political life made him during his later years
in an equal degree the antagonist of the principles of the Holy
Alliance which it is his great glory as a statesman to have
defeated. The Holy Alliance endeavored to impose upon other
nations principles and a law of life not their own. As Canning
objected to the Holy Alliance, so he would have objected to its
present secular substitute, the Concert of Europe, which simply
means the agreement of the great powers to inflict their will
upon the small ones, not allowing them to develop according to
their native forces and genius, but constraining them to such
forms and confining them within such limits as suits the
convenience of a despotic hexarchy of states, or of a majority
of them. The country which is England at home should be England
abroad, reserving all its freedom of action. Canning's foreign
policy, which was for 'Europe' to read 'England,' and to 'get
rid of Areopagus and all that,' was sound and statesmanlike and
abundantly justified by its results."



QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1.  How did England join with the rest of Europe in undoing
the work of Napoleon?
2.  Give the chief events in the early life of Canning.
3.  Why did Canning authorize an attack on Denmark?
4.  What was his relation to the Peninsular War?
5.  What was his "lost opportunity" of 1812?
6.  How did he set forth his plans when he became foreign
secretary in 1821?
7.  What interference in the affairs of Europe did the
Holy Alliance attempt?
8.  How did Canning defend his recognition of Spanish-American
independence?
9.  What part did England play in the liberation of Greece?
10. What were the personal qualities of Canning?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GEORGE CANNING.             Frank H. Hill.
POETRY OF THE ANTI-JACOBIN. Edited by Charles Edmonds.




IV

STEPHENSON AND THE RAILWAY

[GEORGE STEPHENSON, born, Wylam, near Newcastle, June 9, 1781;
died, August 12, 1848; driver lad in a colliery; at fourteen,
assistant to his father as fireman of colliery engines; at
seventeen, engineman; at eighteen, learned to read in night
school; 1812, enginewright at Killingworth colliery; 1814,
operated his locomotive, "My Lord"; 1822, engineer of Stockton
and Darlington Railroad (opened 1825); engineer of Liverpool and
Manchester Railroad (opened 1830); produced locomotive "Rocket,"
capable of thirty miles an hour.]

In a bare room of a laborer's tenement in the colliery village of
Wylam, in Northumberland, on the 9th day of June, 1781, was born
a babe to whose mind and hand England was to owe as much in
future years as to any high-born minister of the crown. Indeed,
one might trust the world to give a verdict in favor of George
Stephenson, the founder of the steam railway as against his
sovereign, King George III. himself.

The father, the "old Rob" of the village boys, was the fireman of
the pumping engine at the colliery hard by. His father before
him--the Stephensons were no pedigree-hunters, and traced their
line no farther- -was a Scotchman who, so far as anything was
remembered of him, had come into the north of England as a
gentleman's servant. Robert was a favorite with the village
children, to whom he gave the freedom of the fire-room, and was
a boon companion of his own houseful of boys and girls, kindling
their fancy by his headful of tales, and sharpening their
observation of the beauties of nature by making them the
companions of his walks a-field, where the birds and other living
things were the objects of his peculiar interest and love.

As soon as little George was old enough to "take notice" he must
have discovered the railway which ran before his father's door,
and his earliest responsibilities were connected with the
oversight of his younger brothers and sisters lest in their play
they should fall under the wheels of the cars or the hoofs of
the horses that supplied the motive power. The road was a wooden
tramway along which coal cars were dragged from the mines to
tidewater.

The first tramways in the northern coal-fields were made by
laying a track of planking on wooden sleepers. This device was
more than a century old when George Stephenson was born. In some
places this had been improved by plating the planks with iron.
While the Wylam lad was still a barefoot boy, cast-iron rails
were being introduced in Leicestershire, a wheel having been
designed with a flange to keep it on the narrow track. Thus the
railway was brought to a stage which needed only the application
of steam to its motive power to carry it into a new and vastly
enlarged phase.

The fireman's son was set to win his share of the family bread
before he was ten. He tended a widow's cows, led the plow-
horses, and hoed turnips before he entered a colliery as a
breaker-boy, where his task was to pick out stones and other
foreign substances from the fuel. Sixpence a day was the wage.
Soon at twopence more he was promoted to drive the gin-horse
that, circling around a capstan, hoisted the buckets of water
and coals out of the pit. At fourteen he became his father's
assistant in the fire-room at Dewley Burn at a shilling a day. At
fifteen he obtained a foreman's position in another colliery. At
seventeen he had gone over his father's head, and had charge of a
pumping engine at Water-row Pit. When his wages reached twelve
shillings a week he thought he was "a made man for life," but his
ignoble content was soon disturbed. Always fascinated by
machinery, as he was by birds and animals, he made a pet of his
engines, studying them with a singular fondness, and making
himself master of their principles and their parts. This
knowledge prompted him to learn more, especially to find out
something about the improved engines of Boulton & Watt, of which
rumors had reached the enginemen of the north. To do this he
must learn to read, an art which he seems to have considered
superfluous until he was eighteen. Never did student work harder
than Geordie Stephenson at his new task, amazing his teachers
and his mates by his progress at "the three R's." He was now
brakesman of a hoisting engine, dividing his small leisure
between his studies and his cobblery, for he added to his
earnings by mending shoes. His income was now some ninety pounds
a year. He saved his first guinea and felt himself a rich man.
At twenty-one he married a farmer's house-servant and went to
housekeeping in a cottage at Wellington Quay.

It would be a long story, however interesting, to follow the
young mechanic through the experiences by which he won a name in
all the North Country as the cleverest of "engine doctors,"
eking out his wages by making lasts, mending watches, and even
cutting out coats and trousers for the wives of the pitmen to
sew up for their husbands. His desire to provide his motherless
boy Robert with better schooling than he had enjoyed sharpened
his wits and added strength to his arm. Fortunately the son
proved to be not only an apt scholar, but had the rare gift of
being able to teach others. Whatever he learned in the good
schools to which his father sent him, he imparted to his father.
So boy and man progressed together in their educational
partnership.

When George Stephenson became chief enginewright of the
Killingworth collieries at one hundred pounds a year he thought
he had reached the summit of his ambition. The duties of the
position made less demand upon him for manual labor, and left him
time to carry out some of his mechanical ideas. He devised new
hoists and pumps for the mines, and then applied himself to the
ever-present problem of cheapening the transportation of the
coals between pit mouth and ship side. One of his first
improvements of this sort was a gravity railway, so arranged that
the loaded cars, running down to the river by their own weight,
furnished the power to draw the empty cars to the summit again by
cable. When George Stephenson took up the problem of
perfecting a "traveling steam engine" he had the advantage of
knowing what had been accomplished by other experimenters. For
fifty years inventors had been turning out steam engines of
considerable promise in the model stage, but of little practical
performance. Indeed, about 1803, a Cornishman named Trevithick
had produced a locomotive which was used for a time to transport
metal and ore to the Pen-y-darran iron works in South Wales. The
heavy engine so damaged the tracks that it was soon dismounted
and degraded to the work of a steam pump. In 1812 a cog-wheel
locomotive, invented by a Mr. Blenkinsop, began running in a
colliery a few miles out of Leeds, and served very well its
purpose to haul heavy trains almost as fast as a horse could
walk. The next year a Derbyshire mechanic produced a "Mechanical
Traveler," the legs of which were moved alternately by steam, but
the bursting of its boiler on its trial trip put an end to its
picturesque career of doubtful usefulness.

One Mr. Blackett, an enterprising collier of Wylam, introduced
the ideas of Trevithick and Blenkinsop to the Tyneside and so
brought them under the observant eye of the Killingworth
enginewright, who had such a clever way of smoothing away
difficulties in complicated machinery. After repeated and costly
experiments, Mr. Blackett evolved a type of locomotive which,
though noisy and clumsy, did better work than any of its
predecessors.

After making a careful study of what had been done by others,
George Stephenson came to the conclusion that he could improve
upon the existing locomotive models. This was about 1813, when he
was about thirty-four years old. He said to his friends that
"there was no limit to the speed of such an engine, if the works
could be made to stand." One of his employers, Lord Ravensworth,
advanced the necessary money for constructing his first
"Traveling Engine" at West Moor, the colliery blacksmith
undertaking to carry out his designs. Dr. Smiles's description of
this locomotive may be reproduced: "The boiler was cylindrical of
wrought iron, eight feet in length and thirty-four inches in
diameter, with an internal flue tube twenty inches wide passing
through it. The engine had two vertical cylinders of eight inches
diameter and two feet stroke let into the boiler, working the
propelling gear with cross heads and connecting rods. The power
of the two cylinders was combined by means of spur-wheels which
communicated the motive power to the wheels supporting the engine
on the rail. . . The engine thus worked upon what is termed the
second motion. The chimney was of wrought iron, round which was a
chamber extending back to the feed pumps, for the purpose of
heating the water previous to the injection into the boiler. The
engine had no springs, and was mounted on a wooden frame
supported on four wheels." The engine made its trial trip July
25, 1814, on which occasion it showed a speed of four miles an
hour in drawing a load of thirty tons. This engine was named
"Blucher," after the distinguished Prussian field-marshal.

Blucher was almost immediately improved by its inventor. First he
doubled the steam-making power of its boiler by turning the
exhaust from the cylinders into the smoke-stack, thus creating a
forced draught. Second he built another engine, in which the
tooth-wheel driving gear gave way to a simple and direct
connection between the piston and the driving wheels which rolled
upon the rails. This type of locomotive, developing some six
miles an hour, did its work so well in the colliery that it was
retained, with very slight alterations, for more than half a
century. The report of its success got abroad slowly, and Mr.
Stephenson was commissioned to build a railway and a number of
locomotives for a colliery in another shire. The success of this
piece of engineering encouraged him in sending his son Robert, a
youth of fine promise, to Edinburgh to study physical sciences in
the university, where in his brief residence he took a
mathematical prize.

The year 1823 marked another forward step for George Stephenson
and railroads. Two years before a road had been chartered to
connect the Durham coal-fields with tidewater. Stephenson heard
of the project, and at once proposed to the company to make an
iron railroad of the new wooden tramway and equip it with his
traveling engines. His arguments and demonstrations won over the
skeptical directors. They had their charter amended so as to
authorize the use of steam as motive power for the transport of
passengers as well as merchandise. Thus began the Stockton and
Darlington Railway, the first in the world with a passenger
charter. The chief engineer was George Stephenson, on a salary of
five hundred pounds. At the same time, with the assistance of the
railroad people, he founded the locomotive shops at Newcastle.

The new railroad, the first public line, was opened in September,
1825. As its construction progressed, its engineer had become
increasingly sanguine of success. He said to his son Robert at
this time: "I venture to tell you that I think you will live to
see the day when railways will supersede almost all other methods
of conveyance in this country--when mail coaches will go by
railway, and railroads will become the great highway for the King
and all his subjects. The time is coming when it will be cheaper
for a workingman to travel upon a railway than to walk on foot. I
know there are great and almost unsurmountable difficulties to be
encountered, but what I have said will come to pass as sure as
you live. I only wish I may live to see the day, though that I
can scarcely hope for, as I know how slow all human progress is,
and with what difficulty I have been able to get the locomotive
thus far adopted, notwithstanding my more than ten years'
successful experiment at Killingworth."

The first train over the road was such an one as had never been
seen before. George Stephenson was at the lever when the engine
pulled out with a string of eight cars behind it. One regular
passenger coach--the first ever built--held the directors, and
twenty-one improvised passenger "wagons" carried some six hundred
daring individuals. Coal and flour filled the other cars. The
journey was safely accomplished at a speed which is said at times
to have reached the hitherto unheard of rate of twelve miles an
hour. The road, with its three Stephenson locomotives and many
horses, was successful from the first, and its dividends were
among the chief inducements which led to the next and more
important advance in railroad construction, the Liverpool and
Manchester line.

Manchester was the great manufacturing center of the industrial
England, which the inventions of Arkwright and Watt had called
into existence. Its port was Liverpool. The natural means of
communication between the two cities was quite inadequate to the
changed conditions. In 1821 surveys were made for a tramway, and
before the Stockton road was completed Stephenson had been
selected as chief engineer of the new and more ambitious
enterprise. Yet his assertion that trains could be moved between
the two cities at twenty miles an hour raised serious doubts in
many minds as to his sanity. A writer in the "Quarterly Review"
thought that even though a few foolhardy persons might trust
themselves to a vehicle moving at such speed--twice that of the
swiftest stagecoaches--Parliament for the general welfare should
limit the speed of all railways to eight or nine miles an hour,
as the greatest that could be ventured on with safety.

It was while the grant of a charter to this Liverpool and
Manchester Railway was being discussed in a committee of the
House of Commons that the shrewd North Country engineer first
faced the trained Parliamentary lawyers. He had been cautioned to
keep his figures for speed within the most moderate limits so as
not to prejudice the company's case, but his belief in his own
invention mastered his restraint, though as he afterward said, he
did his best "to keep the engine down to ten miles an hour." In
fact, his daring prediction of twelve miles per hour struck the
learned counsel with horror. They objected that horses would fly
in terror from such a monster. He replied that horses had been
known to shy at wheelbarrows. They tried to make him admit that
the wheels would slip on the smooth rails, but he knew that they
would bite without teeth. One of the committee said, "Suppose
that a cow were to stray upon the line and get in the way of the
engine; would not that be a very awkward circumstance?" To which
the countryman had a ready reply, "Very awkward--for the cow!"
The opposition, which was largely animated by the existing canal
interest, ventured some views which the experience of the next
five years was to make most ridiculous. They declared that the
plan to carry the rails over the surveyed route across Chat Moss,
a wide morass, was impossible; and furthermore, that no
locomotive could make headway against the high winds which at
times prevailed in that region. Experts were brought to testify
that "no engineer in his senses would go through Chat Moss if he
wanted to make a railroad from Liverpool to Manchester." "In my
judgment," said one of them, "a railroad cannot be made over Chat
Moss without going to the bottom." The committee decided against
the bill, but at the next session Parliament granted the company
the power to construct the road, the question whether or not
locomotives should be used upon it being left in abeyance. George
Stephenson was chosen to be chief engineer, at one thousand
pounds a year.

Chat Moss was conquered by an ingenious device which practically
floated the road-bed upon its spongy surface. Tunnels were driven
through the hills, deep cuttings were made wherever needed, a
ravine was crossed by a viaduct of brick and stone, and more than
threescore bridges were thrown across the streams. All the plans
for this complicated work passed under the eye, and many of them
took their first form in the mind of the chief, whose skill as a
mechanic was for the time sunk in his genius for civil
engineering. By dint of the most strenuous application, and by
the dominance of a spirit of perseverance which no discouragement
or obstacle could daunt, Stephenson brought the road to
triumphant completion. The next thing was to convince the
directors that the steam locomotive was the proper equipment for
a public railway. As a beginning, he persuaded the company to
place one of his engines upon its construction trains. The
experts who were employed to investigate the many proposed
applications of power decided, however, that the most feasible
equipment was a series of twenty-one stationary engines located
at intervals along the right of way and hauling the cars stage
after stage by means of a rope wound upon a drum-the principle of
the cable railway which afterwards had its day in our streets.
Still Stephenson would give the directors no peace. Finally, in
order to settle the question of the practical utility of the
traveling engine, the company offered a prize of five hundred
pounds for the best locomotive engine, to be awarded after a
competitive test upon certain conditions, the most notable of
which were:

"2. The engine of six tons weight must be able to draw
after it, day by day, twenty tons weight at ten miles an
hour with a pressure of steam on the boiler not exceeding
fifty pounds to the square inch."

"4. The engine and boiler must be supported on springs and
rest on six wheels, the height of the whole not exceeding
fifteen feet to the top of the chimney."

"7. The engine must be delivered complete and ready for
trial at the Liverpool end of the railway not later than
the 1st of October, 1829."

"8. The price of the engine must not exceed five hundred
and fifty pounds."

George Stephenson and his son Robert threw all their resources
into the production of the locomotive which was to carry their
colors in the contest. The "Rocket" engine, which was built in
their Newcastle shop, was fitted with a tubular boiler six feet
long and three feet four inches in diameter. The fire-box was two
feet wide and three feet high. On each side of the boiler at its
rear end was an oblique cylinder, the piston-rods being connected
with the outside of the two driving wheels, which were in front.
The two rear wheels were about one-half the diameter of the
drivers. The tender, also fourwheeled, was a simple affair, the
water being carried in a large cask.

After a successful trial trip, the "Rocket," which weighed but
four and a half tons, was sent by wagon across England to
Carlisle, and thence to Liverpool. It was one of four steam
engines entered in the competition which attracted wide
attention. Among the entries was the "Novelty," the production of
that talented Swede, John Ericsson, who afterwards, in America,
built the iron-clad "Monitor." The "Novelty" showed fine bursts
of speed, but failed in point of endurance. The "Perseverance"
and "Sanspareil" developed radical defects, but the "Rocket,"
driven by George Stephenson's own hand was prepared for every
turn of the competition, and surpassed all in power, speed, and
general serviceability. To its makers the prize was
unhesitatingly awarded, whereupon the hardy engineer amazed every
beholder by letting out the last link and dashing past the
grandstand at the rate of more than thirty miles an hour. The
forced draft, which had made the Killingworth freight engines so
successful, coupled with the tubular boiler, formed a combination
which won the battle for the locomotive once for all, and made
the name of George Stephenson a household word.

A year later, on the 15th of September, 1830, the Manchester and
Liverpool Railway was formally opened. The Duke of Wellington--
the first citizen of the realm--was present with Sir Robert Peel
and other distinguished personages, together with a vast throng
of sightseers, enthusiastic spectators of the consummation of
George Stephenson's dreams. Though marred by a fatal accident,
the occasion proved the entire practicability of the railway as a
means of transportation. The multitudes who rode in its cars on
that memorable day were but a foretaste of the patronage which
the line was to receive. Although the intention of its projectors
was to limit its traffic chiefly to freight, the road from the
first found its offices besieged by persons eager to ride. Thus
passenger traffic became established as its leading source of
revenue, and thus were the capitalists encouraged to prosecute
the extension of the railway system to points where the outlook
for freight business was much less than between Liverpool and
Manchester. Though these roads were fiercely opposed by the
landowners, the canal-men, and turnpike proprietors, they were
pressed forward in every direction. Robert Stephenson shared with
his father the responsibility of engineering some of the
principal lines, though the two men had the grim satisfaction of
seeing the experts who had ridiculed the initial project now
eagerly bidding for the opportunity of conducting surveys for the
new lines.

A mania for building railroads seized the world. The Stephensons
were in demand not only throughout Great Britain, but even on the
Continent. They had already made a market for their engines
abroad, when, in 1835, they were summoned by the King of Belgium
to assist in laying out a system of railways for that kingdom.
For his services here the engineer was knighted by the King and
banqueted at the royal table. Honored at home and abroad; happy
in the general adoption of the ideas to which he had clung
through opposition and adversity; proud of the son Robert, for
whose education he had worked like a slave, and whom he now saw
hailed as one of the great engineers of the world; fortunate in
business; respected and beloved by men of every class, George
Stephenson spent the closing years of his life in affluence and
ease. He had earned his peace, for he had fought and won the
battle of the locomotive, and so, by improving the means of
communication, had advanced the interests of trade, and promoted
the welfare of England and of mankind. George Stephenson died in
1848. His son Robert outlived him but eleven years, and was
buried in Westminster Abbey as one of the great men of the
century. The boldness of his engineering projects, the skill and
daring with which he flung his railway bridges and viaducts
across rivers, valleys, and straits, had caught and held the
imagination of the world. Together the two men wrote the name of
Stephenson large and lasting in the record of nineteenth-century
England.

Had the nineteenth century nothing else to show save the
improvement in transportation, its fame would be secure. Within a
dozen years after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester
Railway, Great Britain was covered with railways or railway
surveys, establishing all the trunk-lines which now exist. The
thirty and a half miles of the original line grew by leaps and
bounds to a system of nearly two thousand miles, the property of
a single company, whose property is valued at five hundred
million dollars. Twenty-five years after the day of the
"Rocket's" victory eight thousand miles of railway were in
operation in the United Kingdom. Another twenty-five years
brought the total up to eighteen thousand miles, which had cost
for construction nearly four billion dollars. At the same time
(1883) the number of locomotives was 14,469, of cars, 490,661.
Before Manchester and Liverpool were connected by railway thirty
stage-coaches sufficed for the passenger traffic. The railway
carried seven hundred thousand passengers between the two cities
in its first year and one-half. Fifty years later the passengers
on all the English lines numbered six hundred million, of whom
eighty-five per cent traveled third-class. The freight traffic in
the same year was two hundred and twenty-six million tons. Robert
Stephenson lived to see one per cent of the entire population of
the United Kingdom employed on the railways. In 1884 the number
of such employees was 367,793. These few figures are sufficient
to suggest the magnitude of the economic changes which took place
in England, and indeed throughout the civilized world, as the
direct result of the talent, industry, and perseverance of George
Stephenson, the Northumbrian plowboy.



QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. Describe the early life of George Stephenson.
2. What attempts at locomotives had been made prior to his time?
3. What success of Stephenson's led to the Stockton-Darlington
railway?
4. How did the " Quarterly" comment on the proposed Liverpool
line?
5. What was the view of the Parliamentary committee?
6. Describe Stephenson's work on the Liverpool & Manchester line.
7. What competitors had the "Rocket"?
8. Describe the later work of the two Stephensons.
9. Contrast Stephenson's England with that of to-day.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIFE OF STEPHENSON. Samuel Smiles. ("Lives of the Engineers.")





V

RUSSELL AND PARLIAMENTARY REFORM

[JOHN RUSSELL, Earl Russell, born, London, August 18, 1792; died,
Pembroke Lodge, Richmond Park, May 28,1878; educated at
Westminster School and Edinburgh University; Member of
Parliament, 1813; favored Catholic emancipation; 1830-34,
paymaster general; 1831, introduced the first Reform Bill; 1832,
carried the third Reform Bill; 1835-39, Home Secretary; 1839-41,
Colonial Secretary; 1846-52, Prime Minister; 1852-53, Foreign
Secretary; 1854-55, President of the Council; 1855, Colonial
Secretary; 1859-65, Foreign Secretary; 1865-66, Prime Minister.]

The Parliament of England is one of the most ancient of political
institutions. Constitutional historians find its germs in the
council of the wise men--"The Witenagemot"--which was summoned to
give advice to the early Anglo-Saxon kings. In the thirteenth
century Simon de Montfort had added to the assembly of the nobles
certain representatives of the counties, cities, and boroughs.
The monarchs found this gathering of the estates of the nation a
useful instrument of taxation and the Parliament in turn acquired
certain legislative rights. In time the nobles or peers began to
sit by themselves, leaving the chosen representatives to meet in
a House of Commons. The story of the increasing influence of
Parliament is in great part the history of the English nation.
Before the close of the seventeenth century the power of
Parliament had become the leading force in the state. Yet much
remained to be done in the nineteenth century to bring this
supreme governing body into living touch with the heart of the
nation.

The conservative habit of the English had left the constitution
of the House of Commons untouched for so many years that it had
lost all but the semblance of a representative body. No uniform
qualification for the voter existed. In one locality the
franchise was closely restricted, in others every man, however
poor, might exercise the right to vote. There were all manner of
variations in these "fancy franchises," which had been conferred
by special charters at long separated intervals. Neither was
there any existing relation between population and
representation. Strange as the statement will appear to American
readers, accustomed to the reapportionment of congressional
representation after every federal census, it is a fact that
there had been no radical change in the boundaries of election
districts in England for centuries. The population had meanwhile
undergone enormous changes. Not only had it increased manifold,
but the rise of modern industry had occasioned a redistribution
of the people. London had become a swarming hive. Liverpool docks
and warehouses were surrounded by a crowded city. Manchester,
Birmingham, Leeds, and other places scarcely known to the England
of Tudor and Stuart, were centers of busy industrial life,
attracting to themselves multitudes of the inhabitants of the
countryside. The counties, large and small, continued to have
equal representation in Parliament, though some of them were many
times more populous than others. In the boroughs the inequalities
were most flagrant. Where a goodly village had been in Tudor
times there might now be nothing visible but the crumbling tower
of the parish church, yet the place still retained its right to
representation in the House of Commons. Such decayed or "rotten"
boroughs existed in considerable numbers. Their few voters were
controlled by the land-owning nobility. McCarthy says, "The case
of Old Sarum is famous. It returned members to Parliament in the
days of Edward III., and from that period down to the time of the
Reform Bill. But the town of Old Sarum gradually disappeared.
Owing to the rise of New Sarum (Salisbury) and to other causes
the population gradually deserted it. The town became practically
effaced from existence; its remains far less palpable or visible
than those of any Baalbec or Palmyra. Yet it continued to be
represented in Parliament. It was at one time bought by Lord
Chatham's grandfather, Governor Pitt. It was coolly observed at
the time that "Mr. Pitt's posterity now have an hereditary seat
in the House of Commons as owners of Old Sarum," just as any earl
had a seat in the House of Lords by virtue of his hereditary
peerage. When the Reform Bill was passed the member of Parliament
for the borough of Ludgershall was himself the only voter in the
borough and had chosen himself to Parliament on his own
nomination. Another place with two members had only seven
qualified voters. McCarthy is quite within the truth when he
asserts that two-thirds of the House of Commons was made up of
the nominees of the peers and great landlords "who owned their
boroughs and members just as they owned their parks and their
cattle." Thus the power of the landed aristocracy, which was the
House of Lords, lacked but little of being the House of Commons
as well. The mass of the nation, which was now rapidly gaining in
education and wealth, had no way of making its influence felt in
Parliament except by the power of public opinion, to which the
periodical and pamphlet press was beginning to give expression.

The condition of the representation, the rotten boroughs, as
those in decay were called, and the pocket boroughs, a name
applied to those which were the property of individuals, opened
the way for shameless corruption. Where the electorate was small
and the secret ballot unknown bribery had free rein. Seats were
openly bought and sold. As early as 1770 the elder Pitt (Lord
Chatham) had placed his finger upon this ailing spot in the
English body politic, and had said, "Before the end of this
century, either the Parliament will reform itself from within, or
be reformed with a vengeance from without." His prediction was
falsified by the reactionary effect of the French Revolution,
which not only made the English aristocracy cautious about
readjusting political arrangements, but kept the minds and hands
of Englishmen so fully occupied with foreign affairs as to divert
attention from their own domestic troubles. At the close of the
long struggle with Napoleon the question came rapidly to the
front. Financial distress and industrial depression made the
populace restless and discontented. The glowing principles which
had inspired the French Revolution in its early days with its
watchwords of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," gained a deep
lodgment in the popular mind. The dissatisfaction vented itself
in attacks upon a political system which denied the right of
representation to so large a proportion of the wealth-producing
population.

The government at first turned a deaf ear to these appeals, then
tried to suppress the agitation which swept through the great
manufacturing towns. It was one of these bungling attempts to
silence free speech in Manchester on August 16, 1819, which led
to the trampling and sabring of many innocent persons by
cavalrymen, the "Peterloo massacre," which the populace long
cherished as a bloody score against, their aristocratic
oppressors. For ten years more the democratic press continued to
agitate even more bitterly for reform, and a lonely "radical"
member of Parliament would bring forward his motions only to have
them contemptuously thrust aside. In 1830, however, a ministry
came into power which allowed nothing to stand in the way until
the long awaited bill had become a law. The condition which
contributed to its success, the incidents of the tremendous
parliamentary struggle, and the men who carried it through, are
all worthy of the most careful attention of the student of human
affairs.

The death of George IV. (June 26, 1830) made way for his brother,
William IV., and made necessary a general parliamentary election.
The summer had seen a liberal revolution in Paris. The Bourbons
had been thrust out and Louis Philippe had been accepted as the
citizen-king of the French, governing under a liberal
constitution. This revolution, and simultaneous movements
throughout western Europe, touched an answering chord in the
breasts of Englishmen, and the Tories found themselves in a
minority when the new Parliament assembled in November. The Duke
of Wellington was Prime Minister, the last man from whom the
popular cause could expect to receive any concessions. At the
opening of the session the premier took occasion to declare his
disbelief "that the state of representation could be improved or
be rendered more satisfactory to the country at large than at the
present moment." "I am fully convinced," he said, "that the
country possesses a legislature which answers all the good
purposes of legislation, and this to a greater degree than any
legislature has answered in any other country whatever." He
flatly declared his determined opposition to any measure of
reform. Within a fortnight his government met its Waterloo and he
resigned.

Earl Gray, the Whig premier who succeeded Wellington, came into
office fully resolved to pass a Reform Bill. The responsibility
of drafting the measure was intrusted to a young Whig commoner,
Lord John Russell, a younger son of the Duke of Bedford, and a
scion of one of the great Whig houses. Lord John Russell had
entered Parliament in 1813, at the age of twenty-one, for one of
the family boroughs. He was now in his thirty-seventh year, and
his parliamentary career, if not brilliant for oratory, had at
least been marked by intelligent devotion to high ideals. In
1819, before the echoes of Peterloo had died away, he had asked
Parliament to disfranchise all boroughs of proved corruption, and
transfer their representation to more deserving constituencies. A
little later he proved to the House the corruption existing at
Gram-pound, and secured the disfranchisement of that borough and
the transfer of its voting rights to the great county of York.
This was but a small step, but it opened the way to tremendous
changes. He was determined, he said, to strip "the dead bones of
a former state of England" of their political influence and give
it to the "living energy of England of the nineteenth century,
with its steam engines and its factories, its cotton and woolen
cloths, its cutlery and its coal mines, its wealth and its
intelligence." Session after session he returned to this text
only to be as often defeated by the Tories. He was more
successful in 1828 when he carried the repeal of the Test and
Corporation Acts, relics of a bygone age when it was thought
necessary to the safety of the nation to exclude from military or
civil office all persons who did not take the communion in
accordance with the ritual of the Established Church. "Lord
John," as he came to be called in the course of his half-century
of parliamentary life, would have advanced from the relief of
Protestant dissenters to the emancipation of the Catholics, had
not the Tories, in their dread of civil war in Ireland,
forestalled him, and made the measure their own (April, 1829).

The first Reform Bill, which had been drafted by Russell, and
worked over by Lord Durham and other ministers, was presented to
the Commons on March 1, 1831. Its provisions had been kept
profoundly secret, and the house was thronged to hear them
explained in the low and measured tones of Lord John Russell. The
nation was as eager as the immediate auditory to know how far the
government would go in granting the popular demand. Touching upon
some of the existing anomalies the speaker imagined a foreigner
visiting England; having been impressed with British wealth,
civilization, and renown, "Would not such a foreigner," he
queried, "be much astonished if he were taken to a green mound
and informed that it sent two members to the British Parliament?
. . . . or if he walked into a park without the vestige of a
dwelling and was told that it, too, sent two members to the
British Parliament? But if he was surprised at this, how much
more would he be astonished if he were carried into the north of
England, where he would see large, flourishing towns, full of
trade, activity, and intelligence, vast magazines of wealth and
manufactures, and were told that these places sent no
representatives to Parliament!"

By the provisions of the bill sixty boroughs with less than two
thousand members were to lose both members, and forty-seven
boroughs were to be reduced to a single member. Of the seats thus
vacated eight were to be given to London, thirty-four to large
towns, fifty-five to English counties, five to Scotland, three to
Ireland, one to Wales. The franchise was to be extended to
inhabitants of houses taxed at ten pounds a year, and to
leaseholders and copyholders of counties. The changes added about
half a million to the number of voters in the United Kingdom.

The country followed the progress of the debate with intense
interest night after night. The bill passed to its second reading
by a majority of one in the fullest house on record and the
country gave itself up to illuminations and other expressions of
joy. But the bill got no farther. The majority was too close for
the comfort of the ministers, and having been defeated on a
matter of detail, they confidently appealed to the country. The
King dissolved Parliament, and writs were issued for a general
election. It was at this juncture, when London was illuminating
to show its satisfaction over the prospect for a reform victory,
that the darkened windows of the Duke of Wellington's town house
were stoned by the populace. The rallying cries of the Whigs were
"The bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the bill," and
"Reform, Aye or No?" Popular agitation by associations,
newspapers, speech-making, monster meetings, etc., reached an
unprecedented height, and the force of public opinion was shown
at the polls. In spite of pocket boroughs, family influence, and
flagrant corruption, the reformers came back to Parliament with
their majority increased to fully one hundred. Of the eighty-two
members for the counties where the popular feeling had its freest
expression, only six were opposed to Lord Russell's scheme of
reform.

Lord Russell's second Reform Bill was introduced on June 24th.
The minority, hopeless of success in a stand-up fight, resorted
to the obstructive tactics now known as "filibustering." After
wasting three months in tedious obstruction the Commons passed
the bill by a majority of one hundred and nine, and Lord Grey
laid it before the House of Lords in the most impressive speech
of his career. He endeavored to persuade the aristocrats before
him that only by such concessions could the Constitution of
England be saved. Already there were wide-spread evidences of
popular discontent in the "nightly alarms, burnings, and popular
disturbances." The rotten boroughs could no longer be tolerated
with safety to the state. "This gangrene upon our representative
system bade defiance to all remedies but that of excision." Deaf
to his arguments, and blind to everything but their own privilege
and immediate interest, the peers pronounced against the bill.

The rejection of the second Reform Bill by the House of Lords
brought England to the brink of revolution. As it was, the
newspapers were full of signs that the patience of the nation was
exhausted. Mobs and incendiary fires were reported in many
districts, and the abolition of the House of Lords found
strenuous advocates. It was at one of the numerous indignation
meetings that Sydney Smith hit off the attempt of the Lords to
stay the progress of reform by comparing it with Mrs.
Partington's attempt to check the high tide at Sidmouth with a
mop. "The Atlantic was roused. Mrs. Partington's spirit was up.
But I need not tell you that the contest was unequal. The
Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington. Gentlemen, be at your ease;
be quiet and steady; you will beat Mrs. Partington!"

As soon as the Parliament reassembled in December, Lord John
Russell offered the third Reform Bill. It was identical in
principle with the others, though the number of the affected
boroughs had been slightly altered. It passed its successive
stages by ample majorities and was in due order presented to the
House of Lords. The ministers were prepared to play their last
card. They found the peers determined to mutilate the proposition
in disregard of the popular demand, now louder than ever, for
"The bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the bill." Earl Grey
and his chancellor, Lord Brougham, thereupon requested King
William to overcome the opposition by sanctioning the creation of
new peers sufficient to insure a majority for the act. But the
King held back. The ministers offered their resignations, and the
King commissioned the Iron Duke to form a government. But no Tory
government could stand a day in the face of the hosts of reform
in the Commons and in the nation, as Wellington had reluctantly
to confess. The monarch had to yield, and so doing, helped
establish the principle more firmly than ever before that the
chief power in the English Constitution is lodged in the House of
Commons, acting through its ministers. In this case it was
Commons against King and Lords, and the Commons had their way. To
save themselves from an inundation of new peerages the Lords
whose hostility to the bill was irreconcilable absented
themselves from Westminster when the vote was taken--"skulked in
clubs and country houses" as Lord Russell sharply phrased it. The
Duke of Wellington's words will show the temper with which the
hide-bound Tories received the act. "Reform, my Lords, has
triumphed. The barriers of the Constitution are broken down, the
waters of destruction have burst the gates of the temple, and the
tempest begins to howl. Who can say where its course should stop?
Who can stay its speed? For my own part I sincerely hope that my
predictions may not be fulfilled, and that my country may not be
ruined."

The immediate effect of the reform was to admit the tradesmen and
tenant-farmers, the sturdy English middle class, to a share in
the government. Thirty-five years later, after Lord Russell had
made three or four futile endeavors to carry still further the
principle of reform, his opponents, the Conservatives, led by
Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli, passed the Reform Bills of 1867-68,
greatly reducing the property qualification of voters, and
rectifying inequalities in borough representation. Under this act
most of the mechanic and artisan class gained the right to vote.
Finally, in 1884, Mr. Gladstone carried the reform another stage,
conferring the franchise upon two millions of poor men, including
the class of agricultural laborers.

His contribution to the success of reform identified Lord John
Russell with the cause of liberty, and made him a leading man. It
is not within the scope of this sketch to follow him through the
shifting scenes of the honorable career in politics and
statesmanship which now opened out before him, and which
continued until, when at nearly four-score, the party leadership
passed from him to his able associate, William Ewart Gladstone.
Among the notable measures in which he had a leading hand was the
Municipal Reform Act of 1835, which put the government of cities
in the hands of the taxpayers and did away with the effete and
corrupt corporations which had exercised it. His "Edinburgh
letter," in 1845, hastened Peel's conversion to free trade. He
was ever concerned in religion and education. After the overthrow
of Peel's government, in 1846, he was raised to the premiership.
He held the position until 1852, and again, from October, 1865,
to June, 1866. His retirement in the latter year removed from
British politics a conspicuous figure. It was a figure which had
filled a large place in the affairs of the world, and for the
most part filled it well, though never again in his career was it
his lot to become such a popular hero as he was during the early
battles for reform. Russell's death, in 1878, brought up the varied
panorama of his life. McCarthy, in reviewing it, touches upon
some of its points of interest. "He had a seat in the
administration at his disposal when another young man might have
been glad of a seat in an opera box. He must have been brought
into more or less intimate association with all the men and women
worth knowing in Europe since the early part of the century. He
was a pupil of Dugald Stewart at Edinburgh, and he sat as a youth
at the feet of Fox. He had accompanied Wellington in some of his
peninsular campaigns; he measured swords with Canning and Peel
successively through years of parliamentary warfare. He knew
Metternich and Talleyrand. He had met the widow of Charles
Stuart, the young chevalier, in Florence; and had conversed with
Napoleon in Elba. He knew Cavour and Bismarck. He was now an ally
of Daniel O'Connell, and now of Cobden and Bright. He was the
close friend of Thomas Moore; he knew Byron. Lord John Russell
had tastes for literature, for art, for philosophy, for history,
for politics, and his aestheticism had the advantage that it made
him seek the society and appreciate the worth of men of genius
and letters. Thus he never remained a mere politician like Pitt
or Palmerston."

No one will now claim that Earl Russell--he was raised to the
peerage with this title--is to be ranked with the few greatest of
English statesmen, but that he served his country devotedly,
honorably, and courageously will not be denied. His contemporary,
Lord Shaftesbury, noted his death in his own journal with this
just comment: "To have begun with disapprobation, to have fought
through many difficulties, to have announced and acted on
principles new to the day in which he lived, to have filled many
important offices, to have made many speeches and written many
books, and in his whole course to have done much with credit and
nothing with dishonor, and so to have sustained and advanced his
reputation to the very end, is a mighty commendation." And the
Queen, in a letter to his widow, wrote: "You will believe that I
truly regret an old friend of forty years' standing, and whose
personal kindness in trying and anxious times I shall ever
remember. 'Lord John,' as I knew him best, was one of my first
and most distinguished ministers, and his departure recalls many
eventful times."



QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1.  In what ways did Parliament fail to be "representative"
at the opening of the nineteenth century?
2.  What circumstances favored agitation of this condition?
3.  What was the "Peterloo Massacre"?
4.  Who was Lord Russell, and what his early relation to the
reform movement?
5.  What was the Test and Corporation Act, and when repealed?
6.  Describe the first Reform Bill, and its effect upon the
House of Commons?
7.  How was the second bill treated by the Commons and by the
Lords?
8.  What circumstances attended the passage of the third bill?
9.  How was the principle of reform extended in later years?
10. What peculiar privileges did Lord John Russell enjoy?
11. How is his character shown in the use which he made of them?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIFE OF EARL RUSSELL.          S. J. Reid.
RECOLLECTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS. Lord John Russell.
THE EPOCH OF REFORM.           Justin McCarthy.
HISTORY OF THE REFORM BILL.    W. N. Molesworth.





VI

COBDEN AND FREE TRADE

[RICHARD COBDEN, born, 1804, at Dunford, near Midhurst, Sussex;
died, London, 1865; after grammar school education, entered
mercantile house in London, soon becoming a traveling salesman;
about 1830 became founder of a cotton-printing concern at
Manchester; traveled in Europe and America; wrote pamphlets on
commercial and economic questions; 1838, became an ardent
supporter of the Anti-Corn Law League; 1841, Member of Parliament
for Stockport; advocate of free trade in the House of Commons;
received popular testimonial of £79,000 in recognition of his
services to the free trade cause; 1847-57, Member of Parliament
for West Riding of York; advocate of arbitration and diminished
expense for military purposes; 1849, Member of Parliament for
Rochdale; 1860, negotiated commercial treaty with France.]

The Reform Bill of 1832 invaded the privileges of the landed
aristocracy by destroying in some measure their control of the
House of Commons through the pocket boroughs. Sixteen years
later a second blow was struck at this class through the repeal
of the Corn Laws.

The Corn Laws aimed to secure to English agriculturists a
monopoly of the home market for grain. The wars with Napoleon,
which paralyzed continental industries, stimulated those of
England to abnormal prosperity. Food advanced in price, but labor
was in great demand and well paid. The prospect of approaching
peace in Europe, in 1813, precipitated hard times in Great
Britain. The price of wheat fell and manufactures declined. The
land-owning classes, then supreme in Parliament, enacted the Corn
Law of 1815 for their own protection. By its provisions the
importation of grain from foreign countries was practically
prohibited until the price in England reached eighty shillings
per quarter. Ten members of the House of Lords protested against
the measure on the grounds that all restraint of trade was
improper; that the restraint of trade in food was especially
iniquitous; that the law would not steady or cheapen prices; and
that "such a measure levied a tax on the consumer in order to
give a bounty to the grower of corn,"--principles which have a
modern sound.

England was at that time living under a system of high protective
tariffs upon imported articles of manufacture as well as of food.
But in 1823-25 Mr. Huskisson succeeded in having most of the
tariffs upon raw materials reduced to a fraction of the former
figures, with the result that production was enormously
stimulated and valuable foreign markets were opened to English
commodities. His only modification of the Corn Law (in 1822) was
to reduce by ten shillings the figure at which importations might
begin. Later he and Canning made some progress with a "sliding
scale" bill, a principle which the Duke of Wellington enacted
into law in 1828. This interesting device provided that when the
price in the home market reached sixty-four shillings the quarter
the duty should be 23s 8d. As the price rose the duty fell. When
wheat was 69s, the duty was 16s 8d, and when the price reached
73s, foreign corn might come in on payment of one shilling per
quarter.

As has been shown in a foregoing chapter, the past half-century
had witnessed a great transformation in the industrial complexion
of England--from a nation chiefly agricultural it had become the
center of the world's manufactures. Tens of thousands of families
had removed from the farms to the cities, "following the work" in
the mills and factories, and hundreds of thousands of pounds had
been invested in a great diversity of industrial enterprises. The
manufacturer and the mill-hand were alike interested in low
prices for food. The manufacturer also saw in the high tariff on
grain a barrier against the free exchange of commodities. As his
output increased it became necessary for him to enlarge his
market, but when he attempted to sell his goods to America and
Russia the law interposed to block the bargain by excluding those
grain-producing countries from selling their superfluous food-
stocks in England. Apparently here was a clash between the
interests of manufacturer and agriculturist.

In 1836 a few thoughtful men in London, who were opposed to any
restraint of trade, formed an Anti-Corn Law Association. But the
metropolis was stony soil for such a plant. In 1838 a similar
association was organized in Manchester, one of the new
industrial cities dominated by modern ideas, crowded with
factories, and populous with laboring men and women, a fit center
for such an agitation as was to precede the downfall of the tax
on food. In Manchester, too, in the person of a calico-printer
named Richard Cobden, the agitation found its mainspring and its
clear and persuasive voice.

Richard Cobden sprang from a long line of plain Sussex yeomen.
His father was a farmer who became bankrupt in 1813, and the lad
Richard, one of twelve children, was sent by a well-meaning
relative to a Yorkshire boarding-school--a sort of Dotheboys
Hall. From such a rough school he passed into the rougher one of
life, becoming the lad of all work in the London warehouse of the
same kinsman, later a clerk, and at twenty-one a traveling
salesman, or "drummer," a position for which his untiring energy
and engaging sociability were high qualifications. A great
reader, he was also a superior converser and a "mixer" as the
present-day phrase goes, adapting himself to his company with
unusual facility. John Morley records that all his friends agree
that "they have never known a man in whom this trait of a sound
and rational desire to know and to learn was so strong and so
inexhaustible." "To know the affairs of the world was the master-
passion of his life," and the knowledge which he gained and
assimilated not merely in his early contact with men in his
business, but in the wider journeys of observation to which he
treated himself in later years, contributed much to the
enrichment of his speeches and writings.

At the age of twenty-four, with two other young men, whose
capital like his own was little more than energy, probity, and
business knowledge, he founded a firm in London for the sale of
Manchester cotton prints on commission. Soon the firm was
printing its own goods in Lancashire, and Mr. Cobden, prospering
greatly from the first, took up his residence in Manchester, to
watch over that end of the business. Though as full of affairs as
any man in that hive of industry, Cobden found time to store his
mind by reading and by reflection upon the knowledge gained by
intercourse with his fellowmen. He visited France, Switzerland,
and in 1835, America, where he foresaw a growing market for his
wares, and where, as he wrote, he fondly hoped "would be realized
some of those dreams of human exaltation if not of perfection"
with which he loved to console himself. In 1836-37 he visited the
Mediterranean countries, and on his return was an unsuccessful
candidate for a seat in the House of Commons.

In May, 1838, Richard Cobden wrote to his brother concerning the
political outlook in the nation, the Chartist agitation, the
Radical demands, and the general disorganization which existed
among the opponents of Tory government. The letter includes these
significant words: "I think the scattered elements may yet be
rallied round the question of the Corn Laws. It appears to me
that a moral, and even a religious, spirit may be infused into
that topic, and if agitated in the same manner that the question
of slavery has been, it will be irresistible."

The purposes of the Manchester Anti-Corn Law Association are thus
stated by Morley: "To obtain by all legal and constitutional
means, such as the formation of local associations, the delivery
of lectures, the distribution of tracts, and the presentation of
petitions to Parliament, the total and immediate repeal of the
Corn and Provision Laws." Mr. Cobden became a member of the
executive committee, and his mind, voice, and pen were active in
the service of the society until its object was attained. In
response to his appeal for a campaign fund ("Let us invest part
of our property in order to save the rest from confiscation") six
thousand pounds poured into the treasury within a month. The
local societies, which sprang up like wildfire in the
manufacturing towns, were affiliated with that at Manchester,
which soon became the headquarters of a far-reaching league.

The leaguers carried political agitation to a point of
thoroughness beyond anything which had yet been reached by
O'Connell or the abolitionists. They issued a newspaper organ
which enunciated its principles and denounced the enemies of free
trade. Vast editions of tracts and leaflets were scattered
broadcast throughout the land, and a staff of carefully
instructed speakers was maintained to itinerate through the rural
districts and preach the gospel of free corn in tavern, market-
place, and town hall.

In Parliament the battle must be won, and the league soon began
its work of capturing seats in the House of Commons. Cobden
himself was chosen, in 1841, as member for Stockport. Almost
immediately he exercised his gift as a speaker, securing at once
the attention of his colleagues by his style of oratory, which,
with little formal eloquence or rhetorical elaboration, was
powerfully persuasive, enriched by many happy illustrations drawn
from life, and infused with a pure and lofty spirit. Whatever the
topic under discussion, he was always able to show its relation
to the obnoxious tariff, and to point out that the only sure
remedy for the prevalent national ills was by way of the repeal
of "the tax on bread." At first the young calico-printer--he was
but thirty-seven--who embodied the opposition to the Corn Laws,
was looked upon as an intruder by the young aristocrats of the
House. They made fun of his classical allusions, and magnified
his lack of education, attempting to laugh down his logic. But
Cobden was not long in proving his ability to take care of
himself on the floor of the House. It was no mere politician who
caught the ear of the country with words like these: "When I go
down to the manufacturing districts, I know that I shall be
returning to a gloomy scene. I know that starvation is stalking
through the land, and that men are perishing for the want of the
merest necessaries of life. When I witness this, and recollect
that there is a law which especially provides for keeping our
population in absolute want, I cannot help attributing murder to
the legislature of this country; and wherever I stand, whether
here or out-of-doors, I will denounce that system of legislative
murder."

Out-of-doors Mr. Cobden had the strong support of the most
eloquent Englishman of his generation, John Bright. The two men
had been drawn together early by a common interest in the welfare
of the manufacturing classes, and especially in popular
education. In September, 1841, Cobden visited his friend in his
house, and found him plunged in sadness by the death of his young
wife. After words of condolence, he said, with great earnestness,
"John, there are thousands of houses in England at this moment
where wives, mothers, and children are dying of hunger. Now when
the first paroxysm of your grief is passed, I would advise you to
come with me and we will never rest until the Corn Law is
repealed."

"For seven years," Mr. Bright afterward said, "the discussion on
that one question--whether it was good for a man to have half a
loaf or a whole loaf--for seven years the discussion was
maintained, I will not say with doubtful result, for the result
was never doubtful and never could be in such a cause; but for
five years or more (1841-46), we devoted ourselves without stint;
every working hour almost was given up to the discussion and to
the movement in connection with this question."

Mr. Morley's description of the two orators and their mission is
memorable: "The public imagination was struck by the figures of
the pair who had given themselves up to a great public cause. The
picture of two plain men leaving their homes and their business
and going over the length and breadth of the land to convert the
nation, had about it something apostolic; it presented something
so far removed from the stereotyped ways of political activity,
that this circumstance alone, apart from the object for which
they were pleading, touched and affected people, and gave a
certain dramatic interest to the long pilgrimages of the two men
who had only become orators because they had something to say
which they were intent on bringing their hearers to believe, and
which happened to be true, wise, and just.....In Cobden, as in
Bright, we feel that there was nothing personal or small, and
that what they cared for so vehemently were great causes. ....
Mr. Bright had all the resources of passion alive within his
breast. He was carried along by vehement political anger, and
deeper than that there glowed a wrath as stern as that of an
ancient prophet. To cling to a mischievous error seemed to him to
savor of moral depravity and corruption of heart. What he saw was
the selfishness of the aristocracy and the landlords and he was
too deeply moved by the hatred of this to care to deal very
patiently with the bad reasoning which their own self-interest
inclined his adversaries to mistake for good. His invective was
not the expression of mere irritation, but a profound and
menacing passion. Hence he dominated his audiences from a height,
while his companion rather drew them along after him as friends
and equals. Cobden was by no means incapable of passion, of
violent feeling, or of vehement expression. His fighting
qualities were in their own way as formidable as Mr.
Bright's..... Still it was not passion to which we must look for
the secret of his oratorical success. In one word, it was
persuasiveness. Cobden made his way to men's hearts by the union
which they saw in him of simplicity, earnestness, and conviction,
with a singular facility of exposition. This facility consisted
in a remarkable power of apt and homely illustration, and a
curious ingenuity in framing the argument that happened to be
wanted.....In such an appeal to popular sentiment and popular
passion as the contemporary agitation of O'Connell for repeal, he
could have played no leading part. Where knowledge and logic were
the proper instruments, Cobden was a master." Nor did his
efficiency cease when the audience dispersed. In council chamber
and work-room his alert and inventive mind and persuasive
conversational eloquence had free scope. His hopeful enthusiasm,
his clever devices for stimulating the jaded interest of the
masses, and his unfailing good humor made him the chief engineer
of the highly complex machinery of the league.

His enthusiasm led to the formation of associations in all the
centers of industry; it redoubled the efforts and efficiency of
the lecturers who carried the doctrines of the league into the
agricultural counties--the enemy's country; it replenished the
treasury of the league with thousands of pounds by subscriptions
and by grand bazaars, one of which netted ten thousand pounds; it
gave life and variety to the newspaper organ of the agitation;
and in Parliament it met the government by a constant fire of
questions, a bombardment of solid fact, and a harassing
recurrence to the necessity of total and immediate repeal as the
only salve for the economic sores of the kingdom.

His parliamentary opponents attacked him fiercely. They accused
him of hypocrisy in carrying on an agitation professedly for the
general good, but really intended to help the cotton
manufacturers at the expense of the landowners and
agriculturists. They laid at Cobden's door the miseries of the
mill-hands of Manchester, crying "Physician, heal thyself." So
strongly intrenched was "monopoly" in the House of Commons that
it was slow work for the Anti-Corn Law League with its weapons of
peaceful agitation to drive it out. Year after year the orators
traveled through the three kingdoms, addressing thousands, tracts
were distributed by the ton, and enormous sums of money were
subscribed (the amount for 1844 being nearly a hundred thousand
pounds). In order that the popular opinion thus carefully
cultivated might be brought effectively to bear at the next
parliamentary election, the league took care that every qualified
free trader was registered on the polling lists. At Cobden's
suggestion large numbers of workingmen qualified by becoming
freeholders.

The eloquence of Bright, the cogent reasoning of Cobden, and the
long campaign of education were steadily doing their work. The
number of professed free traders in Parliament was still small,
but the thoughtful leaders of the great parties, the men who
studied the sentiment of the country, and watched the signs of
the times, and weighed well the masses of evidence which the
league continually brought forward-these men were being converted
to the Manchester idea. What Cobden said in a popular assembly in
the summer of 1845 was truer than even he may have believed.
"What," he asked, "if you could get at the minds of the people
would you find them thinking as to the repeal of the Corn Laws? I
know it as well as if I were in their hearts. It is this: they
are all afraid that this Corn Law cannot be maintained--no, not a
rag of it--during a period of scarcity prices, of a famine
season, such as we had in '39, '40, and '41. They know it. They
are prepared when such a time comes to abolish the Corn
Laws.....They are going to repeal it--mark my words--at a season
of distress. That distress may come; aye, three weeks of showery
weather, when the wheat is in bloom or ripening, would repeal
these Corn Laws." He had already shown the precarious condition
of the Irish people, whose only food was the potato, and whom the
high price of grain kept on the edge of famine. The autumnal
rains of 1845 precipitated the crisis, and fulfilled Cobden's
prediction. The failure of the potato harvest plunged Ireland
into dire distress for food. The league in crowded meetings
denounced the tax on bread while men starved. The government of
Sir Robert Peel hesitated as to the proper course. To suspend the
food tariff might prove a concession to free trade which could
never be regained. While Peel's cabinet hung back Lord John
Russell, the leader of the Whigs, issued (November 22) his famous
Edinburgh letter to his constituents, declaring that the time had
come for the repeal of the baneful legislation. Peel was of the
same mind, but some of his Tory colleagues resisted. None were
more stubborn than Wellington, whose action at this juncture led
Cobden to say, "Let me remind him that, notwithstanding all his
victories in the field, he never yet entered into a contest with
Englishmen in which he was not beaten." The effort of the Whigs
to form a ministry having failed, Peel resumed the premiership
which he had resigned. Parliament assembled on January 26, 1846,
and the Prime Minister's speech foreshadowed his conversion to
the policy of Cobden. The next day he explained his program. The
Corn Laws were to be totally repealed by gradual reductions of
the duty extending over a period of three years. Despite the
mockery of Disraeli and the protectionists the bill passed the
Commons by a great majority, and bowing to superior power, the
Duke of Wellington helped it to pass the House. On June 26th
Cobden carried the news to his wife: "Hurrah! Hurrah! The corn
bill is law, and now my work is done!"

Cobden's utter consecration of himself for eight years to the
Anti-Corn Law agitation had cost him severely. The constant
travel, exposure, and hardship of speaking in the open air had
seriously impaired his health. His business had been neglected
until he had been only saved from bankruptcy by the generosity of
friends. The league into which he had poured his best thought and
effort honored him by a popular subscription amounting to nearly
eighty thousand pounds as a testimonial to his public-spirited
devotion. He might have entered the government, but preferred
otherwise. During the twenty years of life which remained to him
he was the advocate of numerous reforms. Ever a lover of peace,
he was a strong champion of the principle of international
arbitration, and of the reduction of armaments. The most
conspicuous achievement of his later years was his successful
negotiation of more liberal commercial treaties between France
and England, a service for which he received the thanks of both
governments. During the American Civil War his sympathies were
strongly enlisted for the North against the cause of the slave-
holders, and his speeches helped to restrain the hostile feeling
of the aristocracy. Though sometimes exposing himself to ridicule
and obloquy by running counter to the popular current, Mr.
Cobden's honesty and sincerity were such that his opponents must
admit his purity of motive and nobility of soul. His death, in
1865, was recognized as a national loss.

No eulogium pronounced over his grave by Bright, the companion of
his labors and triumphs, or by Disraeli and Gladstone, great
converts to his economic doctrines, is so memorable as the brief
passage in which Sir Robert Peel, in the last hours of his
premiership, gave to the free-trade agitator the credit for the
great reform: "In reference to our proposing these measures," he
said, "I have no wish to rob any person of the credit which is
justly due to him for them. But I may say that neither the
gentlemen sitting on the benches opposite, nor myself, nor the
gentlemen sitting round me--are the parties who are strictly
entitled to the merit.....Sir, the name which ought to be, and
which will be, associated with the success of these measures is
the name of a man who, acting, I believe from pure and
disinterested motives, has advocated their cause with untiring
energy, and by appeals to reason, expressed by an eloquence the
more to be admired because it was unaffected and unadorned, the
name which ought to be, and will be, associated with the success
of these measures is the name of Richard Cobden. Without scruple,
sir, I attribute the success of these measures to him."

The commercial policy which England inaugurated, in 1846, under
the lead of Richard Cobden, continued in force throughout the
century. Under its workings the commercial supremacy of England
in the markets of the world has been achieved.



QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1.  What conditions brought about the Corn Laws?
2.  What was the object of the "sliding scale"?
3.  How did the Corn Laws work against both mill-hand and
manufacturer?
4.  Give an account of the early life of Richard Cobden.
5.  Describe the organization of the Anti-Corn Law Association.
6.  What impression did Cobden make in the House of Commons?
7.  How was John Bright enlisted in the agitation?
8.  Compare the oratorical qualities of the two men.
9.  In what varied ways did Cobden's enthusiasm make itself felt?
10. What events fulfilled Cobden's prediction and brought about
the repeal of the Corn Laws?
11. What were the chief events of the last twenty years of Cobden's
life?
12. What tribute did Sir Robert Peel pay to him?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIFE OF RICHARD COBDEN.       John Morley.
HISTORY OF THE ANTI-CORN LAW LEAGUE. Prentice.
CORN LAW RHYMES.           Ebenezer Elliott.





VII

PEEL AND ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS

[ROBERT PEEL, born February 5, 1788, near Bury, Lancashire; died,
London, July 2, 1850; educated at Harrow and Christ Church,
Oxford, B.A., 1808 (double first); Member of Parliament, 1809;
1811, Under-Secretary for the Colonies; 1812-18, Secretary for
Ireland; 1817, Member of Parliament for Oxford University; 1819,
advocated return to specie payment; 1820, married Julia, daughter
of General Sir John Floyd; 1822-27, Home Secretary, Leader of
House of Commons; 1826, proposed reform of Criminal Law; 1828,
Home Secretary and Leader of the House; 1829, proposed Catholic
emancipation; 1834-35, Prime Minister; 1841-46, Prime Minister;
1842, carried Income Tax; 1846, repealed the Corn Laws; 1846-50,
without office.]

When the Reform Bill of 1832 was passed, the Duke of Wellington
bluntly declared his conviction that the result would be the
speedy overthrow of the British Constitution. More sagacious
observers than the great field-marshal were of the opinion that a
radical change must ensue, and that the Tory party, long the prop
of Church and Throne, having lost control of legislation in the
House of Commons through the abolition of the close and rotten
boroughs, could never regain the seat of power by electing a
majority of members. That these forebodings and prophecies did
not come true was largely due to the consummate political skill
of Sir Robert Peel.

In reviewing a life so rich in public activity as Peel's it is
impossible to point to any one important question as his
particular contribution to the history of his time. There was
scarcely a single great parliamentary battle in which he did not
bear a hand on one side or the other. Indeed, hostile criticism
has censured him for having in not a few instances carried to
ultimate success the very measures of which, when first proposed,
he had been the stoutest enemy. This is true of the Resumption of
Specie Payments, the Catholic Emancipation Acts, and most notably
of all the repeal of the Corn Laws. The characteristics which
resulted so strangely may be accounted for in part at least by
some knowledge of the early life of the great parliamentary
leader.

The Peels were weavers and printers of calicoes. The father of
the Prime Minister was one of the wealthiest manufacturers in his
generation, a thorough-going Tory, and an ardent admirer of Mr.
Pitt. He was sent to Parliament in 1790, and his support of the
government by his vote there, and by his contribution of fifty
thousand pounds to the war fund, won for him, in 1800, a
baronetcy. There had been Robert Peels before his day, but now
for the first time there was a Sir Robert.

Sir Robert's most loving care was lavished upon the training of
his eldest son and namesake, who from the day of his birth,
February 5, 1788, the patriotic father had prayerfully
consecrated to the service of his country. Many stories are told
of the pains which the great calico-printer bestowed on the lad's
training for a public career. We see the little lad standing on a
table to declaim or recite to his parental mentor, and read of
the rigor of cross-examination to which this lad of twelve was
subjected after hearing a sermon or public address. A current
anecdote represents the doting father as saying, " Bob, you dog,
if you're not prime minister, I'll disinherit you." At Harrow, as
a schoolboy he reflected credit upon his father's training, and
at Christ Church, Oxford, he achieved the unusual honor of a
double first class (classics and mathematics). When he left the
university at the age of twenty-one his father provided him with
a seat in Parliament, and so, with every favoring circumstance of
youth, health, education, friends, and wealth, he began his
eventful career in the House of Commons which was to be the scene
of his best labors until the day of his death.

Old Sir Robert and his son sat on the same side of the House, but
the alert and active mind of the young man could not accept
untested his father's political creed of hide-bound Toryism. The
first question upon which the son and father parted company was
on the subject of the resumption of specie payments, which had
been discontinued in 1797 under the financial stress of the war
with France. In 1811 the two Peels voted together against a
resolution looking toward resumption, but the younger man's mind
was fascinated with the economic aspects of the problem, and half
a dozen years later, when the subject again pressed for
settlement, he brought forward the act which placed England on a
gold basis. The father openly bewailed the son's misguided
course, but Peel's act became the law (1819).

Before he was thirty, the younger Robert Peel had gained a
valuable experience in administrative work by a term of six years
(1812-1818) as Chief Secretary for Ireland. Here, as in the
preparation of his studies at Oxford and of his speeches for the
House of Commons, he was painstaking, methodical, thorough, and
energetic. In fact he applied to the public business the same
sterling qualities which had made his father and grandfather
successful merchants and manufacturers. His most notable reform
in Ireland, which was then in a sad condition of disorder, was
the replacement of military rule by a well-organized civil force
of police, acting under the orders of the magistrates. He favored
a more liberal scheme of popular education for the unhappy
island, but his Tory prejudices stood in the way of relieving the
Catholics of their disabilities. Because of his avowed opposition
to this demand, and his bitter hostility to O'Connell, the
champion of the cause, Mr. Peel--"Orange" Peel, as the Catholic
Irish nicknamed him--had the satisfaction of being returned to
Parliament in 1817 for the University of Oxford, perhaps the most
ultra-Tory constituency in the three kingdoms.

In January, 1822, Peel entered the cabinet of Lord Liverpool as
Home Secretary. From the first he showed that his mind was not
impenetrable to the legal reforms which earnest men had long been
advocating, but to which the Tories had turned a deaf ear. The
reform of the criminal law, which still carried the harsh
statutes of an unquiet age, had been ably championed by Romilly,
Mackintosh, and others, but it was Peel's way first to oppose,
then to admit the principle of the reform, and finally to enact
it into enduring law. On his initiative, in 1823, "nearly one
hundred felonies were removed from the list of capital crimes,
and judges were empowered to withhold the death penalty in all
cases except murder, when the culprit appeared deserving of
mercy." Other acts originating with him consolidated and unified
the vast and complex body of criminal statutes so as to simplify
procedure, and facilitate the ends of justice. Some conception of
his services in this particular may be gained from the fact that
"he secured the repeal of two hundred and seventy-eight acts
relating to the criminal law, embodying their useful provisions
in eight acts."

On Catholic emancipation Peel's process of conversion was slower.
He steadily fought the proposals for relief in the House of
Commons as long as Lord Liverpool lived, and when Canning
succeeded to the premiership (1827), he resigned rather than
serve under a pro-Catholic chief. When the Tories came back to
power under Wellington, in 1828, Peel resumed the Home
Secretaryship, with the leadership of the House of Commons, a
position for which he possessed incomparable qualifications. His
second administration of the home department was distinguished by
a series of radical improvements in the criminal laws. One law
for the punishment of offenses against the person took the place
of fifty-seven existing acts. In 1829 he replaced the ridiculous
London watch with the police force which has served as a model
for many other large cities. Many who speak familiarly of the
blue-coated guardians of the peace as "Bobbies" and "Peelers"
would be surprised to know that these sobriquets constitute a
popular tribute to the name of Robert Peel, the creator of the
model force.

These legal and administrative reforms, beneficent as they were,
were not great party questions like the two others which the
Wellington government had to face, and gained so little credit in
the facing. The Whigs, under John Russell, urged the demand for
the relief of Protestant dissenters from their political
disabilities by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Peel
argued against the change, but it was carried, nevertheless, and
the Tories accepted the measure with the best grace they could
summon. Their resistance to Catholic emancipation cost them more
dearly. O'Connell, master of all the arts of agitation, fanned
the excitement in Ireland into flame. His Catholic Association
made itself heard, and felt, and feared. In June, 1828, a member
of the government standing for election for County Clare was
soundly defeated by O'Connell himself, a man whom the anti-
Catholic laws disqualified from sitting in Parliament. The
government knew not which way to turn, and O'Connell, perceiving
his advantage, lashed his followers to the verge of an
insurrection. This was the question on which George III. had
broken with William Pitt a generation before, and now it was only
by the most vehement arguments, and even by threats of
resignation, that the ministers could obtain his son's consent to
the inevitable. In a speech of four hours' duration Peel
explained the measures to the House of Commons, confessing that
the necessity under which he acted "was the severest blow it had
ever been his lot to experience." The speech was an admission of
defeat, and an elaboration of the measures by which the
government, in the hour of concession, proposed to limit the
"dangerous power of the Roman Catholics." The bill became a law,
and the Irish Catholic members began to sit in Parliament--with
some of the disturbing consequences which no one foresaw better
than Peel himself.

The Wellington ministry barely survived the strain of carrying
Catholic emancipation. The year 1830 found Sir Robert Peel--the
elder baronet having died--the leader of the opposition. In this
character he led his party against the Reform Bills of 1831-32.
Their weak points were mercilessly laid bare, and the excellences
and past glories of the existing system were effectively
displayed. But nothing at that day could stop the progress of
reform, as the King and peers soon learned.

The defeat of the Tories in the first general election under the
Reform Act was overwhelming. They mustered less than one-fourth
of the House of Commons. It seemed to most cool political
observers that the Whigs who now assumed office could not be
displaced for a decade at least. The spirit of change was alive
in all the nations of western Europe, and in England there seemed
to be small need of a political party whose steady resistance to
innovation was relieved only by the exceptions in which the party
had espoused reform in extremity to save its own existence.
Wellington and the rigid Tories of his stripe saw no hope for
their party, and little enough for England in the way along which
she was plunging. Peel, however, was supremely suited to the
times. Bound to the party of Church and Crown by the traditions
of his father, he nevertheless was endowed with a mind which was
not quite dominated by prejudice. The study of facts, the
examination of conflicting claims, the weighing of argument, had
their full effect upon him, and he had the courage of his
convictions. At this juncture, when so much was shifting which
had anchored England to the past, Sir Robert Peel, with his
clear-eyed vision, his trained judgment, his honesty, and his
moderation, formed a rallying point for those Tories who had no
other leader, and attracted to him moderate and enlightened men
of whatever party who feared the unbalanced radicalism of the
day, and who were bent on preserving or conserving the best
elements which remained of the ancient Constitution of England.
From such accretions grew up a party which gradually dropped the
name of Tory and adopted that of Conservative. One of Peel's
biographers, writing of this period as Peel's opportunity, says:
"Since Conservatism, like Liberalism, is an imperishable instinct
in human nature, every society must contain a Conservative party,
and such a party speedily develops, even amid the wildest storm
of revolution. The Reform Act of 1832 had made room for a
Conservative party suited to the age. The Tories had been weak
because their strength was confined to the landed interest.
Possessed by a panic-dread of change, bred by the events of the
French Revolution, they had refused to admit any new interests to
a share of power. In their despite the Reform Act had transferred
the control of politics from the aristocracy to the middle class.
But the English middle class was naturally Conservative. It was
orderly, it was rich, it was sensitive to social influence, it
was devout and serious in a stiff, unbending way. Some reforms
certainly it required; an effective administration for the great
towns where it lived and traded; the amendment of a poor law
which shocked all its economic maxims; the abolition of negro
slavery which revolted its religion; the abolition of laws which,
pressing hardly upon non-conformists, revolted its sense of
justice. It had not yet declared for free trade, although it
might be expected to do so. The ameliorations which the middle
class at this time desired, Peel was ready to approve, and these
ameliorations once granted, the middle class would tend to be
Conservative. But theirs would not be the conservatism of squires
and rectors. They would incline to a conservatism of their own,
and they would want a leader of their own to formulate it and to
organize them. They would want a statesman who was bone of their
bone, and flesh of their flesh; a good man of business, cautious,
but open to practical suggestions, one who would satisfy their
ideal of industry and economy; one who would always be grave and
decorous, never puzzle them with epigrams or alarm them with
rhetoric; in short, such a great man as they could conceive. Such
Sir Robert Peel was. There never breathed a politician more truly
congenial to them. He represented their virtues and their
failings; he shared their talents and their prejudices; he was
always growing in their confidence; and when he died lamented by
all his fellow-citizens, he was most deeply lamented by them."

With such tact and such mastery of the political situation did
Peel conduct himself in the years of opposition--now mildly
criticising the government's policy, now joining forces with it,
and now tearing its policies to pieces--that he constantly grew
in the national esteem, and began to be looked upon as the
inevitable successor of the Whigs. His turn came sooner than any
one expected, in December, 1834. It was too soon, in fact, for
the first Peel ministry could maintain itself but a few months,
failing to secure a majority of Parliament. Yet in this brief
lease of power Peel gave evidence of his fitness to govern. He
undertook the reform of the ecclesiastical courts, gratified the
Dissenters by proposing to remove the regulations which required
all marriages to be celebrated according to the rites of the
Established Church. He even addressed himself to the delicate
question of settling the temporalities of the Established Church
in Ireland, where the collection of church tithes was accompanied
with much disorder and distress, arising from the fact that the
vast majority of the tithe-payers were hostile to the Protestant
bishops and clergy whom they were taxed to support. The
opposition, led by John Russell, took advantage of the prejudices
surrounding this subject and forced a succession of adverse
votes, in consequence of which the Peel ministry abandoned office
in April, 1835, after one hundred days of power--a period
sometimes considered the most brilliant in Peel's whole career.

For six years Sir Robert Peel remained in opposition, conducting
himself so sagaciously as to gather about him all disaffected
elements of the disintegrating majority. Peel saw to it that
whatever popular measures of reform were carried by the Melbourne
ministry should be credited largely to Conservative support.
Wellington still survived as a great national figure, but his
political influence was gone, and there was no one in the Whig or
Liberal camp who could dispute Peel's position as the leading
public man of England. Of his course at this time he said himself
(1838): "My object is that by steadily attending to our duty, by
censuring the government on all occasions when they deserve it,
enforcing our principles by aiding them to carry those measures
which we think right, even though by so doing we may be rescuing
the government, we may establish new claims upon the approbation
of the country."

The majority of the House of Commons was made up of incongruous
elements, whose interests were at variance on many questions.
Peel actually came to the rescue of the ministers not once, but
so many times as to give bitterness to the taunt hurled at them
by a Radical orator: "Why! the right honorable member for
Tamworth (Peel) governs England. The honorable and learned member
for Dublin (O'Connell) governs England. The Whigs govern nothing
but Downing Street. The right honorable member for Tamworth is
contented with power without place or patronage, and the Whigs
are contented with place and patronage without power!"

Hard times came on and the nation faced an annual deficit.
Distress was widespread among the people, nourishing the Chartist
agitation on the one hand, and giving point to the arguments of
the Anti-Corn Law orators on the other. There was pressing need
for a wise and energetic Prime Minister, and hope of such
qualities in Lord Melbourne had long since failed. The general
elections of 1841 showed a clear majority for the Conservatives,
and in August Sir Robert Peel came back to power, backed by a
consolidated party and trusted by the nation.

The most pressing problems were financial. Peel proposed a
modification of the Corn Law duties, at the same time defending
the system of protection, not in the interests of the
agriculturist class, but to make England independent of foreign
countries for its food supplies. His proposals were enacted into
law. His first budget attempted to turn the customary deficit
into a surplus by means of an income tax of seven pence in the
pound on incomes of one hundred and fifty pounds and upward. His
revision of the tariff on imports introduced important changes
looking toward increased freedom of trade, especially in the raw
materials of manufacture. The times improved; revenue exceeded
expenditure; consols were quoted at only a fraction below par,
and two hundred and fifty million pounds of the national debt was
converted from three and one-half per cent into a loan paying
three and one-fourth per cent for ten years and three per cent
thereafter. By another far-reaching measure--the Bank Charter
Act--Peel placed salutary restrictions upon the issue of paper
money, and increased his reputation as a master of financial
legislation.

From year to year, as the surplus revenue increased, the
government employed it to cut down the duties upon imports. From
wool, cotton, and glass, and many minor items they were entirely
removed, and there were reductions throughout the schedules. The
grants in aid of education were trebled in the face of bitter
protest from his own party. Education in Ireland was aided by
grants to the Catholic College at Maynooth and by the
establishment of other "Queen's colleges" in affiliation with the
university at Dublin.

In one way and another Ireland played a great part in the history
of this administration. In 1843 the agitation of O'Connell, for
the repeal of the union of Ireland with England, culminated in
immense and angry meetings which threatened the public peace. The
government then took the matter in hand, "proclaimed" the
gatherings and arrested O'Connell. It was the failure of the
potato crop of 1845, and the consequent Irish famine which forced
Peel to abandon the last stronghold of protection and recommend
the total and absolute repeal forever of all duties on all
articles of subsistence. The history of the repeal of the Corn
Laws, in 1846, has already been given. On the day on which the
bill passed to its third reading in the House of Lords, all the
enemies of the government, led by Tory protectionists who
considered themselves betrayed by their own Prime Minister
combined to overthrow him. On a bill for the protection of life
in Ireland Peel was defeated by seventy-three votes. Four 

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