Essays on political and social science : contributed chiefly to the Edinburgh Review

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ESSAYS

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL
SCIENCE,

CONTRIBUTED CHIEFLY TO

THE EDINBURGH EEVIEW,

BY WILLIAM R. GREG.

IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.

LONDON:

LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS.

1853.

LONDON :

SPOTTISWOODES and SHAW,
New-street-Square.

CONTENTS

OF

THE SECOND VOLUME.

Page

THE FERMENTATION OP EUROPE - - - 1

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE - - -22

FRANCE SINCE 1848 - - - 63

NET RESULTS OF 1848 IN GERMANY AND ITALY - 113

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852 - - - - - 157

SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES? - - - 219

THE RELATION BETWEEN EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED - 252

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY - 303

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP - - 364

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL - - 422

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM - - - - -518

ESSAYS

ON

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE

CONTBIBUi'ED TO VARIOUS KEVIEWS.

.

THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE.*

THE spring of 1848 will be memorable through all time,
both for the magnitude of the political events which
it has witnessed, and for the unexampled rapidity with
which they have succeeded each other. Demands —
concessions — constitutions — revolutions — abdications
—have trod upon the heels of one another, with a speed
which takes away the breath of the beholder. The
quiet of last year has been followed by a series of ex-
plosions, almost, if not altogether, without precedent ;
and the hopes and fears of all who are interested in the
progress and amelioration of humanity are excited to
the highest point. For ourselves, our hopes greatly
predominate over our fears; not, perhaps, for the im-
mediate present, but for the not very remote future;
not, perhaps, for France, but for Europe, and the
world.

Of the present, and the immediate future of France,
the aspect seems very gloomy. We have no hopes,

* From the "Economist" of April, 1848.
VOL. II. B

2 THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE.

either from the present movement or the present men.
The day for the regeneration of that unlearning and
impure country has not yet dawned. " Oh ! that she
had known, in this her day of opportunity, the things
which belong unto her peace ; but alas ! they are hidden
from her eyes." Upon her alone, of all the nations of
Europe, the experience of the past, in which she was
the greatest sharer and sufferer, seems to have been
thrown away. She alone, like her old nightmares, the
Bourbons, seems to have learnt nothing, and forgotten
nothing* ; to have forgotten no old watchwords, and
learned no new wisdom.

The popular outbreak, and the overthrow of the late
government, caused us little surprise, and no regret.
For that unwise monarch, who, for the last seventeen
years, has been labouring with patient and unresting
industry to destroy the freedom and complete the de-
moralisation of his country, we can feel little compassion.
It is just that he, whose whole regal career has been a
series of pertinacious treasons against that popular
spirit which placed him on the throne, should be at
last ejected with ludicrous ignominy in the extremity
of age. It is just that he, who has so unceasingly
plotted for the aggrandisement of his family and the
augmentation of his enormous wealth, and has not
scrupled at means which would have soiled the hands
of a notary or a huckster, should in the end be flung
upon a foreign shore, stripped of his vast possessions,
and almost dependent upon eleemosynary aid. It is
just that he, who was prepared to entangle his country
in a war with England, for the sake of gaining a royal
position for his son, should be reduced, with that son, to
find himself in England, a fugitive, and a petitioner for

* Talleyrand's remark on the Bourbon family, after the restoration,
was, " Ces gens la n'ont rien oublie, ni rien appris."

THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE. 3

shelter. He has sown the wind, and it was just that he
should reap the whirlwind.

"Za charte sera desormais une verite" exclaimed Louis
Philippe, when he ascended the .throne in 1830; but
instead of a truth, he has made it a nullity. Step
by step he augmented the power of the crown, and
restricted the privileges of the people ; he curtailed the
liberty of the press, and the security for fair trial to
political offenders, while he used the machinery of cor-
ruption (always too mighty and well organised in
France) with unparalleled and unsparing profusion ;
till every vestige of individual liberty had been swept
away. So completely had this work been accomplished,
that men might be, and were, imprisoned without
warrant, and kept in prison without either themselves
or any one else knowing what was the charge against
them : and whatever wrong or outrage might be com-
mitted against a citizen by an authorised agent of the
" citizen king," the former had no refuge or redress ; he
could not apply for protection or amends from a court
of law, without first asking permission from the king in
council, the very notion of which was scouted as an
absurdity ; so that unless he had a friend in the Chamber
of Deputies, to interrogate the minister in his behalf,
his demand for justice was as echoless and ineffectual
as that of one crying in the wilderness.

Therefore, we did not wonder that the French people,
who seern to be as impatient of oppression as they are
unfit for freedom, arose in a frenzy to reconquer their
rights. Nor did we wonder that when Louis Philippe
abdicated, they at once, and, as it were, instinctively, de-
clared for a republic. Every branch of the Bourbons had
been tried in turn ; and every branch had proved so in-
grainedly and incurably bad, that we scarcely see that
any choice was left them. Therefore, though not re-
publicans ourselves, it is from no dislike of that form of

B 2

4 THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE.

government, still less from any admiration of the go-
vernment it has superseded, that we are led to augur ill
for France, but from the character and condition of the
people — from the mode in which the revolution was
effected — from all the proceedings of the Provisional
Government — and from the conduct and manifested
animus of the nation, ever since the memorable 24th of
February.

In the first place, there does not seem to be now in
France, any more than at any previous period, the
slightest conception of, or care for, what we in England
call personal liberty— the liberty of the subject. Their
only idea of liberty seems to be equality. Political
rights — the right of suffrage — the right to a free press
— the abolition of the exclusive rights and privileges of
others, they comprehend and contend for. But indi-
vidual freedom —the right of unfettered action and
speech — the right of every man to do what he likes so
long as he interferes not with the equivalent right of
others — exemption from all unnecessary restraint, and
from all authority but that of recorded or adjudicated
law — security against the illegal exercise of power by
the agents of the government — for these the French
do not ask, of these they seem not to comprehend the
importance. Not only have they no habeas corpus, but
in all their many opportunities they have never, we
believe, demanded it. The constitutions of 1789, 1793,
1795, the 18th Brumaire, the restoration, the hundred
days, 1830, all passed away without conferring this
inestimable boon — this sine qua non of freedom; and
the result is, that never in their wildest days of
licence have Frenchmen enjoyed half the liberty — half
the security from, or security against, the tyranny of
their sovereign or their neighbour, as the poorest and
meanest Englishman has possessed for the last century
and a half. To all appearance the revolution of 1848

THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE. 5

will pass away like its predecessors, without having
bestowed on the French nation this easy, this simple,
this grand, yet apparently this undesired achievement.

Again, in France (if we except a short period in
1789) there has never been a struggle for liberty: what
have been termed such, have, in sad and sober truth,
been simply struggles for the administration of a tyranny.
The centralised form of their government is greatly to
blame for this. To the French imagination, the simplest,
shortest, and easiest way of conquering their liberty,
when oppression has become unbearable, has always
been to seize upon the reins of power. Other nations
wring concessions from their governors: the French
" cashier " their governors, and become governors them-
selves. But the French governmental administration is
a machine of tremendous power, of immense extent, of
universal interpenetration. He who seizes the reins of
government in France, finds himself — owing to the
centralisation which is its essence — absolute master of
every functionary in every department of administration
throughout that vast empire. Through these function-
aries he finds himself invested with almost uncontrolled
power over every one of his fellow-countrymen. He is
at the head of the police, justice, gendarmerie, finance,
education, not merely in Parisj but in the remotest and
obscurest corner of the land. He finds himself, by the
accident of his position, a despot, an autocrat ; and it is
to ask a miracle of human nature, to expect him not to
use this despotic power; it is to ask little less than a
miracle from a man who has sprung from an oppressed
caste — unused to the sweets, uninured to the difficulties,
of rule — to expect him not to use it despotically.
Moreover, the very habits of the nation, the very nature
of the organisation, force the use of this power upon him.
The functionaries, throughout the country, feeling them-
selves only portions of one great machine — accustomed

B 3

6 THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE.

to refer everything to their head at Paris — constantly
and naturally apply to him for orders, and he is almost
compelled to act. Whatever party, therefore, assumes
the government in France, find themselves necessarily,
and ipso facto, invested with supreme power, and are
expected, called upon, compelled to use it; or the
machine of administration would stand still.

How completely this notion — that it is in the power,
and is the duty of the government to do everything —
is rooted in the minds both of the rulers and the ruled
— has been shown with tragic and ludicrous clearness
during the last month. We have seen deputations from
workmen to ask the Provisional Government to fix the
hours of labour, and the rate of wages — from omnibus
drivers to ask them to decide the price of fares — from
merchants and tradesmen to postpone the dates of bills
of exchange — from manufacturers for loans on the
security of their goods — from railway employes to ask
for a compulsory participation in the profits of capital
to which they have not contributed — and, finally, from
students to demand the dismissal of an obnoxious pro-
fessor, and the exclusion of cosmography and natural
history from their list of lessons !

Few of our readers, we believe, have any idea of the
extent to which this system of centralisation has been
carried in France, or what ramified and far reaching
power it puts into the hands of the actual rulers,
whoever they may be. The following table will aid
them to form a just conception of this gigantic machine.
It is calculated that there are dependent on the

Employes. Francs.

Minister of the Interior 203,900 receiving 46,000,000

Justice - 30,280 „ 16,000,000

Public Instruction - 25,000 „ 25,000,000

Public Works - 20,000 „ 20,000,000

Trade and Agriculture - 12,000 „ 12,000,000

THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE.

Employes. Francs.

Finance - 277,900 receiving 145,000,000

War - - 25,000 „ 31,000,000

Foreign Affairs - 640 „ 8,000,000

Marine - 3,000 „ 5,000,000

597,720 308,000,000

This is the system which a poet, an historian, an
editor, an astronomer, and workman, are suddenly
called on to administer — an army of 600,000 agents,
and a purse of 12,000,000/. sterling.

These two remarkable facts, then — the centralised
system of administration which pervades all France,
and the utter absence of all conception of the true
nature of personal liberty, joined to another feature of
the national character, as prominent and yet more
deplorable, namely an entire want of that perception of
what is due to others, that clear sense of the rights of
others, which lies at the basis of all real freedom — will
explain what else would appear so inexplicable — the
astounding proceedings of the Provisional Government,
since they took the helm of state into their hands.
Their course was comparatively clear ; the limits of
their sphere of action were defined by the nature of
their position, and even by their very name; their
duties were confined to the simple tasks of preserving
public order, keeping the administrative machine at
work, and arranging the details of the mode in which
the national will should express itself. It was not for
them, mere administrators ad interim, but for the nation,
to decide for a republic or a monarchy. It was not for
them, but for the nation, to enact new laws and abolish
old ones. Yet they have issued edicts, and decrees
without end ; with a profusion, a peremptoriness, and
a haste, which neither Napoleon nor Robespierre could
have surpassed. They have passed laws, proprio motu,

B 4

8 THE FEKMENTATION OF EUROPE.

of their own autocratic will, which demanded the gravest
deliberation, and involved the most momentous conse-
quences. They have issued ukases affecting the very
foundation of the social system. They have imposed
new and additional taxation in a most unequal and un-
justifiable form. Their very first acts were invasions
of the freedom of the subject, more flagrant and undis-
guised than any of those by which Louis Philippe and
Charles X. were held to have deservedly forfeited their
thrones. In one short month they have run round the
whole cycle of tyranny, spent all the resources of des-
potism, repeated and exhausted all the obsolete contri-
vances and low stratagems of arbitrary power. They
have seized on property, interfered with contracts,
threatened the rich, swamped the respectable, broken
faith with the national creditor, influenced elections by
terror and chicanery, and displayed, in a word, not only
all the ignorance, but all the vices, of a fierce and over-
bearing democracy. Therefore, we have no hopes for
France.

The refusal to pay the depositors at the savings'
banks, and the suspension of cash payments at the Bank
of France, were measures sufficiently discreditable, but
which might be defended on the plea of necessity — a
necessity, however, which we must not forget was wholly
created by their own wild proceedings. But the pro-
ceedings which we view with the greatest disapprobation
and alarm, both on account of the animus which they
manifest, and of the scenes which they so vividly recall,
are the barefaced resolutions displayed in the decree for
the re- organisation of the National Guard, to swamp the
influence of the respectable and educated classes by a
forced amalgamation with the mob ; the evident deter-
mination to scruple at no means for suppressing the
expression of opinion on the part of those who love
order, who fears the government of the lowest classes,

THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE.

and who may be supposed to be influenced by a regard
to character and rank, as evinced in the famous circular
of the minister of the interior; the leading articles
which have appeared in journals known to be closely
connected with members of the government, couched in
no covert language, menacing emigrants, natives, and
even foreigners, with the indignation of their country,
and threatening those capitalists who refused to subscribe,
or did not subscribe largely enough, to the new banks
of discount, with public denunciation ; and, finally, the
firm and almost contemptuous tone in which the govern-
ment have met the remonstrances of the middle classes,
contrasted with the gentleness and timidity* with
which they have submitted to the overbearing dictation
of the mob of workmen. These things show that the
rock on which the liberty of France was wrecked in
1792 is still as prominent and as perilous as then.
Therefore, it is, that we have no hopes for France.

But it is the unchanged national character of the
French which most inclines us to despair. Such as it
was in 1790, such, in many of its features, it is still. It
may appear a paradoxical assertion respecting a people
so notoriously brave as the French ; but, as a general
fact, they seem utterly destitute of moral courage.
Daring even to rashness in the field — unshrinking even
to levity upon the scaffold — bold even to audacity in
public, en masse, and where bravery can be theatrically
displayed — they have individually, it would seem, no
civil courage. They dare not face the disapprobation
and dislike of their countrymen. They dare not differ
from the prevalent current of opinion. They cannot
swim against the stream. They are in everything the
victims and slaves of the prevailing fashion. They dare

* From this charge, however, we must except Lamartine, who
throughout has shown a courage and spirit above all praise.

10 THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE.

not risk being in a minority. Hence the suddenness and
apparent unanimity of all political movements through-
out France. Hence they can always be governed by a
small minority. Hence they will generally be governed
by the boldest and most desperate among themselves.
The wild, the bold, the inconsiderate, the destitute, are
the only ones who do not wait to consider whether
others will support them. They take advantage of the
general discontent, and, by a timely and well contrived
emeute, possess themselves of the reins of government.
Their boldness gives them power. No one knows how
few they are, but only think how numerous they may
be; and most people measure their number by their
daring. Every one fears to be left behind if he delays
to join them ; it becomes a rush and a scramble to see
who will be first to swear allegiance to the self-elected
government of yesterday ; and thus it suddenly finds
itself possessed of supreme power, and may retain it till
its conduct has made some other party desperate enough to
rise against it without calculating chances, when it falls to
pieces like a rope of sand. Such has been the history
of every popular government in France. Such is, and
will be, we anticipate, the history of the present one. It
is, we believe, supported heartily by a very small mi-
nority of the population. Putting aside the ouvriers of
Paris, Lyons, and Rouen, its real bond fide friends we do
not believe comprise one tenth of the people. With
this conviction, it will be readily conceived that, among
all the breathless transactions which made up the revo-
lution of February, 1848, we regard as one of the most
disquieting and discreditable, the almost instant, unre-
served, undeliberating adhesion with which the Provi-
sional Government was hailed throughout the country.
However unpopular the old monarchy may have been, it
is impossible to believe that all parties in France wished
in their hearts for a republic ; still less, that all believed

THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE. 11

MM. Lamartine, Arago, Louis Blanc, and Albert, the
fittest men to guide the vessel of the state. Yet no
sooner was the formation of this ministry announced in
Paris, and the news spread by telegraph through the
departments, than every one hastened to fall prostrate
at its feet. Without even waiting to see what its first
measures would be — without stopping to consider
whether the morals or the ability of its members
qualified them for the tremendous task they had under-
taken — public bodies, private individuals, marshals,
admirals, prefects, princes, deputies — at once, by post,
by telegraph, and in person — rushed to swear allegiance
to the unknown and untried novelty: and the same
week which saw the Monarchy omnipotent and over-
thrown, saw also the Kepublic conceived, improvised,
installed, announced, acknowledged, and supreme,
throughout the length and breadth of the land. There-
fore, we have no hopes for France.

Not only does there seem to be no deliberation, no
exercise, of individual judgment in France : but neither
does there seem to be any power or spirit of resistance,
or of self-defence. The edicts of a temporary and self-
appointed ministry are submitted to by the first bodies
in the empire, as humbly and unremonstratingly as if
they were the unappealable decrees of fate. The Pro-
visional Government decrees, in the name of equality,
that no monuments shall be erected over the graves of
the departed — that all shall take their last sleep in one
undistinguishable crowd. An edict which thus tramples
upon all the most tender and sacred feelings of our
nature, which brutally forbids that tribute which in all
ages affection has yearned to pay to the relics of departed
love, and which generous admiration has felt proud to
offer at the shrines of translated excellence and vanished
worth, is obeyed with meek and unmurmuring pusil-
lanimity. How would such an edict be received in

12 THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE.

England ? It would be instantaneously fatal to the
government which should dare to promulgate it, and to
the future career of every individual composing such
government. — Again, the Provisional Government de-
crees the abolition of all titles ; and the peers, to a man,
lay them down without a murmur. Why, were such
a decree issued in England, every peer in the nobility
would spend the last drop of his blood in defence even
of such unreal honours. And can it be imagined for a
moment that all, or most, of the French noblesse, value
their titles and decorations as nothing, or agree in their
hearts with the spirit of the order which commands their
annihilation ? No : but the pluck, the courage is want-
ing, to remonstrate or resist. Therefore, it is, that we
have no hopes for France.

One other most discouraging feature in the social
aspect of France at the present moment, and which
prevails, also, to a great extent in the sister Republic of
America, is the singular absence of all great men. In
all turbulent times in other countries — in the first
revolution, even in France — distinguished men sprung
up, as it were, by rnagic, and in crowds ; men, it is true,
" darkly wise," and " rudely " and irregularly " great,"
but still possessed of many of the elements of real gran-
deur, and many of the qualities of mighty leaders.
There were Barnave, Lafayette, Roland, Vergniaud,
Danton, Carnot, and the greatest and wildest of all,
Mirabeau. Now, there is no centre, no rallying point,
no salient character, no great name, standing out from
the crowd, to which men may look for guidance and
salvation. As for the second-rate leaders of the cham-
bers, the men who passed for great under the old regime,
— Thiers, Odillon Barrot, and their colleagues, — they
are gone, lost, hushed in the stillness of this universal
mediocrity. Lamartine, alone, with his brilliant fancy ?
his elegant culture, his poetic visions, his indomitable

THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE. 13

courage, affords a relief to the eye, amid the countless
platitudes around him.

The French will answer, that in this very absence of
eminent and great men lies their safety and their glory
— that great men are dangerous — that in a republic
of which equality is the basis and the watchword, they
are not wanted and would be out of place. But they
have yet to learn that it is only among a people where
the mass are reasonably good and moderately wise, that
great men can be safely dispensed with. No nation, no
government, can exist in safety and in honour without
the guidance and support of a vast amount of wisdom
and of virtue ; and if this wisdom and virtue does not
pervade and vivify the mass, it must be concentrated in
the men who are to govern and control them. Where
it is dispersed through a whole people, a democracy
becomes possible, reasonable, and safe: where it is
confined to a few, nature calls unmistakeably for an
aristocracy. On this account, above all others, therefore,
do we despair of the present government of France.

A republican form of government is, perhaps, theo-
retically, the most perfect ; it seems, more than any
other, to meet the requirements of bare reason. But for
a republic to be either safe or stable, three conditions
are necessary : — a pervading, generally prevalent sense
of justice and morality : a vivid idea, at least, if not a
habit, of municipality, or self-government ; and material
well-being, or a steady progress towards it, on the part
of the lower classes. Now, all these elements of security
and hope are wanting in France.

I. It is a painful, and may seem an uncharitable,
statement, but we think it is impossible to shut our
eyes to the truth that a profound demoralisation, of one
kind or another, prevails through both the higher and
lower classes of society in France. The disorders and
disorganisation of the close of the last century, and the

14 THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE.

first fifteen years of this, added to the systematic cor-
ruption of the late government, undermined all that the
regency and Louis XV. had left undestroyed of that
nice sense of honour and scrupulous care of character
which was at one time proverbially distinctive of the
French nobility. That " sensibility of principle, that
chastity of honour, which felt stain like a wound," has
had a melancholy funeral oration pronounced over its
grave, by the ambassador Bresson, the general officer
Cubieres, the cabinet minister Teste, and the Duke de
Choiseul-Praslin ; and, unhappily, religion has not
stepped in to fill the place left vacant by the demise of
a sensitive regard to reputation.

Among the people we perceive a moral deficiency of
another kind. They do not seem possessed of that
rectitude of feeling, that sense of justice, that quick
perception and ready acknowledgment of the rights of
others, without which democracy cannot fail to become
the most grinding and intolerable of all tyrannies.
Their interference with the relations of creditor and
debtor — their behaviour to the English workmen, and
to their own National Guard — have shown this defi-
ciency in the most glaring manner. It is, perhaps, too
much to expect from the people that " charity which
seeketh not her own : " but without that strict sense of
justice which forbears to seek it by trampling upon the
rights of others, no republic can or ought to endure.
A sense of duty, and a sense of justice, pervading the
community, constitute the sine qua non of a stable and
respectable democracy. Its very foundation is national
morality.

II. Real and efficient, not merely nominal, municipal
institutions, seem essential to instruct and practise a
people in habits of self-government. If they have not
been experienced in the administration of parish affairs,
they will rarely be competent to undertake the adminis-

THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE. 15

tration of an empire. England, America, and Switzer-
land, are essentially municipal. What we have termed
the habit of municipality pervades all the ideas and social
practices of the people. In France it is quite otherwise.
The government there is a bureaucracy. The people
have never governed themselves, even during .the most
levelling periods of their democracies ; they are governed
by the minister at Paris, through his infinitely numerous
agents and subordinates. Every licence is granted by
the central authority. Every official throughout the
empire — every prefect, mayor, notary, tobacco-dealer,
throughout France, is appointed by a minister at Paris,
and can be dismissed by him ; and as long as this con-
tinues to be the case, we do not conceive how either
stability or real freedom is to be secured. Kepublican
institutions, and a centralised administration, involve
ideas radically contradictory and hostile.

III. Thirdly, and lastly, we have no hopes for France,
on account of the deplorable material condition, and the
still more deplorable material prospect, of her lower
classes. This condition is bad enough now, it is steadily
deteriorating, and the Provisional Government has taken
every step in its power to make this deterioration more
rapid, more certain, more difficult of arrest and cure.
The most concise summary of facts will suffice to show
what fearful elements of danger are in existence, and in
active and multiplying operation. The commerce of
France, always insignificant for so powerful and ex-
tensive an empire, is gradually decaying. The last
report of the minister for that department shows a
steady and regular diminution of their mercantile
marine, which now can only muster one ship as large as
700 tons — the ordinary size of English merchant
vessels being 1000 tons, and many of them 1,500 tons.
The system of monopoly and protection so long per-
severingly pursued, and still so dear to that uneconomic

16 THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE.

people — the perverse determination to force manu-
factures for which their country has no natural capa-
bilities, at the expense of the export trade in those
productions for which it is especially adapted — have
ended in placing not only the prosperity, but the very
subsistence of the country in serious jeopardy. Their
wine trade — the most natural and profitable branch of
commerce they possess — has long been stagnant and
languishing. Their silk trade — to judge by the per-
petual complaints of misery on the part of the Lyonese
workmen — cannot be in a much more flourishing con-
dition; their other manufactures are maintained by
means of an artificial system which must fall before the
progress of economic science, and which may, any hour,
be suddenly swept away ; their woods, which should
have been carefully husbanded for domestic use, have
been wastefully consumed in iron furnaces, which pro-
duce iron at double the cost at which it might be
furnished to them from England, till at length the price
of fuel has risen to a height which makes it almost
inaccessible to the poor man, — for coal is scarcely to be
found in France, and cannot be purchased from England
except by means of that export trade which is gradually,
and not slowly, drying up.

But the condition and prospects of agriculture on
which the vast majority of the population of France
depends directly for subsistence, are still more calculated
to excite alarm. It appears, from the authorities care-
fully collected by Mr. M'Culloch, in his recent "Treatise
on Succession," that although two thirds of the popu-
lation are there actually engaged in agricultural occu-
pations, against one third in England, the produce per
acre, with an equal soil and a far superior climate, is
only one half what it is with us — that already the
southern provinces annually import grain to a large
amount — that the food of the people has been for a

THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE. 17

long time steadily deteriorating, till they are rapidly
approaching to the potato diet of the Irish — that live
stock, the basis of all good farming, is diminishing in an
alarming ratio — that nearly all the cavalry horses are
obliged to be imported from abroad, so wretched is the
native breed — that the consumption of butchers' meat
in Paris (and we may conclude in other parts of France
likewise) is only one-third what it was in 1812 — and,
finally, that this gradual decline in agricultural position
is the natural arid inevitable result of a law to which, as
the offspring and embodiment of their crotchet of
equality, the people cling with a fanatical attachment,
the law of equal partition — a law which has already
been carried out to such an extent, that out of an
aggregate of 4,800,000 proprietors, 3,900,000, or four-
fifths, hold properties averaging only nine acres in
extent ; nay, so small are many of them, that one-half
the whole number are under forty shillings of yearly
value.

France, then, presents this alarming combination of
circumstances — an increasing population, commerce
languishing and contracting, agriculture decaying, and
manufactures precarious and valetudinarian, because
artificially bolstered up ; with all the causes which have
led to these conditions still in active operation. But this
is not all. The new government is occupied with all its
might, and with all its ingenuity, in exasperating all
these fatal maladies. The revenue is collected with
greater and greater difficulty every year, from the in-
creasing poverty of the people ; the debt is already
immense ; the public expenditure far exceeds the income,
and can scarcely be diminished, for the present immense
army of officials cannot be disbanded till France shall
have learned to change centralisation for municipality.
Yet the first acts of the Provisional Government have
tended enormously to add to this expenditure, by taking,

VOL. II. C

18 THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE.

as it were, the whole unemployed population into its
pay ; by establishing wages without labour, and national
workshops without even the aim or pretence of pro-
ducing exchangeable commodities ; enhancing the cost
of production of exportable articles, by allowing the
workmen to dictate terms and hours of work to their
masters, and thus slaying manufactures and commerce
by one treacherous blow ; while at the same time they
have dried up the most inexhaustible source of revenue
by acting with a senseless tyranny, which has at once
ruined the affluent, and prostrated financial and com-
mercial credit in the dust. At a single move they have
augmented the national expenditure, and not so much
crippled, as shattered the national resources. With a
population already very poor, a decrepit agriculture, the
whole commercial and industrial system shaken to its
foundation, employment cut away from under the people
when most needed to support them, a vast expenditure,
a failing revenue, and a government at once incapable
and desperate, we see not where their salvation is to
come from.

One hope, only one, remains. It lies in a prompt
and energetic counter-revolution. It is, perhaps, well
for France that the cloven foot should have been shown
so soon — that the downward progress of her new rulers
should have been so rapid, and the abyss to which they
are hurrying so apparent, so yawning, and so near. The
Provisional Government and its hearty well-wishers we
firmly believe to form at this moment a small and, but
for their position, an insignificant minority of the nation.
The men of property, the friends of order, merchants,
manufacturers, country gentlemen and their peasants, a
great proportion of the National Guard, and nearly all
the army, look on their proceedings with discontent,
anger, and alarm. The circular of Ledru Rollin, the
decree for the dissolution of the Compagnies d'elite, and

THE FERMENTATION OF EUKOrE. 19

the attempts of the people to disarm those regiments of
the line which remained in Paris, and which have been
since ordered away, show clearly that the Provisional
Government is well aware of this wide-spread feeling of
dissatisfaction and hostility. A rallying point — a
standard of revolt — is alone wanting. If the royal
family had been less heartily disliked and despised than
they are ; if any one of them had had the spirit to
remain for the chance of a revulsion of popular feeling ;
if there were any great or daring man either among the
civil or the military notorieties of the country to com-
mence an opposition, or simply to speak out boldly and
loudly what so many millions of his countrymen are
thinking, we believe that a single week would suffice to
transfer the members of the Provisional Government
from the Hotel de Ville to Yincennes or the Salpetriere,
with an impeachment hanging over their heads, and to
save France from the universal ruin which threatens to
engulph it. But can such a salient, central, initiative
man be found ?

But though despairing about France, we are sanguine
about the rest of Europe. If only war can be kept at
bay, we are hopeful of the constitutional regeneration
of both Italy and Germany. We have hopes for both
(notwithstanding the known reluctance and perfidy of
Ferdinand, and the known incapacity of Francis), be-
cause in both countries the people seek to extort con-
cessions from their rulers, not to supersede them ; be-
cause they seek to govern in concert with their sove-
reigns, not instead of them ; because, intellectually and
morally, despite long ages of degradation, they are a
far finer race of men than the French ; because, cruelly
as they have been oppressed, they struggle for real re-
forms, they demand liberty, not equality — the abolition
of oppressive privileges, not of harmless titles or bene-
ficial rank. We have hopes especially for the Italians,

c 2

20 THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE.

because slight as is their experience, small their science
in self-government, it is at least equal to that of their
rulers, and because, with much poverty, there is little
real destitution or sordid misery. We have hopes espe-
cially for Sicily, because there the revolution has been
effected by the united action of all classes ; it has been
led by the nobles, arid consecrated by the priests ; and
because the insurgents know what they want, and their
demands have been steady and consistent. We have
hopes for Germany, because the Germans are a loyal
and honourable people, with the sense of justice and of
brotherhood strong and genuine within them ; because
they are a reflective, a peaceful, and a moral race ;
imbued with the habits of municipality (though these
of late have been sadly overridden by the government
functionaries), and with just notions of real personal
liberty. Finally, we are full of hope both for Italy and
Germany, because it is evident that though France has
forgotten the lessons of the past, they have not> but
retain a lively recollection, a wholesome horror, and a
wise distrust, of French sympathy and French frater-
nisation.

While these are our feelings with regard to the
present movement in Italy and Germany, — while we
have no hopes for France, we have no fears for England.
Though there are many abuses and anomalies in our
government, and much sad and terrible misery among
our people, every Englishman is conscious that the first
are in daily course of exposure and rectification, and
that all classes are labouring earnestly and sincerely, if
not always wisely, to amend and mitigate the last.
Every one is obliged to admit that no phase of moral
suffering exists among us without finding many who
perseveringly struggle to publish, to alleviate, and to
remove it. The poorest have friends in the senate, in
the council chamber, in the palace; the lowest can

THE FERMENTATION OF EUROPE. 21

make their voice heard and their wants known, without
having recourse to violence and tumult. Moreover,
our system of administration is municipal, not central ;
order is beloved by us ; property is sacred with us ; we
are accustomed to govern and defend ourselves ; we
respect the rights of others, and know how to maintain
our own. Therefore, we have no fears for England.

The wise course for England and Europe to pursue
throughout the present crisis seems to us both obvious
and simple. We must regard France as suffering in
the paroxysm of a strange disease, and draw a cordon
sanitaire around her, till the violence of the malady
shall have spent itself, and the danger of contagion shall
be past.

c 3

22

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE.*

MANY of the errors of political philosophers, and many
of the failures of practical statesmen, appear to us to
have had their origin in the same oversight : both have
too commonly ignored, or have not sufficiently studied,
the fundamental characteristics, intellectual and moral,
which distinguish different nations : they have too
generally reasoned and acted as if they had to deal with
an abstract or an "average" man, instead of with popu-
lations impressed — whether by the hand of Nature, or
by the operation of long antecedent circumstances —
with marked and distinctive features ; endowed with
special aptitudes, gifted with peculiar excellences, dis-
qualified by peculiar deficiencies. In consequence of
the omission of these considerations, which should form,
not only an essential element in their calculations, but
almost the-foundation of them, their philosophy becomes
inapplicable, and their statesmanship ends in disap-
pointment. That nations are marked by such distinc-
tive capacities and incapacities, few observers of our
species on a large scale will be found to doubt : any
difference of opinion merely regards the inherent and
ineradicable nature of these distinctions. While some
conceive them to belong to the race, its pedigree, its
physical conformation — others attribute them to the
operation of external influences, as country, climate,
government, surrounding accidents, or historical ante-
cedents.

* From the " Edinburgh Review."

Le Siecle. Le Pouvoir : Le Moniteur : Le Journal des Debats :
,1849, 1850.

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 23

Thus, a broad line of demarcation distinguishes the
Oriental from the European nations. Progress distin-
guishes the one ; a stereotyped stationariness the other.
The former rest unambitiously in the blind worship of
the past ; the latter draw all their inspiration from
hope, and lay the scenes of their dreams of happiness in
the times that are to come. The golden age of the one
is the primeval Eden of their ancestors ; the Paradise
of the other is the future dwelling-place of their chil-
dren's children. Passive and unmurmuring resignation
under the evils of life is the religion of the East ; indo-
mitable and untiring energy in conflict with those evils
is the virtue of the West. The Oriental acquiesces in
all that is ordained ; the European acquiesces in nothing
that can be amended. Neither character presents a
complete and perfect whole : and the philosopher may
be tempted to speculate on the splendid results which
would signalise the union of the two, if such an event
be among the future possibilities of human destiny : —

<( In dreaming of each mighty birth,

That shall one day be born
From marriage of the Western earth
With nations of the Morn."

Nor can we shut our eyes to the fact that differences,
less marked indeed, but quite as real, distinguish the
several European races from each other. Each has
its peculiar gift — its special line of excellence, in which
it is unapproachable — its special incapacity, which no
experience and no effort seem able to cure. The spirit
of patient, unwearying, and minute research, of pro-
found and far-reaching speculation — the perfection of
the abstract intellect — are the dowry of the Germans.
But the faculty of managing successfully the rougher
and homelier affairs of social life, seems to have been
granted to them in far scantier measure. They are

c 4

24 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE.

glorious musicians — very commonplace administrators.
On the theoretical science of government they think
profoundly — in the actual art of it they have been as
yet children. To the Italians, again, is assigned that
fervid imagination — that keen susceptibility to all the
finer influences — that intense homage to the beautiful
— that pursuit of the ideal as a reality, out of which
springs the perfection of the fine arts. But for some
centuries back they have seemed to purchase this bril-
liant pre-eminence at the expense of incompetence for
the practical duties and business of political life. With
the most singular combination of intellectual powers
among European nations, they have suffered themselves
to be more misgoverned than any people except the
Spaniards ; and with the finest soil and climate in the
world, they have long remained nearly at a stand-still
in all the material elements of civilisation. Perhaps it
may be this, very sacrifice to the ideal which incapa-
citates them for the achievements of common life, where
modifications and adaptations, rather than creations, are
wanted — improvements of what is, rather than the
removal of it, to make room for what ought to be.
Probably, also, the pursuit and overweening apprecia-
tion of the merely beautiful are unfavourable to a
certain hardness and sternness of mind, which may be
essential to success in the rough work of the political
arena.

The French, too, unrivalled in scientific precision, are
stricken with impotence when they approach the higher
regions of poetical or spiritual thought. Pre-eminent
as a military people, they have signally failed in all
attempts to add naval success to their other achieve-
ments. And with the thoughts of the whole people,
occupied for sixty years in the search after that " ab-
stract perfection in government " (which, as Canning
remarked, is not an object of reasonable pursuit, because

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 25

it is not one of possible attainment), and with as fair a
field, and as unimpeded a career, as was ever vouchsafed
to any nation in Europe — they are actually at the
present time no nearer than at the beginning, to the
realisation of their ideal. While the English, on the
other hand — loathing abstract thought, looking with
suspicion or contempt on all endeavours after scientific
accuracy in moral or political questions, empiric, tenta-
tive, often blundering, always unsystematic, alternately
sleeping in smiling apathy, and awakening with a panic
start — now straining at the smallest hardship, now
swallowing the most monstrous oppression ; now ne-
glecting the growth of the most frightful evils, now
arousing themselves to the most microscopic vigilance ;
now wretched, frantic, and remorseful, if a criminal is
harshly treated, or a pauper inadequately fed ; now
contemplating with serene indifference the grinding
misery of thousands ; — nevertheless have contrived to
advance with magical rapidity in the material arts of
life ; and to proceed, though at a far slower rate, with
the remedy of public ills, and the diffusion of social
welfare. Surrounded by difficulties, they succeed in
maintaining their freedom unimpaired, and even con-
firmed ; and in making almost yearly some steps —
halting and uncertain as they are — towards a better
and wiser government.

If we are right in these views — if no national cha-
racter is complete and perfect, and equipped in an
adequate measure with all capacities — it follows that,
to expect from all nations success and excellence in all
lines, or in the same lines, is an unreasonable demand ;
and to imagine that the same political garments will fit
all alike, is a practical mistake of the most dangerous
description. Yet recent events have shown that it is
about the most widely diffused of all misapprehensions ;
and it is the one, of all others, into which Englishmen

I

26 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FKANCE.

are most apt to fall. We have been too much like the
enthusiastic convalescent who would force upon every
invalid the invaluable medicine which has cured his
own malady and agreed with his own system. To our
representative institutions — to our " glorious British
constitution" — we gratefully ascribe (whether alto-
gether justly we need not here discuss) our long career
of prosperity, our wide empire, our high position, our
unequalled amount of personal freedom, the buoyancy
with which we ride out the fiercest storms, the elastic
energy which carries us triumphantly through the
darkest disasters. Our neighbours draw the same in-
ference, and clamour for institutions similar to ours ;
and they are backed in their demand by the most ardent
sympathy which the flattered vanity and the genuine
benevolence of England can afford. They seize eagerly
upon the magic spell; and find — alas! too late — alike
to their astonishment and ours, that the magic resides,
not in the spell, but in its special adaptation to the
practised hand that wields it. Close observation, both
of ourselves and of our imitators, may convince us that
the real merit and effect of these institutions belong far
less to the forms themselves than to those national
qualities which enable us to use them so skilfully, to
supply their deficiencies, and correct their incongruities.
We think that a little reflection will show reason for
believing that, if we have succeeded in the great object
of a people's existence — progress towards good — it is
to be attributed far more to our national character than
to our national institutions ; and perhaps more to the
suitability of the two to each other, than to the peculiar
excellence of either; — that if these institutions have
worked well, and borne rich fruit here, thanks are due
less to any inherent perfection of their own than to that
sterling good sense and good feeling which so inces-
santly, habitually, and almost unconsciously, interfere

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 27

to prevent them from working ill. We believe it may-
be shown, in the first place, that we have materials, in
the frame-work of our society and in our national cha-
racter, for the formation and management of the repre-
sentative system, and of free institutions generally, such
as no other people is blessed with; and, in the second
place, that that system and those institutions could
only bring out satisfactory results — could, in fact, only
subsist at all — among a people who need as little govern-
ment as the Americans and the English. The price
which even we ourselves have paid and are still paying
for the proud distinction of parliamentary government,
in the shape of defective administration, expense,
blunders, and neglects ; and the extent to which indi-
vidual wisdom and collective reasonableness and energy
are hourly called in to counteract the perils arid remedy
the mischiefs resulting from this form of government ;
these are points which foreigners can never know —
which Englishmen themselves are seldom fully aware
of — and of the tendency of which no one can form an
adequate conception, who has not watched the working
of English institutions in Irish hands, and thence gained
a glimpse of what in such a case would happen, were
England not at hand to interpose a corrective and re-
straining power.

The English constitution is full of theoretical defects.
It contains at least half a dozen indefensible provisions,
any one of which would, at first sight, appear sufficient
to vitiate all its excellences, and to bring it to a dead-
lock in a month. Yet not only has it continued (with
some variety of form) to work for centuries ; but under
it, and in spite of its manifest imperfections, English-
men have enjoyed a greater degree of practical and
sober liberty than any natiofl in the world. Its faults
are neutralised, and its contradictions have become
reconciled or hidden. Mindful that a mixed govern-

28 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FEANCE.

ment can exist only by compromise, we have always
prevented the extreme cases of the constitution from
occurring, and taken care not to strain our conflicting
rights till they give way. For instance, our monarch
has an absolute veto, which has not been exercised
since the days of William of Orange: and which,
though the unquestioned prerogative of the Crown,
never is and never will again be exercised ; because its
exercise would practically bring the entire political
machine to a stand. Our House of Commons has the
power, when it differs in opinion from the Crown and
the House of Peers, of stopping the supplies, and so
starving them into a surrender. But the power is
never exercised, — rarely even threatened or hinted at,
—because the tyranny of the proceeding would be re-
pugnant to the general feelings of the country, save in
those ultimate emergencies which are never permitted
to occur. The monarch, when the House of Lords
thwarts his wishes, has the power of controlling its op-
position within itself and reducing it to obedience by
swamping it with new creations ; but his subjects and
himself alike shrink from such a violent enforcement of
the prerogative. In like manner the House of Peers,
by obstinate resistance to the will of the Commons and
the Crown, may effectually stop legislation altogether ;
but prudential considerations have always come in aid
and held them back, before they had carried this pri-
vilege too far. Thus, any one of the three constituent
elements of our government may, by the theory of the
constitution, tyrannise over the others : yet they never
do so; or if they do, the oppression is covered by a
decent and courteous veil. Nay, more ; any two or
three factious members of the House of Commons have
the power of arresting all the business of the country,
stopping the supplies, paralysing the government, and
checkmating the parliament, by putting in practice their
undoubted right of incessantly moving the adjournment

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 29

of the House. Yet the propriety of such a power,
when exercised moderately, and its utter inadmissibility
when carried to excess, are found practically to be a
guarantee against both its abolition and its abuse. In
the same way, the unanimity required from juries
would habitually defeat the ends of justice and abet the
escape of criminals, did not the common sense and
mutual forbearance, characteristic of our countrymen,
practically convert this unanimity into the opinion of
the majority, except in the very rarest instances ; so
that, in reality, it only operates as a security for more
careful and deliberate decision. In the Sister Island
these salutary counteractions have been found wanting ;
arid the whole history of the Irish parliament and the
Irish courts of law is a practical comment, of the most
convincing kind, on the great truth on which we are now
dwelling: — how necessary is an approach to English
steadiness and English principle to make English insti-
tutions work.

For the last sixty years the idolaters of free insti-
tutions and of the representative system have been,
grievously disappointed and disgusted by observing
how ill these worked in France; how deplorably they
were mismanaged ; and how small a measure of public
good or real liberty they wrought. In the first Eevo-
lution, many of our purest English sympathisers were
staggered in their adherence to the principles of consti-
tutional freedom in consequence of what they witnessed
in France. Traces of this may be found in the writings
of the staunchest Whigs of the period, such as Romilly
and Mackintosh. They were horror-struck at seeing
what mischief might be wrought by forms of govern-
ment which they had been accustomed to look up to as
only instruments of good. We can all of us remember
how bitter was our mortification after the second Revo-
lution, when, under a far soberer movement, the dangers
of a violent and destructive despotism appeared to be

30 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FKANCE.

exchanged for a scarce less damaging and discreditable
corruption. And now, after a third experiment, how
many real lovers of the public good are sighing for a
military autocrat to educe something like order out of
chaos ! how few venture to hope that France can extri-
cate herself from her present dismal and almost desperate
condition, without either succumbing to a tyranny, or
undergoing a fourth convulsion ! Much of this dis-
appointment might have been spared, much of this
infidelity to the worship of liberty might have been
avoided, had we reflected that sufficiently free institu-
tions need certain national qualities for their success, —
that they have no patent for conferring wisdom and
virtue, but are simply instruments by which wisdom
and virtue may work out infinite good ; but which, in
the hands of violence, selfishness, or folly, may be turned
to immeasurable evil.

In order to bring out our views more clearly, we will
endeavour succinctly to point out first, a few of those
qualities in a people which are indispensable to the suc-
cessful working of self-government, or a parliamentary
government like ours; and, secondly, some of the un-
avoidable mischiefs which such a government entails
even among ourselves, — mischiefs, however, which we
gladly submit to as the needful price for a most pre-
cious good, and which we meet and neutralise as best
we may.

The very first requisite is a sense of truth and justice,
widely diffused and deeply engrained in the heart of the
people. It must be borne in mind that he who takes a
share in the direction of the community, is called upon
to govern others. It is not merely his own interests
that he has to consider, but the interests of his country
and his fellow-citizens, even where these clash, or appear
to clash, with his own. It is not only what is due to
himself, but what is due to all other members of the

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 31

commonwealth, that he is under a solemn obligation
to regard. Conceive what a community that would be
of which simple selfishness, unchecked by conscience,
unenlightened by clear-sighted wisdom, should be the
motive impulse and the guiding star ! All history has
shown that real freedom can only be maintained where
genuine patriotism pervades the nation, — and the very
essence of patriotism is an unselfish, though a partial,
love of justice. Amid a people wanting in real public
spirit, the representative system must soon degenerate
into a deceptive form, and may then become one of the
most fearful phases and instruments of misrule. The
secret history of the Irish Parliament and of the French
Chambers proclaims this lesson with alarming vividness.
The very safety of a nation, as well as its interest and
its honour, depend upon having just men carried to the
head of affairs, and maintained there; but where, —
when the population has been made a prey to ignorant,
greedy, tenacious self-seeking, — where is to be found
the sense or the principle, either to choose such, or to
tolerate their rule when chosen ? A government selected
from and by the people can only reflect the qualities of
that people ; if the mass of the nation be wise, just, and
true, the rulers will be not only the embodiment, but
the elite, the filtered essence, of that wisdom, that justice,
that truth ; if the mass be corrupted, grasping, and
regardless of the rights of others, the concentration and
aggravation of all these disqualifying elements is certain
to be found, sooner or later, in the high places of the
state.

The entire absence of a due regard for the rights of
others — almost of a perception that such rights exist
— which has been manifested by nearly all classes in
France, both during and since the convulsion of 1848,
will go far to illustrate our meaning. Liberty— equality
^—fraternity — were the watchwords of the last revolu-

32 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE.

tion, as of the first. The Provisional Government
announced them at its first sitting in the Hotel cle Ville,
and all their decrees were headed with the magical
syllables. Every man was to have a share, an equal
share, in the choice of rulers and the decision of the
form of government. Nothing could be fairer than the

o o

promise ; and, if the old system of things was to be
considered entirely swept away, nothing could be juster
than the principle. But it soon appeared that neither
the Provisional Government nor their supporters had
any idea of adhering to it. Their profession, as well as
their duty, clearly was, to ascertain as soon as might be,
by universal suffrage, the real wishes of the country on
the nature of their government, and then promptly and
unmurmuringly to carry them into effect. But it early
became evident that nothing could be further from their
thoughts than either to obey these wishes when ascer-
tained, or even to wait for their expression. They
proclaimed a republic at once ; alike ignorant and
careless whether France, when consulted, would not
prefer a monarchy or an empire. They issued decrees
after decrees with greater recklessness, greater indiffer-
ence to the feelings, greater contempt for the rights and
possessions of their fellow-citizens, than any autocrat in
Asia would have dared to manifest. They plundered
alike the rich and the poor ; they abolished titles, and
robbed the savings' bank. They did not even profess
to allow the French nation (out of Paris) freedom or
fair play in the exercise of the universal suffrage they
had just proclaimed. They sent out emissaries to the
provinces with authority to displace any functionaries
who held opinions adverse to the governing clique at
Paris, and to use every means to secure the election of
such representatives, and such only, as should be
thorough republicans. Louis Philippe, among all his
oppressions, never ventured upon any attack on the

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 33

freedom of suffrage half so barefaced. The government,
so far from wishing fairly to ascertain the will of the
whole nation, evidently feared the expression of that
will, and were anxious to control it. Most of the active
parties in the Parisian movement shared this feeling ;
they fancied (right or wrong) that the majority of the
French nation were not on their side, — were not
favourable to republican institutions ; and they were
resolved — so ill had they learned the first principles of
liberty — that the voice of the majority should be
silenced or coerced. When the regiments of the Na-
tional Guard assembled to choose their officers, the
pledge exacted from the candidates was this: — "that
in the event of the new convention declaring against a
republic, they would march against them and put them
clown ! " What was this, but to make public profession
of military despotism ? What was this, but a declara-
tion on the part of certain classes of the population of
Paris, — " If the votes of the great majority of French
citizens, honestly ascertained, should decide against our
views, we will unscrupulously trample upon that majo-
rity, and carry out our views by force ? " Accordingly,
when the convention met, the members were compelled
to appear upon the balcony in presence of the armed
mob of the metropolis, and cry Vive la Republique,
without having even a decent interval allowed them for
going through the form of a deliberation. How could
free institutions work among a people who showed
themselves so utterly insensible to the commonest dic-
tates of justice between man and man ?

The same regardlessness of the rights of others, thus
early pronounced by the Provisional Government and
the National Guard, pervaded every class, and every
individual, both in Paris and the other great towns.
No one had the slightest scruple about imposing his

VOL. II. D

34 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE.

own will upon others by force. In all discussions, the
minority were ready to appeal to arms. If out-voted,
they would fight for it. However small the number
who held their opinions, however conscious they were
that the vast mass of the nation was opposed to them,
they still held themselves entitled to compel obedience
to their wishes. Every man maintained his right to
coerce the whole nation. Every vote of the Assembly
was a signal for some party or other who were offended
at it, to " descend into the streets," as the phrase was.
Hence the six months succeeding February, witnessed a
scarcely interrupted succession of actual or attempted
emeutes. How could a representative system flourish
and bear fruit, when the very foundation on which it
rests, — submission to the decision of the electors, un-
equivocally and constitutionally expressed, — was not
merely overlooked or overborne, but openly denied and
scouted ?

A similar1 spirit has animated the course pursued by
all parties even to the date at which we write. The
President and the Assembly preserve an attitude of
mutual and indecorous hostility, instead of mutual for-
bearance and respect. The malcontent minority rail at
the triumphant majority, i. e. the Assembly ; and the
Assembly, forgetting that angry criticism is the inalien-
able right of the minority, endeavours to punish and
gag the press. The defeated Socialists seem incessantly
occupied with plots against the government, and the
alarmed authorities retaliate by a new electoral law
which disfranchises half the constituency of France.
Encroachment is retorted by encroachment ; and ty-
ranny on the one side, and "conspiracy on the other, in-
dicate too plainly how little either party understand the
duties of citizens or the rights of man. " Partout," says
M. Guizot, "les libertes individuelles des citoyens seules
en presence de la volonte unique de la majorite nurne-

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 35

rique de la nation. Partout le principe du despotisme
en face du droit de 1'insurrection ! "

Again, a general regard for truth is the bond, the
tacit postulate, which lies at the very root of every
social relation. In all the daily and hourly transactions
of life, we assume that a man will do what he swears to
do, and has done what he affirms that he has done.
We could not get on without this assumption ; all so-
ciety would be brought to a dead-lock in a single day,
were we compelled to forego it. No concerns, least of
all those in which the citizens take a direct share, as in
the administration of justice or in' municipal govern-
ment, could be carried on, were this postulate once
proved and felt to be a false one. The effect upon the
operation of free institutions, of an habitual disregard
of the obligations of truth and justice, is well illustrated
by the working of trial by jury in Ireland in a certain
class of cases in recent times.

This institution is based upon the assumption that
witnesses will give true evidence, and that jurymen will
a true verdict find according to the evidence, — both
parties swearing that they will do so. If this assump-
tion be correct, trial by jury is the most invaluable of
free institutions ; if the assumption be false, it is of all
institutions the most noxious and treacherous. Where
the assumption is correct, trial by jury is the safeguard
of liberty and the protection of the community ; where
the assumption is incorrect, then trial by jury is the
shield of the wrong-doer, the peril of the good citizen —
" a delusion, a mockery, and a snare ;" — it becomes an
institution, not for discovering, but for concealing truth
—not for administering, but for evading justice — for
compromising, dishonouring, and endangering society.
Now the assumption has long been not correct in Ire-
land ; and it is notorious that it has not been so. In
that country it is well known that where party feeling,

D 2

36 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE.

religious hostility, or class sympathies intervene, neither
the statement of a witness, nor the oath of jurymen, can
be relied on. One instance will suffice. The statement
was Mr. O'Connell's, and was made, we believe, in the
House of Commons. " On one occasion," said the great
agitator, " I was counsel for a man on his trial for
murder. I called only one witness for the defence ; but
that one, anywhere save in Ireland, would have been
sufficient. I put the murdered man into the witness-box,
to prove that he was still alive. No question was raised
as to his identity, but my client was found guilty.1'''
The state trials in Ireland in 1848 brought out the same
truth with the most painful and instructive clearness.
Three men were severally put on their trial for treason
and sedition. About their guilt there was not a doubt :
it was notorious and avowed. They did not even plead
that they had not committed treason ; they simply
argued, after the pattern of the French emeutiers, that
they had a right to commit it. Yet so doubtful was
the decision of an Irish jury felt to be, that the whole
struggle took place, not on the question as to the value
or relevancy of the evidence, but on the striking of the
panel. In the two first cases the prisoners escaped,
because unanimity was required, and two of the jurymen
were partisans : in the third case a conviction was
obtained, because the prisoner chanced to have no
friends in the jury-box. So completely was this ac-
knowledged, that in all the angry discussions which
subsequently took place, the only question argued on
either side turned on the constitution of the jury; —
for on the great issue, that of guilt or innocence, there

* Mr. Lover, in his " Rory O'More," mentions a similar instance.
Mr. Foster (" Letters on Ireland," p. 409.) states, having had the
curiosity to count, that in 1000 instances the statements made before
Lord Devon's commission on oath, have been flatly contradicted on
oath.

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 37

was no difference of opinion. The complaint of the
seditious was that their virtual accomplices were ex-
cluded from the jury-box : the defence of the authorities
was, that this was indispensable in order to obtain an
honest verdict. Both parties were right. But how can
trial by jury work in a country where oaths are of so
little cogency, and where party feeling is so universal,
so vehement, and so unscrupulous, that, to speak plainly,
a prisoner's only choice often lies between a jury of an-
tagonists or a jury of partisans ?

The second national requisite for the successful
working of self-government, is an habitual respect for
established law. Before a people can be trusted either
to make the laws, or to enforce them, they must have
learned the first great lesson of yielding them a cheerful
and reverential obedience. Without the wide diffusion
of this virtue through all ranks, the law can have no
permanence, the administrators of the law no authority.
Without this, what hold could judges and officers have
over the people, by whom they were appointed, by whom
they were removable, and from the will of whom they
derived their mission to control that will ? Where the
great majority of the nation venerate and uphold the
law, the judge and the sheriff act against the malefactors
and the turbulent with the whole power of the commu-
nity ; where it is otherwise, their task is the hopeless
one of casting out Satan by Satan's agency. Conceive
the consequences in Ireland, were legislators, judges,
and officers the direct creatures of the people's choice !
Who would dare to make a just law, or enforce a strin-
gent one ? In America, the great body of the people
still retains much of their ancestral reverence for the
laws — what Carlyle calls "an inveterate and inborn
reverence for the constable's staff," — and a wholesome
education is contending manfully in the same direction.

D 3

38 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE.

Yet even there, we see occasionally alarming indications
of the difficulties which are felt by popularly elected
officers, in cases where the law-makers and the law-
breakers are identical. In France, the despotic and
anomalous power of the police, to which Frenchmen
have been long accustomed to submit, and the extensive
ramifications of the bureaucratic system, which scarcely
leaves full freedom of action in any of the ordinary
transactions of life, have hitherto, in some degree, re-
placed that respect for law which is so sadly wanting
there ; but as these wear out, or are cast off, the con-
sequences cannot fail to develop themselves.

The French have a significant phrase in common
use, le droit d* insurrection — the right of revolt. The
expression, at least the ordinary use of it, speaks
volumes. The right of rising in arms against the
government is with them one of the most precious of
the "rights of man," — a right, too, which they take
care shall not be lost non utendo — a right not, as with
us, kept in the background, in secrecy and silence,
disused and forgotten till oppression has driven wise
men mad, but kept bright and burnished as a daily
weapon, constantly flourished in the face of rulers, and
ready to be acted upon on the most trivial occasions.
To repeat a simile which has become a common-place
with us, — what in England is considered the extreme
medicine of the constitution, is made in France its
daily bread. In the code of French constitutional law,
every man whom the rulers may have injured or dis-
pleased— every man who deems any decisions of the
Chamber unpatriotic or unwise — every man who thinks
the proceedings of the government oppressive, or its
form impolitic, — has the sacred arid inalienable right
of insurrection to fall back upon, and may at once set
up the standard of revolt, and try what fiery and foolish
spirits are rash enough to join him. An Englishman

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 39

would shrink back from any similar enterprise, as being
black with the guilt, and terrible with the penalties, of
treason. A Frenchman has no such feeling : with him
it is no question of right or wrong, but simply of the
chance of failure or success. The right of " cashiering"
his rulers, if they will not do his bidding — if they
persist in doing the bidding of the great mass of his
countrymen instead — he considers to be as indisputably
and inherently vested in him as the right of choosing
his representative, and one to be exercised with almost
as little consideration. Mr. Burke thus describes our
very different English feeling on this matter: — " The
question of dethroning, or, if these gentlemen like the
phrase better, ' cashiering' kings, will always be, as
it has always been, an extraordinary question of state,
and wholly out of the law, — a question (like all other
questions of state) of dispositions, and of means, and of
probable consequences, rather than of positive rights.
As it was not made for common abuses, so it is not to
be agitated by common minds. The speculative line
of demarcation, where obedience ought to end, and
resistance must begin, is faint, obscure, and not easily
definable. It is not a single act, or a single event,
which determines it. Government must be abused and
deranged indeed before it can be thought of; and the
prospect of the future must be as ba<£ as the experience
of the past. When things are in that lamentable con-
dition, the nature of the disease is to indicate the
remedy to those whom nature has qualified to administer
in extremities this critical, ambiguous, bitter potion to
a distempered state. Times, and occasions, and pro-
vocations, will teach their own lesson. The wise will
determine from the gravity of the case ; the irritable,
from sensibility to oppression ; the high-minded, from
disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy

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40 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE.

hands ; the bold and the brave, from the love of honour-
able danger in a generous cause : but, with or without
right, a revolution will always be the very last resource
of the thinking and the good."

A further illustration may be gathered from com-
paring the whole tone of proceedings in state trials for
libel, treason, and sedition, in France and in England.
The contrast is startling and instructive. In England
the sole questions asked are, " What is the law ? and
has the accused violated that law?" To these ques-
tions all parties — judge, prosecutor, and prisoner —
address themselves, and confine themselves. Neither
the counsel for the crown, nor, generally, the counsel
for the prisoner, makes any appeal to the political pre-
dilections of the jury : they are supposed to bring no
such predilections into court. The judge coldly ex-
plains the law; the jury impartially investigate the
fact. If the prisoner is condemned, it is because it has
been made clear that he knowingly broke the law : no
other inquiry is entered into. If he escapes, it is either
because he is able to prove his innocence, — or, as is
more frequently the case, the possibility of his inno-
cence,— or because our almost superstitious reverence
for law allows him to avail himself of some loophole
which its weary technicalities afford. In France, the
prosecutor blazon s*the iniquity of the doctrines broached
by the accused, or the seditious views he is known to
entertain ; and the accused replies, seldom attempting
to prove that he did not publish the libel, or was not
concerned in the emeute, but pleading boldly his droit
d 'insurrection, defending at great length the soundness
of his political opinions, and appealing to the first prin-
ciples of society, the laws of nature, and the rights of
man. We remember to have read an account of one of
these trials, in which the prisoners in their defence left
wholly on one side the question of their guilt or in-

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 41

nocence, and confined themselves to a proof of la
superiorite de leurs principes !

This want of respect for established law is far more
to be deplored than wondered at. How, indeed, should
the French possess it? Since the first ^Revolution,
sixty years ago, swept away all the laws and institu-
tions which were venerable and powerful from the
strength of centuries, none of those by which they were
replaced have lasted long enough to acquire any firm
hold upon the popular mind, or fairly to take root in
the habits and affections of the nation. Every insti-
tution has been liable to be changed long before it had
time to gain a prescriptive title to respect ; everjr law
has stood by its own strength alone ; and France has
found itself in the pitiable, anchorless, rudderless situ-
ation of a nation without antecedents. It is probable
that a least a century of stable government must in-
tervene before Frenchmen can look upon their national
laws with any of the same feelings, with which an
Englishman bows to those which are hallowed to his
mind by their connection with the past and the antiquity
of some eight hundred years.

One of the most essential conditions of success in
self-government, in nations as in individuals, is a certain
sobriety of character. They must have some capacity
of independent thought, some power of resisting the
influence of mere oratory, of withstanding the contagion
of sympathy with numbers, of turning a deaf ear to
high-sounding but unmeaning watchwords. Now, to
be able to do all this implies either unusual natural
solidity of intellect, or a degree of mental cultivation
hitherto rarely to be found in the body of the people.
It is curious, as well as instructive, to observe how
much more readily the populace of most countries,
France and Ireland more especially, can be fired by
grand ideas, and fine, though wild, conceptions, than

42 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE.

by the ablest appeal to their reason or even to their
material interests. They turn with disgust or incre-
dulity from the wise and far-sighted political economist,
and drink in with eager ears the exciting rhapsodies of
the poet. " Gain but their ear (it has been said), and
you will rarely find them fail in their comprehension
of an abstract notion ; whereas they are generally in-
capable of penetrating into any points of detail. Talk
to the starving people of plans, the best devised and
wisest, for giving them bread to eat; try to induce
them to see the positive correctness of your calcu-
lations ; and they will either leave you to discourse to
the winds or will stone you to death, after accusing
you of wishing to take advantage of the public distress.
But entertain them with declamations about glory,
honour, charity, and they will forget their wants in
child-like admiration." Now, there is much that is
beautiful, much even that is hopeful, in this greater
aptitude for the entertainment of high and glowing
images than of material and interested considerations,
in this keener susceptibility of the passions than the
appetites ; but it is a feature in the popular mind
which does not promise well for the success of free
institutions at the time, nor indicate a high capacity
for self-government. It is a peculiarity which makes
a people the easy victims of demagogues, the ready
instruments of every fanatic orator, the prey of every
soured or hungry patriot. It is interesting to see the
French artisan, scarcely able by the strictest frugality
and the hardest toil to maintain his family, yet listening
with eager aspect, swelling attitude, and flashing eyes,
to the haranguer. And what says the harangue ? It
speaks to him of the unblemished honours of the flag
of France, ends every sentence with la gloire et la patrie,
and strives by an appeal to historic memories to arouse
his ancestral antipathy to England. Under the excite-

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 43

ment not only is poverty forgotten, but joyfully ex-
changed for actual starvation, so that some imagined
insult offered to the glory of his country may be
avenged. It is interesting to see the Irishman, with
all his habitual want of order and self-control, touched,
and subdued, and carried away captive by Father
Mathew. His picturesque arid imaginative tempera-
ment was so wrought upon, as to enable him to re-
nounce his favourite vice, and exercise a forbearance
which no regard to his own interests could ever force
upon him. But in both these spectacles, if there is
much t ) interest, there is also much to alarm. They
point to a weakness in the national mind, — a weakness
which, beyond doubt, has its bright and serviceable
side, but still a weakness which has been found to
seriously impair their fitness for the management of
their own affairs, — a weakness which places them at
the mercy of any eloquent misleader, — a weakness
which is at least as easily swayed to evil as to good.
This infirmity is one which the demagogues of both
countries have understood thoroughly, and have worked
most mercilessly for their own bad ends ; which in
France, indeed, Lamartine once turned to temporary
good, but which in Ireland O'Connell turned — also
with one great exception — to incessant and incalcu-
lable mischief.

Further. It is of the last moment that all who are,
or are likely to be, called to administer the affairs of a
free state, should be deeply imbued with the statesman-
like virtues of modesty and caution, and should act
under a profound sense of their personal responsibility.
It is an awful thing to undertake the government of a
great country ; and no man can be any way worthy of
that high calling who does not from his inmost soul feel
it to be so. When we reflect upon the fearful conse-
quences, both to the lives, the material interests, and the

44 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE.

moral well-being of thousands, which may ensue from a
hasty word, an erroneous judgment, a temporary care-
lessness, or lapse of diligence ; when we remember that
every action of a statesman is pregnant with results
which may last for generations after he is gathered to
his fathers ; that his decisions may, and probably must,
affect for good or ill the destinies of future times ; that
peace or war, crime or virtue, prosperity or adversity,
the honour or dishonour of his country, the right or
wrong, wise or unwise solution of some of the mightiest
problems in the progress of humanity, depend upon the
course he may pursue at those critical moments which
to ordinary men occur but rarely, but which crowd the
daily life of a statesman ; the marvel is that men should
be forthcoming bold enough to venture on such a task.
Now', among public men in England this sense of re-
sponsibility is in general adequately felt. It affords an
honourable (and in most cases we believe a true) expla-
nation of that singular discrepancy between public men
when in and when out of office, — that inconsistency
between the promise and the performance, — between
what the leader of the opposition urges the minister to
do, and what the same leader, when minister himself,
actually does, — which is so commonly attributed to less
reputable motives. The independent member may
speculate and criticise at his ease ; may see, as he thinks,
clearly, and with an undoubting and imperious con-
viction, what course on this or that question ought to
be pursued ; may feel so unboundedly confident in the
soundness of his views, that he cannot comprehend or
pardon the inability of ministers to see as he sees, and
to act as he would wish; but as soon as the over-
whelming responsibilities of office are his own, — as
soon as he finds no obstacle to the carrying out of his
plans except such as may arise from the sense that he
does so at the risk of his country's welfare and his own

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 45

reputation, — he is seized with a strange diffidence, a
new-born modesty, a mistrust of his own judgment
which he never felt before ; he re-examines, he hesitates,
he delays ; he brings to bear upon the investigation all
the new light which official knowledge has revealed to
him ; and finds at last that he scruples to do himself
what he had not scrupled to insist upon before. So
deep-rooted is this sense of responsibility with our
countrymen, that whatever parties a crisis of popular
feeling might carry into power, we should have com-
paratively little dread of rash, and no dread of corrupt,
conduct on their part : we scarcely know the public
man who, when his country's destinies were committed
to his charge, could for a moment dream of acting other-
wise than with scrupulous integrity, and to the best of
his utmost diligence and most cautious judgment," — at
all events till the dulness of daily custom had laid his
self-vigilance asleep. We are convinced that, were
Lord Stanhope and Mr. D'Israeli to be borne into office
by some grotesque freak of fortune, even they would
become sobered as by magic, and would astonish all
beholders, not by their vagaries, but by their steadiness
and discretion.

Now, of this wholesome sense of awful responsibility,
we see no indications among public men in France.
Dumont says, in his " Eecollections of Mirabeau," " I
have sometimes thought that if you were to stop a
hundred men indiscriminately in the streets of Paris
and London, and propose to each to undertake the
government, ninety-nine of the Londoners would refuse
and ninety-nine of the Parisians would accept." In fact
we find that it is only one or two of the more experienced
habitues of office who in France ever seem to feel any
hesitation. Ordinary deputies, military men, journalists,
men of science, accept, with a naive and simple courage,
posts for which, except that courage, they possess no

4:6 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE.

single qualification. But this is not the worst ; they
never hesitate, at their country's risk and cost, to carry
out their own favourite schemes to an experiment ; in
fact, they often seem to value office mainly for that
purpose, and to regard their country chiefly as the
corpus vile on which the experiment is to be made.
Diffidence — filial respect for their native land — are
sentiments, apparently, alike unknown. To make way
for their cherished theories, they relentlessly sweep out
of sight the whole past, and never appear to contem-
plate either the possibility of failure, or the weight of
parricidal guilt which failure will cast upon them. Like
the daughters of Pelias, they unscrupulously " hack
their aged parent in pieces, and put him into the kettle
of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds
and wild incantations, they may regenerate the paternal
constitution, and renovate their father's life."

Few men ever lived so well entitled as Burke to try
their hand at constructing a theoretical constitution and
at setting it to work. But, though the first of political
philosophers, he was to the last unable to conceive " how
any man can have brought himself to that pitch of pre-
sumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte-
llanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he
pleases." This point, however, has been attained by
many of the most active politicians of France. The
events of 1848 too clearly showed it. The history of the
strange proceedings in February of that year, and of
Lamartine's part in them, as detailed by him in his
history of the late revolution, displays more strikingly
than any words of ours could do how utterly the portion
of patriotism which consists in reverence for country,
is absent from the thoughts of even the principal per-
former on that occasion. Lamartine relates, that on
reaching the Chamber of Deputies on the morning of
the 24th February, he was accosted and led into a

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 47

private room by seven or eight individuals, chiefly
journalists, who addressed him in the extraordinary
terms which we formerly quoted : —

" L'heure presse ; les evenemens sont suspendus sur 1'inconnu ;
nous sommes republicans ; nos convictions, nos pensees, nos vies,

sont devouees a la republique Nous ne 1'abandonne-

rons jamais; mais nous pouvons Fajourner et la suspendre
devant les interets superieurs a nos yeux a la republique meme,
les interets de la patrie. La France est elle mure pour cette
forme de gouvernement ? 1'accepterait-elle sans resistance ? . . .
Voila 1'etat de nos esprits, voila nos scrupules; resolvons-les.
Nous ne vous connaissons pas, nous ne vous flattens pas, mais
nous vous estimons. Le peuple invoque votre nom. II a
confiance en vons ; vous etes a nos yeux 1'homme de la circon-
stance. Ce que vous direz sera dit. Ce que vous voudrez sera
fait. Le regne de Louis Philippe est fini ; aucune reconciliation
n'est possible entre lui et nous. Mais une continuation de
royaute temporaire sous le nom d'un enfant, sous la main foible
d'une femine, et sous la direction d'un ministre populaire,
mandataire du peuple, cher aux republicans, peut-elle clore la
crise? .... Voulez-vous etre ce ministre? .... Le
parti-republicain se donne authentiquement a vous par nos voix.
Nous sommes prets a prendre Fengagement formel de vous
porter au pouvoir par la main desormais invincible de la revolu-
tion qui gronde a ces portes, de vous y soutenir, de vous y per-
petuer Yotre cause sera la notre."

Lamartine asked jive minutes for reflection ; and
then, without a shadow of diffidence or compunction,
decided in favour of a republic, — and within six hours
was accordingly installed, as the head of a Provisional
Government, at the Hotel de Ville.

Now, consider well the salient points of this strange
narrative. While Louis Philippe still reigns at the
Tuilleries, —while the city is in tumult, and occasional
shots are heard, — while the new ministers are insanely
withdrawing the troops under the idea that the people
will be satisfied with the concessions of the monarch

48 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE.

and the appointment of a reforming administration,
half a dozen journalists accost an influential deputy,
inform him that the old government is at an end, that
the monarch is, or shall be, deposed, — offer him the
helm of state, as being in their gift, and crown the
monstrous proceeding by giving him Jive minutes to
decide whether the future government of France shall
be a republic, or a constitutional monarchy under the
Count of Paris! Lamartine expresses no surprise, —
he is not shocked at the astounding audacity of the
proposal, — he is not terrified by the face-to-face view
of conspiracy and treason, — he does not disclaim the
influence which is ascribed to him, — he does not shrink
from the tremendous magnitude of the question sub-
mitted to his decision ; but, " covering his face with his
hands, and leaning his elbows on the table," he rapidly
runs over the arguments on both sides, for and against,
and then — in less time than an English banker would
take to decide upon the acceptance of a dubious bill, or
a merchant to decide upon a purchase or a sale of
stock — he raises his head, and with the confident dog-
matism of an oracle, pronounces the fiat which expels
the House of Orleans from France, and changes at once
a dynasty and a constitution ! We question whether
all history can produce a parallel instance of sublime
assurance.

Some nations need, and are accustomed to, a much
greater amount of government than others. In that
case, their habits, and the necessities generated by those
habits, present serious obstacles to the satisfactory
working of a more popular organisation. A people
reared in that condition of swathed and bandaged help-
lessness which bureaucracy inevitably engenders, has a
long and difficult track to traverse, before it is fitted
either to use free institutions, or to maintain them.
A business-like training in the school of municipal

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 49

self-government would seem to be an indispensable
preparative for managing the affairs of a republic. In
America and in England it is surprising how little
government we require ; and how much of that little
we supply to ourselves through the instrumentality of
local administration. Much of our taxation, and many
of our public works, we settle at parochial or county
meetings. We may pass year after year, without ever
becoming conscious of any direct action of government
upon us. So rarely does it step in to affect officially
the ordinary life of an Englishman, either to guide or
to control, that he may pass through his whole career
without becoming cognisant of its existence, except
through the periodical demands of the tax-gatherer.
He is accustomed to guide himself, to decide for himself,
to arrange for himself in all the transactions of the
world, without the interference or consultation of any
higher power. But in France and Austria, and through-
out the Continent generally, the case is as much the
reverse of this as possible. In almost every proceeding
and event of private life, the action of government is
felt, — peremptory and immediate. The public func-
tionaries are omnipresent, omniscient, and almost om-
nipotent. In the choice of a profession, in the conduct
of a business, in contracting a marriage, in making a
will, the central authority interferes to direct, to license,
to sanction, to prohibit. The Frenchman and the Aus-
trian experiences, endures, and therefore perhaps by
this time needs, twenty times as much government as
the Englishman or the American. Hence, free insti-
tutions bestow upon him, not personal liberty, but
merely the power of selecting the particular set of
busy-bodies who shall fetter that liberty. His discon-
tent remains the same under all changes ; for he feels
himself little, if at all, more free under the republic
than under the monarchy, — the heavy and irritating

VOL. II. E

50 DIFFICULTIES OF KEPUBLICAN FRANCE.

tyranny of the bureaucracy existing equally under
both. He is as much governed by other people as he
was before, and left as little to the government of
himself; and feeling this, as Carlyle would call it,
" inarticulately, " he is as little satisfied with the idol
he has set up as with that he has thrown down.

Where the functions of the ruling powers are limited
to the decision of peace or war, the maintenance of
order, and the execution of settled laws, the men who
are to execute these functions may be chosen and
changed by the popular will more or less wisely, more
or less frequently and rashly, yet without any very
serious consequences in ordinary times. But when
these functions are extended over every department
and almost every action of social life ; when the rulers
undertake to dictate to every man what he shall do,
and when and how he shall do it ; when all those local
and parochial arrangements, which we make for our-
selves and among ourselves, are settled at the tedious
discretion of a central power, it is clear that a class of
persons with wholly different qualities arid powers are
needed : you then require men specially trained and
long habituated to the business of administration, in-
dependent of the dislike of those whom they are to drill
and lead, and not liable to be removed through popular
caprice and replaced by inexperienced successors. It
seems almost a truism to say, that the less government
a people require, the fitter are they for governing them-
selves ; and that the more independent they are of
external guidance and control, the greater the chance
of popular institutions succeeding among them.

It now remains to point out a few of the items that
enter into the price which we find ourselves called
upon to pay for the blessing of a popular parliamentary
government, — even inj;his country, where our suffrage

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 51

is still so limited, and our aristocracy still so powerful ;
— a price which would probably be far heavier else-
where.

The first great disadvantage inherent in representative
government, where the basis of the representation is at
all extended, is this; — it brings to the head of affairs
not necessarily the wisest statesmen nor the ablest
administrators, but simply the most effective speakers
and the most popular leaders. In a country, — where
the body of the people are so much in the habit, and
cling so much to the privilege, of expressing their
opinions in public meetings, and where, periodically,
the candidates for their suffrages address them from
the hustings, — rhetorical powers will of course be in
the greatest demand, and cannot fail to command for
their possessor a success and a position in public esti-
mation out of all proportion to their real value. In a
representative assembly, too, where all the measures of
government and all the interests of the nation are
topics of daily viva voce discussion, — promptitude and
vigour in debate, the "art of dressing up statements
for the House," readiness of speech, quick perception of
the fallacies of an opponent, practised skill in concealing
one's own, are the qualities which raise a senator to
eminence. It is these endowments, far more than
profound views or administrative ability, which give
the leadership in popular assemblies ; and it is from
among the leaders that, by constitutional etiquette, if
not of constitutional necessity, the ministers of state
are chosen. Such men cannot, it is felt, be passed over
in the distribution of offices, whatever may be the idea
formed of their official capacity. So large an aris-
tocratic element still lingers in our constitution (long
may it linger!) that mere eloquence, or brilliant de-
bating skill, will not often alone give the leadership
of a party in England ; but it is even here a main step,

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52 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE.

and elsewhere must become the main step to it ; and
the position is universally recognised as constituting in
itself a title to the high places of a new administration.
The men who occupy the front rank as debaters in the
Houge of Commons, or in the French Chambers, feel
that they have a prescriptive right to the chief offices
of state whenever their party comes into power ; with
perhaps this difference, that in England it is speaking,
and in France writing, which confers this special dis-
tinction. Now it is evident, and is daily proved, that
lucid statement, powerful rapid argument, eloquent
declamation, skilful sarcasm, fierce invective, — all the
elements which go to make up the mighty orator, —
not only differ widely from, but are seldom lodged in
the same mind with, those which concur to form a
sagacious statesman, viz. sobriety of view, tenacity of
purpose, comprehensiveness of vision, patience in in-
quiry, wisdom which learns from the past, prophetic
insight which can discern the direction of the future.
It is probable that these endowments are found more
frequently, and in richer measure, among those who
speak seldom and who speak ill, than among the more
prominent and brilliant debaters. It is possible that
the chief, to whom the task of forming an adminis-
tration is intrusted, may be fully aware of this fact, —
may distrust the salient brilliancy, and recognise the
value of the hidden gem ; but he must succumb to the
necessities which representative government imposes.
Even while we write, the evil which we are pointing
out forms one of the chief embarrassments of the Pro-
tectionist party, when speculating on the prospect of
their return to office. The position occupied by Mr.
Disraeli, long their most pointed and striking speaker,
and latterly their recognised leader in the Lower
House, unquestionably singles him out as entitled to
one of the principal secretaryships of state in the event

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 53

of a Protectionist administration. Lord Stanley is the
last man who with any grace could deny the validity
of the claim according to etiquette and custom ; and
Mr. Disraeli is riot a man to waive it. Yet so uni-
versally, even among those who most admire his talents,
is his incapacity for such a responsible situation felt
and acknowledged, that few prime ministers would dare
to place him in it. The danger of appointing him
would be even greater than the danger of omitting
him ; and either difficulty is great enough to render
the formation of a Protectionist ministry almost im-
possible.*,

In England, the mischiefs arising from the cause we
have here indicated, are kept in check by our national
esteem for solid character; also by the opportunity
which the work of parliament offers to men of general
ability for proving their several powers, independently
of mere oratory, and of acquiring a sufficient facility of
speech for the transaction of ordinary business. But
it is evident that the more excitable the people, the more
extensive and dangerous this evil. Among nations so
susceptible to eloquence as the Irish and the French,
men like O'Connell and Lamartine, though possessed of
no particular qualification, and with almost every dis-
qualification, for the government of others, might
acquire a degree of influence, which could not fail to be
attended with the most fatal consequences.

It would seem to be the tendency of all nations in the
enjoyment of free institutions, more and more to super-
sede the original functions of their legislatures, and to
carry on in society at large, by popular meetings, or
through the medium of the press, those political discus-

* Sheridan and O'Connell may be specified as recent examples of
distinguished debaters in the House of Commons, and in one sense
undoubted leaders, whom yet it would have been fatal to appoint to
influential offices.

E 3

54 DIFFICULTIES OF KEPUBLICAN FRANCE.

sions for which the Representative Assembly is the re-
cognised arena. The effect of this is to approximate the
Legislative Chambers to a sort of lits de justice, for the
registration of the popular decrees. Whether this be or
be not an evil, is not here the question : the tendency is
clearly observable in England as well as in America and
France. The same cause operates to reduce ministers
from the rank of originating, initiating, and really ruling
statesmen, to that of mere executors of the popular will.
The class of qualifications we require from them is
thus materially changed ; administrative ability is more
specially needed than a capacity even for philosophic
legislation ; and as there is now no place or little open-
ing for commanding statesmen, it becomes more impor-
tant that we should have able administrators — men who
can carry out with skill and judgment the recorded
decisions of the nation.

Another of the drawbacks inherent in popular govern-
ment is that the turmoil, tumult, and contention it
involves, deter men of thoughtful minds, peaceful tem-
pers, and retired habits from coming forward to bear
their part in it. The more popular the system, the
pressure of this objection becomes more sensibly felt.
Now, the object of every nation is, or should be, to call
to its councils and place at the head of its affairs the
ablest and most virtuous of its citizens. That form of
constitution which could show that it best secured this
end, would go far towards showing that it was itself the
best. Now, the honest and deeply reflective man, whose
views of the true interests of a nation are soundest and
most comprehensive, will often be found of a character
which unfits him for conciliating the popular voice, and
inspires in him a distaste for public struggles. The
same habits of patient and quiet thought which have
guided him to wisdom, indispose him to carry that
wisdom to a noisy and contentious market. The pro-

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FHANCE. 55

found and subtle understanding which is an invaluable
assistant at the Council Board, is commonly accompanied
with a refined and fastidious taste which shrinks from
the contest with reluctant colleagues, angry opponents,
or an unappreciating and coarse constituency. Thus
we find that in democracies, and more or less in all
governments which approach that form, the most useful
men are often shut out from public life. That they
allow themselves to be so, is no doubt partly a weakness
and a dereliction of duty on their side ; but when the
highest kind of wisdom is likely to be overlooked, and
their duties are made irksome to the wise and good, the
public will have to bear by far the greatest share both
of the penalty and blame. It is an ill-omen for a nation,
that calm, delicate, and philosophical minds should abjure
her service, and retire into privacy. The mischief is
already perceptible in England, notwithstanding the
limitation of our suffrage, the variety of our consti-
tuencies, and the generally correct and gentlemanly
spirit of our popular assembly. But in France it is
seriously felt ; and in America it has long been a source
of regret and alarm to her most intelligent sons.

Thirdly, — representative government prevents our
chief oificers of state from regarding merit in the distri-
bution of their appointments as much, or as exclusively,
as the interest of the country demands, and as we be-
lieve they themselves would wish. The applicants for
every vacant office are innumerable ; and their respective
claims are supported by influential parties whose alliance,
from public motives, must be ri vetted, whose hostility
must not be risked, or to whom a debt of gratitude is
owing for former services. The distribution of patronage
is, and we fear must inevitably be, materially affected
by a view to the purchase of parliamentary support.
Paley in his day shocked the more moral sections of the
public by broadly stating the extent, in which influence

E 4

56 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE.

had succeeded to prerogative : and in itself this is un-
questionably an evil and a danger. But we do not
mention it as a reproach to any set of ministers, when
kept within due bounds. It is to be regarded rather as
one of the inherent defects in a parliamentary system, —
as part of the price which we pay for representative in-
stitutions,— a price which the sense and virtue of our
statesmen, aided by the watchfulness of the people, it
may be hoped, will continue to prevent from becoming
too exorbitant. Indeed, a marked improvement in this
respect has taken place in England within the last few
years. Still the danger remains one which only a gene-
rally high tone of public morality can keep at bay ; and
it is one to which France is more especially exposed from
the immense number of places at the disposal of the
government, — we have seen it put at nearly 600,000,
— and the universal spirit of place-hunting, stimulated,
though not . generated, under the late dynasty. The
spirit is of older date. Madame de Stael bears witness
to it under the empire.

Under a parliamentary government, an inordinate
amount of the time and strength of our statesmen is
wasted in parrying attacks on themselves and their
measures : days and hours that ought to be devoted to
the silent and undisturbed study of the country's wants,
are habitually consumed in meeting the assaults of im-
placable and sleepless adversaries ; and energies that
should be spent in the actual work of administration,
are frittered away in the far more harassing task of per-
sonal defence. This is a sore and a growing evil, and
one under which the public service suffers most deplor-
ably. Any senator, whom hostile feeling, love of noto-
riety, or genuine though restless patriotism, prompts to
bring charges of partiality, malversation, or injudicious
conduct agairist a minister, may occupy the time of the
House and the country in the investigation of charges

DIFFICULTIES OE REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 57

which often turn out frivolous or groundless ; and the
minister is called away from his appropriate duties —
already far too heavy for his strength — to rake up the
ashes of long-forgotten transactions, and prepare and
collect documents needed for his justification, but useless
for any other purpose. We have seen many instances
of this in our days, — some indefensible enough of very
recent date. It is well, no doubt, that all public
measures, especially such as are to be embodied into
laws, should undergo the ordeal of the severest and
most searching criticism ; it is well too that all public
men should feel that they are acting in the light of day,
and before an audience, by whom their characters will
be considered public property, and no lapse or failing
be permitted to pass with impunity; — but in these
points, as in so many others, the immoderate use of a
valuable privilege may be a serious drawback on its
value, — so much so, that the price paid for it at last
may depopularise and discredit what ought to be the
grand censorial office of a House of Commons. Popu-
lar bodies will always want reminding more or less of
the celebrated protest of their most illustrious member
to his constituents at Bristol: "I must beg leave just
to hint to you, that we may suffer very great detriment
by being open to every talker. It is not to be imagined
how much service is lost from spirits full of activity and
full of energy, who are pressing to great and capital
objects, when you oblige them to be continually looking
back. Whilst they are defending one service, they
defraud you of a hundred. Applaud us when we run ;
console us when we fall ; cheer us when we recover ;
but let us pass on — for God's sake, let us pass on."

But this is not the only evil arising from the same
cause. The constant, pervading recollection that they
have to run the gauntlet betwixt ranks of hostile
critics, almost inevitably compels ministers to frame

58 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE.

their measures with a view to the ordeal through which
they will have to pass, rather than with a sole reference
to the public good. They construct, not the best they
are capable of, but the most passable. Statesmen under
an autocratic government are at liberty to bring forward
such enactments as diligent inquiry and practised sa-
gacity satisfy them will be most conducive to the public
weal : they can disregard the opposition or the doubts
of those less informed or less far-sighted than themselves,
and can trust to time to vindicate the wisdom of their
views. But statesmen under a representative system
are unable thus to appeal from the present to the future :
they can pass no measures for which they cannot make
out a case clear and satisfactory to the public at the
moment : their projects must be plausible, as well as
sound, — they must seem, as well as be, wise and expe-
dient, — and often the reality must be sacrificed to the
seeming. Here, again, the extent of the mischief will
be measured by the degree to which the democratic
element prevails in the assembly ; since that will pro-
bably be the measure of the degree in which the wisdom
of the trained statesman surpasses the wisdom of the
legislative many.

It will be readily believed that we have been led to
dwell upon the difficulties and drawbacks inherent in
the working of free institutions with no idea of dispa-
raging them, or casting doubts upon their value ; but
in order to warn those nations which are new to them,
and those which are striving after them, that, when
they have won them, their work is not ended, often
indeed only half begun ; that these institutions are not
unmixed blessings, nor self-acting charms; that their
real value must depend upon the wisdom and the
virtue of those who manage them. In themselves they
can confer neither personal freedom, nor good govern-

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 59

ment, nor national prosperity ; they are simply a means
of obtaining these signal advantages. They are a spell
of power, but not of power for good alone. They afford
a field for the exercise of all patriotic virtues: while
they dispense with none. For France this warning is
especially needed ; since, in truth, she is trying an ex-
periment which, taken in all its collateral circumstances,
is altogether new. The apparent similarity of her insti-
tutions to those of England and America should not
blind her to this vital fact. She is trying the experi-
ment of the most completely democratic government the
world ever saw — with the broad basis of a suffrage all
but universal — among a people the vast numerical
majority of whom are not only defective in general edu-
cation, but are wholly destitute of that special political
education which habits of municipality (so to speak)
can alone bestow. In America general education is
cared for, and universally spread among the people to
an unparalleled degree ; in no country is so large an
annual sum willingly raised and expended for this noble
purpose. Severe economists in everything else, they
are prodigal in this. But this is not all — the Ameri-
cans have an instinctive faculty for self-government —
a faculty which is kept in continual practice. They
govern themselves in every detail of social life ; in every
town, in every village, in every hamlet, they can at
once extemporise a municipal administration, without
the least aid from the central power. By this means
their political education is continually going on ; every
American is early and daily accustomed to discuss and
act in political affairs ; and the result is, that he under-
stands these when he understands anything, and often
when his education is deplorably defective on all other
points. In England, it is true, though political train-
ing and habits of combined action are far more widely
diffused than in France, yet the mass of our people are

60 DIFFICULTIES OF EEPUBLICAN FRANCE.

nearly as uneducated ; but then we have a very limited
suffrage, and a still powerful aristocracy. France, in
her perilous political experiment, possesses neither the
safeguards of America nor those of England.

We do not mean to predict that therefore the experi-
ment must fail — we hope better things ; but we say
that it must encounter dangers severer than have
menaced either of its prototypes ; and that its success
must depend upon the manifestation of qualities to
which Frenchmen have not yet made good their claim.
Their perils are obvious ; and we think their course is
clear. It will not mend the matter to seek, either by
fraud or force, to give the cards another shuffle. Having
based their constitution on universal suffrage, and
having thus secured a fair and simple means of ascer-
taining the popular will, their plain duty is not to flinch
from the consequences of this fundamental principle,
but to bow to that will as the supreme law. It is more
sensible and more conservative than they suppose. Let
them enlighten it as fast as they may — change it when
they can by eloquence and reason ; but obey it unre-
servedly while unchanged. Let it be recognised on the
part of all — as an axiom of their understanding, a
dogma of their creed, a fixed, unquestionable rule of
their public morals — that the majority must rule ; —
that, on the one hand, any appeal to arms or to secret
conspiracy on the part of the minority is treason to the
majesty of the law, for which no dishonour can be too
deep, no penalty too sharp or peremptory ; that, on the
other hand, (as a correlative proposition) any attempt
by their Rulers to coerce, prevent, or vitiate that free
expression of the popular voice by which only the real
majority can be ascertained, is an equal treason arid
equal crime.

Majorities and minorities have reciprocal rights and

DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE. 61

duties. Any tampering with the fair broad basis of the
suffrage — any fetters upon free discussion — any re-
strictions on the decent freedom of the press — are, on
the part of the victorious majority, as clear, undoubted
violations of the rights of their antagonists, as insurrec-
tion and conspiracies would be on the part of the defeated
minority. While every man has a vote, and full freedom
in the expression of his views, no excuse can exist for
violence or secret plots. On the other hand, while
every man bows to the decision of the aggregate votes
of the community, no excuse can exist for tyranny on
the side of the dominant party. Everything must be
decided by votes, and votes must be gained by discus-
sion. This is the inevitable corollary of the Revolution :
in accepting it frankly, and following it out boldly, lies
now the only hope of freedom or salvation — the endea-
vour to escape from it can lead only to bloodshed and
confusion. In a forbearing respect for each other's
rights the antagonist parties will do well to seek safety
and peace. For if peace is their object, to this they
must come at last. Otherwise, as long as each persists
in encroaching on the power and province of the other
— in pursuing secretly ulterior designs incompatible
with loyalty to the constitution they have sworn to
maintain — in employing power, when they have ob-
tained it, to cripple and disarm their opponents — in
refusing allegiance to any government, and obedience to
any law, which does not embody their own crotchets,
or which is not established by their own party — we
can see no prospect but continued turbulence and final
anarchy. If the President will make secret war on the
Assembly, and intrigue for an illegal augmentation or
continuance of power — if the Assembly will thwart the
President and encroach upon his functions — if the con-
servative majority will fetter the press, and disfranchise

62 DIFFICULTIES OF REPUBLICAN FRANCE.

half France, because it fears the Socialist minority —
while the Socialist minority lives, moves, and breathes
in a perpetual conspiracy against government and order
— the issue cannot be either distant or doubtful ; and,
end how it may, the result cannot but be lastingly in-
jurious to France, and discrediting to the cause of
Representative Government all over the world.

63

FRANCE SINCE 1848.*

FRANCE is, XUT s^op^'i/, the land of experiment, as Eng-
land is the land of compromise. There is scarcely a
religious, political, or social experiment she has not
tried; scarcely a religious, political, or social phase
which she has not passed through. The form of Ro-
manism in its narrowest and harshest bigotry which
she exhibited towards the close of the reign of Louis
XIV., was exchanged under his successors for a wild,
angry, aggressive infidelity. This in its turn was suc-
ceeded by a cold and contemptuous indifference, which
is now giving place to a somewhat more hopeful spirit
in the poetical and mystical faith of Lamennais and
Lamartine among the adherents of the old creed, and
to the stiff and dogmatic opinions of Guizot, Coquerel,
and Quinet among the votaries of the new. In polity
France was at one time a military aristocracy, when
the Guises and the Condes were almost the equals of
the reigning prince. Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis
XIV. curbed the power of these rival potentates, and
established a central and relentless despotism, which
lasted till 1789, and was then followed in rapid succes-
sion by the most democratic of republics and the most
stern of military empires, — by a restoration, a second
revolution, a constitutional limited monarchy, a third
revolution, and an anomalous, ambiguous, tottering
republic. The social changes which the country has
undergone have been no less startling. Vassals and serfs

* From the " North British Review."
Revue des deux Mondes. Paris : 1849, 1850.

64 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

till sixty years ago, the people suddenly became, first,
the equals,, then the tyrants of their former masters;
and after losing their power under the empire, and
being firmly repressed under the succeeding dynasties,
they saw Communism for one short period actually tri-
umphant and in power, and are still struggling to replace
it at the Luxembourg. The middle classes, non-existent
or insignificant under the old monarchy, and unwisely
despised by Napoleon, have been dominant since 1830,
and promise to remain so still ; while the aristocracy,
formerly the proudest and mightiest in Europe, have
sunk into apparently hopeless impotence, retaining even
their titles with difficulty, and in occasional abeyance.
Hitherto, in all the manifold forms which her govern-
ment and her society have assumed, France has been
almost equally unfortunate: she has travelled round
the whole circle of national possibilities, and like
Milton's Satan, has contrived constantly " to ride with
darkness."

When the revolution of 1848 once more summoned
her to the task of reconstruction, that task was far
more difficult than at any former period. In 1789 her
course was comparatively clear, and her materials com-
paratively rich. There were scandalous and universally
recognised abuses to be removed ; enormous grievances
to be redressed ; shameful oppressions to be cancelled ;
and rights long and cruelly withheld to be conferred.
There might be danger in all these changes; but the
changes were rendered necessary by decency and justice;
and the necessity was clearly seen. The old theories of
government and society were to be swept away, but the
new ones had been long readyt o take their place. Men
might be mistaken as to the value of the objects they
had at heart, and might overestimate the advantages
which were to flow from their attainment; but they
had no doubt or confusion as to what these objects

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 65

were. They knew what they wanted. The enthusiasm
of the reformers might be irrational, and their faith
fanatical; but they had a faith and an enthusiasm as
earnest as ever carried martyrs unflinching to the stake.
They had a new political framework to construct, but
they had the constituent elements of that framework
ready to their hand: they had an existing though a
damaged monarchy ; they had an aristocracy, frivolous,
corrupt, and haughty, but still retaining some of the
better elements of nobility within its bosom, and num-
bering many generous and worthy men among its
ranks ; and they had a tiers-etat, indignant at past op-
pressions, thirsting for the promised freedom, energetic,
trusting, simple, and with a loyalty not yet utterly
extinguished. The court, the clergy, the high nobility
were discredited and corrupt; but corruption had not
yet penetrated the heart of the common people. They
had a hard task to fulfil, but the means of its ac-
complishment were within reach: there was devotion,
energy, and zeal in' ample measure — there was high
virtue and aspiring genius — there was eloquence of the
loftiest order, and courage tried in many a conflict, all
girding up their loins and buckling on their armour for
the struggle.

In 1799, the task was a clearer and a ruder one still
— it was simply to replace an anarchy of which all
were sick and weary, by a strong government of any
kind. In 1830, it was simply to enthrone a monarch
who would govern according to the law, in the place of
one who sought to govern by his own foolish and
wicked will. But in 1848, when to the amazement of
all and with scarcely any note of warning, the monarch
fled and the dynasty and the constitution crumbled
away like dust; and when the social as well as the
political structure seemed to be resolved into its original
elements, France saw before it a labour of a far more

VOL. II. F

66 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

herculean cast, surrounded with far more formidable
difficulties, and demanding a profounder wisdom. It
was not the reconstruction of a shattered cabinet — it
was not the restoration of a fallen dynasty — it was not
even the reform and purification of a partial and per-
verted constitution : — it was the re-edification of society
itself, — of a society corrupt to its very core, — in which
all the usual constituents of the social edifice were poi-
soned, damaged, discredited, or non-existent — in which
the monarchy was despised — in which the aristocracy
was powerless — in which the clergy was without in-
fluence or general respect — in which the leading poli-
ticians could not furnish forth a single man able to
command the confidence of the people — in which the
middle classes were hopelessly selfish and devoted to
material interests, and the mass of the lower orders
were enduring severe privations, and swayed to and fro
by the wildest theories and the most impracticable
aspirations.

The purely political difficulties which presented them-
selves to the reconstructing statesmen of 1848, were the
least they had to encounter. Yet these were embar-
rassing enough. When James II. abdicated or was
dismissed from the English throne in 1688, he had only
one rival and possible successor. The nation, too, as
far as it could be said to be divided at all, was divided
between the adherents of James and those of William of
Orange. The old parties of Cromwell's days were
extinct or powerless. But in France there were, and
are still, four distinct parties, — any two of them ca-
pable by their junction of paralysing and checkmating
the others, — any three of them, by their union, able
to overpower and drive out the fourth. There were
the old Legitimists, who acknowledged no monarch
but the exiled Count de Chambord ; not strong in
numbers, or in influence, or in genius ; inexperienced
and unskilful in political action, and singularly defective

FRANCE SINCE 1848, 67

in political sagacity; strangely blind to the signs of the
times ; living in dreams of the past and visions of the
future; — but strong in this one point, that they alone
of all the parties which divided France, had a living
political faith,- firm religious convictions, earnest an-
cestral and traditional affections, a distinct principle to
fight for, and an acknowledged banner to rally round.
Though not numbering many adherents or vassals even
in the remoter and less altered provinces, their position
in society as the undoubted heads of the polite and
fashionable world, and embracing the oldest and most
respected families of the ancient aristocracy, gave them
a certain influence which, much as the prestige of high
birth has been dissipated in France, was still not
inconsiderable.

Next to them came the Imperialists — those whom
recollections of former glory, and worship of the memory
of the most wonderful man of modern times, attached to
anything that bore the name or the impress of Napoleon.
Their chief strength lay in the army, whose veterans
looked upon their great captain almost as on a demigod,
whose soldiers had known no spoil, and whose marshals
no glory, since the empire had departed, whose thoughts
were always dwelling on the campaigns of Jena and
Marengo, who were constantly thirsting to renew the
triumphs of Austerlitz, and to wipe out the discomfiture
of Waterloo. But, besides the army, this party could
count a great number of adherents among the middle
classes, who remembered how Napoleon had restored
order and stability at home, while he extended the
boundaries and the influence of France abroad ; how he
had opened by force new Continental markets for their
produce ; how he had stimulated industry, protected
commerce, and covered the land with roads, bridges,
and public institutions. Among the commercial people,
too, there were many who regretted the times when

p 2

68 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

commissaries and contractors grew wealthy in a single
year, and when a hardy speculation or a glorious cam-
paign supplied wherewithal to found and endow a
family. The peasantry of France, too, were Buona-
partists almost to a man, as far as they had any political
predilections at all. It was Napoleon who had re-
organised society after the horrors of the revolution.
If it was Napoleon who had taken their sons and
brothers as conscripts, it was he also who had led them
on to renown, and often to wealth and distinction. He
wrote his name indelibly on the very soil in every
department of France ; his is literally the only name
known in the agricultural provinces and among the
ignorant and stationary cultivators of the land. The
demagogues who agitated France and the ruffians who
ruined her before his time, as well as the monarchs who
have ruled her since, have passed away and left no
trace, — but- Napoleon is remembered and regretted
everywhere ; his is the only fame which has survived
the repeated catastrophes of sixty years, and floats un-
ingulfed on the waters of the deluge. Many of the pea-
santry have never realised his death. Many even believe,
incredible as it may seem, that it is he himself who now
rules France. The overwhelming majority which elected
Louis Napoleon to the Presidency surprised no one who
has had an opportunity of conversing with the peasantry
in the less visited districts of the country.

The third party was the Orleanists, or adherents of
the existing dynasty. They were numerous and
powerful, arid comprised many sections. They included
a great majority of the middle ranks, nearly the whole
of the commercial classes, and five-sixths of the practical,
sober, and experienced politicians of the land. Besides
those who were attached to the government by long con-
nection, by old habit, by services rendered or benefits
received, the Orleans dynasty rallied round it all the
friends of constitutional liberty, all admirers of the

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 69

English system, all who hoped by means of the charter
— imperfect and mutilated as it was — and of the two
Chambers — restricted as was the suffrage, and corrupt
as was often the influence brought to bear upon the
elections — gradually to train France to a purer freedom,
and a higher degree of self-government; to tide over
the period of national boyhood and inexperience, and
navigate the vessel of the state through the rocks and
shoals which menaced it, into smoother waters and more
tranquil times; — all the moneyed men, too, to whom
confusion, uncertainty, and change are fraught with
impoverishment and ruin ; all that class, so numerous,
especially in Paris, who lived by supplying the wants of
travellers and foreign residents ; all whose idol was
order, by whatever means it might be enforced, and at
whatever price it might be purchased, and who saw no
chance of peace or stability save under Louis Philippe's
rule ; and, finally, all belonging to that vast and inde-
scribable section of every nation, who owned no allegi-
ance, who worshipped no ideal, who sacrificed to no
principle, whom Dante has scorched with his withering
contempt, as neither good nor bad, but simply, and
before everything, selfish. The strength of this party
lay in its wealth, in its political experience, in its culti-
vation of the material interests of the country, in the
sympathy of England, and in all those nameless advan-
tages which long possession of the reins of power, under
a government of centralisation, never fails to confer.

Lastly, came the Republicans, divided, like the
Orleanists, into many sections. There were the re-
publicans on principle — stern, honest, able, and uncom-
promising, of whom Cavaignac may be taken as the
living, and Armand Carrel as the departed, type. They
had clear, though often wild, conceptions of liberty —
an intelligible, though an impracticable, political theory;
they worshipped a noble, though generally a classical,

F 3

70 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

ideal, for which they were as ready to die and to kill,
as any martyr who was ever bound to the stake. They
belonged to the same order of men as the Cromwells
and the Harrisons of England, and the Balfours of
Scotland, with the difference, that their fanaticism was
not religious, but political. Still they were, for the
most part, estimable for their character, respectable in
talents, and eminently formidable from the concentrated
and resolute determination of their zeal. — There were
the republicans by temperament — the young, the ex-
citable, and the poetic, who longed for an opportunity
of realising the dreams of their fancy, whose associations
of freedom and renown all attached themselves to the
first phase of the old revolution, and whose watchword
was " the year 1793." Such are to be found in nearly
all countries. Their mental characteristic belongs
rather to the time of life, than to the nation or the age.
Still they have played a prominent part in all French
convulsions. The Ecole Polytechnique has an historical
fame — Then there were the Socialist republicans, whose
hostility was directed less against any dynasty or form
of government, than against the arrangements of society
itself; who conceived that the entire system of things
was based upon a wrong foundation, and who saw, in
the overthrow of existing powers, the only chance of
remodelling the world after their fashion. Of these
Louis Blanc was the leader ; and among his followers
were hundreds of thousands of the operative classes,
soured and maddened with privations, thirsty for en-
joyment, and intoxicated with the brilliant and beauti-
ful perspective so eloquently sketched out before them
— but, for the most part sincere, well-meaning, ignorant,
and gullible, and easily dazzled and misled to wrong by
the lofty and sonorous watchwords which their mis-
chievous guides knew so well how to pronounce. —
Lastly, there were the wretches who in troubled times
come at the heels of every party, to soil its banner, to

FRANCE SINCE 184.8. 71

disgrace its fortunes, to stain its name — who profit by
its victory, and slink away from it in defeat. The idle,
who disdained to labour; the criminal, who lived by
plunder ; the savage, whose element was uproar ; men
who hated every government, because they had made
themselves amenable to the laws of all ; thieves and
murderers, whom the galley and the prison had dis-
gorged— all these obscene and hideous constituents
stalked forth from their dens to swell the ranks of the
republicans, and to pillage and slay in the name of the
republic.

Such were the political parties, in the midst of whose
noisy and furious hostility France- was called upon to
constitute a strong and stable government, on the
morrow of that amazing catastrophe, which, on the
24th of February, 1848, had upset a constitution, chased
away a dynasty, and left society itself in a state of
abeyance, if not of dissolution. The provisional autho-
rities— partly self-elected, partly voted in by acclama-
tion, partly foisted in by low and impudent intrigue —
had proclaimed a republic, without waiting to give the
nation time to express its volition in the matter, and
without any intention of deferring to this volition even
when expressed. To establish and consolidate a repub-
lican form of government was thus the task assigned to
the country ; — a task which the existence of the several
parties we have enumerated would alone have sufficed
to make perplexing and difficult enough. But impedi-
ments far more serious were behind. All things con-
sidered, the problem was probably the hardest ever set
before a nation : — to reconstruct society on a stable
foundation, with all the usual elements of society absent
or broken up, — without a monarch, without an aristo-
cracy, without a religion, — with no principle unques-
tioned, with no truth universally admitted and rever-
enced, with no time-honoured institution left standing

F 4

72 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

amid the ruins. She had to do all this, and more, in
spite of nearly every obstacle which the past and the
present could gather round her, and in the absence of
nearly every needed instrument for the work. With
antecedents in her history — with monuments on her
soil — with arrangements in her social structure — with
elements in her national character — which seemed
peremptorily to forbid and exclude republicanism, she
endeavoured to construct a republic, and seemed re-
solved to be satisfied with nothing else. With no
honest, high-minded, or venerated statesmen, standing
out like beacon-lights among the multitude, whom all
were emulous to love, honour, and obey, she was called
upon to undertake a work which only the loftiest in-
tellects, operating upon the most trusting and submis-
sive people, could satisfactorily accomplish. She set
herself to rival and surpass, in their most difficult
achievements, nations that differed from her in nearly
every element of their national life. With a pervading
military spirit — with a standing force of nearly half a
million, and an armed and trained population amounting
to two millions more — with a centralised despotic
bureaucracy — with Versailles and the Tuilleries ever
recalling the regal magnificence of former days — with
an excitable temper, an uncommercial spirit, and a
subdivided soil — she is endeavouring to imitate and
exceed that political liberty, and hoping successfully to
manage those democratic institutions, which have been
the slow and laborious acquisitions of Britain, with her
municipal habits and her liberal nobility ; of America,
with her long- trained faculty of self-government, her
boundless and teeming territory, and her universally
diffused material well-being ; of Switzerland, with her
mountainous regions and her historic education ; and of
Norway, with her simple, hardy, and religious popula-
tion, and her barren and untempting soil.

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 73

Let us look a little' more closely Into a few of those
peculiarities in the national character and circum-
stances, which appear to render the present struggles
of the French after a constitution at once stable and
democratic, so difficult if not so hopeless.

And, first, as to KACE. Eaces of men, like indi-
viduals, have their distinct type, their peculiar genius,
which is the product of their origin, their physiological
organisation, their climate, and the development of
civilisation through which they have passed, — which
is, in fact, their inheritance from ancient times. Few
European nations are of pure blood ; almost all contain
several elements, and are the more sound and vigorous
for the admixture. The French and the English have
in common something of the Norman and something of
the Teutonic blood ; but in England the prevailing
element is the Saxon sub-variety of the Teutonic; in
France the prevailing element is the Gallic sub-variety
of the Celtic. From our Norman conquerors we derive
that intellectual activity, that high resolve, those habits
of conquest and command, so characteristic of our
upper ranks, and which have spread by intermarriage
through all classes. From our German forefathers we
inherit our phlegm, our steadiness, our domestic habi-
tudes, and our unhappy addiction to spirituous liquors.
The predominance of Frank and Norman blood gave to
the old aristocracy of France those generous and noble
qualities which so long distinguished the class ; but
since it was submerged in the great deluge which de-
solated the closing years of the last century, the Celtic
element which pervades the great mass of the people
has shone forth paramount and nearly unmodified.
Now, the Teuton and the Celt have characteristics and
capacities wholly dissimilar. According to the masterly
analysis of our first ethnographical authority, M. Gustaf

74 PRANCE SINCE 1848.

Kombst, the distinctive marks of the former are slow-
ness but accuracy of perception, a just, deep, and pene-
trating, but not quick or brilliant intellect. The
distinctive peculiarities of the Celt, on the contrary,
are quickness of perception, readiness of combination,
wit, and fertility of resource. The passion of the Celt
is for national power and grandeur ; that of the Teuton
for personal freedom and self-rule. The Teuton is
hospitable, but unsocial and reserved ; the Celt is im-
moderately fond of society, of amusement, and of glory.
The one is provident and cautious ; the other impetuous
and rash. The one values his own life, and respects
that of others ; the other sets little value upon either.
Respect for women is the characteristic of the Teuton ;
passion for women the characteristic of the Celt.* The
latter is intemperate in love ; the former is intemperate
in wine. The fancy of the one is sensuous ; that of the
other ideal. Lastly, the religious element presents
diverse manifestations in the two races; — in the Celt
there is a latent tendency towards polytheism, while
the Teuton displays a decided preference for mono-
theistic views; — Romanism retains an almost unshaken
hold over the former; Protestantism has achieved its
victories exclusively among the latter.

Now, these distinctions are not fancies of our own,
derived from a glance at France, Germany, and Eng-
land, under their present phases ; they are taken on the
authority of a philosopher, whose conclusions are the
result of long study, and of the widest range of obser-
vation. The general accuracy of the delineation will
be generally acknowledged, and can scarcely fail to
impress us with the improbability that institutions
which are indigenous among one of these great divisions

* Dr. Kombst remarks, as a constant fact, the existence of Found-
ling Hospitals among Celtic nations, and their absence among those
of Teutonic origin.

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 75

of humanity should flourish and survive when they are
transplanted into the other. Self-government, and the
forms and appliances of political freedom, are plants of
native growth in England and America ; they are only
delicate and valuable exotics in France. These national
discrepancies manifest themselves in public life in a
thousand daily forms. The Englishman is practical,
business-like, and averse to change ; his imagination,
though powerful, is not easily excited; his views and
aims are positive, unideal, and distinct. The French-
man is ambitious, restless, and excitable — aspiring
after the perfect ; passionne pour Vinconnu ; prone to
"la recherche de Vabsolu;" constantly, as Lamartine
says, wrecking his chance or his possession of the good
"par I' impatience du mieux" The Englishman, in his
political movements, knows exactly what he wants ;
his object is definite, and is generally even the recovery
of something that has been lost, the abolition of some
excrescence or abuse, the recurrence to some venerated
precedent. The Frenchman is commonly aroused by
the vague desire of something new, something vast,
something magnificent ; he prefers to fly to evils that
he knows not of, rather than to bear those with which
he is familiar. His golden age beckons to him out of
the untried and unrealised future ; ours is placed almost
as baselessly, but far less dangerously, in the historic
past. The Frenchman is given to scientific definitions
and theories in politics ; the Englishman turns on all
such things a lazy and contemptuous glance. The
former draws up formal declarations of the rights of
man, but has an imperfect understanding of his own,
and is apt to overlook those of others ; the latter never
descants on his rights, but exercises them daily as a
matter of course, and defends them stoutly when at-
tacked. The one is confident in his own opinion,
though he be almost alone in his adhesion to it; the

76 FRANCE SINGE 1848.

other has always a secret misgiving that he is wrong
when he does not agree with the majority. All these
are so many criteria of the possession of that " political
instinct," that native aptitude for administrative busi-
ness, the defect of which in the French people has
hitherto rendered all their attempts at a working con-
stitution so abortive.

Next, as to KELIGION, — the absence of which as a
pervading element is a deplorable feature of the na-
tional character of France. The decay of her religious
spirit dates from the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
That fatal measure, while it banished Protestantism,
struck Eomanism with impotence and a paralytic
languor. " The Gallican Church, no doubt, looked
upon this revocation as a signal triumph. But what
was the consequence ? Where shall we look after this
period for her Fen&ons and her Pascals ? where for
those bright monuments of piety and learning which
were the glory of her better days ? As for piety, she
perceived that she had no occasion for it, when there
was no longer any lustre of Christian holiness sur-
rounding her ; nor for learning, when there were no
longer any opponents to confute or any controversies
to maintain. She felt herself at liberty to become as
ignorant, as secular, as irreligious as she pleased ; and
amidst the silence and darkness she had created around
her she drew the curtains and retired to rest/'* To the
forced and gloomy bigotry which marked the declining
years of Louis Quatorze succeeded the terrible reaction
of the regency and the following reigns. Amid the
orgies of weary and satiated profligacy arose first a
spirit of scoffing, then of savage, vindictive, and ag-
gressive scepticism. The whole intellect of that acute
and brilliant people ranged itself on the side of irre-

* Robert Hall — Review of " Zeal without Innovation."

FKANCE SINCE 1848. 77

ligion ; and nothing was left to oppose to the wits, the
philosophers, and the encyclopedists, save cold prosings
which it was a weariness to listen to, frauds and fictions
which it would have been imbecility to credit, pre-
tensions which the growing enlightenment of the age
laughed to scorn, and the few rags of traditional re-
verence which the indolent, luxurious, and profligate
lives of the clergy were fast tearing away. The un-
belief of the higher ranks spread rapidly to those below
them: some were unbelievers from conviction, some
from fashion, some from a low and deplorable ambition
to ape their superiors. " Bien que je ne suis qu'un
pauvre coiffeur," said a hair-dresser to his employer
one day in 1788, aje n'ai plus de croyance qu'un
autre." But worse than this, all that was warm or
generous in human sympathies, all that was hopeful or
promising for human progress, all that was true and
genuine in native feeling, was found on the side of the
philosophers. Religion ranged itself on the side of
ignorance and despotism. Scepticism fought the battle
of justice, of science, of political and civil freedom.
The philosophers had truth and right on their side in
nearly everything but their assaults on Christianity;
and the Christianity then presented to the nation was
scarcely recognisable as such. The result of these
unnatural and unhappy combinations has been that
religion has been indissolubly associated in the mind
of the French with puerile conceits, with intellectual
nonsense, with political oppression ; while infidelity
wears in their eyes the cap of liberty, the robes of
wisdom, the civic crown of patriotic service.

Even the shocking license into which atheism wan-
dered under the republic produced nothing more
genuine or deep than the reaction towards decency
under Napoleon. The nation remained at heart either
wholly indifferent or actively irreligious ; and such, in

8 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

spite of growing exceptions, it continues to this day, by
the confession of those even among its own people who
know it best. The two reigns of the Restoration, and
that of Louis Philippe, rather aggravated than mitigated
the evil. The effect of this national deficiency in the
religious element, is to augment to a gigantic height the
difficulty of building up either society or government in
France. Its noxious operation can scarcely be overrated.
The foundation-rock is gone ; the very basis is a shifting
quicksand. The habitual reverence for a Supreme
Being, whose will is law, and whose laws are above
assault, question, or resistance ; the sense of control and
the duty of obedience which flow from this first great
conviction, — lie at the bottom of all community and all
rule ; without these it is difficult to see how the con-
structive task can even be commenced.

The absence of a fundamental and pervading religious
faith has shown itself in France in two special conse-
quences, either of which would suffice to make the work
set before them not merely herculean, but nearly hope-
less. The first is this : — France prides herself upon
being a land in which pure reason is the only authority
extant. She has no prejudices to lie at the root of her phi-
losophy, no doctrine settled and universally adopted and
laid by as an everlasting possession, — a xr^a z$ asi, —
in the sacred archives of the nation. She has no axioms
which it would be insanity or sacrilege to question.
Everything is matter for speculation, for doubt, for dis-
cussion. The very opinions which, with all other
people, have long since passed into the category of first
principles, are with her still themes for the wit of the
saloon and the paradoxical declamation of the schoolboy.
The simplest and clearest rules of duty, the most esta-
blished maxims of political and moral action, the
assumptions, or the proved premises which lie at the
root of all social arrangements, dogmatic facts the most

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 79

ancient and widely recognised, have in France every
morning to be considered and discussed anew. Every
belief and opinion, without exception, is daily remanded
into the arena of question and of conflict. Topics the
most frivolous and the most sacred, truths the most
obvious and the most recondite, doctrines the clearest
and the most mystical, are perpetually summoned afresh
before the judgment- seat of logic, till none can by any
possibility obtain a firm and undisputed hold upon the
mind. The fact is not wonderful, though its conse-
quences are enormously pernicious. It is the inherited
misfortune of a generation which has grown up in the
vortex of a political and moral whirlpool, where nothing
was stable, nothing permanent ; where it was impossible
to point to a system, an institution, or a creed, quod
semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus ; where one philo-
sophy after another chased its predecessor from the
stage; where one form of government was scarcely
seated on the throne before its successor drove it into
exile ; where, in a word, there was not a school, a
doctrine, or a dynasty, of which men of mature age (to
use the fine and pathetic language of Grattan) had not
" rocked the cradle and followed the hearse," — not an
institution extant and surviving of which nearly every
one alive could not remember the time when it was not
The result of all this has been that an entirely different
class of subjects from those ordinarily agitated in
settled countries has come up. Instead of discussing
whether a monarch should govern or only reign, they
are discussing whether the lowest and most ignorant
orders of the mob should not have the actual sovereignty
in their hands. Instead of considering modifications in
the laws of landed inheritance, they are disputing
whether the very institution of property be not in itself
a robbery. Instead of differing on details of the law of
marriage and divorce, they are bringing into question

80 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

the subject of family ties, and the relation between the
sexes in its entirety. Their struggles are not on behalf
of religious liberty, nor for this Church, nor for that
sect, but for or against those fundamental ideas which
are common to all creeds alike. It is not such or such
a political innovation, such or such a social or hierar-
chical reform which form the subject of habitual con-
troversy ; it is the religious, political, and moral ground-
work of society that is at stake and in dispute.

We are here at once led to the recognition of that
great fact which explains, better than any divergence of
historic antecedents, or any dissimilarity of national
character, the startling contrast between the failure of
the French Revolution, and the success of that great
English movement of the seventeenth century which
corresponds to it. M. Guizot, with his accustomed
sagacity, has in his last work placed his finger upon this
distinction, • though he abstains from following out a
contrast so painful and unfavourable to his countrymen.
The French Revolution followed on a sceptical and
philosophic movement of men's minds. The English
Revolution followed on a period of deep religious excite-
ment. The English revolutionists were even more
attached to their religious faith than to their political
opinions. They fought for liberty of conscience even
more fiercely than for civil rights. " Ce fut la fortune
de TAngleterre au xviie* siecle, que 1'esprit de foi reli-
gieuse et 1'esprit de liberte politique y regnaient ensemble.
Toutes les grandes passions de la nature humaine se
deployerent ainsi sans qu'elle brisdt tons ses freins" The
English political reformers were pious Christians, whose
faith was an earnest, stimulating, exalting, strengthen-
ing reality ; — the French political reformers, on the
other hand, were atheists, brought up in the school of
the Encyclopedists to despise and deride all that other
men held sacred, whose passions, interests, and preju-

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 81

dices, therefore, found no internal impediment to their
overflow. The Puritans unquestionably were bold re-
formers of religious matters as well as of political ones ;
they indeed attacked and overthrew the established
creed, while maintaining intact the common principles
of the Christian faith ; but in the midst of their suc-
cesses— in the chaos of ruins both of temples and
palaces which, like Samson, they heaped round them —
there was something left always standing which all sects
reverenced and spared. They still, as M. Guizot beau-
tifully says, recognised and bowed down before a law
which they had not made. It was this law which they
had not made — this boundary wall not built with
hands — which was wanting to the French reformers :
to them everything was human ; on no side did they
meet an obstacle, acknowledged as divine, which com-
manded them to stop in their career of conquest and
destruction. The consequence was, that in the one
case the bouleversement reached only the secondary and
derivative, — in the other, it embraced the primitive,
fundamental, and indispensable institutions of social
life.

The second special operation of French irreligion on
society may be thus explained : — The thirst after
happiness is natural to the human heart, and inseparable
from its healthy action. After this happiness we all
strive, though with every imaginable difference as to the
intensity of our desire, and the conception of our aim,
— as to the scene in which we locate it, and the means
we employ to arrive at it. The cultivated, the virtuous,
and the wise, place their happiness in the gratification
of the affections, and the development of the intellectual
and moral powers. Material welfare they value indeed,
but they pursue it with a moderate and restrained
desire. To the ignorant and the sensual, happiness
consists in physical enjoyment and the possession of the

VOL. n. G

82 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

good things of life. The paradise of the religious man
is laid in a future and spiritual world ; that of the un-
believer — practical or theoretic — in some earthly Eden.
On the belief or disbelief in the immortality of the soul,
will practically depend both the nature and the locality
of the heaven we desire. Now the French — that is,
that active and energetic portion of them which gives
the tone to the whole people — repudiate the doctrine
of a future life, and yet are vehement aspirants after
enjoyment. They are well described by one of them-
selves as "passionnes pour le bonheur materiel.'11 The
effect of the disbelief in a future world is, of course, not
only to turn all their desires and efforts after happiness
upon this, but to make their conception of the happiness
of this life essentially and exclusively earthly, and to
cause them to pursue it with the impatience, the hurry,
the snatching avidity of men who feel that now or never
is their time, that every moment that elapses before their
object is grasped is a portion of bliss lost to them for
ever. Those who, however dissatisfied with their portion
of this world's goods, still, like the majority — a de-
creasing majority we fear — of our English working
classes, retain some belief in a future life, can strive
after the improvement of their earthly lot with a more
deliberate and less angry haste ; for if they fail, their
happiness is not denied, but only postponed to a more
distant and a better day.

" To them there never came the thought
That this their life was meant to be
A pleasure-house, where peace unbought
Should minister to pride or glee.

" Sublimely they endure each ill

As a plain fact, whose right, or wrong
They question not, confiding still
That it shall last not overlong :

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 83

" Willing, from first to last, to take

The mysteries of our life as given ;
Leaving the time-worn soul to slake
Its thirst in an undoubted heaven."

But if this earth is indeed all, then no time is to be lost,
no excuse or delay is to be listened to. It is natural, it
is logical, it is inevitable for those who hold this dreary
creed to scout as insults those cautions as to the danger
of going too fast, those maxims of wisdom which would
assure us that social wellbeing is a plant of slow growth,
that we must be satisfied with small and rare instal-
ments of amelioration, that we must be content to sow
the seed in this generation, and leave our children, or
our children's children, to reap the fruit. These indis-
putable truths sound like cruel mockery to the man who,
suffering under actual and severe privations, regards a
future existence as the dream of the poet, or the inven-
tion of the priest.

The immeasurable and impatient appetite for material
felicity, which is now one of the distinctive traits of
French society, and which is the legitimate offspring of
her irreligion, is beyond question the deepest and most
dangerous malady which the state physician has to deal
with ; for the Frenchman is not only logical, but always
ready and anxious to translate his logic into practice.
If our lot is to be worked out, and our nature to receive
its full development on earth, we must set to work at
once, at all hazards, and in spite of all obstacles, to
construct that present paradise which is to be our only
one. One of the historians of the recent revolution,
who writes under the pseudonyme of Daniel Sterne, has
the following just remark: — " S'il est vrai de dire que
le socialisme semble au premier abord une extension du
principe de fraternite, apporte au monde par Jesus-
Christ, il est en meme temps et surtout une reaction

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84 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

centre le dogme essential du Christianisme, la Chute et
1'Expiation. On pourrait, je crois, avec plus de justesse,
considerer le socialisme comme une tentative pour mate-
rialiser et immediatiser, si Ton pent parler ainsi, la vie
future et le paradis spirituel des Chretiens." Hence
these Socialist and Communistic schemes, those plans
for the re-organisation of society on a new and improved
footing, which have taken such a strong hold on the ima-
gination and affection of the French proletaires. Hence
the eagerness and ready credulity with which they listen
to any orators or theorists who promise them, by some
royal road, some magic change, the wellbeing which
they believe to be both attainable and their due. Hence,
too, that daring, unscrupulous, unrelenting impetuosity,
with which these social iconoclasts emulate the fanaticism
of religious sectaries, and drive their car of triumph over
ranks and institutions, over principalities and powers,
over all the rich legacies and pathetic associations of
the past, as remorselessly as did the daughter of Servius
over the scarce lifeless body of her father.

This passion for material wellbeing — this "haste to
be happy" — is by no means confined to the socialist
schemers or the operative classes. It pervades ranks
far above them, more especially those members of the
bourgeoisie who have entered the liberal professions
without any means or qualifications except natural
aptitude and intellectual culture ; the advocates, sur-
geons, artists, journalists, and men of letters. These
are described by one who knows them well as the
section of French society whose material condition is
the most unsatisfactory and incongruous, while the
influence they exert on the fortunes of the country is
the most powerful. Their life is a combination of re-
volting contrasts, — a feverish and perpetual struggle.
Their cultivated intellect, their excited fancy, raise
them every moment to a dazzling height, and show

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 85

them in dreams all the felicities and grandeurs of the
earth ; while their waking hours " must stoop to strive
with misery at the door," and be passed in conflict with
the anxieties and humiliations of actual indigence or
uncertain remuneration. They live in daily contact
with men, their superiors in power and wealth, their
equals or inferiors in character, in talent, or in culti-
vation; and the comparison disgusts them with in-
equalities of fortune, and the gradations of the social
hierarchy. Their ambition, everywhere excited, and
everywhere crushed back, finding in society as con-
stituted, no clear field, no adequate recompense, no
prizes satisfying to their wants or glorious enough for
their conceptions, sets itself to the task of reconstructing
society afresh, after the pattern of their dreams. From
this class are furnished the chiefs of the socialist and
revolutionary movements; — men whose desires are at
war with their destiny ; and who in place of chastening
and moderating the former, would re-fashion and reverse
the latter.

There is yet another class, swayed by loftier motives,
but pulling in the same direction. These are perhaps
the most formidable of all, because their enthusiasm is of
a more unselfish order, and flows from a purer spring.
These are men of high powers and a fine order of mind,
with little faith, or at most only a mystical and dreamy
one, in God or in futurity, but overflowing with gene-
rous sympathies and worshipping a high ideal, — shocked
and pained with the miseries they see around them, and
confident in their capability of cure. They are a sort
of political Werthers, profoundly disgusted with the
actual condition of the world ; the lofty melancholy,
inseparable from noble minds, broods darkly over their
spirits ; an indescribable sadness

" Deepens the murmur of the falling floods ;" —

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86 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

they are disenchanted with life, and hold it cheap, for
it realises none of their youthful visions ; they deem
that this world ought to be a paradise, and believe it
might be made such; and, feeling existence to be not
worth having, unless the whole face of things can be re-
newed, and the entire arrangements of society changed,
they are prepared to encounter anything, and to inflict
anything, for the promotion of such change. Hence ob-
stacles do not deter them — sacrifices do not appal them
— personal danger is absolutely beneath their consider-
ation— and both in France and Germany we have seen
them mount the barricades and fight in the streets with a
contempt of death which was utterly amazing, and seemed
to have nothing in common either with the vaunting
heroism of the French soldier, or the systematic and stub-
born courage of the English, or the hardy indifference of
the Russian. France has martyrs still — martyrs as
willing and enthusiastic as ever — but their cause is no
longer that of old. Instead of martyrs who suffered
death for freedom, for country, for religion, for devotion
to the moral law, we have men ready to encounter mar-
tyrdom for objects scarcely worthy of the sacrifice, — for
the exigencies of the passions, for the conquest of mate-
rial felicity, for the realisation of an earthly paradise.

The degree to which this universal and insatiable
thirst for present and immediate enjoyment, and the
schemes, associations, and ambitions to which it gives
rise, must complicate the difficulties of any government
formed at a time when such desires and such attempts
at their realisation are rife, must be obvious at a glance.
One special point which even aggravates these diffi-
culties, we shall have to recur to presently.

Side by side with the absence of religion in France —
partly as a consequence, partly as a co-existing effect of
remoter causes, there prevailed a deep-seated torpor
and perversion of moral principle. We do not mean

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 87

that there was not much virtue, much simple honesty,
much conscientious adherence to the dictates of the
moral sense, still to be found in many classes of the
people, among the unsophisticated peasantry of the in-
terior, among the scanty and scattered rural gentry
who lived on their estates, and even among the artisan
class of the cities. But a profound and mean im-
morality had spread its poisonous influence deep and
wide through nearly all those ranks which, either directly
or indirectly, act upon the government, and give the
tone to the national character and the direction to the
national policy. So obvious was this painful truth,
that it escaped neither foreigner nor native ; — it led to
a general and frequently expressed, though vague ex-
pectation, that some great catastrophe must be at hand;
it was dimly felt that nearly all those warning signs —
those mystic letters on the wall — by which Providence
intimates approaching change, were visible on the face
of French society; and we well remember that one
individual, thoroughly conversant with that society in
all its circles, distinctly predicted the revolution of
February more than a year before it occurred, not on
the ground of any political symptoms or necessities, but
solely from the corruption of morals and manners
which pervaded the higher and middle classes, — the
politicians, the writers, the commercial men, the artists,
the circles of fashion — all alike. License in all that
concerned the relations between the sexes was no novelty
in France — in this respect the profligacy of the Regency
and the Directory could not be surpassed, and indeed
was not approached. But the high and scrupulous,
though sometimes fantastic and inconsistent sense of
honour, which formerly distinguished the French gentle-
man, seemed to be gone ; his regard for truth and even
pecuniary integrity was deplorably weakened ; the "mire

Q 4

88 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

of dirty ways," whether in political life or in speculative
business, no longer instinctively revolted his finer sus-
ceptibilities; — that " sensibility of principle, that chas-
tity of honour, which felt stain like a wound, which
inspired valour, while it mitigated ferocity," had died
away under the demoralising influence of the repeated
social convulsions of the last sixty years. When reli-
gion has become an empty garment, and piety a faded
sentiment, and loyalty extinct from want of nourish-
ment, and when strict moral rules have thus lost their
fixity and their sanctions, the spirit of a gentleman may
for a time, in some measure, supply their place ; but if
this also has died out, the last barrier to the overflow
of the twin vices of licentiousness and barbarity is
swept away.

The extent to which this spirit was extinguished was
not known to the world till the filthy intrigues con-
nected with the Spanish marriages (since so remorse-
lessly laid bare by the publication of Louis Philippe's
private letters), and the suicide of the diplomatic tool
concerned in them, the Count de Bresson, out of pure
disgust at the dirt he had been dragged through, — first
exposed a degree of low turpitude, for which even
France was scarcely prepared. Then followed in quick
succession the trial and conviction of a cabinet minister
and a general officer for dishonesty and peculation in
their official capacities, and the awful tragedy of the
Duke de Choiseul-Praslin, a member of the highest
nobility in France — the murder of his wife as an ob-
stacle to his illegitimate desires, and his own subsequent
suicide in prison. When, finally, a statesman and phi-
losopher as high in rank and reputation as Guizot, ex-
pressed little surprise and no horror at the corrupt
malversation of his former colleague M. Teste, and even
consented to soil his lips in public with a quasi-lie, in
order to defend the duplicity of his master, — a sort of

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 89

shudder ran through the better circles of Europe, — a
perception that the measure of iniquity was full, and
that the time of retribution must be at hand. It was
as if the book had been closed, and the awful fiat had
gone forth : — u Ephraim is joined unto idols: let him
alone" " He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; he
that is filthy, let him be filthy still: behold, I come
quickly, to give to every man according as his work
shall be ! "

The prevalent immorality showed itself to the French
themselves in many minute symptoms which were un-
observable by other nations, — in the looseness of do-
mestic ties, in the grasping and gambling spirit of
Parisian society, in the appearance of the lionnes, as
they were called, and other extravagant indecorums of
fashionable life; but to the world at large, it was
chiefly signalised in the strange taste and monstrous
conceptions which degraded their popular and lighter
literature, and in the general corruption which per-
vaded all departments of the administration. We very
much question whether any period of history can
furnish a parallel to the French fictitious and dramatic
literature of the last twenty years. Former times may
have furnished comedies more coarse, tragedies more
brutal, novels more profligate ; but none displaying
a taste so utterly vicious, a style of sentiment so radi-
cally false and hollow, a tone and spirit so thoroughly
diseased. Not only do voluptuous pictures everywhere
abound ; not only is the unrestrained indulgence of the
natural passions preached up as venial, to say the
least ; not only is the conjugal tie habitually ridiculed
or ignored ; not only is genius ever busy to throw a
halo of loveliness over the most questionable feelings,
and the most unquestionable frailties; — but crimes of
the darkest dye are chosen by preference, and with
research, as the materials of their plot; criminals, black

90 FEANCE SINCE 1848.

with every enormity which we hold most loathsome,
are the picked and chosen favourites of the play-wright
and the novelist ; scenes, which the pure and the refined
mind shrinks even to dream of, are the commonest
localities of their unholy delineations ; — and the imagi-
nation of the writer is racked to devise the most un-
natural occurrences, the most impossible combinations,
the most startling horrors. This language sounds like
exaggeration ; but it will not be deemed such by any
one who has even dipped into the cloaca of modern
French fiction, from its more moderate phase in Victor
Hugo, to its culminating point in " Le Juif errant,"
and the "Mysteres de Paris." The favourite plan —
the supreme effort — of these writers is to conceive some
marvellous event or combination which has no proto-
type in nature, and could never have presented itself to
a sound or healthy fancy ; to depict some monstrous
criminal, and surround him with the aureole of a saint,
— to describe some pure, beautiful, and perfect maiden,
and place her, as her atmosphere and cradle, in the lowest
and filthiest haunts, where barbarity nestles with licen-
tiousness. Excitement — what the French call une sen-
sation— is the one thing sought after ; the object to which
taste, decency, and artistic probabilities, are all sacrificed:
or if any more serious idea and sentiment runs through
this class of works, it is that of hostility to the existing
arrangements of society, — its inequalities, its restrain-
ing laws, its few still unshattered sanctities. It is
worthy of remark that Victor Hugo, the author of
" Marion de L'Orme," " Lucrece Borgia," " Bug-Jargal,"
and " Hans d'Islande," is a leader of the extreme party
in the Chambers; that Eugene Sue, the author of
" Atar-Gull," "Le Juif errant," and " Les Mysteres du
Peuple," is the chosen representative of the more tur-
bulent socialists ; and that George Sand (whom we
grieve to class with these even for a moment) was the

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 91

reputed friend and right hand of the desperate demo-
cratic tyrant, Ledru Rollin. Literature in France has
become allied not only with democracy — that it may
well be without any derogation from its nobility — but
with the lowest arid most envious passions of the mob,
with the worst and most meretricious tastes of the
coulisses and the saloon. Its votaries and its priests
seem to have alike forgotten that they had an ideal to
worship, a high ministry to exercise, a sacred mission
to fulfil. Excellence, for which in former times men
of letters strove with every faculty of their devoted
souls, — for the achievement of which they deemed no
effort too strenuous, no time too long — is deposed from
its "place of pride;" and success, — temporary, mo-
mentary, sudden success, — success among a class of
readers whose vote can confer no garland of real
honour, no crown of enduring immortality, — success,
however tarnished, and by what mean and base com-
pliances soever it be won, — is their sole object and
reward.

The unwholesome and disordering sentiment which
alone could flow from such a school is nearly all that
the lighter intellect of France has had to feed upon for
more than half a generation ; and the corruption of the
national taste and morals consequent upon such diet,
is only too easily discernible. A passion for unceasing
excitement, a morbid craving for mental stimulants
thus constantly goaded and supplied, has rendered
everything simple, genuine, and solid in literature,
everything settled and sober in social relations, every-
thing moderate, stable, and rigid in political arrange-
ments, alike stale and flat. The appetite of the nation
is diseased ; arid to minister to this appetite, or to
control and cure it, are the equally difficult and dan-
gerous alternatives now offered to its rulers.

The second form in which the national demoralisation

92 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

especially showed itself — at once a fatal symptom and
an aggravating cause — was in the general adminis-
trative corruption which prevailed. This did not ori-
ginate under Louis Philippe, but was beyond question
vastly increased during his reign ; and was not only
not discouraged but was actually stimulated by his
personal example. The system of place-hunting — the
universal mendicancy for public employment, which
reached so shameless a height just before the last re-
volution, found in him one of its worst specimens. No
jobbing or begging elector ever besieged the door of
the minister for a tobacco-license, or a place in the
customs or the passport office, with more impudent
pertinacity, than Louis Philippe showed in persecuting
the Chambers for dotations for his sons. Those who
were conversant with the French ministerial bureaux
declare, that it is difficult to imagine, and that it was
impossible to behold without humiliation and disgust,
the passionate covetousness, the mingled audacity and
meanness, displayed among the candidates for place.
Everybody seemed turned into a hanger-on of govern-
ment, or a petitioner to become so : everybody was
seeking a snug berth for himself or for his son, and
vowing eternal vengeance against the government if he
were refused. The system of civil administration in
France — the senseless multiplication of public func-
tionaries— has to thank itself for much of this embar-
rassing and disreputable scramble. The number of
places, more or less worth having, at the disposal of
government, appears, by a late return to the Chamber,
to exceed 535,000.

" Les Fran^ais," says a recent acute writer in the Revue des
deux Mondes, " se precipitent vers les fonctions, parceque c'est
la seule carriere qui guarantisse Fexistence meme mediocre, et
qui permette la securite du lendemain. Dans 1'espoir d'assurer
a leurs enfans un enlargement au budget, nous voyons chaque

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 93

jour de petits capitalists consacrer au frais de leur education
une partie on la totalite de leur mince heritage. Les fonctions
publiques sont considerees comme une assurance sur la vie, ou
un placement a fonds perdus. Une place exerce sur 1'esprit des
families la meme fascination que faisait autrefois une prebende
ou un canonicat. Madame de Stael disait autrefois : 6 Les
Fran£ais ne seront satisfaits que lorsqu'on aura promulgue une
constitution ainsi coii9ue ; article unique : Tous les Francais
sont fonctionnaires ?' Le socialisme ne fait que generalise!' sous
une autre forme la passion des Francais pour les places, et
realiser, sous un autre nom, le mot de Madame de Stael. La
Charte du droit au travail peut, en effet, s'enoncer en une seule
phrase : Tous les citoyens sont salaries par 1'etat."

The number of electors in Louis Philippe's time was
180,000 — the number of places in the gift of the
Crown was 535,000 ; that is, there were three places
available for the purpose of bribing each elector. Put
this fact side by side with that passion for the position
of a government employe which we have just .described,
and it will be obvious that the corruption must have
been, as it was, systematic and universal. The electors
regarded their votes as a means of purchasing a place.
Each deputy was expected to provide in this way for
as many of his constituents as possible, and knew that
his tenure of his seat depended upon his doing so. Of
course he was not likely to forget himself: having pur-
chased his seat, it was natural he should sell his vote.
Thus the government bribed the Chambers, and the
Chambers bribed the electoral body. Now, from this
eleemosynary giving way of places, to selling them —
from selling them for support to selling them for money
-the step is short and easy.

Some important considerations have been suggested
in mitigation of the culpability of Louis Philippe's
government in thus corrupting both the candidates and
the constituency, — to which, though not pretending to
admit their entire justice, we may give whatever weight

94 PRANCE SINCE 1848.

they may, on due reflection, seem to deserve. It is
questionable (it has been said) whether representative
institutions among a corrupt and turbulent people, or
a people from any other causes unfit for self-govern-
ment, do not necessitate bribery in some form. It was
found so in Ireland : it was found so in those dark
times of English history which elapsed from 1600 to
1760. The government of July found representative
institutions already established, and was obliged to rule
through their instrumentality. The ministers were in
this position : a majority in the Chambers was essential
to them, to the stability of their position, to the adequacy
of their powers. This majority could not be secured,
among an excitable and foolish people, by wise mea-
sures, by sound economy, by resolute behaviour ; nor
among a corrupt and venal people, by purity of ad-
ministration, or steady preference of obscure and un-
protected merit. They were the creation of a revolution,
which their defeat might renew and perpetuate, and a
renewal of which would be, to the last extent, disastrous
to the country. They had, therefore, only two alter-
natives— either to distribute places with a view to the
purchase of parliamentary votes, to hand over appoint-
ments to deputies for the purchase in their turn of
electoral suffrages ; or to enlarge the franchise to such
an extent as to render bribery impossible, and so throw
themselves on the chance which the good sense and
fitness for self-rule of the mass of the people might
afford them. This they had not nerve enough or con-
fidence enough to do ; and who that knows the French
people, and has seen their conduct on recent occasions,
will venture to say that they were wrong ?

If the French nation were fit for representative in-
stitutions, if it had the sagacity, the prudence, the
virtues needed for self-government, the latter ought to
have been the course of the administration of July ; if

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 95

it had not (and who now will venture to pronounce
that it had ?), the administration had no choice but to
command a majority by the only means open to them,
viz., corruption. Representative institutions among a
people unqualified for them can, therefore, only be
worked by corruption, i.e., by distributing the appoint-
ments at the disposal of the state with a view to the
purchase of parliamentary or electoral support. What
government, even in England or America, still less in
France — what government, in fact, in any country not
autocratically ruled — could stand a month if all its
appointments were distributed with regard to merit
alone; if, for example, Lord Stanley refused office to
Mr. Disraeli or Lord John Manners because they were
less competent to its duties than obscurer men ; if Lord
Lonsdale or the Duke of Newcastle had all their re-
commendations treated with merited disregard ; if the
members for Manchester or London saw their proteges
contemptuously and rigidly set aside in favour of abler
but less protected men ? If corruption essentially
consists, as it undeniably does, in distributing the ap-
pointments and favours of the state otherwise than with a
sole regard to merit and capacity — if any deviation from
this exclusive rule be corruption in a greater or less
degree, then it is clear that some degree of corruption
is inherent and inevitable in all representative govern-
ments, and that the extent to which it prevails will be
in precise inverse proportion to the sagacity and self-
denying virtue of the people, i. e., to the degree in
which they can endure to see meritorious strangers
preferred to less deserving friends. Where, in modern
times, shall we find that blended humility and patriotism,
which made the rejected candidate for the Lacedemo-
nian senate go home rejoicing (perhaps with a touch of
quiet sarcasm in his tone), " that there were five hun-
dred better men in Sparta than himself?" The people.

96 FKANCE SINCE 1848.

therefore, and the institutions, not the rulers, are to
blame for the amount of corruption which prevails. If
they have the reins in their own hands, and yet cannot
guide themselves, they must be governed by circuitous
stratagems instead of direct force — for governed ab
extra they must be. It is the exclusive prerogative of an
autocratic government to distribute appointments ac-
cording to merit only. Corruption — i.e., appointments
not exclusively according to desert, but with ulterior
views, to purchase or reward parliamentary support —
is the price which must be paid for free institutions
among an imperfect people.

There is much truth in this plea ; a plea which will
be recognised as valid by each individual, in proportion
as he is conversant with administrative life ; but it
does not affect our argument. For, whether the go-
vernment of France were excusable or not, the operation
of the wholesale, systematic, and unblushing venality
and scramble for place which prevailed, was equally
indicative of, and destructive to, the morals of the
community.

One result of all this — one of the saddest features of
French national life, one of the darkest auguries for the
future — is the low estimation in which all public men
are held ; the absence of any great, salient, unstained
statesman, whom all reverenced, whom all could trust,
and whom all honest citizens were willing to follow
and obey ; of any politician who, in times of trial, could
influence and sway the people by the force of character
alone. They are not only worse off than other nations,
at similar crises of their history, they are worse off
than themselves ever were before. They have not only
no Pericles, no Hampden, no Washington; they have
not even a Turgot, a Lafayette, or a Mirabeau. Three
only of their public men have been long enough and
prominently enough before the world to have made

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 97

themselves a European reputation — Guizot, Thiers, and
Lamartine. All of these men have been at the head of
affairs in turn ; all are writers and historians of high
fame ; all are men of unquestioned genius ; and two of
them at least are types of a class. Thiers is a Proven9al
by birth, with all the restless excitability, all the petil-
lante vivacity, all the quenchless fire, all the shrewd,
intriguing sagacity of the south. He launched into
the mixed career of literature and politics at a very
early age, and a characteristic anecdote is related of his
first successes. The Academy of Aix, his native town,
proposed the Eloge de Vauvenargues as the subject of
their yearly prize. Thiers sent in an essay (anony-
mous, as was the rule) which was of paramount merit;
but it was suspected to be his, and as he and his patron
had many enemies, the academic judges proposed to
postpone the adjudication of the prize till the following
year, on the ground of insufficient merit in all the rival
essays. Some days were yet wanting to the period of
final decision. Thiers instantly set to work, and pro-
duced with great rapidity another essay on the same
text, which he sent in with the post-mark of a distant
town. The first prize was instantly adjudged to this,
and the second only to the original production ; and
when both turned out to be the work of the same
envied author, the academicians looked foolish enough.
Shortly after this youthful stratagem Thiers came to
Paris, the great rendezvous for all French talent, and
commenced life as a journalist — that line which in
France so often leads to eminence and power. His
clear, vivacious, and energetic style, and the singular
vigour and frequent depth of his views, soon made him
favourably known. His " Histoire de la Revolution"
established his fame ; and when, on the appointment of
the Polignac ministry in 1829, he (in conjunction with
Mignet and Carrel) established the " National" news-

VOL. II. H

98 TRANCE SINCE 1848.

paper, with the express object of upsetting them, and
pleading the cause of legal and constitutional monarchy
against them, he was one of the acknowledged leaders of
public opinion in France. The settled aim and plan of
the three friends' is thus epigrarnmatically stated by M.
de St. Beuve : — " Enfermer les Bourbons dans la Charte,
dans la Constitution, fermer exacternent les portes ; Us
sauteront immanquablement par la fenetre." In seven
months the work was done — the coup d'etat w&s struck;
and Thiers was the prominent actor both in that public
protestation against the legality of the Ordinances,
which commenced the Kevolution of July, and in those
intrigues which completed it by placing the Duke of
Orleans on the throne. Since that date he has been
the most noted politician of France — sometimes in
office — sometimes in opposition — sometimes, as in Fe-
bruary, 1848, bending to the popular storm, and disap-
pearing under the waves — again, as in May, reappearing
on the surface, as active and prominent as ever, as soon
as the deluge was beginning to subside. Next to M.
Guizot, he is unquestionably the statesman of the
greatest genius and the most practical ability in France ;
subtle, indefatigable ; a brilliant orator, an inveterate
intriguer ; skilled in all the arts by which men obtain
power; restrained by no delicate scruples from using
it as his egotism may suggest ; alike unprincipled as a
minister, and untruthful as an historian ; boundless in
the aspirations, and far from nice in the instruments, of
his ambition ; inspiring admiration in every one, but
confidence in no one. Still he is one of the few leading
men in France who have a clear perception of what
that country needs, and can bear ; and if his character
had been as high as his talents are vast, he might
now have been almost omnipotent.

Guizot is a statesman of a different sort, gifted,
perhaps, with a less vivid genius, but with a character
of more solid excellence and an intellect of a much

PRANCE SINCE 1848. 99

loftier order. He earned his rank by many years of
labour in the paths of history and philosophy before he
entered the miry and thorny ways of politics, and both
as a diplomatist and a minister has shown himself equal
to every crisis. Clear, systematic, and undoubting in
his opinions, and pertinacious in the promotion of them ;
stern, cold, and unbending in his manners, with some-
thing of the Puritan and much of the Stoic in the for-
mation of his mind, fitted by nature rather for the
professor's chair than the turbulent arena of the senate,
but " equal to either fortune ; " earnestly devoted to the
pursuit of truth in philosophic matters, but not always
scrupulously adhering to it in the labyrinth of political
intrigue ; taught by history and knowledge of contem-
poraneous life to look upon his countrymen with a
degree of mistrust and contempt, which his ministerial
career too often showed ; watching their follies with
more of lofty disdain than of melancholy pity, oftener
with a sardonic smile than with a Christian sigh, and
meeting the most hostile and stormy opposition with a
cold and haughty imperturbability ; he was, perhaps,
the most suitable, but was certainly the most unpopular
ruler that France could have had. The stern front
which he constantly opposed to any extension of the
popular power or privileges, his resolute hostility to the
liberalism of the day, was much blamed at the time, and
has since been regarded by some as the proximate cause
of the Kevolution of February, though scarcely, we
think, with justice. We are too well aware of the pro-
digious and unseen obstacles which public men have to
encounter, and of the incalculable difficulty of arriving
at a just estimate of their conduct in any peculiar cir-
cumstances, which is inevitable to all who are not
behind the scenes, to be much disposed to condemn the
conduct of M. Guizot, on this head, from 1840 to 1848.
It was evidently pursued on system, and subsequent

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100 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

events dispose us to think that it may very possibly
have been judicious. He seems to have been convinced
that the French were not ripe for larger liberties or a
wider franchise, and to have resolved to let the education
of many years of constitutional monarchy pass over
their head before granting them more; and when we
remember that the parliamentary reforms of M. Thiers
were as promptly and scornfully thrust aside by the
leaders of the February revolution, as the conservative
policy of his predecessor, we greatly incline to think
M. Guizot may have been right. At all events, he acted
on a plan, and from conviction ; and if his master had
trusted him with sufficient confidence, and had displayed
half his nerve, the convulsion which agitated and upset
all Europe might, we believe, have been easily com-
pressed within the limits of a Parisian emeute. It is
worthy of remark that the three governments which
succeeded, the Provisional Government, the Dictatorship
of Cavaignac, and the National Assembly, have all found,
or thought, themselves obliged to be far more sternly
repressive than ever M. Guizot was. His two works,
published since his fall, on " Democracy in France," and
on " The Causes of the Success of the English Kevolu-
tion," display a profound knowledge of the foibles, the
wants, and the perils of his countrymen, such as no
other French statesman has shown. If he were again
at the head of affairs, the experience of the last two
years would, we believe, be found to have rendered the
French far more competent to appreciate his merits and
more disposed to submit to his rule. A popular states-
man he can never be.

Lamartine was made to be the idol of the French
because he was the embodiment of all their more
brilliant and superficial qualities. But he was utterly
devoid of statesmanlike capacity. His mind and cha-
racter were essentially and exclusively poetic; for

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 101

power and effect as an orator he was unrivalled ; and
his " Histoire des Girondins " is one of the most splendid
and ornate narratives extant in the world. He had
much of the hero about him ; he was a man of fine sen-
timents, of noble impulses, of generous emotions, of a
courage worthy of Bayard, and greater perhaps than
even Bayard would have shown in civil struggles. In
the first three days of the Provisional Government,
Lamartine was truly a great man : he was exactly the
man demanded by the crisis ; he had all the qualities
those sixty hours of "fighting with human beasts"
required ; — and it was not till that long agony was
passed, and the government, once fairly seated, was
called upon to act, that his profound incapacity and
ignorance of political science became apparent. No man
spoke more ably or more nobly: no man could have
acted more madly, weakly, or irresolutely. He sank at
once like a stone. From being the admiration of
Europe — the central object on whom all eyes were
turned, he fell with unexampled rapidity into disrepute,
obscurity, and contempt; and the entire absence of
dignity, manliness, and sense betrayed in his subsequent
writings has been astounding and appalling. The
words in which he sums up the characteristics of the
old Girondins are precisely descriptive of himself: —
" Us ne savaient faire que deux choses — bien parler, et
bien mourir."

The peculiar administrative institutions of France
present another obstacle of the most formidable nature
to the establishment of a stable republican government
in that country. There are two distinct and opposite
systems of administration, the municipal or self-go-
verning, and the centralising or bureaucratic ; and the
degree of real freedom enjoyed by any nation will depend
more on the circumstance which of these systems it has

H 3

102 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

adopted, than on the form of its government or the
name and rank of its ruler. The former system prevails
in America, in England, and in Norway ; the latter is
general upon the Continent, and has reached its extreme
point in Germany and France. The two systems, as
usually understood, are utterly irreconcilable: they
proceed upon opposite assumptions ; they lead to oppo-
site results. The municipal system proceeds on the
belief that men can manage their own individual con-
cerns, and look after their own interests for themselves;
and that they can combine for the management of such
affairs as require to be carried on in concert. Cen-
tralisation proceeds on the belief that men cannot
manage their own affairs, but that government must do
all for them. The one system narrows the sphere of
action of the central power to strictly national and
general concerns ; the other makes this sphere embrace,
embarrass, and assist at the daily life of every individual
in the community. Out of the one system a republic
naturally springs ; or, if the form of national govern-
ment be not republican in name, it will have the same
freedom, and the same advantages as if it were : — out
of the other no republic can arise ; on it no republic, if
forcibly engrafted, can permanently take root ; its basis,
its fundamental idea, is despotic.

In no country has the centralising system been
carried so far as in France. In no country does it
seem so suitable to or so submissively endured by the
inhabitants. In no country is the metropolis so omni-
potent in fashion, in literature, and in politics. In none
is provincialism so marked a term of contempt. In
none has the minister at the centre such a stupendous
army of functionaries at his beck, appointed by his
choice, and removable at his pleasure. The number of
civil officers under the control of the central govern-
ment in France is 535,000: in England it is 23,000.

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 103

The functions of these individuals penetrate into every
man's home and business ; they are cognisant of, and
license or prohibit his goings out and comings in, his
buildings and pullings down, his entering into, or
leaving business, and his mode of transacting it. This
system, which in England would be felt to be intolerably
meddlesome and vexatious, is (it is in vain to disguise it)
singularly popular in France: — it is a grand and mag-
nificent fabric to behold ; it dates in its completeness
from the Consulate, when the nation first began to
breathe freely after the revolutionary storms; and
amid all the changes and catastrophes which have since
ensued, amid governments overthrown and dynasties
chased away, no one has made any serious endeavour to
alter or even to mitigate this oppressive and paralysing
centralisation. It has evidently penetrated into and
harmonises with the national character. The idea of
ruling themselves is one which has not yet reached the
French understanding: the idea of choosing those who
are to rule them is the only one they have hitherto been
able to conceive.

Now, this system, and the habits of mind which it
engenders, operate in two ways to add to the difficulties
of establishing a firm and compact government. In
the first place, it deprives the people of all political
education ; it shuts them out from the means of ob-
taining political practice or experience ; it forbids that
daily association of the citizens with the proceedings of
the government, from which only skill and efficient
knowledge is to be derived. In England and in America,
every citizen is trained in vestries, in boards of guar-
dians, in parochial or public meetings, in political unions,
in charitable societies, in magistrates' conclaves, to prac-
tise all the arts of government and self-government on
a small scale and in an humble sphere; so that when

H 4

104 TRANCE SINCE 1848.

called upon to act in a higher function, and on a wider
stage, he is seldom at a loss. This apprenticeship, these
normal schools, are wholly wanting to the Frenchman.
The establishment of them and practice in them is an
essential preliminary to the formation of any republic
that can last. The French have been busy in erecting
the superstructure, but have never thought of laying
the foundation. The following contrast drawn by a
citizen of the United States is, in many respects, just
and instructive : —

61 It has never been denied that political institutions are
healthful and durable only according as they have naturally
grown out of the manners and wants of the population among
which they exist. Thus, the inhabitants of the United States,
inheriting from their English ancestors the habit of taking care
of themselves, and needing nothing but to be left to the govern-
ment of their own magistrates, have gone on prospering and to
prosper in the, work of their own hands. Every state, county,
city, and town in America, you need not be told, has always
been accustomed to manage its own concerns without application
to or interference from the supreme authority at the capital.
And this self-controlling policy is so habitual and ingrained
wherever the Anglo-Saxon race has spread, that it will for ever
present an insuperable obstacle to the successful usurpation of
undue authority by any individual. The people of the thirteen
original transatlantic states, in the construction of a common-
wealth, had only to build upon a real and solid foundation made
to hand ; but in France the reverse of this was the case when in
the last century a republic was proclaimed, and continues so
now, without any material diminution of the rubbish, which
must be swept away before a trustworthy basis can be found
for the most dangerous experiment in a nation's history. The
executive power, securely ensconced in central Paris, like a
sleepless fly-catcher in the middle of his well- spun web, feels
and responds to every vibration throughout the artfully or-
ganised system, which extends from channel to sea, and from
river to ocean. Its aim has been to keep the departments in
leading-strings, and its success to prevent neighbours from

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 105

leaning only on each other for neutral aid and comfort in every
undertaking great or small, and to drive them to the minister of
the interior as the sole dispenser of patronage. Provincialism
has hence become naturally associated with social inferiority,
sliding easily into vulgarity ; and as vulgarity is often carelessly
taken for intellectual incapacity, the consequence is, that the
many millions living at a distance from the factitious fountain of
power are regarded and treated as children, even in matters that
most deeply concern their daily comfort. If, for example, a
river is to be bridged, a morass drained, or a church erected,
more time is lost in negotiating at head-quarters for permission
to commence the undertaking than would suffice in England or
America to accomplish the same object twice over. Disgusted,
doubtless, with all this, and, as too frequently happens, ex-
pressly educated by aspiring parents for some official employ-
ment, most provincials of distinguished talents, instead of
honourably addressing themselves for advancement, as is the
custom in the United States, to their own immediate commu-
nities, hasten to the feast of good things, whether within the
Elysee or elsewhere, at which they soon learn to take care of
themselves, leaving their country, as the motto on their current
coin has it, to the ' protection of God.'

" No one ought to feel surprised, then, whenever a revolution
happens here, and a republic, the universal panacea which
haunts the French brain, is announced, that the people out of
Paris, utterly destitute of political training, and without leaders,
as they are, should stand agape and helpless as a shipload of
passengers in a gale whose ruthless violence has left them with-
out captain or crew. Nor should their helplessness and apparent
imbecility be a reproach to their natural intelligence, for the
system of centralisation, so briefly alluded to above as a curse
to the country, has in its long course benumbed their faculties
and paralysed their energies for every sort of action beyond the
little circle of a material existence. Neither is this system
likely to be soon abandoned, the present minister of the interior
having very lately, to my certain knowledge, fiercely and firmly
resisted every attempt on the part of the Council of State to
modify its operation. In the absence, therefore, of the very
groundwork whereon to create and sustain a republic, how can
such a form of government endure, except while it is kept, as

106 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

at present, from toppling over, by the unwilling support of
various factions, which preserve it from falling only to prevent
an antagonist still more detested from taking its place ? "

The second effect of this administrative centralisation
is to direct all the active, aspiring, discontented spirit
which is always fermenting in the community, upon the
originating power in the state. The people are passive
as regards the administrators, aggressive as regards the
government. They are annoyed or insulted by a po-
liceman or a sous-prefetj and they at once, having no
means of direct action upon him, the immediate and sub-
ordinate agent, vent their indignation on the central
power. They have no readier way of avenging them-
selves on an obnoxious prefect than by upsetting the
dynasty which appointed him. When they feel them-
selves oppressed, unprosperous, or suffering, they go at
once to that which the system has taught them to
regard as the source of all — the regal palace or the
ministerial hotel at Paris : they cashier their rulers, but
never dream of changing the system of administration,
and consequently never mend their position. The evil
remains undiminished ; the discontent continues ; and
all that has been learned is the fatal lesson with what
astounding facility governments may be overthrown
which have no root in the affections, the habits, the
wants, or the character of the people. In England, if a
policeman affronts us, we bring him before a magistrate;
if an overseer or relieving officer disgusts us, we re-
member it at the next election of guardians ; if a tax-
gatherer oversteps his powers, we complain to his chief
and insist on his dismissal; if refused a hearing we
make parliament itself a party to our grievance; if
a magistrate acts oppressively we either expose him, or
bring an action against him, secure of impartial justice.
But no act of injustice or oppression ever weakens our
loyalty to Queen or parliament, for we know they are

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 107

not responsible for the faults of their subordinates, since
they have given us ample means of self-protection
against them.

A third reason which renders this central bureau-
cracy incompatible with any settled and secure govern-
ment, except a powerful despotism, deserves much con-
sideration. We have already spoken of the great diffi-
culties thrown in the way of the re- organisation of
France, by that passion for material wellbeing which is
at present so salient a feature in the character of her
citizens. These difficulties are enormously enhanced
when this material wellbeing is demanded at the hands
of the government. Yet this demand is one which every
Frenchman thinks himself entitled to make; and for
generations successive governments have countenanced
the claim. By taking out of the hands of the individual
the regulation of his own destiny, and teaching him to
look up to the abstraction called "The State," for
guidance, direction, and support, it has sedulously
fostered a habit of expecting everything from this sup-
posed omnipotence, and has effectually trodden out that
spirit of humble but dignified self-reliance which is the
chief source from which material wellbeing can be
derived. It has said to its subjects, to quote the words
of one who has read deeply the signs of the times, " Ce
n'est point a vous, faibles individus, de vous conserver,
de vous diriger, de vous sauver vous-memes. II y a
tout pres de vous un etre merveilleux, dont la puissance
est sans bornes, la sagesse infaillible, 1' opulence inepui-
sible. II s'appelle I'^tat. C'est 4 lui qu'il faut vous
addresser ; c'est lui qui est charge d'avoir de la force
et de la prevoyance pour tout le monde ; c'est lui qui
devinera votre vocation, qui disposera de vos capacites,
qui recompensera vos labeurs, qui elevera votre enfance,
qui recueillera votre vieillesse, qui soignera vos maladies,
qui protegera votre famille, qui vous donnera sans

108 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

mesure travail, bien-etre, liberte*."* It is not won-
derful, then, that the French should have contracted
the habit of asking and expecting everything — even
impossibilities — from their government; and of urging
their claims with the confidence and audacity of " sturdy
beggars ;" — but picture to yourself a people " passionne
pour le bonheur," and trained to look for this bonheur
at the hands of a government which has taught them
to demand it, but has no power to bestow it, and then
ask yourself what chance of success or permanence can
a republic so situated have ?

Republicanism and bureaucracy are incompatible ex-
istences. You may call your state a republic if you
will — you may modify its form as you please — you
may have two chambers or one — you may place at the
head a military dictator, or an elective president holding
office for one year, for four years, or for ten; — but so
long as the administration of public affairs remains
central and bureaucratic, the utmost that full repre-
sentation or universal suffrage can give you, is the
power of choosing the particular set of busy bodies who
shall rule you, or rather the irresponsible individual
who shall appoint them. It is not liberty, but merely
the selection of your head oppressor. Thus France is
in a radically false position, and she has not yet found
it out ; she is endeavouring unconsciously to unite two
incompatibilities. Her government has all the finished
and scientific organisation of a despotism, with the
political institutions which belong to freedom. Each
man has a share in the choice of his legislator and his
executive chief; each man is the depositary of a cal-
culable fraction of the sovereign power ; but each man
is the slave of the passport office, the prefect, the
gendarme, and the policeman. The republic of to-day

* Emile Saisset.

FRANCE SINCE 1848. 109

may wake and find itself an empire to-morrow — scarcely
an individual Frenchman would feel the difference —
and not one iota of the administration need be changed.
As it exists now, it was the child and may be the
parent of imperialism. The whole machinery of auto-
cratic rule is at all times ready for the hand of any one
who can seize it.

Again : the national traditions of the French as
written in their chequered history — the monuments of
regal magnificence and splendour, still so cherished and
admired, in the Tuileries, at Versailles, and at Fon-
tainebleau — the inextinguishable taste of the people for
gorgeous and imposing shows, and their incurable mili-
tary spirit, — all combine to make the simplicity of a
genuine republic unharmonious, grotesque, and out of
place among them. It is manifestly an exotic — a
transplanted tree of liberty, which nature never in-
tended to grow out of such a soil. The republic, save
for a few short years, is associated with no recollections
of historic glory : the times which a Frenchman loves
to recall are those of Henri Quatre, Louis Quatorze,
and Napoleon — none of them names redolent of liberty.
The French are, essentially and above all, a military
people. Now, unreasoning obedience to a non-elected
and non-deposable chief, an utter abnegation of the
individual will, which are the soul of success in war,
are direct contradictions to the ideas on which demo-
cracies are founded. The passion for external luxury
and splendour is incongruous and fatal in a democracy,
unless that splendour can be shared by all the people ;
yet in no civilised nations is that passion stronger than
in France, and in few is the contrast so great between
the palaces of their monarchs (which they still take
pride in and adorn), and the habitations of the other
classes of the community. In England, where the
democratic element is so powerful and so spreading,

110 FKANCE SINCE 1848.

there is little difference either in comfort or magni-
ficence between Windsor Castle and Chatsworth, be-
tween St. James' Palace and the noble mansion of
Longleat. The palaces of our sovereigns, the castles of
our nobility, the halls of our wealthy and ancient com-
moners, are connected by imperceptible gradations;
our Queen might take up her abode at the houses of
some of our country gentlemen, and scarcely discover
any diminution in the comfort of her accommodations,
or the splendour of her furniture. But in France this
is not so. Her royal palaces may rival or eclipse ours
— certainly we have nothing so immense or gorgeous
as Versailles — but the chateaux and hotels of her
nobles belong to an entirely different and much lower
class than ours. She has nothing to represent that
class of mansions, which we count by hundreds, of
which Devonshire House, Northumberland House, Bel-
voir Castle, Drayton Manor, Chatsworth, and Longleat,
are the type writh us. The character of her social
hierarchy as depicted in her dwellings is essentially
monarchical : ours is essentially aristocratic. Versailles
and a republic would be a standing contradiction — a
perpetual incongruity and mutual reproach. They re-
present, and suggest, wholly opposite ideas.

If this article had not already extended to so great a
length, we should have dwelt on other difficulties which
beset the task of reorganising government and society
in France ; on those arising from the material condition
of her people ; from the degree of poverty, incompatible
with contentment, in which so large a portion of her
population live ; from the want of a " career," so pain-
fully felt by many thousands of her most active spirits,
and so dangerous to internal peace ; from the inadequacy
of her protected manufactures, her imperfect agricul-
ture, and her undeveloped commerce, to support in
comfort the actual numbers on her soil ; from the law

FRANCE SINCE 1848. Ill

of equal inheritance, with all its fatal and unforeseen
consequences to peace, to freedom, to wealth, to social
interests, and intellectual culture ; and last, not least,
from the fatal necessity, which each new government
that has sprung from a popular insurrection finds itself
under, of turning instantly round upon the parties, the
ideas, and the principles which have elevated it to
power. A government created by a revolution finds
that almost its first task must be to repress revolu-
tionary tendencies ; nay more, that it must repress
these tendencies far more promptly, more severely,
more incessantly, than would be necessary to a govern-
ment strong in the loyalty of the nation, in the tra-
ditions of the past, in the deliberate judgment of the
influential classes, and which was not harassed by the
spectre of anarchy daily knocking at its gates. Yet
such a government — casting down the ladder by which
it climbed to office — shutting the door in the faces of
undeniable claims — rebuking and punishing the enthu-
siastic soldiers who had fought for it — imprisoning the
friends to whom it owed its existence — fettering and
fining the press which had paved the way for its inau-
guration— has, it cannot be disguised, primd facie, an
ugly aspect.

To conclude. The basis of the governments which
owed their origin to the first Revolution was reaction
against old anomalies ; the basis of the Empire was
military power ; the basis of the Restoration was legiti-
macy, prejudice, arid prestige ; the basis of Louis
Philippe's government was the material interests of the
nation, and the supremacy of the bourgeoisie as the
depositaries and guardians of those interests. The Re-
volution of February — being (as it were) an aggressive
negation, not a positive effort, having no clear idea at
its root, but being simply the product of discontent and
disgust — furnishes no foundation for a government.

112 FRANCE SINCE 1848.

Loyalty to a legitimate monarch ; deference to an
ancient aristocracy ; faith in a loved and venerated
creed ; devotion to a military leader ; sober schemes
for well-understood material prosperity; — all these
may form, and have formed, the foundation of stable
and powerful governments : mere reaction, mere denial,
mere dissatisfaction, mere vague desires, mere aggres-
sion on existing things — never.

To construct a firm and abiding commonwealth out
of such materials, and in the face of such obstacles as
we have attempted to delineate, — such is the problem
the French people are called upon to conduct to a suc-
cessful issue. Without a positive and earnest creed ;
without a social hierarchy ; without municipal institu-
tions and the political education they bestow ; without
a spirit of reverence for rights and of obedience to
authority, penetrating all ranks, — we greatly doubt
whether the very instruments for the creation of a
republic are not wanting. A republic does not create
these — it supposes and postulates their existence. They
are inheritances from the past, not possessions to be
called into being by a fiat. They are the slow growth
of a settled political and social system, acting with
justice, founded on authority and tradition, and con-
solidated by long years of unshaken continuance.

113

NET RESULTS OF 1848 IN GERMANY AND ITALY.*

PKOBABLY since the fall of the Koman Empire the
world has never seen a year so eventful and distracting
as 1848. It seemed like a century compressed into a
lustrum. Never was there a year so distinguished
beyond all previous example by the magnitude and the
multiplicity of its political changes — by the violence of
the shock which it gave to the framework of European
society --by the oscillations of opinion and success
between the two great parties in the Continental
struggle. Never was there a year so pregnant with
instruction and with warning — so rich in all the
materials of wisdom both for sovereign and for people
— so crowded with wrecks and ruins, with the ruins of
ancient grandeur, and the wrecks of glorious anticipa-
tions — so filled with splendid promises and paltry
realisations, with hopes brilliant and fantastic as fairy-
land, with disappointments dismal and bitter as the
grave. Thrones, which but yesterday had seemed based
upon the everlasting hills, shattered in a day ; sovereigns
whose wisdom had become a proverb, and sovereigns
whose imbecility had been notorious, alike flying from
their capitals, and abdicating without a natural murmur
or a gallant struggle; rulers, who had long been the

* From the "North British Review."

1. Royalty and Republicanism in Italy. By JOSEPH MAZZINI.
London: 1850.

2. Italy in 1848. By MARIOTTI. London : 1851.

3. Taschenbuch der Neuesten Geschichte. Von ROBT. PRUTZ.
Dessau: 1851.

4. Germany in 1850 ; its Courts, Camps, and People. By the
Baroness BLAZE DE BURY. London : 1850.

VOL. II. I

114 NET KESULTS OE 1848

embodiment of obstinate resistance to all popular
demands, vying with each other in the promptitude and
the extent of their concessions ; statesmen of the longest
experience, the deepest insight, the acutest talent -
statesmen like Mettemich and Guizot — baffled, beaten,
and chased away, and reaching their foreign banishment
only to turn and gaze with a melancholy and bewildered
air on the ecroulement of schemes and systems of policy
the construction of which had been the labour of a life-
time ; eminent men sinking into obscurity, and going
out like snuff; obscure men rising at one bound into
eminence and power ; ambitious men finding the objects
of their wildest hopes suddenly placed within their
grasp ; Utopian dreamers staggered and intoxicated by
seeing their most gorgeous visions on the point of rea-
lisation ; patriots beholding the sudden and miraculous
advent of that liberty which they had prayed for, fought
for, suffered for, through years of imprisonment, po-
verty, and exile ; nations, which had long pined in
darkness, dazzled and bewildered by the blaze of in-
stantaneous light ; the powerful smitten with impotence ;
the peasant and the bondsman endowed with freedom
and unresisted might ; the first last and the last first ;
— such were the strange phenomena of that mar-
vellous era, which took away the breath of the beholder,
which the journalist was unable to keep pace with, and
" which panting Time toiled after in vain."

The year opened with apparent tranquillity. In two
quarters only of Europe had there been any indications
of the coming earthquake ; and to both of these the eyes
of all friends of freedom were turned with hopeful in-
terest and earnest sympathy. The first dawn of a new
day had arisen in a country where least of all it could
have been looked for — in Kome. There, in a state
long renowned for the most corrupt, imbecile, mis-
chievous administration of the western world, a new

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 115

Pope, in the prime of life, full of respect for his sacred
office, and deeply impressed with the solemn responsi-
bilities of his high position, set himself with serious
purpose and a single mind, though with limited views
and inadequate capacities, to the task of cleansing those
Augean stables from the accumulated filth of centuries.
He commenced reform — where reform, though most
rare, is always the most safe — from above ; he purified
the grosser parts of the old administrative system ; he
showed an active determination to put down all abuse,
and to give his people the benefit of a really honest
government ; he ventured on the bold innovation, in it-
self a mighty boon and a strange progress, of appointing
laymen to offices of state : and, finally, he convoked a
representative assembly, and gave the Romans a consti-
tution — the first they had seen since the days of RienzL
His people were, as might have been anticipated, warmly
grateful for the gifts, and enthusiastically attached to
the person, of their excellent Pontiff; all Europe looked
on with delight ; Pio Nono was the hero of the day ;
and everything seemed so safe, so wise, so happy, that
we felt justified in hoping that a new day had really
dawned upon the ancient capital of the world.

Sicily, too, had about the same time entered upon a
struggle to recover some portion of her promised freedom
and her stolen rights. Her wrongs had been so flagrant
so manifold, so monstrous ; the despotism under which
she groaned was at once so incapable, so mean, so low,
so brutal ; her condition was so wretched, and her capa-
bilities so vast, that the sympathies of the world went
with her in her struggle with her false and bad
oppressor. All ranks of her citizens were unanimous in
their resolution of resistance ; even the priests, elsewhere
the ready tools of tyranny, here fought on the side of
the people, and blessed the arms and banners of the
reformers; and what was still more remarkable, and

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116 NET RESULTS OF 1848

of more hopeful augury, all classes seemed to put
mutual jealousies aside, and to be actuated by the same
spirit of sincere, self-denying, self-sacrificing patriotism.
Their demands were moderate but firm, and so reason-
able, that the mere fact of such demands having to be
made, was an indelible disgrace to Naples. So far, too,
their course had been singularly cautious ; they had
committed no blunder, they had displayed no san-
guinary passion, and no violent excitement, and it was
impossible not to hope everything from a contest so
wisely conducted, and so unimpeachably just. At
length, on the 8th of February, the Sicilians having
been everywhere victorious, the preliminaries of an
arrangement with the King of Naples were agreed to,
on the basis of the constitution of 1812. So far all
went well.

In the meantime, excited or warned by the example
of the Pope,1 and the enthusiasm of the Romans, other
Italian princes began to move in the path of improve-
ment. The King of Sardinia, the Grand Duke of Tus-
cany, and the King of Naples, promised a constitution
to their subjects, and actually took measures for car-
rying these promises into effect. The excitement soon
reached Lombardy ; popular movements took place at
Milan, but were repressed by the Austrian government
with even more than wonted promptitude and severity.
Hungary had for some years been making great efforts
towards national improvement, and some relaxation of
the old feudal privileges, as well as towards a recovery
of their old constitutional liberties ; but Austria had
steadily repressed all such exertions ; and a long course
of perfidy and oppression had at length so exasperated
the Hungarians, and united all parties among them
against the common enemy, that it became evident that
the contest was approaching to an open rupture.

Such was the position of affairs when the French

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 117

revolution of February came like an earthquake, as-
tounding nations, " and, with fear of change, perplexing
raonarchs." The events which ensued are still fresh in
the memory of all men. The democratic party through-
out the whole of central Europe burned to follow the
example of a movement, the success of which had been
so signal and so prompt. The effect was electric ; but
not everywhere, nor altogether, wholesome. The
friends of freedom felt that the time was come to assert
their cause, and to claim, without fear of a refusal, the
rights so long withheld ; while those nations which had
already taken some steps towards the attainment of free
institutions, and had hitherto deemed their progress
rapid and brilliant beyond the most sanguine anticipa-
tions, now began to regard it as tardy, jog-trot, and
inadequate. They looked askance on constitutional
monarchy, and began to sigh for a republic. The
arrangement between the Sicilians and their sovereign,
which had been all but concluded, was broken off, in
consequence of an augmentation of the popular de-
mands; while Tuscany, Sardinia, and Rome, began to
think their liberal rulers scarce liberal enough. At
Berlin, where some tardy steps had at length been
taken towards the advent of a constitutional govern-
ment, the people were anxious to get on faster than the
fears or the opinions of the monarch could go with
them; an insurrection broke out, and a sanguinary
contest of two days' duration desolated the city, and
terminated in the scarcely veiled defeat of the crown.
This was on the 18th of March. On the 6th, an insur-
rection took place at Munich, which resulted in the
exaction of extensive reforms, and was shortly after-
wards followed by the abdication of the king. On the
14th a revolution broke out at Vienna, which ended in
the flight of Prince Metternich, and the proclamation
of a representative government. On the 19th the Aus-

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118 NET RESULTS OF 1848

trians were driven out of Milan, and a provisional
government was established in Lombardy. Thus, in a
month from the outbreak of the French revolution,
the whole of central Europe was revolutionised.

Such is a summary of these astounding events, the
like of which were assuredly never crowded into so
brief a portion of time. The popular party, — the friends
of free institutions and constitutional rule, - — every-
\yhere aroused and everywhere triumphant, achieving,
with an ease and rapidity which partook of the miracu-
lous, the most decisive victories over the oldest, sternest,
rustiest administrative systems of Europe, — were
everywhere followed by the sympathy, the admiration,
and the prayers of all lovers of humanity, and every-
where strong with the strength which such sympathy
must always give.

Where now are all those bright prospects vanished ?
— which of .all those mighty changes have become per-
manent ? — what has been the enduring fruit of all
these brilliant victories ? — where now are to be found
all those fresh, young, sanguine constitutions ? With
scarcely an exception, everything has fallen back into
its old condition. In nearly every state the old demon
of despotism has returned, bringing with it worse devils
than itself. Hungary and Hesse are crushed ; Bavaria
has been degraded into the brutal tool of a more brutal
tyrant ; the Prussian people are sullen, desponding, and
disarmed, and the Prussian government sunk into a
terrible abyss of degradation ; Austria has a new em-
peror, more insolently despotic than any of his prede-
cessors for many a long year ; and throughout Germany
constitutional liberty has been effectually trampled out.
In Italy, Venice and Lombardy have been reconquered,
and are now experiencing the voe metis ; Tuscany is
worse, because more Austrian than before, and alarmed
at the peril she has incurred ; the small duchies are as

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 119

bad as ever — they could not be worse ; the Pope, ter-
rified out of his benevolence and his patriotism, has
been restored by foreign arms, and the old ecclesiastical
abominations are reinstated in their old supremacy;
while Naples and Sicily are again prostrate at the feet
of the most imbecile and brutal of the incurable race of
Bourbons. Two short years have passed away since
Europe presented to the lover of liberty and human
progress the most smiling aspect she had ever worn ; —
and in this brief space of time, an inexorable destiny
has gathered together all the far reaching anticipa-
tions, all the noble prospects, all the rapid conquests,
all the rich achievements of that memorable era, and
covered them over with these two narrow words — Hie
jacet.

Even patriots like ourselves, who stood aloof from
actual participation in the strife, viewing its vicissi-
tudes with the simple interest of spectators, and who
had no personal concern in the issue, might well be
disheartened at such tremendous reverses and such
extreme reaction. The cup of hope was probably
never filled so full, or approached so near to the lips
that were not to drink it. A victory so nearly gained,
and so entirely lost — success so brilliant and complete,
followed by failure so disastrous and so crushing —
has scarcely ever been recorded in history. But we
are too firm believers in human progress to imagine
that even in this case the defeat has been as total and
thorough as it appears ; nay, we are convinced that in
the midst of apparent retrogression there has been
actual advance ; that in spite of all appearances to the
contrary, the years 1848, 1849, 1850, have not been
lost to the onward march of humanity ; that the cause
of freedom — though often fought so ill, though stained
with some excesses, though tarnished by so many
follies, though overshadowed for the moment by so

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120 NET RESULTS OF 1848

dark and thick a cloud — has yet on the whole gained
by the struggle, and grown stronger, notwithstanding
its manifest defeat ; and instead, therefore, of lamenting
an irrevocable past, or endeavouring to allot to the
various parties in the melee their respective shares in
the production of the common failure, we shall do
better service by attempting to extract from the con-
fusion of events the net results, the residual gain, of
these unexampled years.

The progress of humanity is never regular. Free-
dom and civilisation advance, externally at least, by
fitful and spasmodic springs. Their march has been
compared to that of the flood-tide, where every wave
retires, yet the whole mass of waters moves incessantly
and irresistibly onwards. But the similitude is inac-
curate, inasmuch as in human progress there is no
constant and steady movement, and no inevitable ebb.
A more correct likeness may be found in the wave
which is slowly but perpetually undermining a vast
cliff, covered with buildings and crowded with men,
containing monuments which have endured for ages,
and results of energetic industry which look forward to
ages more. Everything bears the impress of stability,
every individual has the conviction of immutable se-
curity, save the few who have descended to the base of
the cliff and perceived the fearful havoc wrought by
the ceaseless and silent toil of their unseen destroyer.
No warning sound, no partial sinking of the earth
gives timely intimation of the catastrophe which is
preparing ; — till at length, when the work is complete,
and the foundations wholly washed away, an accident,
a nothing, a trivial shake, a rolling of distant thunder,
gives the needed jar, and the whole structure, with its
mighty edifices, its ancient bulwarks, its modern cre-
ations, its vivid, teeming, multitudinous life, is en-
gulfed in the destroying sea.

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 121

A more exact one still is to be found in the old
arithmetical puzzle of our childhood — the snail which
climbed up three feet every day, and slipped down two
feet every night. The year 1848 was the climbing
day ; 1849 and 1850 were the backsliding night.
Now, in 1851, we can estimate the two together, and
calculate roughly how much has on the whole been
gained, how much further forward we are than we
were in 1847. In a previous Paper we spoke of France ;
her drama is not yet played out, and its issue and
residual phenomenon no man can foresee. At present
we shall confine our attention to Germany and Italy —
a sad spectacle, but, closely and rightly viewed, by no
means a despairing one.

The condition of these two countries when the revo-
lution broke out, presented some interesting points of
similarity with each other, and of contrast with France
and England, which it is important to notice. In all four
countries there was much suffering and much discon-
tent; but the malcontents and the sufferers belonged
to different classes in society. In England and in
France the lower orders were the chief malcontents ;
and unquestionably, especially in the latter country,
they had much to complain of, and much to endure.
Difficulty of obtaining subsistence, actual and severe
privation in the present, and no more hopeful prospects
for the future, darkened the lot and soured the temper
of hundreds of thousands of the people. The more
fortunate saw little before them beyond strenuous and
ceaseless toil, from early morning till late evening,
from precocious childhood to premature decrepitude.
The less fortunate often sought toil in vain, dug for it
as for hidden treasure, and found it, when obtained,
uncertain and unremunerative. A class— often a very
numerous class — had grown up among them, whom
defective social arrangements had left without any

122 NET RESULTS OF 1848

means of subsistence, beyond habitual crime and the
God-send of occasional insurrections.

Nearly all these were more or less uneducated, with
passions unsoftened by culture, and appetites sharpened
by privation — excitable, undisciplined, and brutal.
Such were always ready for any social or political
convulsion — prompt to aid and aggravate it, certain to
complicate and disgrace it. It is a fearful addition to
the perplexities and horrors of a revolution when the
mass of the nation are destitute and wretched. Germany
and Italy were in a singular measure free from this
element of confusion ; and in so far their path was
wonderfully clear and easy. In Germany the orderly,
industrious, and simple habits of the peasantry; the
general possession of land by the rural portion of them,
especially in the Prussian provinces ; the relics of the
old distribution of artisans into guilds; the watchful
care of the .numberless bureaucratic governments to
prevent the too rapid increase of this, or indeed of any
class ; the systematic care of Austria, especially, to
keep the lower classes in a state of material comfort ;
the habit in some states, as Bavaria, of requiring a
certificate of property as a preliminary to marriage, —
had combined to prevent poverty, except in rare cases,
from degenerating into destitution, so that there was,
generally speaking, little physical distress or suffering
among the mass. The diffusion of elementary educa-
tion, too, (such as it was, for we are no amateurs of
the Continental system in such matters,) prevented
the existence of such utterly savage and ignorant
masses as were to be met with in France, and un-
happily in England also. The same exemption from
squalid misery which in Germany was due to care,
system, and culture, was bestowed upon the Italians by
their genial climate, their fertile soil, and their tem-
perate and frugal habits, so that though there was

IN GEKMANY AND ITALY. 123

often poverty — though poverty, and, as we in England
should regard it, poverty of the extremest kind was
frequent, and in Eome and Naples almost universal —
still, that actual want of the bread of to-day, and that
anxiety for the bread of to-morrow, which make men
ready for any violence or commotion, were in the
greater part of Italy comparatively rare. In Tuscany
and Lombardy, more especially, the utterly destitute
and starving were a class quite unknown.

In both countries, therefore, the discontented and
aspiring class — the makers of revolutions — were the
educated and the well-to-do; men whose moral, not
whose material, wants were starved and denied by the
existing system ; men of the middle ranks, who found
their free action impeded at every step, whose noblest
instincts were relentlessly crushed, whose intellectual
cravings were famished by the censorship, and whose
hungry and avid minds were compelled daily to sit
down to a meal of miserable and unrelished pottage ;
men of the upper classes, whose ambition was cramped
into the pettiest sphere, and forced into the narrowest
channels, to whom every career worthy of their ener-
gies and their patriotism was despotically closed, who
were compelled to waste their life and fritter away
their powers in the insipid pleasures of a spiritless
society, in metaphysical speculation, or antiquarian
research. Hence, with all its faults, the revolution in
Germany and in Italy had a far nobler origin, and a
loftier character than that of France ; it was the revolt,
not of starved stomachs, but of famished souls ; it was
the protest of human beings against a tyranny by which
the noblest attributes of humanity were affronted and
suppressed ; it was the recoil from a listless and unsatis-
fying life by men who felt that they were made for, and
competent to, a worthier existence ; it was a rebellion
of hearts who loved their country, against a system by

124 NET RESULTS OF 1848

which that country was dishonoured, and its develop-
ment impeded; it was not the work of passionate,
personal, and party aims, but of men who, however
wild their enthusiasm, however deplorable their blun-
ders, still set before them a lofty purpose, and wor-
shipped a high ideal.

The mouvement party (to borrow an expressive phrase
from the French) is composed in different countries of
characteristically different materials. The busy ex-
parliamentary reformers; the radicals, who take one
grievance or anomaly after another, and agitate and
grumble till they have procured its abolition ; who have
either originated or been the means of carrying each
successive measure of reform, are with us almost ex-
clusively composed of the active and practical men of
the middle classes — merchants and manufacturers,
educated enough to be able to comprehend the whole
bearings of the case, but distrusting theory, eschewing
abstractions, and too well trained in the actual business
of life to be in much danger from disproportionate
enthusiasm ; shopkeepers and tradesmen, not perhaps
masters of the political importance or full scope of the
question at issue, but quick to detect its bearing on
their personal interests, bringing to its examination a
strong, if a somewhat narrow, common sense, observing
a due proportion between their means and their ends,
and never, in the heat of contest, losing sight of the
main chance; — these constitute the centre and the
leaders of the movement party in England, and have
imparted to all our innovations that character for dis-
tinctness of purpose, sobriety of aim, and practicability

of result, which has always marked them In France

the mouvement party has been composed of the poli-
ticians by profession or by taste ; of the amateurs and
adventurers of public life ; of journalists, who had each
their pet crotchet and their special watchword, and

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 125

who attained in that country a degree of personal in-
fluence which is without a parallel elsewhere ; of men
to whom the Kepublic was a passion ; of men to whom
it was a dream ; of men to whom it opened a vista rich
in visions of pillage and of pleasure. It was a vast
heterogeneous congeries of all the impatient suffering,
of all the fermenting discontent, of all the unchained
and disreputable passions, of all the low and of all the
lofty ambition of the community. In Germany, again,
the mouvement party was composed, in overwhelming
proportion, of the Burschenschaft — of students and
professors, of young dreamers and their dreaming guides
-men qualified beyond all others to conceive and
describe a glorious Utopia, but disqualified beyond all
others to embody it in actual life. It is curious to
observe how everywhere throughout the German revo-
lutions, the collegians were prominent. The students
led the struggle at Berlin ; the Academic Legion was
for some time the ruling body at Vienna ; the Frank-
fort Assembly was, as " The Times " truly characterised
it, " an anarchy of professors." We do not mean to say,
that the revolutionary movement was not joined and
sympathised with by numbers in all ranks and classes
— though it is important to observe, that from the
peculiar system of educational training in Germany, all
these had gone through the same discipline, and been
subject to the same influences ; but the tone of the
movement was given, its course directed, and its limit
decided, by learned men, whom a life of university
seclusion and theoretic studies had precluded from the
possession of all practical experience, and by young
men fresh from the scenes and the heroes of classic
times, and glowing with that wild enthusiasm, that
passionate but unchastened patriotism, those visions of
an earthly Eden and a golden age, and that unrea-
soning devotion to everything that bears the name or

126 NET RESULTS OF 1848

usurps the semblance of liberty, which at their age it
would be grievous not to find. Finally, in Italy, the
leaders of the new Reformation were men of as pure
and lofty an enthusiasm, but of far finer capacities, and
of a sterner and firmer make of mind, but equally
untrained in political administration, and with a task
beyond their means ; — men, not indeed finished states-
men or accurate philosophers, because debarred from
that education of action which alone can complete the
training of the statesman and test the principles of the
thinker, — but of the materials out of which the noblest
statesmen and the profoundest philosophers are made ;
— many of them

" Of the canvass which men use
To make storm stay-sails ; "

many of them exhibiting powers for government and
war which rieed only a fairer field to obtain their full
appreciation.

It is natural that political changes emanating from
bodies so variously constituted as these, should be
widely different in their nature and objects, and be
crowned with very various degrees of success. In Italy
and Germany the patriots had one almost insuperable
difficulty to contend with. In both countries the fatal
system of bureaucracy had paralysed the energies and
dwarfed the political capacities of the people. In Ger-
many they had been ruled like children — in Italy like
victims or like vanquished slaves. But in both coun-
tries the whole province of administration, even in its
lowest branches, had been confided to a separate class,
set apart and trained to that profession, and directed
and controlled from head-quarters. The people could
do nothing except by official permission and under
official supervision ; long disuse produced inevitable
disqualification ; long inaction inevitable incapacity ; —

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 127

till when the crisis arrived, it appeared that the old
established functionaries were the only men capable of
practical action. When the power was suddenly thrown
into the hands of the inexperienced classes, none could
be found among them — in Germany at least — com-
petent to use it. In the south of Italy the old func-
tionaries had always been so abominably bad, that even
the most incompetent and fresh of the new aspirants
could not possibly make worse administrators. But in
Germany the fact was as unquestionable as humiliating ;
and one of the most important lessons inculcated by the
time was the utter inadequacy of the best contrived
system of national or college education for supplying
political training. The lower portion of the middle
classes in Germany receive a far more complete and
careful education in literary and scientific matters than
the same portion with us ; and in the instruction of the
working classes there is (or was lately) no comparison ;
yet our municipal councils, our vestry meetings, our
boards of guardians, our numberless voluntary associa-
tions, form normal schools for statesmen and adminis-
trators to which the Continent presents no analogies,
and for which unhappily it can furnish no substitutes,
and the want of which was most deeply felt in 1848.
It may be safely conceded to the advocates of bureau-
cracy and centralisation in this country, that we pay
dearly for our love of self-government in daily extrava-
gance and incessant blunders ; but it must also be
allowed, after recent events, that the costly experience
and capacity thus acquired is cheap at anv price.

In speaking, however, thus severely of the incapacity
displayed by the Germans for the construction and
management of constitutional forms of government, we
are bound to particularise one remarkable exception —
an exception so signal and instructive as to inspire the
most sanguine hopes for the success of the Germans in

128 NET RESULTS OF 1848

this new career, when the next opportunity shall be
afforded them of showing how far they have profited
by the experience of the past. We allude to the small
state of Hesse-Cassel, whose admirable struggle and sad
catastrophe well deserve a brief digression. In general,
we are too well aware, our countrymen take little
interest in the internal concerns of foreign states ; but
the case of Hesse is so peculiar, so scandalous, and
presents so many analogies with the most important
and glorious struggles in our own history, that it will
need only a short statement of what her constitution
was, how it has been crushed, and how it has been
defended, to excite in English bosoms the warmest
admiration for the unfortunate vanquished, and the sin-
cerest admiration for their firmness, forbearance, noble
disinterestedness, and unswerving reverence for law.

The constitution of Hesse-Cassel was granted on the
5th of January 1831, by the father of the present
elector. Its date shows its origin. The French revo-
lution of 1830 had awakened in the mind of Frederick-
William some fears for the stability of his own throne,
and he proffered his subjects a free constitution. The
terms were soon agreed upon ; and considering the
period of excitement in which they originated, they are
strangely moderate and fair, and show, on the part of
the Hessians, a far more real conception of the essence
and the guarantees of freedom than is common among
Continental nations. The following are a few of the
most important provisions : —

" The representatives are not bound by instructions from their
electors, but give their vote in accordance with their duties to-
wards their Sovereign and their fellow-citizens, according to
their own judgment, as they hope to answer it before God and
their conscience.

"Each representative must take the following oath: — (I
swear to hold sacred the Constitution, and always to have at

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 129

heart, in my votes and motions in this Assembly, both the wel-
fare of my Sovereign and that of my fatherland, according to
my own conviction, and without allowing myself to be influenced
by any other consideration. So help me God.'

" The representatives are elected to act as such for three
years. After three years, new elections take place, without any
decree to that effect requiring to be issued on the part of the
Government. The same persons may be re-elected.

" The Elector calls the representatives together as often as
he may think it necessary for the settlement of any important or
pressing matters referring to the affairs of the State, They
must, however, be called together at least every three years.

" The Elector has the right to adjourn or dissolve the As-
sembly, but the adjournment is not to last above three months,
and in case of a dissolution, the order for new elections has to
be issued at the same time.

" All orders and regulations referring to the maintenance or
carrying out of any of the existing laws shall emanate from the
Government alone. The Government can also, during the time
the Assembly is not sitting, on the request of the respective
heads of the ministerial departments, and with the co-operation
of the permanent committee, pass such exceptional measures as
the already existing laws may not provide for, but which they
may consider necessary for the security of the State, or for the
maintenance of the public peace. After such measures have
been passed, the representatives shall, on the requisition of their
committee, be called together without delay, in order that their
sanction to such measures may be obtained.

" Previous to a dissolution or adjournment of the Assembly
taking place, the members have to elect a committee of three or
five of their own number, not only to watch the carrying out of
the measures or laws passed by the Assembly, and take care of
its interest, but also to act in accordance with the instructions
they may have received from the Assembly, and the provisions
of the Constitution. The majority of this committee shall
neither consist of officers of Government nor of those holding
appointments at Court.

" The head of each ministerial department has to countersign
any decree or regulation referring to his department issued by
the Elector, and is held personally responsible for the contents

VOL. II. K

130 NET RESULTS OF 1848

being strictly in accordance with the provisions of the Constitu-
tion and the laws of the country. As regards any decrees or
regulations which have reference to more than one or the whole
of the Government departments, they have to be countersigned,
jointly, by the respective heads of each department, each being
held personally responsible for his own department.

" All Government officers shall be held responsible for their
acts, and any one guilty of a violation of the Constitution, par-
ticularly by carrying out any decree not issued in a strictly con-
stitutional form, shall be proceeded against before the competent
legal authorities. The representatives have the right, and are
bound to proceed before the High Court of Appeal, against any
of the heads of the Government departments who may be guilty
of a violation of the Constitution. Should the accused be found
guilty, he is dismissed, and can no longer hold office.

" Beginning with the year 1831, no direct or indirect taxes
can be levied, either in war or peace, without the sanction of the
Assembly. For this purpose an estimate, stating the probable
income and cost of the Government, with the greatest possible
accuracy and completeness, must be laid before the Assembly.
The necessity or desirableness of the different estimates must be
shown ; the different departments of the Government are bound to
furnish the Assembly with any information in their possession
which may be required.

" All Government decrees relating to the collection of taxes
shall state particularly that such taxes are levied with the con-
sent of the Assembly, without which it shall not be lawful for
any collector to collect such taxes, nor are the people bound to
pay them."

To this constitution the Hessian representatives, the
civil and military functionaries, and the Elector himself,
solemnly swore allegiance. So sensible, so moderate,
so little democratic was it, though framed at a time
when most extravagant ideas of freedom were fer-
menting throughout Europe — so scrupulously did it
confine itself to those two essential provisions, without
which all political freedom is a mockery, (viz., esta-
blishing the supremacy of law, and securing it to the
representatives of the people the sole power of taxation,)

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 131

that it caused considerable disappointment to the ex-
treme party. Moderate as it was, however, the ink was
scarcely dry with which the Elector had signed his
name to it, before he began a series of covert stratagems
to undermine the liberties which he had sworn to main-
tain inviolate ; and, with the help of the same Hasen-
flug, who has since earned such an unenviable notoriety
as prime minister in one country, and as prisoner, on a
charge of forgery, in another — he had nearly succeeded
in reducing the constitution to a mere name, when the
revolution of February broke out in Paris, arid frightened
him back into decency and law. As cowardly as he was
false, he immediately issued a proclamation announcing
his intention to govern in future in a really legal and
popular spirit, and gave a ready sanction to a number
of salutary reforms. The result was that Hesse-Cassel
remained perfectly tranquil during the revolutionary
furor which deluged and desolated the rest of Germany
in 1848 arid 1849 ; and with a forbearance and magna-
nimity which has met with a black requital, the people
refrained from availing themselves of the power which
that season of excitement put into their hands, to extort
from their perfidious prince any additional securities,
or more extended rights,

But the Elector was not a man to whom forbearance
could be safely shown. He belonged to that class of
sovereigns who have been described as " the opprobria of
the southern thrones of Europe — men false alike to the
accomplices who have served them, and the opponents
who have spared them — men who, in the hour of danger,
concede everything, promise everything, turn their
cheek to every smiter, give up to vengeance every
minister of their iniquities, and await, with meek and
smiling implacability, the blessed day of perjury and
proscription." As soon as the prevalence of the re-

132 NET RESULTS OF 1848

actionary spirit of 1850 made it safe, Hasenflug (who
had been obliged to retire in 1837) re-appeared in the
Council- chamber, detested from old recollections, and
loaded with recent infamy. He returned with the
express mission of trampling down the constitution, and
lost no time in setting about his task. In direct
violation of clause 144. he demanded a vote of money
from the Chamber, but proposed no budget, and in-
solently refused all explanation of the purposes to which
the money was to be applied. The Chamber did its
duty, and refused the vote. Hasenflug then dissolved
the Chamber, and, in violation of clause 146., issued a
decree ordering payment of the unvoted taxes. The
Supreme Court of Appeal pronounced the decree illegal.
The people, confident in the sense and patriotism of the
civil authorities, remained stubbornly and provokingly
tranquil, notwithstanding many sinister attempts to
goad them into some uproar which might serve as a
pretext for more violent proceedings. The Elector,
however, issued a proclamation, placing the whole
country under martial law, and directing the press to
be silenced, and the taxes to be levied by force. The
Supreme Court of Appeal immediately issued a counter
proclamation, pronouncing all these transactions uncon-
stitutional and illegal, and impeaching the general officer
(Bauer) who had accepted the office of carrying them
out. General Bauer resigned, and the Elector and his
minister fled, baffled, dishonoured, and derided.

From his place of refuge the Elector appointed a new
commander-in-chief, General Haynau, with unlimited
powers. It now became necessary for the Hessian
army to decide upon their course. They had to decide
between their country and their oath on the one side,
and their habits of military obedience on the other.
The officers consulted together, and then waited on the
General, and informed him that he might depend upon

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 133

them only so far as was consistent with the oath they
had been required to give to uphold the constitution
intact. He gave them the choice between obedience
or throwing up their commission : they chose the latter
alternative almost to a man. He then took the step,
quite without a precedent in Germany, of offering
commands to the non-commissioned officers : they unani-
mously refused to accept them. The army was thus pa-
ralysed, the press was silenced, the journals seized, the
courts suspended, but the people remained resolute and
passive ; they simply did nothing, and by this attitude
embarrassed the Elector far more than the most active
resistance could have done. The taxes were still uncol-
lected, for the financial employes, pointing to clause 146.,
refused to collect any which had not been legally im-
posed. The Elector was baffled by the pure inability
to find among his own subjects a sufficient number of
agents, either civil or military, base and unpatriotic
enough to carry out his nefarious designs. With the
exception of a few among the upper classes, the resis-
tance and the virtue were strictly national.

Under these circumstances he applied to Austria for
assistance to reduce his subjects to obedience ; and the
Emperor, too happy to have an opportunity of inter-
ference, marched a body of Austrian and Bavarian
troops into Hesse, and took military possession of the
Electorate. Prussia, as usual, blustered, threatened,
and gave way, leaving the unhappy Hessians to the
tender mercies of an ill-disciplined and hostile soldiery.

These troops — the army of execution, as they were
called — have entirely eaten up the resources of the
Electorate. They were billeted on the refractory em-
ployes, till they either resigned or gave in their ad-
herence to the illegal decrees of the Elector. Few
have been found to do the latter. Judges of the Su-
preme Court had fifteen to twenty Bavarian brutes

K 3

134 NET EESULTS OF 1848

quartered on their families, with a threat of an ad-
ditional number each day, if they would not resign
their functions to more compliant successors. The
members of the Town-council, in addition to this, were
menaced with a court-martial and corporal punishment,
if they would not declare (which as men of conscience
it is impossible they could) that the decree of martial
law was in accordance with the constitution. Indi-
viduals of every class, rich and poor, were oppressed
and extortionised in the same brutal manner, and daily
subjected to all the indignities which could be offered
to them by a coarse and savage soldiery, whose express
duty was to make them as miserable as they could, for
the sake of more promptly reducing them to submission.
Such is a brief outline of the Hessian tragedy; —
such the deliberate abolition by foreign force of a con-
stitution like our own ; — such the treatment of a people
who have shown that they knew how both to value and
to use their rights, and whose conduct will lose nothing
by a comparison with that of the constitutional heroes
of our own country — the goodly fellowship of our po-
litical reformers — the noble army of our civil martyrs.
Its consequences will probably be far wider and more
serious than might, at first sight, seem likely to ensue
from a mere piece of cruel tyranny on the part of a
petty sovereign of central Europe. There exists an
element of revolutionary disturbance in Germany which
deserves far more attention than it has hitherto received,
which is fraught with menace not only to the present
order of things, but to monarchy per se, — a source of
strength to the people, and of weakness and danger to
the princes, and which no mere political reaction, no
mere military oppression, can put down. The Germans
are, on the whole, especially the middle classes, a sincere,
loyal, virtuous, and reverential people. They are at-
tached to all the homely and substantial excellences of

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 135

character. They love truth and honesty ; they value
the decorums and respectabilities of life ; and they are
naturally disposed to respect, even to enthusiasm, the
authority of rank and grandeur. But this disposition
and habit of reverence has of late been rudely shaken,
and is now entirely rooted out. As they look round
upon their princes and rulers, they can find but few
who are worthy of respect, either for capacity, truth-
fulness, or propriety of private character. Many of
those who are placed in hereditary authority over them,
are persons whom no man of sense could converse with
without despising — whom no honest man could trust
in the common transactions of life — whom no man of
correct morals would willingly admit into his family.
The secret — sometimes the notorious — history of many
of their courts for the last forty years has been a tissue
of oppression, duplicity, and profligacy. Putting aside
the King of Hanover — of whom, wishing to say no evil,
we shall of necessity say nothing at all — and the kings
of Prussia, the late as well as the present, whose per-
fidious conduct can find its only excuse in the suppo-
sition of impaired capacities — the present virtual rulers
of Austria, Prince Schwartzenberg and the Archduchess
Sophia, are persons whose private character will bear
no examination, and whose scandalous chronicle is well
known upon the Continent; — the old King of Bavaria
made himself the disgrace and ridicule of Europe, by
his open and vagabond amours ; — while the Elector of
Hesse-Cassel is a man whose profligacy has set at
nought all the bounds of secrecy and decorum, and
whose personal honour is stained, in addition, with pro-
ceedings worthy only of a low-lived sharper. Yet this
is the very prince for whose pleasure a noble and high-
spirited people have been subjected to military outrage,
to restore whose despotic authority a free constitution
like that of England has been violated and annulled ;

K 4

136 NET EESULTS OF 1848

and Austria and Bavaria, sharers in his impurities,
have been the chosen and willing instruments in this
high-handed oppression. We cannot wonder that all
this has spread an anti-regal spirit in Germany, which
will one day — probably an early day — bring bitter
fruits ; and when we remember that it has needed all
the honest benevolence of William IV., and all the
spotless purity and domestic virtues of Victoria, to
enable the loyalty of Englishmen to recover from the
shock it received from the contrasted conduct of their
predecessor, we may form some conception of the state
of feeling among a people like the Germans, who,
wherever they turn their eyes, can see nothing above
them to love, reverence, or trust. " Spiritual wickedness
In high places " has dissipated the prestige which should
" hedge in " greatness, and hallow rank and rule ; there
is growing up among them a deep-rooted conviction that
the royal races are incurably bad, untrustworthy, and
incapable ; and in the very next period of disturbance
6r political enthusiasm like 1848, the consequences of
this conviction will be too plainly seen.

Another sad and dangerous opinion which the trans-
actions in Hesse have impressed upon the German
rnind is this : — that no moderation in a free constitution,
and no forbearance or strict adherence to law and
written contract on the part of those who enjoy it, will
be any guarantee of safety, or any protection against
the enmity of those courts to whom any degree or form
of liberty is an eye-sore, an abhorrence, and a reproach.
The destruction, of the Hessian constitution is a decla-
ration of war against freedom in the abstract. The re-
action in many states against the democratic proceedings
in 1848 has some excuse, and met with some sympathy,
even from the liberal European states, because the
popular party had neither used their victory with
wisdom, nor confined it within the bounds of mode-

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 137

ration ; but the violation and forcible suppression of the
Hessian constitution, which had no fault except that it
was free, and which contained no more freedom than
was necessary to make its provisions a reality and not
a mockery, and the tyrannical treatment of the Hessian
people, who had committed no definable offence, and
had been guilty of no disturbance which could afford
even a pretext for the use of force against them, have
proclaimed too clearly the code and creed of the despotic
princes of Germany, and the principles on which their
course will henceforth be guided, — viz., that no sem-
blance of a free constitution shall raise its head within
the limits of their influence — that the object of their
dread is not popular excess but popular rights — that it
is not radicalism or republicanism against which they
wage implacable and interminable war, but liberty as
such, liberty in the most moderate degree, liberty in the
most unobjectionable form. A more perilous, demoral-
ising, revolutionary lesson could not have been taught
to the German people, nor one which, when the day of
opportunity arrives, will recoil with more fearful retri-
bution on the heads of its foolish and fanatical pro-
pounders.

After this account of the destruction of the only
really free constitution which Germany could boast of
previously to 1848, it may seem paradoxical to say that
we are deliberately of opinion that the cause of liberty
and progress has on the whole been a gainer by the
events of that year, in spite of the extensive and general
subsequent reaction. The superficies of European so-
ciety speaks only of retrogression : but a somewhat
deeper and more careful glance will discover many indi-
cations which point to a very different conclusion. A
few of the more prominent of these we shall endeavour
concisely to enumerate.

I. The gain to freedom has been immense — and such

138 NET RESULTS OF 1848

as can be cancelled by no subsequent contradictory
occurrences — in the discovery of the first fact which
the Spring of 1848 proclaimed so emphatically to the
world, of the utter hollowness of the apparently solid
and imposing structure of European policy, of the
internal rottenness of what had looked to the common
eye so stable and so sound, of the intrinsic weakness
of what had seemed externally so strong. To a few
observers, indeed, keener and profounder than the rest,
to a few statesmen like Metternich*, — whose long ex-

* The profound sagacity of this remarkable man was never more
shown than in the accuracy with which he read the signs of the times
in the last few years which preceded his downfall. With the gallant
resolution of a man of distinct and unshaken purpose, he had con-
scientiously adhered through life to the principles and ideas of a past
age ; and our conviction of the entire erroneousness of his aims
cannot blind us either to his admirable consistency, his dignified
firmness, or his lofty powers. He was a statesman of the order of
Richelieu : he -knew exactly what he wanted, what he deemed best
for his country, and how best to obtain it. But he was at variance
with the spirit of the age, and lived a century too late. Still he
struggled on. For a long while he trusted that the deluge of demo-
cracy which he foresaw could be stayed during his lifetime. But
latterly even this hope had deserted him. In the Autumn of 1848,
we have the following account of his feelings from the pen of M. von
Usedom, a Prussian diplomatist : — " From my personal knowledge I
can testify, that he foresaw with absolute certainty the great ship-
wreck of last Spring (1848). He spoke to me much at length of the
political ruin which threatened to fall on Europe soon, perhaps very
soon, and of the even deeper growth and wider range of radical and
communistic ideas, against which means of repression had proved
ineffectual. I could not at that time believe that things had gone so
far ; but rather thought that the age would take counsel from these
events, and learn prudence from the failure of such a policy. ' I am
no prophet,' said the Prince, * and I know not what will happen : but
I am an old practitioner, and I know how to discriminate between
curable and fatal diseases. This one is fatal : here we hold as long
as we can, but I despair of the issue.' " Mazzini gives, in his work,
some curious extracts from Metternich's diplomatic correspondence,
showing how much more truly he read the course of events than the
generality of politicians, of whatever section.

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 139

perience, vigilant sagacity, and native instinct, enabled
them to pierce below the surface of society, and discern
all that was feeble in its seeming strength, all that was
unreal in its superficial prosperity, all that was boiling
beneath its smooth tranquillity — a suspicion of the truth
may have presented itself. But the astounding facility
with which revolution after revolution was effected:
the feeble pusillanimity with which monarch after
monarch succumbed without a struggle or a stroke ;
the crash with which throne after throne went down at
the first menace of assault, like the walls of Jericho
before the mere blast of hostile trumpets ; the instan-
taneousness with which institutions of the oldest date
crumbled away at the first touch of the popular arm, —
betrayed at once to the rulers the secret of their weak-
ness, and to the people the secret of their strength, and
inculcated a pregnant lesson which will not be forgotten
by either party. Paris, Berlin, Venice, Lornbardy,
Munich, Turin, Florence, Naples, and Rome — all revo-
lutionised within a month, and all by independent and
internal movements, without concert and without co-
operation — showed how ripe for revolt every country
must have been, and how ludicrously feeble must have
been the power which had been feared so long. The
moral influence of such events can never be got over or
forgotten ; the prestige of power is gone ; some leaves
fall off every time the tree is shaken ; and authority,
once so rudely handled and so easily overthrown, can
never resume its former hold upon the mind. Those
who have learned how impotent before the fury of an
aroused people are all the weapons and array of
despotism, will never dread that despotism as they did
before ; and those who have felt

" The might that slumbers in a peasant's arm,"

will live in perpetual fear lest it should be again
awakened. For a while the wrath of terror may excite

140 NET RESULTS OF 1848

monarchs to make a savage use of their recovered
power, but this will only be for a time: they have
learned the resistless force of their subjects, when once
put forth, too recently, not to make them timid and
cautious in again arousing it. They know now that
they hold their power only on the tenure of a people's
forbearance, and that that forbearance will give way if
strained too far. On the other hand, the people who
have once, by one great single effort of volition, brought
their rulers to their feet, and seen how human, how
feeble, how pusillanimous they were, will, in oppression
and defeat, remember the events of 1848 as the proof
of their own inherent strength, and the earnest of a
future day of more signal and enduring triumph.

II. Again : when it came to actual war, in two cases
at least, the people proved stronger than their masters,
It became evident either that disciplined armies were
not altogether to be relied upon, or that there was some-
thing in national determination which even disciplined
armies could not make head against. In Hungary and
in Kome the cause of freedom showed itself mightier
and more stubborn in arms than the cause of despo-
tism. In Hungary, notwithstanding all the difficulties
arising from divided nationalities, and the crippling
errors of t"he only just abolished feudalism, the people
made head against the whole force of Austria, gained
ground month by month, and were morally certain
of a complete and final victory, when the aid of
Russia was called in, and, in an evil hour for Europe,
granted and permitted. Even then the result was
doubtful, till aided by internal treachery. That is, it
required the combined efforts of the two great empires
of Russia and Austria to conquer the Hungarian people.
Hungary, single-handed, was more than a match for
the whole Austrian empire single-handed. If the
prompt and vigorous interference of England, France,

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 141

and Prussia had forbidden, as it easily might have done,
the intervention of Kussia, how different now would
the whole aspect of Europe have been ! The whole
subsequent oppressions and insolences of the Viennese
Court would have been prevented. With Hungary
triumphant and independent, Austria could not have
bullied Prussia, could not have trampled on the consti-
tution of Hesse, could not have conquered Venice,
could not have retained even though she had recovered
Lombardy, could not have given France even the paltry
and miserable pretext for that attack on Rome which
has covered both her arms and her diplomacy with in-
delible infamy. The permission of the interference of
Russia was the one great glaring mistake of the time,
— the teterrima causa of the subsequent reaction, and
the present prostration of Continental liberty. Why it
was permitted by the three great powers, is a question
which we fear admits, in the case of two of them at least,
of no reputable answer. It is alleged that England's
repeated interventions in favour of the constitutional
cause in Spain and Portugal deprived her of any just
claim to protest against a corresponding intervention by
an absolute monarch in favour of absolutism in the case
of an allied power. But France could be withheld by
no such consideration, and her sympathy and her in-
terest lay in the same direction, viz., in crippling the
power of Austrian despotism. Prussia by herself could
do little ; and whatever were the sentiments of the
Prussian nation, the Prussian Court was never itself
desirous of the triumph of liberty in any quarter.

In Lombardy, the cause of independence was lost
from causes which had no relation to its intrinsic
strength. There can, we think, be little doubt that the
people who, by no sudden surprise, but by five days'
hard and sustained fighting, had driven the ablest
warrior and the picked soldiers of Austria out of Milan

142 NET RESULTS OF 1848

and to the borders of the Alps, would, if left to them-
selves, have completed their victory and made good their
ground. But it is impossible to read Mazzini's and
Mariotti's account of the war, without admitting that
the cause never had fair play from the beginning.
Charles Albert joined the Lombards from pure dread of
a republic so near him being followed by a republic in
his own territories; he fought therefore gallantly and
well, but he fought for his own personal ambition, and
to prevent the Lombard republicans from fighting, and
his great anxiety throughout was to gain the campaign
without their aid. The republicans, on the other hand,
mistrusted the king, and were little disposed to shed
their blood for the aggrandisement of a dynasty which
they had little reason to respect or love : and thus the
real cause of Italian independence was compromised and
paralysed at the very outset by mutual and well-grounded
mistrust.* .Still enough remains, and enough was done,
to show what, might have been done, and what may be
done again, if either the monarchical party would
abstain from encumbering the republicans with aid, or
if a monarch would arise whom even the republicans
would fight for, and could trust. Enough was done to
show how simple the condition, and how practicable the
combinations, by which the battle may be won.

In Rome, too, when the people and their sovereign
were pitted singly against each other, the victory was
not for a moment doubtful. The Pope was powerless
— the people were omnipotent; and this, though they,
a Catholic and superstitious people, had to fight against
spiritual terrors as well as temporal arms. The Pope

* One of the most melancholy features of Mazzini's book is the
rooted nristrust he displays towards the moderate party, whose sin-
cerity and capacity he seems entirely unable to admit. It is an ill
omen for the Italian cause when a man like Mazzini is unable to
appreciate a man like Azeglio.

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 143

fled, and was not missed. His return was, indeed,
formally asked for ; but a republic was organised with-
out him, and, for the first time, the Eomans had a
glimpse of what good government might be. It was
reserved for a foreign, a friendly, and a republican
government again to interfere, and deprive a people of
the opportunity of showing how well they could use,
and how well they had deserved their freedom. France,
which had just chased away her own sovereign, which
had just established her own republic, which had just
proclaimed the inalienable right of every nation to
choose its own rulers, and work out its own emancipa-
tion — France was not ashamed to interfere to crush a
sister democracy, on the most flimsy, transparent, and
inadequate pretext ever urged to palliate a flagrant
crime. France, noted throughout the world as the
least religious nation in Christendom, was not ashamed
to be made the instrument of replacing on the necks of
a free people the yoke of the most corrupt priesthood
and the narrowest creed that Christendom ever saw.
France, with her 40,000,000 of people, and her army of
500,000 men, was not ashamed to attack a state only
just emerged from slavery, and a city garrisoned only
by a few thousand untrained and inexperienced soldiers,
and was kept at bay for weeks. The nineteenth century
has registered no blacker deed within its annals ! The
recording angel of the French nation, in all her stained
and chequered history, has chronicled nothing worse !

Hungary and Kome, then, had cast oif the yoke by
their own unaided efforts ; and their masters, by their
own unaided efforts, were powerless to replace it. If
the revolutionary years had brought to light no other
fact, this alone would have been worth all their turmoil
and their bloodshed. The sovereigns of these people at
least reign only by the intervention of foreign merce-
naries. The Pope is a French proconsul; and the

144 NET RESULTS OF 1848

Emperor of Austria is a vassal who does homage for his
territories to the Czar of Kussia, The people are no
longer slaves to their own rulers, whom they had con-
quered and expelled. They are simply prisoners of war
to a foreign potentate.

III. It is impossible that so many experiments should
have been tried, and so many mistakes made, so many
failures incurred, so many catastrophes brought about,
without leaving much sad but salutary wisdom behind
them. Those who were concerned as actors in the
events of 1848, and those who regarded them merely as
spectators, will, by subsequent reflection, be able to elicit
from them much guidance for the future. It was the
first time that the popular party, in Germany at least,
went fairly and practically to school. It was their first
attempt in organisation and administration, and its
lessons cannot have been altogether lost. It may at
least be hoped that the same mistakes will not be made
in future, that in their next voyage they will avoid ship-
wreck on the same rocks. It would lead us into too
protracted a digression were we to attempt a specifica-
tion of their errors and their faults ; two only of the
principal ones we can briefly indicate. In the first
place, the want of definite purpose and of moderate
boundary, which generally distinguishes popular move-
ments, was early and almost universally apparent. The
patriots seldom knew exactly what they wanted, and
seldomer still, knew exactly where to stop. Up to the
month of May, success and sympathy had everywhere
gone with the insurgents. But about that time, it
began to be painfully manifest how defective was their
wisdom ; how imperfect their conception of their cause
and their position ; how ignoble and impure were often
the motives which actuated their leaders ; and how
completely the sober, the moderate, and the honest
were everywhere outbid by the selfish, the ignorant,

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 145

and the violent — by men whose ambition was restrained
by no principle, and whose measures were guided by no
reflection — the demagogue by nature, the rebel by
temperament, the malcontent by misery, the emeutier
by profession. One blunder was followed by another
still more serious and criminal : one leader was cashiered
to be replaced by another of a deeper colour and a lower
stamp ; checks and reverses succeeded one another, but
seemed to inspire only desperation — not wisdom, nor
repentance and retractation ; till throughout Europe
the constitutional cause seemed not so much defeated as
dishonoured, betrayed, and thrown away.

In every country, the friends of movement committed
precisely the same series of blunders. They had not
yet learned the lesson now taught them, we trust, alike
by the successes and the failures of that memorable
year — that concessions wrung from sovereigns form
the surest basis of a nation's freedom — that it is only
by making the most of these, by consolidating and
using them, not by pushing them to excess, that consti-
tutional liberty is secured ; and that to push victory so
far as to drive away the sovereign, is, in nine cases out
of ten, to resign themselves, bound hand and foot, to
the dictation of the mob. They became excited instead
of being contented with the vast concessions they had
won ; —

" Nil actum reputans dum quid superesset agendi,"

they grasped at more, in place of employing and
securing what they had. They showed by their attitude
their proposals, and their language, that they were
neither intellectually nor morally masters of their posi-
tion ; they were not educated up to the requirements of
their new station ; their minds could not rise to a full
comprehension of its duties, nor their consciences to a
clear comprehension of its responsibilities ; they alarmed

VOL. II. L

146 NET RESULTS OF 1848

where they should have soothed, disgusted where they
should have conciliated (and, alas ! conciliated and
temporised where they should have repressed), dared
where they should have shrunk, and, " like fools, rushed
in where angels fear to tread." They did not under-
stand the business, nature, and limits of constitutional
freedom. They committed the fatal error — in their
position so difficult to avoid — of tolerating and encou-
raging even, rather than suppressing, popular turbulence
and mob-dictation — of relaxing the arm of the law at
the very moment when its strength and its sternness
required to be most plainly felt. By these errors and
deficiencies they signed the death-warrant of their own
ascendency, by convincing the wise and patriotic that
liberty was not safe with them ; the proprietary body
that property was not safe with them : the commercial
classes that credit was not safe with them.

In the spring of 1848 there were at least five consti-
tuted representative assemblies, sitting in their respective
countries, as democratic in their composition as could
well be desired, — at Paris, Berlin, Frankfort, Vienna,
and Naples. Of the last we shall say nothing, because
it had little real action, and we know little of the
elements which composed it : but the others were
elected by universal suffrage, or nearly so, and presented
as motley and miscellaneous an assemblage as could be
imagined. Every rank, every class, every passion,
every prejudice, every desire, every degree of know-
ledge and of ignorance, was there faithfully mir-
rored. Exclusiveness was the only thing excluded.
Two of the German assemblies comprised, we believe,
upwards of sixty bond fide peasants each. Here surely,
if ever, was the means presented of trying advantage-
ously the great experiment of a popular yet constitu-
tional rule. Yet in every case the experiment failed,
and in every case from the same error. These popular

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 147

assemblies all lost themselves and discredited their
cause by the same grand mistake, of stepping beyond
their appropriate and allotted province, and usurping
functions that did not belong to them. Nowhere do
they seem to have understood with any precision the
nature of their duties, or the limits of their powers.
Where they were constituent assemblies, they encroached
on the province of permanent legislation ; where they
were legislative bodies, they endeavoured to assume the
functions of the executive. Their whole history was
one pertinacious effort to concentrate in their own
hands all the powers of the state ; and in the course of
their attacks on the executive (though we are far from
saying that they were always indefensible or without
valid grounds for mistrust), they contrived, by demands
which no rulers with the least comprehension of, or
respect for, their own position could dream of conceding,
to put themselves so completely in the wrong that
public sympathy had deserted them long before their fall.
The second mistake, to which we have referred as
committed by the friends of freedom in 1848, was the
mixing up of two objects, wholly distinct in themselves,
and of which the desirableness was by no means equally
clear, — constitutional rights and national unity. Both
in Italy and Germany, instead of concentrating their
efforts on the attainment of free institutions for each
separate state, they complicated their cause, and dis-
tracted and weakened their party, by raising the stan-
dard of freedom and that of unity at the same time.
Each object was gigantic in itself; the two together
were nearly hopeless. Eepresentative assemblies, a free
press, an open administration of justice, were boons
which every one could appreciate, and which every one
was willing to fight for. The creation of one great
state out of the various nationalities of Italy and Ger-
many, respectively, was a dream of enthusiastic theorists,

JL 2

148 NET RESULTS OF 1848

and however important or beneficial it might ultimately
have proved, it was not universally desired, and it was
surrounded with difficulties which, if not insuperable,
demanded at least a peaceful era and a patient incuba-
tion for their solution. Many states were by no means
willing to merge their distinct individualities for the
very questionable equivalent of forming inadequate or in-
appreciable portions of one un wieldly nationality. How
could reasonable men hope that the mutual jealousies,
differences, and respective claims of Prussia, Austria,
Bavaria, Hanover, and Wurtemberg, in one quarter,
or of Naples, Rome, Florence, Piedmont, and Lombardy,
in another, could be harmonised and reconciled by a
constitution struck out at a heat ? Moreover, it might
well be doubted whether the fusion of so many states
into one great and powerful empire, however desirable
as an object of European policy, would contribute to
the wellbeing of the constituent elements. Hear what
Goethe says on this point : —

" I am not uneasy about the unity of Germany ; our good
highroads and future railroads will do their part. But, above
all, may Germany be one in love, one against the foreign foe.
May it be one, so that dollars and groschen may be of equal
value through the whole empire ; so that my travelling chest
may pass unopened through all the six-and-thirty states. May
it be one in passports, in weight and measure, in trade and
commerce, and a hundred similar things, which might be named.
But, if we imagine that the unity of Germany should consist in
this, that the very great empire should have a single capital, and
that this one great capital would conduce to the development of
individual talent, or to the welfare of the mass of the people, we
are in error.

" A state has justly been compared to a living body, with
many limbs ; and the capital of a state may be compared to the
heart, from which life and prosperity flow to the individual
members near or far. But, if the members be very distant from
the heart, the life that flows to them will become weaker and
weaker. Whence is Germany great, but by the admirable

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 149

culture of the people, which equally pervades all parts of the
kingdom ? But does not this proceed from the various seats of
government ? and do not these foster and support it ? Suppose
we had had, for centuries past, in Germany, only the two
capitals, Berlin and Vienna, or only one of these, how would it
have fared with German culture? or even with that generally
diffused opulence which goes hand in hand with culture ? Ger-
many has about twenty universities, distributed about the whole
empire, and about a hundred public libraries, similarly spread.
How does France stand with regard to such ?

" And now, think of such cities as Dresden, Munich, Stutt-
gard, Cassel, Weimar, Hanover, and the like ; think of the great
elements of life comprised within these cities ; think of the effect
which they have upon the neighbouring provinces, — and ask
yourself if all this would have been so if they had not for a long
time been the residence of princes. Frankfort, Bremen, Ham-
burg, and Lubeck, are great and brilliant ; their effect upon the
prosperity of Germany is incalculable. But would they remain
what they are if they lost their own sovereignty, and became
incorporated with a great German kingdom as provincial
towns?"*

The great axiom of political wisdom which we trust
the friends of liberty and progress will have learned
from the events of 1848 is this, that constitutional
freedom must be gained by degrees, not by one desperate
and sudden snatch. People must be content to conquer
their political and civil rights step by step, as not only
the easiest and surest, but in the end the speediest way.
Their true and safe policy is to accept and make the
most of all concessions which either a sense of danger
or a sense of justice may dictate to their rulers ; to re-
member that these, small though they may seem to
one party, probably seem great to the other, and may
have cost harder efforts of self-sacrifice than we can
well appreciate, — and that, at all events, they are much
as compared with the past ; to use them diligently but

* Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann, vol. ii. p. 104.

L 3

150 NET RESULTS OF 1848

soberly, as not abusing them ; to grow familiar with
them ; to become masters of them ; to acquire, by
constant practice, dexterity in the use of them ; to con-
solidate and secure the possession of them ; and then to
employ them gradually, and as opportunity shall serve,
as the stepping-stone to more; — but never, save in the
last extremity, to supersede or weaken the executive
authority, or to call in the mob. Any attempt on the
part of the people to snatch, in the hour of victory,
more than they know how to wield, more than they
can use well, is a retrograde and fatally false step ; it
is in fact playing the game of their opponents. If they
employ their newly acquired rights and institutions in
such a manner as to show that they do not understand
them and cannot manage them, and that, therefore,
public tranquillity and social security are likely to be
endangered by the mistakes of their excitement and in-
experience, the great body of sober and peaceful citizens
are quick to take alarm, and carry back the material
and moral weight of their sympathies to the side of the
old system. Their feeling, when expressed in the ar-
ticulate language of a principle, is simply this — and it
is just and true: — all wise and educated people will
prefer a free to a despotic government, ceteris paribus,
i. e., order and security being predicated in both cases :
but the worst theoretical government which assures
these essential predicates, will be, and ought to be, pre-
ferred to the best theoretical government which en-
dangers them. The majority of the sober and influential
classes will always be found on the side of that party
which best understands the practical act of administration ,
however defective or erroneous may be its fundamental
principles, however medieval may be its name. If the
year 1848 has taught this truth to the movement party,
the cause of rational freedom will have gained incal-
culably by its first disasters.

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 151

IV. It is not to be denied that the character of the
Italians stands far higher in the eyes of Europe than it
did before 1848. The various nations of the Peninsula
came out of that fierce ordeal with a reputation for
bravery, for sustained enthusiasm, for pure devoted
patriotism, for capacity of self-government, such as they
never before enjoyed. Their conduct in 1848 was of a
nature to redeem all their previous failures and miser-
able exhibitions. It is true that the Lombards, what-
ever be the true explanation of their supineness, did
nothing to fulfil the promise of their first brilliant
exploit. It is true that the Sicilians, by a strange
fatality of mismanagement, lost all the liberty for which
they had fought so ably and so gallantly, and which
they had so nearly won. Still the expulsion of Ra-
detsky, and the entire defeat of Ferdinand, showed
capacities for which neither Milan nor Palermo could
have previously gained credit. Both the Piedmontese
regulars and the Roman and Tuscan volunteers distin-
guished themselves by a steady and determined courage,
on numerous occasions, which the soldiers of no country
could surpass. But it was at Rome and Venice that
the Italian nation won her spurs, and made good her
claim to join the communion of the noble and the free
states of the earth. In the former city, when the pope
had fled, the republicans organised a government which
for five months preserved order throughout the land,
such as Romagna had not known for generations, with
no bloodshed, and scarcely any imprisonment or exile ;
indeed, with a marvellous scantiness of punishment of
any kind; — while, during nearly the whole of this
period, Rome, with 14,000 improvised troops, made
good her defence against 30,000 French, supplied with
the best artillery, and commanded by experienced
generals, and Garibaldi drove the invading army of

i. 4

152 NET RESULTS OF 1848

Naples before him like frightened sheep.* With such
means and against such antagonists it was impossible to
have done more ; in the face of such hopeless odds few
people and few cities would have done as much. For a
space of time yet longer, Venice, under the elected dic-
tatorship of one man, put forward energies and dis-
played virtues which were little expected from the most
pleasure-loving and sybaritic city of the world. The
wealthy brought their stores, the dissolute shook off
their luxury, the effeminate braced themselves to hard-
ship and exertion, and without assistance or allies these
heroic citizens kept at bay for many months the whole
force of the Austrian empire, and at last obtained
liberal and honourable terms. After two such ex-
amples as these, the Italians can never again be despised
as incapable and cowardly, or pronounced unfit for the
freedom they had seized so gallantly and wielded so
well. The comparison of 1848 with 1821 indicates a
whole century of progress ; and makes us confident, in
spite of the cloudy and impenetrable present, that the
day of the final emancipation of Italy must be near at
hand.

Then Italy and Hungary — how unlike France and
Germany — have shown themselves rich in men not
unequal to or unworthy of the crisis. While in the two
latter countries, convulsions so deep and startling, exi-
gencies so suggestive and imperative, as seemed especially
fitted to call forth whatever genius and greatness might
be lying dormant in obscure inaction, waiting for its
hour, have brought to light no single man of eminence
or commanding character, — while, in those times of
trial which test of what metal men are made, many re-
putations have been ruined, and none have been created,
— in the east and in the south men have sprung up as

* This army, however, had no good will towards the conflict.

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 153

they were wanted, and such as were wanted. Hungary
has produced Kossuth, a wonderful orator and a man of
great genius, though scarcely a great statesman, revered,
loved, and almost worshipped by his countrymen, in de-
spite of that failure generally so fatal to all popular idols.
In Italy — not to speak of Balbo, Capponi, and other less
known names — three men of tried capacities and cha-
racters have appeared, and made good their claim to be
the leaders and organisers of Italian independence,
Azeglio, Mazzini, and Manin. As patriotic writer, as
gallant soldier, as prime minister of a constitutional
kingdom, the first of these has shown his devotion
to Italy, and his ability to serve her; and, both as
virtual ruler of Piedmont, and head of the moderate
party, is probably now the most essential man in the
Peninsula. Mazzini, who previously had been re-
garded as merely an impracticable, fanatical enthu-
siast, displayed, as Chief of the Koman Triumvirate,
capacity both for administration and for war, which
mark him as the future statesman of Rome, when Rome
shall again be in her own hands : while Manin, who, as
far as we are aware, was wholly unknown to fame,
appeared at the critical moment when the fate of Venice
hung in the balance, gifted with the precise qualities
demanded by the emergency. When Italy shall be free,
we need not fear any lack of men competent to guide
her destinies.

Y. All these, however, may by some be undervalued
or denied as imaginary gains. But one great material
fact stands out, an unquestionable reality. The revo-
lutionary and the reactionary deluge have alike swept
by, and the Sardinian constitution is left standing. The
free institutions established by Charles Albert on the
4th of March, 1848, have survived his death, the utter
defeat of the Piedmontese army, and the attempts of
internal foes, and are still in active and successful ope-

154 NET RESULTS OF 1848

ration under the successor of the monarch who granted
them, and under the ministry of the nobleman whose
labours were mainly instrumental in procuring them.
A short sketch of the chief provisions of the constitution
will show its real value, and the immense importance
not only to Piedmont, but to all Italy, of its permanence
and successful working.

" The State of Sardinia is a Representative monarchy : the
throne is hereditary, and the person of the king inviolable. In
him is concentrated the whole executive power of the State.
He makes peace and declares war; appoints to all offices, and
concludes all treaties — with this proviso, that any treaties in-
volving taxation or a variation of territory, are invalid without
the consent of the Chambers.

" The Legislative power resides in the king and the two
Chambers collectively. The Chambers must be convoked every
year, but the king has the power of dissolving the Chamber of
Deputies. The initiation of laws is common to all three branches
of the Legislature. The civil list of the king shall be fixed by
the Chambers on his accession to the throne, when he shall take
a solemn oath of allegiance to the constitution.

" The Chamber of Deputies is chosen by electors of all classes,
who pay a very small amount of direct taxes, all heads of trading
or industrial establishments, and parties engaged in arts and
professions (employment in which is assumed to indicate capacity
and education). The Deputies are required to be thirty years
of age ; they are inviolable during session except for flagrant
crime ; they are representatives, not delegates, bound by autho-
ritative instructions ; they are chosen for five years ; and have
the right of impeachment over the Ministers.

" The Senate is composed of Members nominated by the
king for life, out of a variety of classes ; e. g.9 the Archbishops
and Bishops, President and experienced Members of the
Chamber of Deputies, the Ambassadors and Ministers of State,
the Chief Magistrates and Judges, Generals and . Admirals,
Members of the Academy of Sciences, and generally all who
have rendered eminent services, or done honour to their country.
The Senate is, like our House of Lords, the Supreme Court of
Judicature of the Kealm.

IN GERMANY AND ITALY. 155

" All citizens, of every class, are equal before the law, and
all contribute to the State in proportion to their means. No
man can be arrested without legal warrant. The press is free ;
the right of public meeting is guaranteed ; and no taxes can be
imposed without the consent of the Chambers.

" The Judges are irremovable after they have served three
years. All judicial proceedings are to be conducted in strict
conformity to the written law."

This constitution, which secures civil rights and equal
freedom to every citizen — and is, in fact, our own?
minus an hereditary Hotfse of Peers — has now been in
active operation for more than three years, to the
general satisfaction of all parties. The Marquis Massimo
d'Azeglio, who is at the head of the ministry, is an
able, popular, and well-tried man, who appears thoroughly
.to comprehend the working of free institutions, and can
generally command in the Chambers a majority of two
to one. As long as he lives and remains at the helm
we have little fear of any mismanagement or serious
imbroglio ; and it is to be hoped that a few years7
practice may train up many statesmen fitted to succeed
him when he shall retire or die. It is scarcely possible,
we think, to estimate too highly the ultimate gain to
the cause of liberty and good government throughout
Italy, by this establishment of a constitutional limited
monarchy in one corner of the Peninsula. It will be
impossible for either Austria or the smaller states to
govern so despotically as they have done, with such a
reproach and such an example at their side. It will be
impossible, also, for the radical party any longer to
declare that no substantial liberty can be enjoyed by
Italy except under a republic. On the one side it will
shame tyrants: on the other, it will instruct freemen.
In time of peace it will train up patriotic statesmen for
future emergencies ; in time of disturbance it will be a
banner to rally round. It will give Italians a definite

156 NET RESULTS OF 1848 IN GERMANY AND ITALY.

example to follow — a definite object to demand. It
will show that even in Italy liberty is not incompatible
with order and progress, and will, we trust, pave the
way to a national prosperity, that may excite at once
the admiration and the emulation of surrounding states.
Piedmont, though defeated at Novara, may yet on
another field, with nobler weapons, and in a higher
sense, be the regenerator and emancipator of Italy.

In the other states of Italy, though not a trace
remains of their transient liberal institutions, though
the press is silenced, and every book of interest or
value is prohibited, though the most stupid and cruel
oppressions are daily accumulating wrath against the
day of wrath, though the Pope has returned to his
vomit, and the Neapolitan sow to its wallowing in the
mire, — yet no man who is acquainted with the internal
feelings of the country has lost heart. The passion for
liberty, independence, and nationality, has enormously
gained ground ; the municipal jealousies which divided
the several sections and cities of the Peninsula have
been materially weakened ; the papal tyranny is be-
coming daily more odious ; — the Mazzini party, as it is
called, is admitted even by its opponents to be rapidly
spreading; — and if the impatient man who is at its
head can have forbearance to bide his time, and wait
his opportunity, it may well prove that the day of de-
liverance is far nearer than is thought. When that
day comes, it is more than probable that the conduct of
the people, and the result to princes, will be very dif-
ferent from those last displayed.

157

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.*

WHEN we wrote of France in May 1851 — of the diffi-
culty of its task, the instability of its government, and
the perplexity of its path — hopeless as we then were of
a successful issue, we could scarcely have anticipated
that in seven short months that government would be
overthrown once more, that task abandoned in despair,
that path more dark and intricate than ever. Within
three years from the expulsion of the Orleanist dynasty
by a knot of fanatical republicans, both victors and
vanquished in that sudden struggle have been sup-
pressed by a military despotism; the polity they had
joined in constructing has been violently swept away,
and France has again become a tabula rasa for consti-
tutional experimentalists. We wrote thus in May, —

"The Revolution of February — being (as it were) an ag-
gressive negation, not a positive effort, having no clear idea at
its root, but being simply the product of discontent and disgust
— furnishes no foundation for a government. Loyalty to a
legitimate monarch ; deference to an ancient aristocracy ; faith
in a loved and venerated creed ; devotion to a military leader ;
sober schemes for well understood material prosperity; — all
these may form, and have formed, the foundation of stable and
powerful governments : mere reaction, mere denial, mere dis-
satisfaction, mere vague desires, mere aggression on existing
things — never.

" To construct a firm and abiding commonwealth out of such
materials, and in the face of such obstacles as we have attempted
to delineate, — such is the problem the French people are called
upon to conduct to a successful issue. Without a positive and

* From the " North British Review."

1. (Euvres de Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Paris. 3 torn. 8vo.

2. Des Idees Napoleoniennes. Par L. N. BONAPARTE. Paris.

158 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

earnest creed ; without a social hierarchy ; without municipal
institutions and the political education they bestow ; without a
spirit of reverence for rights, and of obedience to authority,
penetrating all ranks, — we greatly doubt whether the very in-
struments for the creation of a republic are not wanting. A
republic does not create these — it supposes and postulates their
existence. They are inheritances from the past, not possessions
to be called into being by a fiat. They are the slow growth of
a settled, political, and social system, acting with justice,
founded on authority and tradition, and consolidated by long
years of unshaken continuance."

Viewed in our imperfect light, and from our field of
limited and feeble vision, the sun in his wide circuit
shines down upon no sadder spectacle than France now
presents to the gazing and astonished world. Rich in
material resources, but unable to turn any of them to
full account ; teeming with brilliant talent and clear
intelligence, but doomed to see the talent prostituted
and the intelligence abortive ; prolific beyond any other
country in theories of social regeneration and impossible
perfection, yet fated beyond any other to wallow in the
mire of the past, and to re-tread the weary cycle of
ancestral blunders; unable to reduce into wholesome
practice any one of her magnificent conceptions ; unable
to conduct to a successful issue any one of her promis-
ing experiments ; ever building houses of cards, which
every wind of passion sweeps away ; ever re-commenc-
ing, never ending ; the loftiest and most insatiable of
aspirants, the most paltry and laggard of performers;
assuming to lead the vanguard of civilisation, but for
ever loitering in the rear, for ever acting as the drag.
Such is the aspect of France to eyes yet shrouded in
the flesh, and darkened by the fears and frailties of
humanity. To higher and wiser witnesses,

" Who watch, like gods, the rolling hours,
With larger, other, eyes than ours,"

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 159

who, gifted with a deeper insight, and purged from our
dazzling and misleading sympathies, can see through
the present confusion to the future issue — it may be
that all these convulsions and vicissitudes are but the
struggles of Chaos to form itself into Kosmos, the
throes and efforts of a new birth. Each apparent
failure may be an essential step in the process of ulti-
mate achievement ; each backsliding may be a reculer
pour mieux sauter ; each shattered hope, over whose
ruin we have mourned, may have been built upon a
false foundation ; each seemingly fair and promising
construction, which we repine to see destroyed, may
have been an obstacle to something sounder and more
solid in the distance ; and the late apparent annihilation
of all that past toil and sacrifice had gained, may be,
when viewed aright, an indispensable pre-requisite to
greater and more permanent acquisitions — not the ebb
of progress — only the receding wave of the advancing
tide.

Let us endeavour to arrive at a clear notion of the
actual situation of affairs, by a rapid glance at the
defunct constitution, and the conduct of the Assembly
and the President respectively.

The destruction of the constitution inaugurated in
1848 has surprised no one ; the peculiar mode and time
of that destruction has surprised nearly everybody.
From the outset it was evident that it was not made to
last. The republic itself was a sudden and unwelcome
improvisation. It was imposed by the violent agents of
the revolution, and was never cordially accepted by the
intelligence, the property, or the experience of the
nation. When the Convention met, the republican
form of government was proclaimed, not deliberated on
nor chosen. The constitution, the work of this Con-
vention, bore upon it the stamp of the circumstances

160 FKANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

under which, and the body from which, it emanated.
It was concocted by a combination of parties who had
all of them ulterior aims, and whose ulterior aims were
at variance with one another. The Republicans were
anxious to make it as purely democratic as possible.
The Constitutionalists desired to make the Assembly
supreme, both over executive and people. The Im-
perialists wished to prevent the return of the Bourbon
branches. The Orleanists and Legitimists wished re-
ciprocally to destroy each other's hopes. But all parties,
dreading lest their rivals should, by caprice or accident,
be recalled and entrusted with the executive authority,
concurred in reducing that authority to a minimum.
The constitution had many faults ; this was probably
its chief one. It would be unreasonable to demand
from a scheme concocted to meet the wants and satisfy
the exigencies of a passing crisis, and with the cannon
of the barricades yet ringing in the ears of its fabrica-
tors, either the maturity of reflection which charac-
terises the productions of patient reasoning, or the
thorough understanding of human passions and re-
quirements, which can only be obtained by long practice
in political affairs ; or that happy conformity with na-
tional tastes and manners, which belongs only to insti-
tutions which have grown up in the course of ages, and
have become firmly rooted in the soil. Few of those
who joined in the construction of it regarded it with
hope ; fewer still with admiration or real satisfaction.
To some it was a work of desperation ; to others a pilot
balloon ; to nearly all an expedient to feel their way
out of an embarrassing position. Between the various
and hostile elements which contended for the mastery in
France, the constitution was not a permanent peace,
but merely an armistice, a hollow truce. From the
first hour that it was promulgated no one had faith in
its durability ; and perhaps the wisest provision which

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 161

it contained was the clause which anticipated the proba-
bility and prescribed the mode of its revision.

A powerful and long-established government — skilful
and unscrupulous, and as resolute in denying the most
reasonable demands of the constitutional opposition, as
the wildest clamours of the socialists — had been over-
thrown by a popular outbreak. A period of strange
misrule had succeeded, in which the more worthless of
the working classes and their leaders reigned almost
supreme. The first attempt at return to that state of
order and repression which the very life of society
demanded, had been met by the desperate insurrection
of the 15th of May, which gave a glimpse of the fearful
fate which hung over Paris, and the other great cities of
France, if the arm of the executive should be for one
moment paralysed or shattered. Scarcely had this been
expressed, and the capital been rescued from the " douze
heures de pillage" which Blanqui had promised to his
followers, when the same warning was repeated in still
more awful tones. The three days' battle in the streets,
which only the concentrated energy of a most resolute
dictator was able to determine in favour of the cause of
property and law — when Cavaignac was preparing to
blow up a whole quarter of the city rather than run
the risk of a defeat ; when the issue appeared so
doubtful, and the case so threatening, that he even medi-
tated withdrawing his army into the country, and con-
centrating his forces for a prolonged civil war; when
the skill and desperation of the insurgents was such,
and compelled such terrible severity, that to this hour
it is not known how many perished, and some estimate
the number at 10,000 — this terminated the series of im-
pressive lessons which should have shown the contrivers
of the constitution what was needed, and in what di-
rection their fears and precautions ought to lie. But
while the ears of every one yet tingled with the frightful

VOL. II. M

162 PRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

denunciations of the ^defeated insurrectionists ; while
the heart of every one yet beat at the thought of the
horrors they had barely escaped, through the dangerous
but indispensable resource of a military dictatorship ;
these pedants devoted their entire attention to weaken-
ing and hampering the executive power which had just,
and with difficulty, saved them : — to a situation and ne-
cessities almost unheard of in the world till then, they
opposed ideas and plans whose impotence and inade-
quacy had been fully proved by reiterated failures.

It was clear that what France demanded from the con-
stituent Assembly, was the establishment of a supreme
power truly and efficiently executive, and a representa-
tion really national,-— a government sufficiently strong
to satisfy the craving need of being governed, which all
Frenchmen feel by a secret instinct, and have been
accustomed to by long generations of a bureaucracy, —
and competent to wield, with a firrnand masterly hand,
the stupendous administrative sceptre which the centra-
lisation organised by Napoleon had bestowed on France ;
and a legislative assembly which should give to the
various elements which constitute the real permanent
majority, to the summary of all the feelings, opinions,
and interests of the nation, an easy, natural, and regular
predominance, proportioned to their respective worth
and weight. How did it discharge this double task ?

For fifty years France has been covered with the
columns and arches of a most majestic administrative
edifice, constructed by a master hand, which strikes the
imagination by its grandeur, and charms the eye by the
uniformity and regularity of its arrangements. The
central power, seated in the capital, radiates to the re-
motest corners of the land, embraces everything in its
glance, grasps everything in its hand, exerts everywhere
its mischievous stimulus or its stern control. It asks
advice from local bodies, but gives them no power, and

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 163

permits no interference. Even where it respects private
rights, it paralyses personal freedom, and weakens in-
dividual responsibility ; it keeps everything and every-
body under surveillance and in leading strings. A
system of direct taxation, strictly levied, gives it an
acquaintance with all fortunes ; an organised system of
state education opens to it an entrance into all families.
Nothing, either in the domain of thought or of material
interests, escapes its interference ; everything looks
towards it ; everything reposes upon it. From one end
of the country to the other, every one of the 37,000
communes into which it is divided, and every one of
the 36,000,000 of people who inhabit it, keep their eyes
steadily fixed upon the head quarters of the motive
power; await their signal from its will; imbibe their
inspiration from its breath. The tremendous weapon
of authority thus given to the central government, the
fearful burden of responsibility thus concentrated upon
a single head, — hard to be wielded and oppressive to be
borne even by royalty secure of its position, accustomed
to command, aided by prestige, and protected by inviola-
bility,— the new constitution placed in the hands of a
novice, renewable every four years ; chosen by the mass
to-day, re-confounded with the crowd to-morrow ; chosen
by one party, and consequently the antagonist and the
destined victim of all other parties ; the butt of a
thousand intriguers, and driven to counter-intrigues for
his defence ; superintended with a hostile vigilance by
the most unsatisfiable and imperious of masters ; viz., a
single, numerous, inexperienced, divided, and factious
Assembly, seldom suspending its sittings, and having
always a committee of "detective police" to watch him
during its short vacations. A dictatorship in the hands
of a puppet ! Supreme power in the hands of one who
is watched and treated as a public enemy! A most
subtle, complete, and universal organisation, created by

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164 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

the fiat, and designed for the purposes, of an iron and
imperial will, yet confided to the management of a
transient, ill-paid officer, bound hand and foot to the
caprices of a popular assembly ! The President was
expected, out of a salary of 25,000£. a-year, to fill with
eclat the position of representative chief of a nation fond
of splendour, of gaiety, of hospitable show. He was
expected to keep the cup of supreme power ever at his
lips, but never to do more than taste it. He was to be
a great monarch without monarchical permanence,
without monarchical veto, without monarchical inviola-
bility. He was carried up to a pinnacle from which he
saw all authority, all grandeur, all dominion within his
reach, and as it were his appointed inheritance, and then
was bidden peremptorily to descend from the giddy
eminence, and to turn away his gaze from the alluring
prize. Kestored for a moment to the imperial throne,
and grasping the reins of the imperial chariot, he was
expected to still every throb of imperial ambition.
Selected by a people accustomed to be much and ener-
getically governed, needing to be so, clamorous to be so,
and intrusted therefore with the position of a Caesar or
a Czar, he was expected to be the submissive slave of a
debating club of vestrymen, quarrelling among them-
selves, and elected by far fewer numbers than himself.

Such was the executive power in France as defined
and inaugurated by the new constitution: was the
legislative body more wisely organised ? It was perhaps
scarcely to be expected, that a people just broke loose
from all rule, fresh from a triumphant struggle with
established authority, fought in the name of the exciting
watchwords of liberty, equality, fraternity, should admit
any aristocratic element into the new system they were
framing ; but why should they have deprived themselves
of that mighty influence in the scale of order and stabi-
lity, which, as all history shows, is afforded by a second

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 165

Chamber ? There are many ways of constituting an
Upper House without making it either a council of
nominees, or a senate of hereditary peers. It might be
elected simply by a higher class of electors, or, as in
Belgium, require higher qualifications in its members.
It might, as in Sardinia, be composed of men selected
from among literary, judicial, scientific, and military
notabilities. It might be chosen by different districts^
and for different terms, from those of the Lower House,
as in the state of New York, or might be obtained by a
double election, as in the Federal Union of America.
There are so many modes in which an effective and
valuable second Chamber might be obtained, that the
French had no excuse for rejecting it on the ground of
difficulty. But the Assembly being resolved to retain
the supreme power in its own hands, was unwilling to
be in any way checked or fettered, or compelled to an
unwelcome degree of deliberation. It therefore cast
away, almost without the compliment of a discussion,
the suggestion of a second Chamber, with all the obvious
advantages that might have flowed from such an ar-
rangement, and substituted a most clumsy and incau-
tious scheme for preventing hasty or inconsiderate
changes in one direction only, — by enacting that, how-
ever faulty their new constitution might prove, it should
be in the power of a small minority to prohibit its
amendment. They required a majority of three-fourths
to legalise a revision. They tied their own hands in
the one case, in which, as it happened, it was peculiarly
desirable to leave them free. Everything else was
stamped in moveable types : the hasty and unmanage-
able constitution was alone stereotyped. — It was, per-
haps, scarcely to be expected that, in a constitution
springing from a revolution which, if not made by the
masses, was at least promptly seized upon by them, any
other system than that of universal suffrage should have

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166 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

been adopted. But three things these lawmakers might
have done which they did not : they might at least have
left the discussion of the matter free ; they might have
respected the principle, once adopted, when it pro-
nounced against them, as well as when it spoke in their
favour; and they might have surrounded its exercise
with all the wise precautions and judicious arrangements
which could mitigate its dangers, and render it the bond
jide expression of the nation's will. Instead of this, the
Convention hastily passed a law early in 1848, placing
the principle of universal suffrage under the protection
of the tribunals — making it penal to question or discuss
it — treating the exposure of its evils and its dangers as
sedition and treason. In the next place, as if conscious
that their successors would desire to undo their clumsy
workmanship, they violated the principle they had laid
down, setting universal suffrage, or the government of
the majority, at defiance, by enacting that, where the
constitution was in question, the many should bow to
the decision of the few. Consider for a moment the full
extent of this grotesque and insolent absurdity. Every
republic, and the republic of 1848 more nakedly than
any other, is based upon the will of the majority. It is
their sole recognised foundation. An absolute monarchy
rests upon the divine right of kings. An hereditary
aristocracy rests upon the superior claims and powers
of special families. A theocracy rests upon direct reli-
gious sanction. But republics sweep all these away.
The republic of 1848 ignored and denied them all.
Hereditary right, constitutional legality, established in-
stitutions, equilibrium of power, — it sacrificed all to
the blind worship of THE MAJORITY. No sooner, how-
ever, had it done so, than it turned round upon the
nation, and said : ^ The majority is omnipotent, and its
authority unquestionable, only to authorise us and to
sanction our decrees : we pronounce it powerless to

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 167

negative or change them. So long as a minority of
one-fourth supports our constitution, so long that con-
stitution shall be inviolable." The majority of the
nation, by the voice of the majority of its representatives
legally elected, demands a change in the form of the
government. The minority steps in and says, " No !
there shall be no such change — neither to-day, nor to-
morrow, nor ten years hence, so long as one-fourth of
the people or their deputies object to it. We, the few,
will control and govern you, the many." And the men
who held this language, and considered this proceeding
just, are the republicans par excellence! The democrats
are the oligarchs. The very men who thus contended
for the permanent right of the few to bind the many,
were the very men who sprung out of the victory of the
many over the few, — whose position, whose very exist-
ence, was the creation of the principle they thus repu-
diated ! The constitution which declared itself invio-
lable and unchangeable, even by a large majority, was
the very constitution which was found to be so intole-
rable that a large majority insisted upon its alteration.
Were they to retain and obey a bad law, because that
law itself forbad them to repeal it ? Whence could
anybody derive a right to make such an enactment ?
With what decency or justice could a constituent
assembly, itself the offspring of the victory of the ma-
jority over the minority, enact that in future the mi-
nority should bind the majority ?

If the principle of universal suffrage was thus slightly
respected, even by those who asserted it most loudly,
the arrangements for carrying it into practical operation
were marked by no extraordinary sagacity. Out of the
seven or eight million of voters who found themselves
endowed with the franchise, a very large proportion
consisted of the peasantry of the rural districts, little
cognisant of political affairs, and little interested in

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168 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

party strife. Numbers of them would have no idea how
to vote : numbers of them would not care how they
voted : numbers more would not wish to vote at all.
The rock on which universal suffrage is almost always
wrecked is, the ignorance or the indifference of the great
mass of the electors. Thousands of the peasantry never
stir from home : hundreds of thousands know no one
beyond the limits of their own commune, and never
hear the names of obscure or intriguing political aspi-
rants. If, therefore, it were desired most effectually to
confirm their indifference to the elections, and to em-
barrass them in their choice of a candidate, and utterly
to confuse their comprehension of the whole transaction,
no better scheme could have been devised than to make
them vote by departments instead of by arrondissements,
or by communes, — and to call upon them to elect at
once, not one man, whom they may chance to know, but
a whole list of ten, fifteen, or twenty, the names of
nearly all of whom they probably never heard of, and of
whose respective qualifications they cannot form the
most remote conception. A plan like this was sure to
throw the virtual choice into the hands of clubs, or
knots of political agitators, who would exploiter the great
body of the electors for their own purposes and inte-
rests ; and was likely to end in the great mass of the
people retiring from the exercise of the suffrage in
carelessness or disgust. One of the chief evils, indeed,
of universal suffrage is, that it never does, and rarely
can, give the actual sentiments and wishes of the nume-
rical mass of the population. Those interested in poli-
tical strife vote ; those who are sick of it, or indifferent
to it, abstain from voting. Among the working classes
this is particularly the case. There is the peaceful
industrious artisan, loving work much, independence
more, and his family most of all, living aloof from the
turmoil and passions of the public world, and whose

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 169

leisure is spent by the domestic hearth, and in the
society of his wife and children. And there is the
artisan who considers himself enlightened, who frequents
cafes, who reads newspapers, who heads processions,
who mans barricades, to whom haranguing is far plea-
santer than honest labour. To the first, a day lost at
elections is a nuisance and an injury, a supper or a
breakfast wanting, diminished wages, an unfinished job,
scantier food or clothing for his children or himself.
To the second it is a joyful holiday, a noisy spree, a
positive indulgence, possibly an actual gain of more than
he would have earned in a week by steady industry.
The result is, that the first man, whose vote would be
of real value and meaning to the community, never
gives it : the second, whose vote is worthless and a
deception, records it on every occasion ; and the nation
is as far as ever from having gathered the real feelings
and opinions of its citizens. In times of excitement
and of novelty, such as the first general election, or the
choice of a president, this evil is not so much felt ; but
so strongly was it beginning to be feared, that one of
the last proposals laid before the late Assembly, was for
making it penal to abstain from the exercise of the
franchise, — for inflicting a fine on all who neglected to
record their votes.*

Such being the constitution imposed upon France,
but never submitted to the country for ratification, what
has been the conduct of the Assembly elected under its
auspices ? Its whole career has been one series of
intrigues against the President, of squabbles among its
members, of assaults upon the liberties of the nation, of
violations of its trust, and of decisions which gave the
lie to its origin and its professions ; and it has done

* For this sketch of the vices of the constitution, we are greatly
indebted to two brochures by M. Albert de Broglie.

170 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

more to sicken France with the very name and principle
of representative government than any elected body
since the days of the National Convention. It was
elected under a republic ; it was appointed to consolidate
and perfect the republic ; it commenced life by swearing
allegiance and fidelity to the republic ; — yet it was
composed in great part of Orleanists, Bonapartists, and
Legitimists, who made no secret either of their actual
views or of their ulterior designs. Probably not more
than 250 members were at any time genuine republicans
at heart. The Orleanists visited Claremont, and intri-
gued for the return of the exiled House. The Legi-
timists avowedly received their directions from Wies-
baden, and kept steadily before them the interests of
the Count de Chambord. The Bonapartists openly
sighed after the imperial regime, and took their orders
from the Ely see. The members of the Mountain alone
were faithful to their trust ; they stood to their colours,
though conscious that the country was against them, and
combined with each of their antagonists in turn to defeat
and embarrass the others. A sadder, more factious,
more disreputable spectacle than that Assembly, a free
country has seldom seen. They turned round almost
immediately upon the constituents who had elected them.
They abolished universal suffrage by 466 votes to 223,
and disfranchised three millions of electors. They sent
an army to crush the republic of Rome, then fighting so
gallantly for its existence, by 469 votes to 180. They
handed over the primary instruction of the nation to
the clergy by 445 votes to 187. They enacted laws and
sanctioned proceedings against the liberty of the press,
severer than Louis Philippe had ever ventured upon
By compelling every writer to sign his name to each
article in the journals, they struck a fatal blow at both
the influence and the independence of journalism. They
sat nearly in permanence, and kept the nation in per.

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 171

petual hot water. Whenever they adjourned for a short
holiday, they left a committee of watch-dogs to overhaul
every act of the executive. Their questors attempted
to gain the command of the army. And, finally, at the
moment of their dissolution, they were discussing, and
were expected, by a factious combination, to pass a law
(" on the responsibility of the executive ") which would
have virtually transferred the whole power of the state
into their hands.

While the Assembly were thus conspiring against,
violating, and discrediting the constitution to which they
owed their existence, and which they had sworn to
maintain, the conduct of the President had scarcely been
one whit more patriotic or more honest. From the first
day of his inauguration, it was evident that he was
determined to be re-elected — by a revision of the con-
stitution, if that could be obtained ; if not, in defiance
of the constitution. It is even probable that he aimed,
not only at a prolongation, but at an increase of his
power. For this he flattered the army; for this he
removed and appointed generals and prefects ; for this
he played into the hands of the priests; for this he
joined the conservative majority in enacting the law of
the 31st of May ; for this he joined the republicans in
demanding its repeal. Every action betrayed his patient
plodding, and unscrupulous ambition. But on the
other hand, he had shown always such sagacity and
often such dignity; his language and bearing were
moulded with such unerring tact to suit .the tastes and
fancies of the French people ; and his personal objects,
as far as they were seen, were felt to harmonise so
much with the apparent interests of the country, that a
strong feeling had grown up among nearly all classes in
his favour. His popularity rose as that of the Assembly
declined. While reputation after reputation among
public men had sunk or suffered shipwreck, — while

172 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

every other statesman had gone down in general esti-
mation,— while Cavaignac had lost much of his prestige,
and Lamartine had been utterly extinguished, and
Thiers had been discredited, baffled, and unmasked, and
even Guizot had failed to make any progress towards
the redemption of his fame, — the character of Louis
Napoleon gradually rose, from the first day of his
election ; every step, whether his own or his opponents',
contributed to confirm his popularity and consolidate
his power. He suffered his rivals and antagonists to
exhaust and expose themselves by their own violence ;
and, keeping strictly within the limits of his prerogative
he " bided his time," and came out victorious from
every struggle. Previous, therefore, to the coup d'etat,
there had gradually grown up among nearly all classes
of Frenchmen, a conviction that the destinies of the
nation would be far safer, and its character far higher,
if confided to a man who, whatever were his faults, had
at least shown that he possessed a definite purpose and
a firm will, — than if left in the hands of a body of men
who had manifested no signs of a lofty and decorous
patriotism, who had regarded all questions of public
policy, foreign and domestic, only as they could be
turned to their own private or factious advantage, and
who had permitted the sacred banner of the common-
wealth, intrusted to their keeping, to be torn by the
animosities, and soiled by the passions of party.

Indeed, it is not easy to exaggerate the discredit
brought upon themselves, and upon the very theory of
representative government, by the proceedings of the
leaders of the various political parties in France.
Chosen by a suffrage almost universal, bound to their
constituents by the closest ties, and returning to them
after only three years' tenure of office, it might have
been anticipated that, if only from selfish considerations,
they would have steadily devoted themselves to study

FKANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 173

the real and permanent interests of the country, and
would have co-operated heartily and zealously with the
executive in devising and carrying out schemes for
rendering France peaceful and prosperous at home, and
powerful and respected abroad. It might have been
hoped that their labour would have been earnestly
directed towards developing the vast resources of the
country, and securing to its industry the freest and
most favourable action; that everything calculated to
raise and improve the condition of the masses would
have had their first and most sedulous attention ; and
that, above all things, they would have striven hard
and have sacrificed much for the maintenance of that
silent internal harmony, which is the primary ne-
cessity of a nation's life. It might have been expected
that they would have regarded every question of foreign
policy, first, in its bearings on the special interests of
France, and secondly, in its bearings on the progress
elsewhere of that freedom which they had just re-
conquered, and of which everywhere they were the
professed defenders. Instead of this, party politics, not
social philosophy, occupied almost their whole time;
and external action was dictated by a desire to gain the
support of this or that section, to destroy this rival, or
discredit that antagonist ; till their entire career became
one indecent and disreputable scramble.

The result inevitably was an increasing feeling on
the part of the public, first of indignation, then of
disgust, latterly of sickened and most ominous indif-
ference. Ominous, that is, for popular leaders and
representative assemblies; — for the people — weary of
watching the objectless and petty squabbles of their
chosen legislators, and disheartened by finding that the
rulers they selected for themselves treated them no
better, and served them no more effectively, than the
rulers who had been imposed upon them — began to

174 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

turn their attention to their own private affairs, and to
discover how much more they could do for themselves
than governments and assemblies could do for them.
Since they had trusted more to themselves and less to
parliaments, they had prospered comparatively well.
Trade was spirited, and industry was thriving and in-
creasing. The political storms which used to agitate
all ranks began to pass nearly unheeded over their
heads ; for they perceived how paltry and inconsequen-
tial they were. They put their own shoulders to the
wheel, instead of calling on the gods above to help them ;
and all the noisy quarrels of the great Olympus fell,
as by magic, into their genuine insignificance. An idea
had already dawned upon the French, that an Assembly
which had done so little for them was not of much im-
portance to them; and that if they could prosper in
spite of its scandalous dereliction of its duties, and its
selfish abuse of its powers, they might perhaps prosper
even were it non-existent. A wholesome lesson, pos-
sibly, for the people, but a fatal one for demagogues
and orators.

When a people has thus begun to look after their
private affairs instead of discussing affairs of state, and
to act for themselves instead of calling on their rulers
to act for them, only one thing is needed to insure their
welfare — viz., that the government should bring them
and secure them tranquillity and order. If it will do
this, they ask no more : if it does not do this, it ab-
negates its paramount and especial function ; it becomes
to them a nuisance, not a protection — "a mockery, a
delusion, and a snare." Now, few Englishmen are
aware, though it is no novel information to a Parisian,
to what an extent Frenchmen had come to look upon
the Assembly in this light. The constant series of
moves and stratagems of which the history of that body
was made up, kept the nation in a perpetual state of

FKANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 175

excitement, expectation, and turmoil. They never knew
what would come next. They were constantly on the
qui vive for some new explosion. So long as the As-
sembly was sitting, there was incessant agitation and
wild unrest ; and thousands would thankfully have paid
the members their twenty-five francs a day not to sit at
all. Peace — comparative peace — came with proroga-
tion ; but the sessions were felt to be deplorably too
long, and the vacations' piteously too few. So that the
body which ought to have been the shield and safeguard
of the nation, the guardian of its interests, the protector
of its rights, had come to be regarded as a plague, a
mischief, and an enemy. Only when it ceased to sit,
did France begin to breathe freely.

The plain truth is that no nation — not even the
French — can bear to be for ever in hot water. Cease-
less political agitation is an element in which neither
material prosperity, nor moral wellbeing, can live. If
it seemed hopeless to find the needed tranquillity in
freedom and republicanism, who can wonder if many
lost faith and heart, and began to cast a sigh after the
calm despotism which beckoned to them out of the
softening haze of the past, or towards that which loomed
gradually out of the uncertain future. France, for
many months back, had echoed in her heart of hearts
the words of that touching inscription on the Italian
tombstone — implora pace. Wearied with achievements
which had led to nothing, and victories which had been
crowned by no enduring conquests, and trophies dearly
purchased, but barren of the promised consequences —
her whole desires were fast merging into the one suc-
cinct petition of the grand old warrior of Carthage,
who — harassed by perpetual warfare, broken by family
afflictions, and thwarted by an ungrateful state — closed
a public life of singular glory and of bitter disenchant-
ment, with the simple prayer, comprised in so few

176 TRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

words, yet full of such melancholy pathos: — " Ego,
Hannibal, peto pacem ! "

Such was the state of feeling in France, and such the
relative position of the contending parties, immediately
previous to the coup d'etat, — and it is important
thoroughly to fix this in our minds, in order to com-
prehend the full meaning of the President's attempt,
and the explanation of the manner in which it was
received by the nation. On the one side stood Louis
Napoleon, who had far surpassed all expectations formed
of him from his discreditable antecedents, and had risen
higher day by day in public estimation — who had shown
consummate knowledge of the temper of the people,
and supreme tact in dealing with it — who had finally
taken his stand on the broad basis of universal suffrage
— who had long foreseen and been preparing for the
inevitable struggle — and with strange sagacity and
patience had, as the phrase is, given his opponents
" rope enough to hang themselves.'7 On the other side
stood the Assembly, on the eve of an election, yet
seemingly intent on showing how unfit they were to be
re-chosen, — pointing, as their sole titles to popular
confidence and a renewal of their trust, to millions of
constituents disfranchised — to the revision of a clumsy
constitution, demanded by the people but refused by
themselves — to the freedom of the press, through their
means, trampled under foot — to France, through their
intrigues, rendered light as a feather in the balance of
European power — to her gallant army, through their
connivance, engaged in the degrading employment of
restoring a miserable pontiff, and enslaving an eman-
cipated people — to a sacred trust, perverted to the
purposes of low ambition — to the very name of a re-
presentative assembly, through their misconduct, covered
with ridicule and shame.

What the President did we need not relate here ;

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 177

how he dissolved the Assembly, abolished the consti-
tution, imprisoned deputies and generals, appealed to
the people, and extinguished all resistance with un-
sparing severity, — all this is known to every one.
The degree of his criminality in this daring usurpation
will be differently estimated by different men according
to the view they may take as to the wishes and interests
of France, the urgency of the crisis, and the reality of
the alleged and indicated intention on the part of the
Assembly to have forestalled and deposed him. On
the one hand, it is unquestionable that if he had waited
till the Assembly had passed the bill (on executive re-
sponsibility), which they were then considering, he
would have been wholly in their power. If he had
allowed matters to go on as they were till the election
of May, a popular outbreak and a deplorable convulsion
would have been almost inevitable ; for matters had
been so arranged that both the legislative and presi-
dential elections would take place at nearly the same
time, under a disputed electoral law, and when all the
powers of the state were in a condition of paralysis and
dissolution. The greatest contest ever known in a re-
presentative system was to take place round the dying
bed of an expiring President and an expiring Assembly ;
and the president sure to be chosen was a president
ineligible by law. — Moreover, Louis Napoleon might
plead that he, as well as the Assembly, was elected by
universal suffrage ; that the Assembly had ceased to be
in harmony with their constituents, while he had not ;
that when two co-ordinate powers, equally chosen by
the people, disagree, the only mode of deciding the
dispute is by an appeal to the authority from which
both emanate; and that all he did was to make that
appeal arbitrarily, which the constitution denied him
the power of doing legally. On the other hand, it is
equally undeniable that the act which he has perpetrated

VOL. II. N

178 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

bears, on the face of it, all the features of a great crime.
The constitution which he has violently suppressed, bad
as it was, was the deliberately framed constitution of
his country, and was the one which, knowing all its
faults, he had sworn to maintain and obey. The
liberties which he had so ruthlessly trampled under
foot, were the liberties which he had sworn to respect
and to watch over. The blood which he has shed was
the blood of his fellow-citizens, and ought to have been
precious in his eyes. The oath which he has broken
was an oath solemnly tendered and often voluntarily re-
affirmed. Therefore, if he is to be forgiven, he must
sue out his pardon from the future. Nothing can
palliate his crime, except its being the last. Nothing
can excuse his seizure of power, except the patriotic
use he makes of it. In the meantime we are not
anxious to hold the balance or to cast the lot between
the guilty President and the guilty Assembly. We
adopt the words of Victor Cousin on a different occa-
sion,— " Je renvoie, done, les extravagances aux ex-
travagans, les crimes aux criminelles, et je detourne les
yeux de ce sang et de cette boue," — and, from the
sickening and idle task of awarding the palm between
two culpable combatants, we turn to consider the
prospects, the feelings, and the fate of FRANCE under
the new regime. Power, illegally seized, is sometimes
legally sanctioned. The crimes of individual ambition
are often overruled by Providence so as to work out the
welfare of nations.

In the first place, Louis Napoleon's usurpation has
been since ratified and sanctioned in a manner which,
after every reasonable deduction has been made on
account of the circumstances of the polling, leaves no
ground whatever for doubting that it was approved by
the nation. Whatever some of our English journals, in
their anger and amazement, may say as to the pro-

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 179

bability of the returns having been falsified, no man in
France believes that anything of the kind has been done,
to any important extent at least. The total adult male
population of France is, as near as can be ascertained,
nine millions, and of these we can scarcely reckon
fewer to be disqualified from various causes than half
a million. This would leave 8,500,000 as the total
number of electors under universal suffrage. Of these
in round numbers 7,500,000 have voted for Louis
Napoleon, and 700,000 against him, while 300,000
have abstained from voting. There can be no doubt
that some voted in ignorance of the facts of the case ;
some in an overweening fear of the socialists; some
because, though no friends to Louis Napoleon, they
saw no alternative between him and anarchy. It is
impossible to aifirm, that an election which has taken
place while all newspapers were suppressed or gar-
bled, while all public meetings and other facilities for
forming and circulating opinion were proscribed, while
the principal political chiefs were in durance, and while
many departments were under martial law, can be con-
sidered as a fair one. We believe that Louis Napoleon
has done himself serious injury and injustice by thus
enabling his antagonists to assert, without the possi-
bility of disproof, that votes have been tampered with,
coerced, or obtained by fraud. But when every allow-
ance has been made, we do not believe, and we think no
man in France really believes, that the late poll does
not give the fair and genuine result of the sentiments
of the vast numerical majority of the nation. As to
the feelings of the middle classes, we are left to gather
the truth from a variety of indications. The great and
continued rise in the French rentes, which, notwith-
standing the foolish insinuations of some ignorant jour-
nalists, was perfectly bond fide ; the equivalent advance
in the price of railway shares ; the increased price of

180 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

most kinds of goods ; the immediate and marked revival
in nearly all branches of trade; the issuing of orders
which had been long suspended; — all concur to intimate
the warm approval of the coup d'etat by the industrial,
commercial, and financial classes of France. All our
own private foreign correspondents, whether enemies or
friends of the President, confirm this conclusion. All
agree in representing the state of anxiety and uncer-
tainty in which they had long been kept as utterly into-
lerable ; most express confidence in the wisdom of Louis
Napoleon's future rule and its suitability to France ; all
speak of the satisfaction felt at the revolution being
nearly universal among all who have anything to lose
or anything to gain by honest and reputable means.
The majority of the press we presume to be hostile, as
also most of the politicians of France. The opinion of
the Legitimists and that of the Orleanists appears to be
divided. On the whole, however, it cannot be denied
that France has elected Louis Napoleon with hearty
good will, and anticipates much from his government.

In considering this matter, it is important that we
should divest ourselves of our insular prejudices and
habits of thought, and inquire not what we should feel
under such circumstances, but what Frenchmen would
be likely to feel ; not what regime would be suitable for
England, but what regime is best adapted for France.
We must bear in mind that our notions of freedom and
policy are utterly at variance with theirs — that our
beau ideal of a perfect government is diametrically
opposite to theirs. The French notion of liberty is
political equality ; the English notion is personal inde-
pendence. The French are accustomed to have their
government do everything for them, and direct them in
everything, and they expect and wish it to do so ; the
English wish never to feel the action, or be compelled
to recognise the existence, of government in their

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 181

daily and private life. It would therefore be both pe-
dantic and misleading to judge the one nation by the
standard of the other, or to act for the one on the
system of the other. There are two kinds of freedom
— two modes in which a nation may exercise and prove
its liberty. We have chosen one ; France has always
shown a marked preference for the other. We prefer
to govern ourselves : it is the peculiar taste of the
Anglo-Saxon, The French prefer to choose their go-
vernor, and then leave everything in his hands: it is
the fancy of the Celt. If we select the more troublesome
mode, of directing and ruling ourselves, and displaying
our liberty in every action of our daily life, we are
scarcely at liberty to despise our neighbour as a slave,
because he prefers the easier, lazier, and more dangerous
plan of concentrating all his liberty into a single deed,
and then abnegating self-management and self-respon-
sibility for ever. Ours, indeed, is unquestionably the
wiser and the safer plan ; but it may not be suited for,
or practicable among, a race so divergent from ourselves
as are the people of France.

May not the French have been all along upon the
wrong tack, in aiming at the establishment of a parlia-
mentary government in their country ? May they not
have been entirely mistaken in adopting and supposing
that they could manage a machine which appeared to
have done so well with us ? May not the form of go-
vernment and the guarantees of freedom suitable for
France be wholly different from those which have been
found available in England ?

An ancient legend of deep significance relates that
there once lived a magician who had discovered a spell
of singular cogency and virtue, by means of which he
could command the attendance and compel the obedience
of a familiar spirit, through whose services he acquired
fame, wealth, and wide dominion. A favourite pupil, in-

N 3

182 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

spired with the ambition of rivalling his master's power,
possessed himself of the mighty secret, pronounced the
magic spell, and evoked the wondrous agency ; but he
had omitted one little and apparently unimportant word
in the formula of invocation, and the demon, therefore,
though he had obeyed the summons, refused to submit
to the control of the incompetent magician ; instead of
being a serviceable and obedient slave, he became an
imperious and terrific tyrant, whom the unfortunate
evoker was unable to dismiss, who tormented him
through life, and ended by tearing him to pieces.

The events that for the last sixty years have been
passing on the other side of the Channel, seem the re-
production of this medieval tale. France is the ambi-
tious pupil; representative institutions the magical
spirit — the power for good or evil — which she has
evoked, but cannot manage or dismiss. In summoning
them to her .aid to enable her to rise out of the servitude
and degradation of the past, and enter on a new career
of greatness and of glory, she forgot one little ingredient
in the composition of the magic spell, the omission of
which has converted a blessing into a bane, a patient
servant into a capricious despot, and has transmuted
the pride and safeguard of England into the curse and
reproach of France. Personal virtue, public principle,
pure, lofty, and self-abnegating patriotism was omitted
from the invocation. The formula was borrowed faith-
fully enough ; the spirit which sanctified and gave it
efficacy was alone left out.

From its first glorious beginning in 1789, to its last
ignominious ending in 1851, the whole history of Re-
presentative Assemblies in France has been one series of
oscillations between despotism and impotence.- When
there has been only one Chamber it has almost invariably
grasped at the supreme authority ; when there have been
two they have been as uniformly curbed or rendered in-
significant. Parliaments in France have always either

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 183

absorbed the executive power or been absorbed by it.
They have alternately been omnipotent or powerless.
They have always been either sinned against, or sinning.
Never yet have the legislative and the executive bodies
worked in harmony as co-equal and co-ordinate func-
tionaries. Neither has endured "a brother near the
throne." Neither seems to have been able to conceive
any medium between absolute authority or complete
subserviency, nor to have believed its existence safe or
dignified till its rival and colleague was effaced or en-
slaved. The reins of power have dangled between the
two, snatched alternately by the one or the other, — the
unhappy chariot of the state, in the meantime, dragged
first into one ditch, then into the other, but always
going to the dogs.

When the first great revolution broke out, sixty-two
years ago, nearly all parties seemed disposed to put
aside the past as an ugly dream, — the present looked
very hopeful, and the future very bright. A monarchy
strong in old associations, an Assembly rich in young
hopes and enthusiastic aspirations, a fine spirit of pa-
triotism and energy pervading most classes of the nation,
seemed materials to warrant the most sanguine antici-
pations. But the struggle for supremacy soon began,
the sovereign intrigued against the Chamber; the
Chamber encroached upon the sovereign, thwarted him,
fettered him, reduced him to a cypher, imprisoned him,
and slew him. The Assembly possessed itself of the
executive power, and governed the country by sections
and committees : how, let the Reign of Terror, and the
reaction, incapacity, and license of the Directory, pro-
claim. When Napoleon, on the 18th Brumaire, over-
powered the Chambers by an armed force, and became
First Consul, then Consul for life, then Emperor, the
Representative Assemblies sank into a nullity, and
throughout his reign remained little but courts for

N 4

184 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

registering arid giving legal form and validity to his
decrees. Under Louis XVIII. and Charles X., they
were little heeded by the monarch, and little respected
by the people ; they spoke sometimes, but scarcely ever
acted, and such spirit of liberty as survived in France
was kept in existence by a resolute but persecuted
press. Then came the revolution of 1830, when "the
charter was henceforth to be a truth," a real fact ; but
corruption soon again made the Chambers what oppres-
sion had made them before, the passive tools of the
monarch's will. An Assembly chosen by 180,000 elec-
tors, among whom the sovereign had 600,000 places to
dispose of, could be no valid barrier to his authority ;
and Louis Philippe became nearly absolute under the
forms of constitutionalism. Lastly followed the revo-
lution of February, which installed in office a single
popular and powerful Chamber, with an elective Presi-
dent high in station, dignity, and nominal authority,
but watched, thwarted, and guarded as a public enemy.
The old contest immediately recommenced ; the Presi-
dent resented and fretted under his position of invidious
and jealous slavery ; the Assembly intrigued to engross
the entire authority of the state ; and the old miserable
struggle was terminated by the old rusty weapon — a
coup d'etat, and a military despotism.

Now, why is it that constitutional government, which
works so well in England, will not work at all in France?
Why is it that, however often it is re-established there,
the irresistible tendency of the nation towards another
state of things ensures its speedy overthrow, or its
virtual dormancy ? Why is it that the representative
system, every time it is set up in France, seems, by its
failure, to proclaim its want of adaptation to the
national necessities, its want of harmony with the na-
tional characteristics ? Does not this reiterated rejec-
tion of it, like food which does not agree, indicate that

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 185

it is not what France requires, that it is not the medicine
or the aliment which nature prescribes for her present
constitution, or her actual maladies ? Let us consider,
especially, two points which will illustrate our meaning.
The representative system is essentially the creature
and the child of compromise. Constitutional govern-
ment, by which we mean an elective body emanating
from the people, co- existing as a reality by the side of
an executive, whether hereditary or not, endowed with
the requisite authority, — is the result of mutual for-
bearance, moderation, and respect ; exists only by virtue
of these qualities ; could not endure for an hour without
them. It is an entire mistake to imagine such a scheme
theoretically good ; it is, on the contrary, theoretically im-
perfect, and is feasible only on the supposition of addi-
tional elements, which are not "nominated in the bond.'*
It is an entire mistake to affirm that English liberty has
flourished in consequence of our glorious constitution.
English liberty has flourished in spite of our anomalous
and defective constitution ; it has flourished in conse-
quence of national virtues, in the absence of which that
constitution would have been utterly unmanageable.
The machine which is supposed to have made us what
we are, would have broken down generations ago, had we
been other than what we are. It is full of checks and
counter-checks, of anomalies and incongruities, which
would seem to indicate its fitting place, as an unworking
model, in a museum of monstrosities. The monarch
has the sole power of forming treaties, and of declaring
peace and war. He alone commands the army. .He
alone appoints all functionaries, civil, military, and
judicial. He can dissolve parliament whenever it
thwarts him, and as often as he pleases. He can put
an absolute veto on all its enactments. He can sus-
pend laws by orders in council, if he can find ministers
bold enough to run the risk of a refusal on the part of

186 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

parliament to indemnify them afterwards. The House
of Lords, or a majority ''of them, about 200 men, can
snub both king and House of Commons, and stop all
proceedings indefinitely, and paralyse the entire action
of government. Again, the House of Commons can
release the army from their allegiance, by omitting
to pass the yearly " Mutiny Bill." It can refuse the
monarch the means of carrying on the war which it
yet empowers him to declare, and of paying the func-
tionaries whom it yet authorises him to appoint. It can
impeach the ministers whom it allows him to nominate ;
yet if they are condemned, it still leaves him the power of
conferring immunity upon them by an unlimited prero-
gative of pardon. The constitution gives the monarch
means of absolute despotism, if he is wicked enough to
desire it, and if the army will stand by him, and if the
people will endure military rule. It gives the nobles
power to set both people and monarch at defiance, if
they are selfish and daring enough to do so. It gives the
Lower House the power of starving both its colleagues
into a surrender, on the supposition that botn its col-
leagues will keep within the limits of the law. But it
proceeds throughout on the supposition that none of
these things will occur ; that their occurrence will be pre-
vented by their possibility ; that none of the three parties
will be forgetful of their duties, or be disposed to push
their rights to an extreme ; that each will bear and
forbear ; that all will join in masking the impossibilities
of the constitution, and avoiding the collisions which its
theory makes so easy ; and that all, like the reverential
children of the frail patriarch of old, will concur in
covering, with a decent and respectful drapery, the
nakedness of their common parent.

But what would be the result were the English
machine to be worked by French hands ? Each of the
three co-ordinate authorities would assert its power to

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 187

w

the utmost. Each would make use of its large portion
to seize the whole. The peers would put on the drag
at the slightest opposition to their will. The Commons
would stop the supplies on the most trivial provocation.
The sovereign would employ the army to levy the taxes
and subdue the people. The parliament would impeach
the minister, and the monarch would insult and defy
them by giving him a free pardon. The whole would
be at a dead-lock in a month. The opposing forces
would substitute mutual antagonism for mutual control ;
and the result would be, not a diagonal as with us, but
simply a checkmate — not a medial movement, but an
absolute stoppage. The ultima ratio which we have
staved off for centuries, would be reached by French-
men in a single session. — Representative government,
then, we say, embodies the essence, breathes the atmo-
sphere, lives the life of COMPROMISE. But the French
hate compromise. The very idea of it disgusts them.
What they are they like to be completely. What they
have, they like to have to themselves, without colleague or
without competitor. A possession which they hold only
in concert, with equal co-proprietors, has few charms
for them. The Legitimists are unwilling to replace their
sovereign on the throne, on any basis but that of divine
right, and absolute authority. In their notion he would
be degraded if he owed his crown to the summons of
the people, or shared his power with a new aristocracy,
or a popular assembly. The bourgeoisie in like manner
would ignore the nobles, and reduce them to a nullity.
And the democracy, equally exclusive and intolerant,
cannot imagine that the mass of the people can be
rightfully called on to admit the existence or recognise
the claims of any other party, and insist upon an ex-
clusive, absolute, and uncontrolled dominion. Guizot,
in his Treatise on Democracy, seized this peculiarity of
France with the quick instinct of a master's eye.

188 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

"Peace is impossible," he says (for the word peace
we would substitute representative constitutionalism,),
" so long as the various classes and political parties
whom our society comprises, nourish the hope of mu-
tually destroying each other, and possessing an exclusive
empire. This is the evil which, since 1789, torments
us continually, and overthrows us periodically. The
monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements, have
not accepted or recognised each other, but have toiled
for their reciprocal exclusion. Constitution, laws, ad-
ministration, have been in turn directed, like engines of
war, to the destruction of one or other party. It has
been a ' war to the knife/ in which neither of the com-
batants believed it possible to live if his rival was still
erect and breathing by his side."

French exclusiveness and hatred of compromise, then,
is the first reason why representative institutions have
not flourished in France. But there is another and a
yet deeper cause. Their revolutions have always begun
at the wrong end. They have looked only to one point,
and that not the primary, nor the most essential one.
They have begun their reforms with institutions, not
with individuals. They have thought it sufficient to
reconstruct society in the aggregate, without modifying
or amending the units which compose it. They forgot
in their earliest efforts, and have never paused to
remember since, that the concrete mass must represent
and resemble the materials of which it is made up ;
and that if the individuals are corrupt, selfish, violent,
and impure, the community cannot be firm, peaceable,
dignified, or noble. Accustomed to trace their evils to
their institutions, taught alike by their writers and
their orators to cast upon empty forms the burden of
their ingrained sins, they conceived that a change of
institutions and of forms would work those miracles,
which are the slow and painful product of private

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 189

virtue and individual exertion ; of patient toil, and
more patient endurance — of mutual respect, and mu-
tual love. They imagined they could reform society
without first reforming themselves. Hence all their
schemes and constitutions have been projects for ob-
taining the reward without the effort — the victory
without the conflict or the sacrifice ; for dispensing
with indispensable qualifications in place of eliciting or
exercising them ; for doing great actions without first
training great souls ; for seeking in the barren and
narrow range of the mechanical, what can only be
found in the rich resources of the moral world. They
worked for the salvation of the individual without
requiring his participation in the task. Fatal blunder !
They imagined that men might be rendered free and
equal by destroying external barriers and striking off
material chains ; they did not perceive that freedom
and equality have their sole roots and guarantees
within the man. They abolished the ancien regime;
but they abolished it in vain, while each man carried
his ancien regime within himself. The old vices, the
old corruption, the old selfishness, the old ambition, the
old passion for material enjoyments, the old incapacity
for silent and elevated patriotism, still survived, and
were never struck at or fairly encountered : how then
should not the old anomalies re-appear ? The garments
were torn and buried ; but the body and the life re-
mained. Now, as surely as the laws of Providence are
constant and inexorable, so surely can there be, for
nation or for individual, no short cut to a goal which
God has placed at the end of a toilsome and appointed
path ; no mechanical contrivances for the attainment of
an end which is the allotted reward of moral effort and
self-denying virtue ; no human fiat for the gratuitous
bestowal of blessings for which heaven has appointed
a hard and heavy purchase-money. The functions of

190 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

government — self-government as well as every other
— demand qualifications, negative and positive, of no
ordinary kind ; qualifications which are not inherent
or innate ; qualifications for which the demand by no
means always calls forth the supply. The mere posses-
sion of power confers neither capacity nor virtue to
exercise it well ; and in obtaining the representative
institutions that belong to freedom, while still tainted
with all the vices of their ancient servitude, the French
only seized a treasure of which they had forgotten to
secure the key, a weapon of which they had not learned
the mastery, a writing in cypher to which they had not
got the clue. Caution, humility, obedience to law,
long-suffering patience, respect for others' rights, and
others' opinions, — these, the sine qua non of a consti-
tutional regime, they never dreamed of practising ; —
aspiring to raise the superstructure, while shirking the
preliminary drudgery of laying the foundation.

A third reason why parliamentary government, which
has answered so well in England, has answered so ill in
France, may be found in the fact, that it harmonises
with our habits and institutions, but is wholly discre-
pant and incongruous with those of our neighbours.
We govern ourselves ; they are governed by officials.
Our whole system is municipal, theirs is bureaucratic.
We have already spoken of their centralised adminis-
tration, and the extent to which it pervades and inter-
penetrates the daily and domestic life of the nation. In
England, the civil servants of the government are few,
unconnected, and unobtrusive ; in France, they are in-
numerable, omnipotent, and constitute a separate, or-
ganised, and powerful class. In England they confine
themselves to absolutely necessary functions ; in France
they interfere with every transaction and every event of
life. In England, as a general rule, a man is only re-
minded of their existence by the annual visit of the tax-

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 191

gatherer, unless, indeed, he has to appeal to the law, or
has rendered himself amenable to it ; in France, scarcely
a day passes, scarcely an operation can be concluded,
without coming into contact or collision with one or
other of their number. Many of the duties performed
by officials on the Continent are here performed by
elected, parochial, or municipal functionaries, many are
left to individual discretion, many more are not per-
formed at all. With us a man's free will is limited only
by his neighbour's free will and his neighbour's rights ;
in France, as in Austria, it can be exercised only subject
to government or police permission previously obtained.
Restriction is the exception here ; it is the rule there.
Throughout the Continent, a citizen cannot engage in
business, build a house, or take a journey, without
leave ; and leave is only to be obtained through an
established routine of tedious and annoying formalities
which would drive an Englishman frantic.

A second operation of this centralised and over-active
bureaucracy, has necessarily been to deprive the people
of France of all share in those minor acts of government
which should form their education for higher offices and
more important functions. They have only the faintest
vestiges of those municipal institutions which, with us,
are such invaluable normal schools of peaceable agitation
and political discussion. They have no local senates to
prepare them for the central senate of the nation ; or,
where such exist, they have no real power, and there-
fore excite little interest. The officials do everything :
the people do nothing. They are associated with none
of the acts of government except the highest. They
choose no one except their legislative representatives
and their executive chief — no one at least whose func-
tions are much more than nominal. Under a bureau-
cracy, they have, and can have, no opportunity of
training themselves in those skilful tactics, those mutual

192 FRANCE IN JANUAKY 1852.

forbearances, those timely retreats, those judicious com-
promises, which form the essence of safe and wise poli-
tical strategies. In a word, they are almost wholly
without those real parochial and communal liberties,
which are an indispensable preparation for national and
republican liberties. Hence, when summoned to the
task of self-government by means of a popular assembly,
they are like pilots intrusted with the navigation of a
ship who have never been at sea before.

In May 1851 we wrote thus: — " Kepublicanism
and bureaucracy are incompatible existences. You
may call your state a republic if you will — you may
modify its form as you please — you may have two
chambers or one — you may place at the head a military
dictator, or an elective president holding office for one
year, for four years, or for ten ; — but so long as the
administration of public affairs remains central and
bureaucratic, the utmost that full representation or
universal suffrage can give, is the power of choosing
the particular set of busy bodies who shall rule you,, or
rather the irresponsible individual who shall appoint
them. It is not liberty, but merely the selection of
your head oppressor. Thus France is in a radically
false position, and she has not yet found it out ; she is
endeavouring unconsciously to unite two incompati-
bilities. Her government has all the finished and scien-
tific organisation of a despotism, with the political in-
stitutions which belong to freedom. Each man has a
share in the choice of his legislator and his executive
chief; each man is the depositary of a calculable frac-
tion of the sovereign power ; but each man is the slave
of the passport office, the prefect, the gendarme, and
the policeman. The republic of to-day may wake and
find itself an empire to-morrow — scarcely an individual
Frenchman would feel the difference — and not one iota
of the administration need be changed. As it exists

FKANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 193

now, it was the child and may be the parent of im-
perialism. The whole machinery of autocratic rule is
at all times ready for the hand of any one who can
seize it."

What a commentary on our prediction has the re-
volution of the 2nd of December afforded ! Surely it
should teach France the soundness of our present posi-
tion— viz., that she cannot serve two masters; she
cannot at the same moment "fill her cup from the
mouth and from the source of the Nile." She cannot
be at once representative and bureaucratic. If she desires
parliamentary government, she must abolish centrali-
sation. But it is beyond dispute that this system of
administration, which to us seems so intolerable, is sin-
gularly popular in France ; and that parliaments, which
appear to us so indispensable, are by no means popular.
The one system is indigenous, and is, therefore, welcome
and stable : the other is an exotic, and, therefore, takes
no root, shows no stamina, can arrive at no permanency
or durability. It did not grow out of the people's
wants : it does not harmonise with the people's senti-
ments. What France wants is what Napoleon gave
her — viz., a firm and all-penetrating administrative
system, with municipal bodies and national assemblies,
whose functions were limited to the representation of
grievances; — and, in addition, she wants what he did
not give her — and what yet remains a desideratum — a
guarantee against the misgovernnient of arbitrary power.
Now, we in England are too apt to fall into the natural
but somewhat pedantic error of supposing that this
guarantee is afforded, and can only be afforded, by
representative institutions. Yet the whole history of
France since her first revolution might have taught us
our mistake. She had representative institutions in
1793 ; yet they did not secure her against the most
grinding tyranny which was ever imposed upon a people

VOL. II. O

194 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

— a tyranny which was known and proved to be that
of a minority — a tyranny, nevertheless, which it re-
quired the bloodshed and the coup of the 9th Therrnidor
to overthrow. She had representative institutions in
1799 ; yet they did not protect her against the wretched
rnisgovernment of the Directory, nor against the daring
conspiracy by which, on the 18th Brumaire, both they
and the Directory were superseded. Representative
institutions did not protect France against the arbi-
trary decrees of Charles X., nor against the necessity
of a revolution to dethrone him. They did not enable
her to extort reform from Louis Philippe without the
same bloody and rudimental expedient. Finally, they
did not protect her from the violent usurpation of the
President in December last. She has tried them under
every form and modification ; and under none have
they superseded the necessity of revolutions; — under
none have they enabled her to dispense with the same rude
and primitive mode of expressing dissatisfaction and
desire of change which is resorted to by nations to whom
parliaments and ballot-boxes are unknown. They are
effective to preserve the rights and liberties of citizens
only where patriotism and a sense of justice are so
paramount that instruments cannot be found to trample
upon them. They are powerful to deter bad rulers
from misgovernment, only when it is known that mis-
government will not be borne. The same coup d'etat
which has overturned the government in France might
have taken place in England just as well, if the monarch
had been wicked enough to attempt it, the parliament
discredited enough to provoke it, the army subservient
enough to enact it, the people base enough or wearied
enough to submit to it. A representative system con-
tains " the form but not the power" of freedom. It
offers no security except on the assumption — true with
us, false with our neighbours — that the parties con-

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 195

cerned in it will be kept within its limits by a sense of
duty, or a sense of fear. A King of England could not
have acted as the President of France has done, not
because the parliament and the law forbad him, but
simply because the army would not have assaulted the
parliament or disobeyed the law, arid because the people
would not tamely have endured either violation. Ke-
presentative institutions are merely an established mode
of manifesting to the ruler the resolution of the nation.
Other simpler, louder, and more cogent modes of mani-
festing this resolution may be found — not indeed
suited to our meridian, but possibly to the meridian of
France. This louder language is what France always
speaks in whether she has a parliament or not. A
central executive chief, chosen by the free vote of the
whole people, and liable at any time or at stated in-
tervals to be cashiered by a reversal of that vote if he
loses national confidence or incurs national condem-
nation, may possibly enough be a better system of go-
vernment for France than any she has yet tried. " But
where is the security (we are asked) that such adverse
vote will be submitted to by a powerful chief?" True;
but in reply we ask — "Have we found that represen-
tative assemblies have afforded any such security?"
And may not the whole matter be summed up in this
brief decision, that no mode of expressing the na-
tional will will ever obtain submissive acquiescence, or
reach the undisputed dignity of a sacred and supreme
decree, till the whole people, those who command as
well as those who obey, those who succumb as well as
those who prevail, are penetrated and imbued with a
paramount love of justice, a noble servitude to duty,
and a solemn reverence for law. When these qualities
reign universal and despotic, almost any form of go-
vernment will suffice to embalm freedom and insure
greatness; till these are acquired and maintained, the

o 2

196 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

wisest system of policy ever devised by the most pro-
found and subtle intellect of man can secure them no
liberty and bring them no rest.*

* We particularly recommend to our readers the following quo-
tations from one of the greatest historians and political thinkers of
our time : —

" The English in the 16th century were, beyond all doubt, a free
people. They had not indeed the outward show of freedom ; but
they had the reality. They had not as good a constitution as we
have; but they had that without which the best constitution is as
useless as the king's proclamation against vice and immorality, that
which without any constitution keeps rulers in awe — force, and the
spirit to use it. ... A modern Englishman can hardly under-
stand how the people can have had any real security for good govern-
ment under kings who levied benevolences and chid the House of
Commons as they would have chid a pack of dogs. People do not
sufficiently consider that, though the legal checks were feeble, the
natural checks were strong. There was one great and effectual limi-
tation on the royal authority — the knowledge that, if the patience of
the nation were severely tried, the nation would put forth its strength,
and that its strength would be irresistible.

" The Irish are better represented in parliament than the Scotch,
who, indeed, are not represented at all. [This was written before
1832.] But are the Irish better governed than the Scotch ? Surely
not. But this only proves that laws have no magical or supernatural
virtue; that priestcraft, ignorance, and the rage of contending fac-
tions may make good institutions useless ; that intelligence, sobriety,
industry, moral freedom, firm union, may supply in a great measure
the defects of the worst representative system. A people whose
education and habits are such that, in every quarter of the world,
they rise above the mass of those with whom they mix, as surely as
oil rises to the top of water; a people of such temper and self-
government that the wildest popular excesses recorded in their history
partake of the purity of judicial proceedings and the solemnity of
religious rites ! a people whose high and haughty spirit is so forcibly
described in the motto which encircles their thistle ; — such a people
cannot be long oppressed. Any government, however constituted,
must respect their wishes, and tremble at their discontents. . . .
They will be better governed under a good constitution than under a
bad constitution. But they will be better governed under the worst
constitution than some other nations under the best. In any general
classification of constitutions, that of Scotland must be reckoned as

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 197

The cultivation of these qualities, then, and of the
virtues which are allied to them and foster them, is the
first necessity of the national life of France. For this
process the two requisites are time and rest. The
whole morale of France is fearfully perverted and dis-
organised ; how fearfully, we endeavoured to describe in
a previous Paper. The very alphabet of the decalogue
has to be revived. Religion has to restore its influence
and re-assert its claims. Literature has to be rescued
from its grotesque deformities and its hideous pollutions,
to be cleansed from its old abominations, and inspired
with a diviner life. The foundations of social existence
have to be purified and renovated. The school-time
and apprenticeship of political action have to be passed
through. But how can religion flourish or be heard
amid the miserable intrigues or the sanguinary conflicts
of balanced factions ? How can the moral standard of
a people be raised and cleared amid the tumults of
passions constantly excited, and of strife unceasingly
renewed ? How can literature rise into a purer atmo-
sphere, or breathe a calmer tone, or spread abroad the
soothing influence of a serener spirit, when " the loud
transactions of the outlying world" keep the cultivated
circles in a perpetual fever, which makes all wholesome
food distasteful, and all moderate and gentle stimuli
insipid ? An interval of repose, a breathing time of
recollection and recovery, seems to be demanded alike
in the name of the material and the spiritual interests
of France — alike for the development of her physical
resources, and the renovation of her moral life; — a
period during which a new generation might grow up,
nurtured amid all the sweet sanctities of domestic life,

one of the worst — perhaps the worst — of Christian Europe. Yet
the Scotch are not ill governed. And the reason simply is that they
will not bear to be ill governed." — Macaulay, Lord Burleigh and his
Times.

o 3

198 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

played upon by all the countless influences of social
peace, and sheltered from the angry passions and tur-
bulent emotions which muddied and distracted the
existences of their fathers and their grandfathers; — a
stable rule, against which rebellion would be madness ;
— a settled law, which should no longer leave obedience
or disobedience an open question ; — a government which
all could respect, and which the bad should fear ; — and
such just civil and moderate political rights as might
be enjoyed and strengthened, and be gradually aug-
mented as they were exercised and mastered: — these
seem now what France requires, and what her new
ruler, if he be either wise or patriotic, might bestow.

That the French nation as a whole is ardently, though
vaguely, attached to the great idea of the first revolution,
there can, we think, be no reasonable doubt. But there
may be great doubt whether French politicians are not as
pedantic in supposing that this idea necessarily involves
a republic, as English politicians are in conceiving all
liberty to be bound up in parliamentary forms. The
two prolific principles established in 1789 were, first,
the sovereignty of the people ; and, secondly, the inad-
missibility of a privileged class. Now neither of these
principles require that a republic, according to our notion
of one, should be the form of government selected. They
merely require that it shall riot be an oligarchy ; and
that, whatever it be, it shall emanate from the people.
Many months ago we were assured by a very intelligent
Parisian, that " La France est repiiblicaine et Bonapar-
tiste; " and that the two were by no means incongruous or
incompatible. That France should at one and the same
moment cling to a republic, and to the name and
memory of the man who destroyed the republic, who
rose upon its ruins, and replaced it by one of the most
iron and autocratic despotisms the world ever saw,
seems at first sight to involve a contradiction ; but the

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 199

inconsistency and improbability will vanish when we
reflect that Napoleon professed to complete the idea of
a republic, and to govern in its name — that he took
especial care to receive each successive elevation through
the forms of a popular election — that a Frenchman's
notion of liberty is not personal freedom, but political
equality — that a republican form of government is
chiefly dear to him as embodying this inaccurate and
incomplete conception — and that his bugbear, his bete
noire, his pious abomination, is not a chief or master,
but a privileged order. He dislikes and dreads an aris-
tocracy, not an autocracy. A nominal Commonwealth,
even with an arbitrary despot like Napoleon at its head,
provided it be in any sense, whether tacitly or formally,
the nation's choice, satisfies a Frenchman's confused and
misty ideal. This singular union of what seem to
Englishmen two opposed and mutually excluding con-
ditions of polity — republican institutions and imperial
sway — is embodied in a most characteristic manner in
much of the current coinage of France. Every old five-
franc piece contains what we should call an Irish bull.
All the money coined under the empire bears " Repub-
lique Franqaise " on the one side, and " Napoleon Em-
pereur " on the reverse. The face of the coin affirms a
fact ; the back gives it a point-blank contradiction.

We believe the coin so marked to be a faithful repre-
sentation of the mind of the great mass of the French
people, arid to speak their real sentiments. An emperor
stamped upon a republic ! A regal, central, powerful,
brilliant chief, elected or confirmed by popular suffrage.
Not freedom from control, but the selection of the great
controller. Napoleon understood this well. Chosen by
the people, at first by a sort of general acclamation, and
afterwards by an almost universal vote, he believed
himself, and we believe him to have been, a truer re-
presentative of their wishes and opinions than any

o 4

200 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

assembly that was ever elected. Strong in the strength
of this conviction, and confident in his perfect compre-
hension of the requirements of his country, he framed
that wonderful administrative organisation of which we
have already spoken, and promulgated the constitution
under which, with some modifications, France lived so
long. The principle of that constitution was that of a
strong and concentrated executive, aided by all the en-
lightenment and assistance it could derive from the
practical knowledge and experience of the ablest men in
the country. Napoleon refused no advice, but permitted
no interference. The idea never entered into his head
of ingrafting upon one another two things as distinct in
their origin and as discordant in their operation as the
centralised administration, so peculiarly French, and
the parliamentary regime, so peculiarly British. He
looked upon the senate, the legislative body, the council
of state, the local and departmental councils, as collec-
tions of men from whom he could gain much useful in-
formation, and much valuable aid ; he never recognised
their right to shackle his administrative action, or to
step out of their narrow and allotted province. With
regard to the provincial councils, he wished that they
should be listened to with deference and patience. One
of the prefects of the Cote d'Or having failed to listen
with due respect to the representations of the municipal
body, Napoleon sent him a severe and grave rebuke.
But when the council-general of the Haute Garonne, in
the same year, took upon it to criticise a portion of the
system of taxation then established, he snubbed it most
unmercifully, and explained very clearly to its members
the nature and limits of their functions, as follows : —

" Les conseils generaux ne sont point institutes pour donner
leurs avis sur les lois et sur les decrets. Ce n'est pas la le but
de leur reunion. On n'a ni le besom ni la volonte de leur
demander de conseils.

FKANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 201

" Us ne sont et ne peuvent etre que des conseils d'adminis-
t ration. Dans cette qualite, leurs devoirs se born en t t\ faire
connaitre comment les lois et les decrets sont executes dans leurs
departemens. Us sont autorises a representer les abus qui les
frappent, soit dans les details de Fadministration particuliere des
departemens, soit dans la conduite des administrateurs ; mais ils
ne doivent les faire qu'en considerant ce qui est ordonne par
les lois ou par les decrets, comme etant le mieux possible.

" Un honime qui sort de la vie privee pour venir passer trois
ou quatre jours au chef-lieu de son departement fait une chose
egalement inconvenante et ridicule lorsqu'il se mele de comparer
ce qui existe en vertu des lois de 1'administration generale
actuelle avec ce qui existait dans un autre temps, et lorsqu'a la
faveur de quelques observations utiles sur l'administration
particuliere de son departement, il se permet des observations
critiques et incoherentes. . . . Sans doute, il a ete des
temps, ou la confusion de toutes les idees, la faiblesse extraordi-
naire de I'administration generale, les intrigues, qui Pagitaient,
faisaient penser a beaucoup de citoyens isoles, qu'ils etaient plus
ages que ceux qui les gouvernaient, et qu'ils avaient plus de
capacite pour les affaires. Ce temps n'est plus. UEmpereur
n'ecoute personne que dans la sphere des attributions respectives"

We are far from saying or thinking that the amount
of political liberty, and of participation in national
affairs, which Napoleon allowed even at the commence-
ment of his consulate, can or ought permanently to
satisfy a people like the French. But it well deserves
the dispassionate consideration both of our own doctri-
naires and our continental imitators, whether a sounder
and higher ultimate result may not be obtained by
commencing from such moderate germs of political
freedom and civil action as may in time, by degrees,
and through a process of extorted concessions, be
ripened and expanded into an ample and fitting consti-
tution, than by starting with such a constitution ready
made — on paper ; whether it would not be wise for
Frenchmen to follow our example in the slow, painful,
and laborious steps by which we have achieved and

202 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

wrung out our liberties — practising them as we won
them — consolidating them as we went along — rather
than to grasp at the finished treasure, without learning
the lessons which teach its value, or acquiring the
mastery over it which confers its value and guarantees
its security. As in the grand old fictions of the Rosi-
crucian fancy, those aspirants after superhuman power
and earthly immortality — who seized prematurely on
the arch-gift and inhaled the rich elixir, before a long
course of strengthening toil, purifying abstinence from
earthly passions, and resolute crucifixion of all low
desires, had fitted their frames to breathe a rarer atmo-
sphere, and gaze upon intenser light — were stricken
into insanity or dazzled into blindness by the awful
revelation and the intolerable stimulus, so surely do the
exciting air, the intoxicating draught, the wild delight,
the terrible power of liberty, ask for their healthy en-
durance and their noble exercise, preparation scarcely
less tedious and elaborate, a soul scarcely less purified
and strengthened. To gaze upon the splendour before
the sight is purged and fortified, is to rush not into
light, but into darkness.*

If Louis Napoleon, as both his writings and his
actions appear to indicate, takes the same view of the
needs and capabilities of France which we have here
endeavoured to explain, and if he be really animated by
that partially pure patriotism which consists in wishing
to connect his name indissolubly with the grandeur and
regeneration of his country, we believe that he may yet
employ his tenure of power in a manner which will
cause its origin to be forgotten and forgiven. That he
will do so, is rather our hope than our sanguine expec-
tation. It is what one of their own philosophers de-

* " Constitutions," said Sir James Mackintosh, " cannot be made ;
they must yroiv." In this profound aphorism we may learn the secret
of French failures.

FKANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 203

scribed a future state to be, un grand pent-fare. It
certainly seems somewhat foolish to fancy that a man
who has attained his supremacy by violence should use
that supremacy for good. It seems the very simplicity
of sanguineness to expect that a man who, in marching
to his end, has trampled all legality under foot, should,
when that end has been reached, proclaim, enforce, arid
submit to legality in future. It is the curse and the
punishment of guilt, in public even more than in private
life, that one crime almost always necessitates another
and another. It is difficult for a usurper to control and
restrain the tools of his usurpation. It is difficult for
the victor in a civil strife to restore freedom and power
of action to the vanquished. It is difficult for a chief
whose conduct is open to the harshest criticism and the
bitterest invective, to permit fair license to the tongues
and pens of his antagonists. Nevertheless, on his ability
and courage to dare all this — in a while, depends Louis
Napoleon's exoneration and success. We cannot too
often repeat that he owes a great expiation to his
country. He has committed a deliberate act of violence
and treason, which can be pardoned only on condition of
its being the last. He has seized power in a manner which
only the beneficial use he makes of it can induce history
to forget or gild. Yet it is undeniable that he has ex-
amples before him of others who have stolen a sceptre
and yet have wielded it in the service of their country.
It is still left for him, by imitating their excellences
and avoiding their errors, to throw a veil over all that
is deplorable and disreputable in the past. Augustus
waded to a throne through an amount of bloodshed and
of perfidy of which Louis Napoleon has given us only a
faint and feeble reflex ; yet by giving to Rome a long
respite from sixty years of civil strife and tyrannous
dominion, by developing her resources, re-organising
her empire, cultivating her intelligence, and laying the

204 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

foundation for 350 years of peace, he has left behind
him a name associated for ever with an age of poli-
tical and literary glory. Cromwell dismissed a parlia-
ment scarcely less despised or discredited than that of
France, with a degree of violence and ignominy as great
as Louis Napoleon inflicted ; yet he governed better,
and raised the name of England higher, than any sove-
reign had done since the Great Queen. In 1799 Na-
poleon drove out the Council of Five Hundred by the
actual use of the bayonet, and installed himself as First
Consul by an autocratic fiat and a military force ; yet
his name is still dear to France — less on account of that
long series of splendid campaigns, which brought her at
first so much glory, and afterwards so much discomfiture
and mortification — than because, for the first time
since 1789, he gave her a strong and settled govern-
ment ; because he made her feel that she had a master-
hand and a sagacious pilot at the helm ; because he
gave her rest from intrigues, conspiracies, and the
wearisome and humiliating succession of imbecilities
which had so long misruled her; because he restored,
under wise and stern conditions, her shattered and
desecrated altars ; because, lastly and chiefly, he re-
organised the dissolved and decrepit system of adminis-
tration on a basis which has never since been shaken,
and educed order out of chaos. Louis Napoleon may
find in the history of his predecessors something of
example, but far more of warning. Three especial
errors he must guard against : he must avoid that love
of war and too exclusive reliance on the army, which
eventually lost Napoleon his crown ; he must avoid the
reaction towards priestcraft and the dread of a free press,
which led to the overthrow of Charles X. ; and that
neglect of the sentiments and demands of the middle
classes, which prepared the way for the ignominious
catastrophe of Louis Philippe.

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 205

First, If Louis Napoleon relies exclusively on the
troops to support his government he will commit a fatal
blunder. They cannot be trusted in to coerce the
nation. They may be relied on for a coup d'etat
against an Assembly respected by no one, deserted by
the bourgeoisie, and abused by the working classes ; but
assuredly they cannot be relied on for a systematic
crusade against the liberties, feelings, and affections of
their fellow-citizens. It has been all along pretty well
understood, that, though ready enough to fight against
emeutiers and socialists of Blanqui's caste, they could
never be relied upon to put down any insurrection in
which the National Guard sided with the masses. In
each individual instance, in each sudden crisis, the
habit of obedience and the recollection of their military
oath would probably prevail, and cause them to obey
the orders of their immediate superiors. But this
would no longer be the case as soon as they had time to
consult and discuss among themselves, and as soan as
they perceived that they were made the tools of a re-
gular system inimical to those whom they loved, and to
whose ranks they belonged, and to the interests of that
nation of which they formed a recognised and sym-
pathising part. They soon learn and strongly retain
the instinct of discipline and the esprit du corps ; but
they never wholly lose the sentiment of citizenship.
French soldiers are not, like English ones, chosen from
the lowest portion of the populace, and enlisted virtually
for life. The conscription takes them nearly indiscri-
minately from all ranks, and they serve, or are required
to serve, only for seven years. After that time, unless
they wish otherwise, they return to mingle with the
mass of their fellow-citizens. The result of this is two-
fold : first, that they retain most of the feelings and
predilections of the classes out of which they were
called yesterday, and into which they will be re-

206 FKANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

absorbed to-morrow ; and, secondly, that France swarms
with thousands of trained and disbanded soldiers, equal
in skill and experience to those actually enrolled, but as
full of political interests and predilections as any of
their compatriot civilians. Thus the army in France is
not, as in England, a distinct body set apart from the
nation, and having no feelings and opinions that are
not bounded by the barrack- walls. It is merely that
portion of the people which in each particular year
chances to be under arms. One-seventh of them were
simple citizens — sons, brothers, husbands, before every-
thing— last year; one-seventh of them again become
simple citizens — sons, brothers, husbands, before every-
thing— this year. The idea of using them against the
NATION, it would therefore be folly in Louis Napoleon
to entertain.

The officers of the army, again, are chosen from
among those middle classes out of whose hands the
late coup d'etat is supposed to have wrested power.
They belong to these classes, they marry into them,
they frequent their society, share their feelings, im-
bibe their sentiments. Like them, they read the news-
papers, and feel the deprivation when newspapers are
suppressed. In proportion to their rank and education
will be their susceptibility to all those social influences
which will make them reluctant and unsafe tools for
resolute misgovernment.

Moreover, the moment the arrny perceives that Louis
Napoleon's government depends on it alone, that moment
it becomes supreme, exacting, jealous, and tyrannical.
That moment also it becomes the arena of the most
desperate personal intrigues. That moment gives to
Louis Napoleon a score of formidable rivals. He is a
civilian. He has won his spurs in no memorable battle ;
and it is only a military chief who can reign by the
sword. If the army is to be the centre and instrument

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 207

of power, there are many who have a better title than
he has to seize it. If, therefore, he relies on the army
alone, as an instrument of inisgovernment, he is leaning
on a spear which will break and pierce him.

Above all, Louis Napoleon must beware of so far mis-
reading the history of the great man whose name he
bears, as to look to war either for safety or for power.
Let the nephew well understand and lay to heart the
real foundations of the uncle's glories, — the true reason
why the mere name is one of such magic, — the true
reason why that name secured his own election, while
yet an unknown or an ill-known man. It was not
Napoleon's military, but his civil, services that made him
the idol of the nation from 1800 to 1804; it was a re-
petition, not of his military, but of his civil services,
that, in 1848, France looked for from his nephew, when
she chose him as her chief at a moment when a similar
confusion to that which Napoleon had closed seemed to
call for a similar elucidation, and made the people turn
with hope and affection to the mere echo of a great
name. Napoleon's military career, magnificent and
brilliant as it was, exhausted the nation, wearied the
army, carried mourning and desolation into every
family : Napoleon's military grandeur all passed away,
and left France no wider, no greater, no richer than he
found her. But his Code Civil has maintained its ground
in every country where he planted it; his clear and
simple coinage has been everywhere adopted and con-
firmed by the sovereigns whom he had ejected, and who
returned after his defeat ; and his elaborate and scien-
tific system of centralised administration has never once
been shaken or meddled with by any of the monarch s
or revolutions that have succeeded him. The trophies
of war have all perished : the trophies of peace have all
survived. The former made France miserable: the
latter have made her a celebrity and an example. The

208 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

former landed Napoleon in a wretched banishment, and
gave

" His name a doubt to all the winds of Heaven : "

the latter placed him high among the permanent bene-
factors of mankind.

To Louis Napoleon, situated as he is, a war would
probably be about the most shallow and suicidal policy
he could pursue. In the first place, till firmly and
fairly established on his new throne, a foreign war
would only let loose his domestic foes. No wise chief
will march against an enemy, if he leaves half-subdued
treason and angry discontent behind him in his own
camp, >ln the second place, a war undertaken in these
days must either be a war against despots with in-
surgents for allies ; or a war against freedom with
despots for allies. A war of the first kind would not
only concentrate against the President all the con-
tinental powers, but would involve him in a net of in-
congruities and perplexities which would aggravate ten-
fold the perplexities of his actual position. It could be
successful only by the aid of those republican parties in
Hungary, Italy, and Prussia whose equivalents and
analoga in France he had just repressed with such stern
severity. He, the military usurper, the violent de-
stroyer of a free constitution, would have to hoist the
banner of liberty, and march to the watchword of the
people's war-cry. The hero of the coup d'etat, the im-
prisoner of inviolable deputies, the gaoler of popular
generals, would have to proclaim everywhere liberty to
the captive, and the restoration of rights to the op-
pressed. If, on the other hand, he joined the European
autocrats, and made war on liberty, and on England,
Belgium, and Sardinia as its representatives, he would
commit a still more fatal blunder. A war with England
would be very popular, no doubt, with many French-

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 209

men, but it would be hateful to many more. It
would be a proclamation of deliberate hostility against
the cause of constitutional rights and liberties all over
the world. It would bring him, the representative and
chief of a nation which still clings to the ideas of the
first great revolution, into close alliance with the old
worn-out tyrannies of Europe, and degrade him into
the ape and flunkey of the withered legitimacy of the
world. It would bring the republic of France, which
swears by universal suffrage, into direct collision with
every state in which any vestige of popular election yet
survives. It would involve her in a crusade against the
freedom for which she has fought so gallantly, and suf-
fered and sacrificed so much. Such a war would be
absolutely detestable to all the better spirits of the
French nation — to the intelligent classes whom it is so
important for Louis Napoleon to conciliate to his regime
— to the moderate as well as the extreme — to all,
except those who love plunder, and those who are
thirsty for revenge. The republicans of France sympa-
thise deeply with the struggling patriots of every land.
To them the expedition against Eome was the most
hateful act of the Assembly. The Orleanists and Mode-
rates feel that they must make common cause with the
supporters of free constitutions and limited monarchy
throughout the globe. The nation as a whole feel that,
if the great contest and victory of 1789 is to bear any
fruit — if it is not to be regarded as a gigantic and in-
sane blunder — if it was an emancipation to be gloried
in, not a crime to be repented of — France must remain
the ally and champion of national independence and
popular rights, wherever they may be asserted. To
espouse the cause of despotism, to attack the free states
of Europe, would be to blaspheme the past, to deny her
mission, to desecrate her flag. For France to league
with the Russian autocrat, the Prussian perjurer, the

VOL. II. P

210 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

Austrian tyrant against constitutional England and
Sardinia, and republican America and Switzerland,
would indeed be for " the dog to return to his vomit,
and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the

mire."

A war must either be successful or unsuccessful ; in
either event it would be fatal to Louis Napoleon's
supremacy. If unsuccessful, the French would never
forgive him for having provoked it. The army would
desert him ; the people would despise him ; the gentry
would hate him ; the whole nation would cry out against
him ; every private interest and every patriotic passion
would combine to assail him ; and the very foundations
of his power would crumble away like sand. If, on the
other hand, the war were to be glorious and triumphant,
it would insure his downfall as infallibly, though from
another cause. Louis Napoleon is not a soldier. His
army must be intrusted to the leadership of the ablest
generals he can appoint. His victories must be won by
others. He must select for the supreme command, not
the men he can rely upon as devoted to himself, but the
men whom the public voice or the desire of the troops
shall proclaim to be most fitted for the post. The first
brilliant exploit will give him a rival. The first glorious
campaign will designate his dethroner and successor.
He may give the signal for war ; but others will reap
its laurels, others will gather in its fruits, others will
monopolise its glory. A war would at once place the
very men whom he has just circumvented, insulted, and
imprisoned, at the head of the army, by means of which
he has climbed to power. A war would at once place
Cavaignac, Changarnier, Bedeau, and Lamoriciere above
him. And if one of these should display any portion of
that political and administrative genius, which the life
of camps so often develops, and affords so many oppor-
tunities of manifesting ; if he should be gifted with that

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 211

terse and stirring eloquence which soldiers often possess ;
and if solid and practical capacity should give him over
the reason of his countrymen, that ascendant which his
victories have already given him over their imagination,
— then, assuredly, Louis Napoleon would have found
his master, and the Assembly its merciless avenger.

Secondly, Louis Napoleon must especially guard
himself against the very probable mistake of supposing,
that because he has the support of the army and of the
masses — of the numerical majority, and of the organised
forces of the nation — he can afford to despise the hos-
tility, or dispense with the allegiance, of the middle and
educated classes. He has already given some indica-
tions of his tendency to fall into this error. He is said
to be contemplating the abolition of the vexatious and
burdensome octroi, the imposition of an income-tax, and
the promotion of extensive public works, with a view
to satisfy the poorer classes. But measures of this sort
will not suffice. The great body of the ignorant pea-
santry have indeed voted for him as representing in
their minds the cause of order, and the brilliant recol-
lections of the Consulate and the Empire. Large
numbers of the working people in the towns have also
voted for him under the impression that he will unite
the two incompatibilities, of a large remission of tax-
ation, and a vigorous increase of public expenditure.
But these alone cannot maintain him. The town ranks
of all sections are always unreasonable in their expecta-
tions from a new regime, and therefore certain to en-
counter disappointment, and to change their admiration
into disgust. Moreover, in no country, least of all in
France, can the contest ever be a hopeful one for de-
spotism, when all the cultivation and intelligence of the
nation is on one side, and only brute numbers on the
other. In no strife in modern days is the major vis ever
on the side of the mere numerical majority. The skill,

p 2

212 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

knowledge, discipline, mental influence, intellectual re-
sources, and moral weight, of the middle and upper
ranks, will always be an immense over-match for mere
masses of ignorant, untrained, and stupid proletaires.
Louis Napoleon, therefore, must govern so as to conci-
liate the adherence of the worthy writers, the financiers,
and the literary and political notabilities of France — the
natural leaders of her people, — the representatives of
her material interests and her moral power.

Now, to these classes, material interests are not the
only ones, nor social comfort and physical wellbeing the
sole necessaries of existence. Selfish and worldly as too
many of them are, they cannot live by bread alone.
They demand a scope for their activity, an arena for
their talents. They will no longer be content with the
old frivolities of the theatre and the salon. They have
eaten of the tree of political knowledge ; and, henceforth,
the paradise of the senses and the fancy is disenchanted
in their eyes. They have known the fascinations of
political action, and will not again acquiesce in being
utterly debarred from it. It will be dangerous to
attempt to re-convert them into cyphers, and impossible
to confine >their energies within the poor arid narrow
circle of social trifling which once sufficed. The Pre-
sident must reckon with this natural ambition, and this
rational activity. His new constitution must be such
as to offer an adequate and worthy field for the power
and aspirations of the practical intellect of France. His
administration must provide places wherein the capaci-
ties of the restless and the ardent may find ample, safe,
and serviceable development. He must prove to the
rising and the experienced politicians of the country,
that the new system offers great prizes for the ambitious,
wide scope for the active, noble occupation for the high-
minded. He must show them that there are worthier
and loftier vocations for the trained and ripened intel-

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 213

lect than party squabbles, or parliamentary intrigues,
in aiding the action of the state, and developing the
resources of the country. His cabinet must be a place
where genuine ability of every kind may find an
entrance. His senate must be an assembly to which it
will not be a degradation to belong. His house of
representatives must be a body entitled to speak freely
and discuss without reticence and fear.

Further, Louis Napoleon must remember that the
educated classes will not long endure to be debarred
from the full privileges and enjoyments of their educa-
tion. It is idle to imagine that men gifted with the
wonderful power of precise and brilliant expression,
which distinguishes the French, will not chafe and
rebel if condemned to an enforced silence, or compelled
to restrain their utterances within limits, or to direct
them into channels which it may suit a despot to
prescribe. Men conscious of capacity to think worthily
and to write splendidly on the exciting questions of
government and war, will not tamely permit themselves
to be warned off their favourite and chosen fields, and
relegated to the duller walks of science or fancy. Genius
and talent, in every department of literature, like gun-
powder, becomes dangerous by being compressed. They
must be enlisted in the service of the government, or
they will be arrayed against it,, and in the end will be
too strong for it. A free press is even a better safety-
valve than a free constitution for the restless intellects
and fiery tempers of the cultivated classes. In addition
to this, we must bear in mind that the French are great
readers. The circulation of the Parisian newspapers
is far beyond that of the London journals. Books and
pamphlets, too, sell there in numbers which appear to
us nearly fabulous. M. Granier de Cassagnac is said to
have sold 100,000 copies of his recent brochure. To
most Parisians of any education, and to many provin-

p 3

214 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

cials, their daily paper, with its brilliant " leader," and
its exciting feuilleton, is as necessary as their daily
breakfast. To deprive them of their habitual intellec-
tual pabulum, or to render it so innutritions and in-
sipid, as it would inevitably become under a censorship,
would, render the President almost as unpopular with
the Parisians as if he were to endeavour, actually and
without metaphor, to starve them into allegiance. The
support then of the thousand writers, and the million
readers of France, Louis Napoleon can only conciliate
by respecting, and restoring as soon as it can be done
with safety, the freedom of the press.

Lastly, and above all, Louis Napoleon must beware
of relying on the PRIESTS. They are about the worst,
the weakest, and the most treacherous reed upon which
he could lean. We regard the tendency he has shown
in this direction with more jealousy than any of his
other proceedings. It looks like a projected coalition
between the two armies of despotism — the military
and the ecclesiastical. It is true that one of the sad-
dest and most menacing features of the present aspect
of French society is the absence of a religious spirit.
It is true that any one who should reanimate religion in
the nation would be the greatest of human benefactors.
But playing into the hands of the Jesuits will have
precisely a contrary effect. They are the notorious
and irreconcilable enemies of the central ideas which
lay at the bottom of the great French Eevolution, and
which are still enshrined in the hearts of the whole
nation, — viz., the sovereignty of the people, as opposed
to the divine right of kings, and the reign of equal
justice, as opposed to class privileges. All that the
country has of noble in its recent history is arrayed
against the priests. All the long years of its degra-
dation and dishonour are associated with their rule.
Everything generous and lofty, everything popular and
stimulating, in its literature, has proclaimed relentless

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 215

war against priestcraft under any form. Right or
wrong, priests in general, and Jesuits in particular, are
hated by everything in France (except moral ignorance
and rare fanaticism, and legitimacy, with its sinister
and ulterior designs), as the foes to enlightenment, the
upholders of humbug, the allies of despotism, and the
serpents who creep into and poison domestic life. The
restoration of them, even to most modified and regu-
lated influence, was one of the most daring, difficult,
and unpopular of Napoleon's achievements. Notwith-
standing the strong reasons which then existed for
doing it, notwithstanding the consummate skill and
caution with which he did it, it was a reactionary step,
which his supporters could hardly tolerate or forgive.
The attempt to associate the priests once more to state
authority had done much to undermine the influence of
Charles X., before their mischievous advice led him to
that attack upon the press by which he forfeited his
throne. The active intellects of the French nation, in
immense preponderance — it is most deplorable that it
should be so, but it is so — regard Christianity as a
deception and a chimera ; and their religious teachers
must resemble the archbishop of Paris much more,
and the bishop of Chartres much less than the great
body of them do at present, before this sad error can
be rectified. And so long as this is the case, any truck-
ling to the priests, any favouritism towards them, any
signs of an intention to re-impose upon the nation a
system which its intellectual leaders believe to be a
sham, will be resented as an insult. Christianity itself
is a glorious truth as well as a great fact ; but to the
educated portion of the nation the substitution of
priestly despotism in its place represents the system
which Rousseau discredited, which D'Alembert, Hel-
vetius, and Condorcet, and all the great literary names
connected with the social and political changes of the

p 4

216 FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

18th century, won their fame by contending with and
overthrowing. The French may endure the restoration
of the imperial despotism — never that of priestly sway.
They may again come under the dominion of the Bastile
— never under that of the Inquisition, Louis Napoleon
could scarcely commit a blunder which will more surely
and more righteously combine against him all that is
virulent and all that is selfish, all that is noble and all
that is vicious, all that loves freedom and all that loves
fame, all that loves truth and all that loves power, in
the intellectual and social world of France, — than by
holding out a hand of favour and alliance to the Jesuits.
The army will despise him for it. The salons will
ridicule and sneer at him for it. The press will hate
him for it almost to a man. The stern Puritan Guizot,
the unprincipled and brilliant Thiers, the learned,
eloquent, and democratic historian Michekt, the richly
gifted and artist-minded George Sand, the dignified
and honoured philosopher Victor Cousin, even the dis-
gracefully-popular ransacker of moral cesspools and
obscene cloacce, Eugene Sue, — men who could join
in nothing else, who have scarcely one other sentiment
in common, — would all unite in one wild cry of mingled
scorn, indignation, and disgust at the ruler who could
dream of replacing France under the broken crozier
and the stained and tattered surplice of the priest.

JSTor could the support of the clergy, thus dearly
purchased as it must be, ever be relied on by Louis
Napoleon. He can scarcely be weak enough to imagine
that an organised hierarchy, whose head and centre is
in Rome, can ever give faithful or cordial adherence
to a man who has risen on the ruin and succeeded to
the inheritance of anointed kings. He cannot believe
that the servants of a Church whose first dogma, and
whose pervading idea, is the supremacy of divine right,
can in their hearts espouse a cause based on military

FRANCE IN JANUARY 1852. 217

usurpation, and sanctioned by an appeal to universal
suffrage. He cannot flatter himself that the alliance
between the child of popular sovereignty and the pro-
claimers of royal sacredness and inviolability, can ever
be more than a treacherous and hollow truce. He
must know that, by the necessity of the case, the Catholic
clergy — such of them at least as receive their im-
pulse from Rome — are secret and zealous Legitimists ;
that they regard him only as a warming-pan ; and that
they propose to use him as the restorer of an edifice
which, when ready, the old and rightful heirs are to
inhabit, — as the instrument for the recovery of a patri-
mony which, as soon as it is secured against the common
enemy, they intend to transfer to the legal owner.
Knowing all this, we can scarcely suppose, however
Louis Napoleon may coquet with the Jesuits for a tem-
porary purpose, that he will commit the enormous
blunder of calling them into his councils, or sharing
with them his power.

We have said that we are not sanguine as to Louis
Napoleon's success in the position which he has so vio-
lently and unwarrantably seized. The chapter of acci-
dents is always too rich in France to induce us to
venture on a prophecy. Our object in this Paper has
been to trace the causes which have led to the catas-
trophe ; to explain the reasons why we think the French
nation may have been altogether on a wrong tack in
their endeavour to naturalise a parliamentary govern-
ment, to call attention to the irreconcilability of such
government with the centralised and bureaucratic ad-
ministration which is apparently so popular, and is
certainly so fixed ; and to show how the powers which
are held by the President, may be wielded for the
benefit of his country, if he be really animated by a
patriotic spirit, and gifted with adequate capacities.

218 FKANCE IN JANUARY 1852.

Since this article was in type, the President has pub-
lished his constitution and fulminated his decrees of
banishment. The first we have no time nor space to
criticise: the latter we cannot pass over without the
expression of our conviction that they are a great
blunder, as well as a great crime. Such indiscriminate
and illegal severity has alarmed and staggered his sup-
porters, and enraged more than it has terrified his
enemies. It is an indication and confession of weakness,
— a wanton trampling upon legal forms, — a menacing
inauguration of a reign of terror. Already the murmurs
of the Parisian salons have warned him of his mistake
and his danger. Confiscation has now followed pro-
scription, and the whole arsenal of tyranny seems to be
opened.

219

SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES?*

OUR colonial empire — independent of the vast posses-
sions of the East India Company ; independent, also, of
the Hudson's Bay Company's territory, and the uncivil-
ised parts of North America — stretches over an area of
nearly four million square miles, and includes a popu-
lation of more than six million souls ; of whom two
millions and a half are whites, and one million and a
half are of British birth or descent. The distribution
of these numbers may be seen more minutely in the fol-
lowing table, where our colonies are classed into groups.
The figures for Africa do not include our last acqui-
sitions at the Cape, nor on the Gold Coast. The East
Indian colonies mean Mauritius and Ceylon. The po-
pulation is given for 1846, the last year for which we
have any accurate returns. Since then, of course, a
very considerable increase has taken place, both by im-
migration and by natural multiplication.

* From the " Edinburgh Review."

1. Speech of Sir W. Molesworth on Colonial Expenditure and
Government, July 25th, 1848.

2. Speech of Sir W. Molesworth on Colonial Administration,
June 25th, 1849.

3. Some Particulars of the Commercial Progress of our Colonial
Dependencies. By J. T. DANSON, Barrister-at-Law. (Read before
the Statistical Society, Feb. 19th, 1849.)

4. The Colonies of England. By J. A. ROEBUCK, M.P. 1849.

5. Speech of Lord John Russell on Colonial Policy, Feb. 8th,
1850.

220

SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES?

Colonies.

Area in
Square Miles.

Population
of British
Descent.

Total
Population.

Average
annual Imports.
1842—1846.

Average
annual Exports.
1842—1846.

North American
West Indian
African -
East Indian
Australian, &c. -

486,000
85,000
138,000
25,400
3,100,000

1,100,000
60,000
20,170
6,000
300,000

1,995,000
936,000
475,000
1,680,000
420,000

£
4,847,995
4,511,649
1,039,139
2,259,036
2,189,982

£
4,188,077
5,496,211
669,846
1,648,202
1,931,132

Total -

3,834,400

1,486,170

5,506,000

£14,847,801

£13,933,468

Now it is abundantly evident that the question of
abandoning or retaining an empire such as this — with
a commerce equal to one-fourth that of the mother
country, with a population equal to one-fifth that of
Great Britain and Ireland, and with an area exceeding
ours in the ratio of thirty-two to one — is far too mo-
mentous to be disposed of at the fag end of a discussion
on our annual budget. It demands a time and place to
itself: it deserves to be discussed on its own merits;
and to be regarded from a higher and more compre-
hensive point of view than one of mere retrenchment
and economy. It is something more than a point to be
settled between Mr. Hume on the one side, and the
Chancellor of the Exchequer on the other.

The advocates for cheap government at any cost, with
Mr. Cobden and the Financial Reform Association at
their head, have resolved upon a reduction of our public
expenditure to the amount of ten millions, out of an
effective total of twenty-three. The object is one of
difficult attainment; and on several recent occasions
Mr. Cobden has admitted — and every one will agree
with him — that whatever savings maybe enforced in
various departments, by a closer watchfulness and a
stricter control — by a sterner supervision over sanguine
experimenters and lavish ship-builders — still, no very
material reduction in our chief items of national expen-
diture— viz., the army, navy, and ordnance — can be

SHALL WE EETAIN OUR COLONIES? 221

effected, so long as we retain our vast and distant
colonial empire. He proposes, therefore, to abandon
that empire, as a measure of economy ; and his mode of
reasoning is, as it always is, simple, plausible, and bold,
— admirably calculated to produce an impression on a
nation impatient of misty declamation, anxious for clear
views, and priding itself on its common sense. His argu-
ments are entitled to careful examination ; and must be
met in a manner as downright and straightforward as his
own. The nation neither will nor ought to allow itself
to be put off from the most searching inquiry by rheto-
rical flourishes about the vastness of our empire by a
deference to ancestral wisdom, by an appeal to tradi-
tional associations and hereditary policy. It is of the
last importance that we should clear our minds upon
the subject, — should ascertain whether our colonies are
valuable, and why they are valuable ; what equivalent
in the present or in prospect they yield as a compensa-
tion for their cost ; in short, whether we are to retain
them, and on what ground that retention is to be
defended.

But before entering upon a discussion of this ques-
tion (which we propose to treat as broadly and concisely
as we can, to the neglect of all avoidable details), we
must premise that we find a difference in limine between
our views and those of the financial reformers as
regards the paramount importance they assign to a
mere curtailed amount of national expenditure. The
cry for cheap government has been so pertinaciously
raised during the last few years ; it is supported by so
active and energetic a party of politicians ; it finds na-
turally such a ready welcome in the popular mind ; it
comprises such an indisputable nucleus of truth sur-
rounded by such a vast nebula of plausibility — that it
requires no ordinary courage to make head against it,
or to hint that it may be carried to an injudicious and

222 SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES ?

dangerous excess. Nevertheless, it is unquestionable
that cheapness may be bought too dear ; that retrench-
ment, on a strictly-regulated and already curtailed ex-
penditure, may be as unwise as retrenchment on a lavish
expenditure is just and needful ; that rigid frugality in
public outlay, though always a duty, may not always be
the first or paramount duty of the crisis or the hour ;
that, in fact, there may be more important objects for
our consideration than the saving of one or two millions
to a people which so frequently spends fifty millions in
some wild speculation, or some gigantic blunder. In
public affairs, as in private, there is a true and a false
— a genuine and a counterfeit — a short-sighted and a
comprehensive — economy. There is an economy which
looks only to the price, as well as a profuseness which
looks only to the object. There is a spirit of shallow,
niggard, and ungenerous parsimony, which looks only
at the cost of the public service, and not at the mode in
which that service is performed ; which would risk or
sacrifice great objects in order to save a small expense ;
which is narrowly mercantile, instead of being broadly
imperial ; which considers an official salary excessive, if
any fairly competent person could be found to under-
take the duty for less remuneration ; which would put
the service of the state on the same footing as the supply
of a workhouse, and have it done by tender; which
would starve departments that, to be efficient, require
to be managed with a liberal and, at times, even with an
unsparing hand; which, in a word, considers only
present saving, and disregards the future outlay and
ultimate extravagance which injudicious and untimely
saving may entail. And there is a wise, sound, and far-
sighted economy — alone deserving of the name

which is profoundly convinced that, in an empire such
as ours, the best government is the cheapest, whatever
be its money cost; which is conscious that where

SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES? 223

millions are at stake, thousands must be often dis-
regarded ; that expenditure may often be cheaper than
saving ; that it is both common sense and enlightened
economy for the state to secure the services of its ablest
citizens, and to keep every department of the public
service in the highest condition of efficiency, — what-
ever be the outlay requisite to attain these purposes.

If the great British nation were, like a private indi-
vidual, possessed only of a fixed limited income, which
no exertion could increase, it would then be matter of
simple necessity, as well as duty, to proportion our ex-
penditure to that income, whatever the consequences
might be. We should be compelled to organise our
servants and our establishments on a scale suited to our
means — to leave unattained, however important, objects
for which we could not pay the necessary price— to
incur perils it would be too costly to provide against —
to forego the services of those superior talents which
we could not afford to remunerate — to sell off any out-
lying portion of our estates which led us into heavy
expenses, and yielded an insufficient present rental.
But this is not our case : not only must we obtain at
any price those objects, and do at any cost those deeds,
and retain by any expenditure those possessions, which
involve our national safety, interests, and honour ; but
we can well afford to do so. It is idle to say — with
our enormous national wealth, with our vast annual
accumulations, with our working classes spending fifty-
four rnillions yearly in self-imposed taxation for noxious
indulgences, with our mercantile and middle classes
flinging away millions after millions, first upon delusive
mines, then upon unneeded and unpaying railways —
that we cannot afford to do anything which the nation
deliberately and conscientiously resolves that it ought
to do. It is something more than idle of Mr. Cobden,
after having been so mainly instrumental in relieving

224 SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES?

us of fiscal burdens estimated at more than twenty-five
millions a year, to pretend that we cannot now endure
an expenditure which we did endure when our national
wealth was only half its present amount, and when our
burdens were twice as heavy. If, then, our colonies are
to be abandoned, let it not be on the plea that we cannot
afford to maintain or defend them. If it be true that
no ties of national interest or obligation bind us to retain
them, let them go ; but if this be the reverse of truth,
let us not be terrified into cutting them adrift from any
such insane notion as sometimes takes possession of
elderly gentlemen of the most enormous wealth, that we
are actually insolvent, and that nothing but the most
instant and fanatical retrenchment can save us from the
workhouse.

Holding these views, we shall not think it necessary
to meet the new school of financial reformers, by en-
deavouring to prove, that the colonies do not cost the
mother country as much as is alleged — exaggerated as
their estimates often are. We shall point out distinctly
the grounds on which we regard them as valuable, and
think they ought to be retained. We shall not allow
our attention to be diverted from the question as a
whole, by any discussion of details, — by disputing as to
the specific importance or desirability of our settlements
at Labuan, at the Falkland Islands, or on the Gold
Coast. Neither shall we take into consideration the
value of our purely military dependencies and outposts.
The importance of these is a military rather than a
strictly imperial question. They are part of the details
of our system of defences, and their proper place is in a
debate on the army and navy estimates, or in consulta-
tions in the departments of the War Office or the Horse
Guards. We confine ourselves to our colonies, properly
so called, respecting which Mr. Cobden is of opinion
that, since the recent systematic change in our com-

SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES? 225

mercial policy, they are of no value whatever to Great
Britain : — respecting which, however, we hold that this
change has only altered the point of view from which
w^e are to form our estimate of their value.

The line of argument we have to meet is lucid, plau-
sible, and attractive. It may be stated thus. In former
times, and under the old mercantile system, we valued
our colonies as outlets for our manufactures, and as
sources of supply for needful products which we could
not obtain, or could not obtain so cheaply or so well,
elsewhere. We valued them as the principal and the
surest channels for that commerce which we felt to be
the life-blood of the nation. They were secure, in-
creasing, and favoured markets for those articles of
British produce which other nations excluded as far as
they could by severe and prohibitory tariifs ; and they
produced for us exclusively those valuable raw materials
and articles of luxury which we wished to debar other
nations from procuring. In conformity with these ideas,
we bound them to the mother country in the bands of a
strict and mutually favouring system of customs' duties:
we compelled them to trade with us exclusively ; to take
from us exclusively all the articles with which we could
supply them; and to send to us exclusively all the pro-
duce of their soil. In return, we admitted their produce
to our markets at lower rates than that of other coun-
tries, or excluded the produce of other countries alto-
gether. This was a consistent, intelligible, and mutually
fair system. Under it our colonies were customers who
could not escape us, and vendors who could sell to us
alone.*

* Bryan Edwards thus describes the system: — "The leading

principle of colonisation in all the maritime states of Europe (Great

Britain among the rest) was commercial monopoly. The word

monopoly in this case admitted a very extensive interpretation. It

VOL. II. Q

226 SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES?

But a new system has risen up, not only differing
from the old one, but based upon radically opposite
notions of commercial policy. We have discovered that,
under this system, our colonies have cost us, in addition
to the annual estimate for their civil government and
their defence, a sum amounting to many millions a year,
in the extra price which we have paid for their produce
beyond that at which other countries could have sup-
plied it to us. In obedience to our new and wiser
commercial policy, we have abolished all discriminating
and protective duties ; we have announced to our
colonies that we shall no longer favour their produc-
tions, and, as a necessary and just corollary, that we
shall no longer compel them to favour ours, — that we
shall supply ourselves with our sugar, coffee, cotton, and
indigo, wherever we can buy them cheapest, and that
they are at liberty to follow the same principle in the
purchase of their calicoes, silks, and woollens. They
are therefore to us now, in a commercial point of view,
friendly trading communities, arid nothing more. The
very object for which we founded, governed, defended,
and cherished them, has been abandoned : why, then,

comprehended the monopoly of supply, the monopoly of colonial pro-
duce, and the monopoly of manufacture. By the first, the colonists
were prohibited from resorting to foreign markets for the supply of
their wants ; by the second, they were compelled to bring their chief
staple commodities to the mother country alone ; and by the third,
to bring them to her in a raw or unmanufactured state, that her own
manufacturers might secure to themselves all the advantages arising
from their further improvement. This latter principle was carried
so far in the colonial system of Great Britain, as to induce the late
Lord Chatham to declare in parliament that the British colonists in
America had no right to manufacture even a nail or a horseshoe." —
History of the West Indies, vol. ii. p. 565.

" The maintenance of this monopoly," says Adam Smith (book iv.
c. vii.), " has hitherto been the principal, or more properly, perhaps,
the sole end and purpose of the dominion which Great Britain as-
sumes over her colonies."

SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES? 227

should we any longer incur the cost of their main-
tenance ?

Being, then, on the footing of independent states, as
far as their tariffs are concerned, they yield us nothing
and benefit us in nothing as colonies, that they would
not yield us and serve us in, were they altogether inde-
pendent. Nay, they are even less serviceable to us;
for the experience of the United States has shown us
how immeasurably faster colonies advance in population,
in enterprise, in agriculture, and in commerce — in
everything which makes them valuable as customers —
when separated from the mother country than when
still attached to it by the bonds of allegiance and the
clumsy fetters of remote and injudicious control. "Our
exports to the United States in 1844," says Sir W.
Moles worth, " equalled our real exports to all our other
colonies together."* Had these states still remained
hampered by their connection with Great Britain, is it
possible to imagine that they would have advanced with
anything like their actual gigantic strides ? Seven
years after they had declared their independence, their
population was short of 4,000,000. By the last census,
sixty years later, it had reached 23,675,000 souls, — all
customers for our productions.

In the next place, our colonies used to be regarded as
inexhaustible storehouses of waste and fertile land, and
as outlets for our dense and often suffering population ;
and it is in this view, perhaps, that most persons are
still disposed especially to value them. But what is the
fact ? Have we not the plainest indications that even
in this respect they would be more valuable if they
were independent, and that even now the United States,

* At present, however, this is by no means true. In 1849, the
total exports of British produce and manufactures was 58,848,000/.
of declared value ; of which 16,594,000/. went to our colonies, and
9,5G5}000/. to the United States.

2

228 SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES?

because independent, are preferred by our emigrants ?
According to Sir William Molesworth's statement in
1848, of 1,673,600 persons who had emigrated during
the preceding twenty years, 825,564 went direct to the
United States, and how many more went indirectly
through Canada, we can only guess. According to the
Appendix to Lord John's Speech in 1850, out of 787,410
persons who emigrated in 1847-8-9, 525,136 went to the
United States. So it is abundantly clear, that as fields
for emigration we can have no motives for the continued
retention of our colonies.

Again: we used to make some of our colonies ser-
viceable as prisons for our convicts — distant and safe
receptacles for the disposal of our metropolitan villany
and filth — places for "burying our dead out of our
sight." Now we can use them as such no longer. Our
colonists have one and all remonstrated; have refused
to receive the sweepings of our gaols any longer ; have
threatened to rebel, if we persist in sending them; —
and we have ourselves, on more than one occasion, ad-
mitted the system to be an indefensible one, and have
announced our determination to abandon it.

We have been taught to believe that our colonial
empire, "on which the sun never sets," is about the
most important element in our national greatness, and
that these vast dominions in every part of the world
add incalculably, though in some mysterious way, to
our imperial dignity and strength. And such vague
declamation as the following is given us in lieu of argu-
ment. " The extent and glory of an empire are solid
advantages for all its inhabitants, and especially for
those who inhabit its centre. Whatever the possession
of our colonies may cost us in money, the possession is
worth more in money than its money cost, and infinitely
more in other respects. For, by overawing foreign
nations and impressing mankind with a prestige of our

SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES ? 229

might, it enables us to keep the peace of the world,
which we have no interest in disturbing, as it would
enable us to disturb the world if we pleased. The
advantage is, that the possession of this immense empire
by England, causes the mere name of England to be a
real and mighty power; the greatest power that now
exists in the world. If we give up our colonies England
would cease to be a power; and in order to preserve
our independence we should have to spend more than
we now do in the business of our defence."* Mr.
Cobden and his party argue on the other hand, and
with much force, that this "prestige of empire" is a
hollow show, which other nations as well as ourselves
are beginning to see through; that outlying depen-
dencies which require to be garrisoned in time of peace
and protected in time of war, draft off from this country
the forces which are needed for our defence at home ;
dissipate our army and navy in forty or fifty isolated
and distant quarters; and waste the funds which should
be devoted to the protection of the mother country. It
is idle, they affirm, to pretend that a system which
gives us such a vast additional territory to defend
without giving us any additional means of defending it,
can be other than a source of dangerous weakness ; that
if we had no dependencies, we should be impregnable
and invulnerable at home ; and that half our navy and
a fourth of our army would suffice for the protection of
our hearths and homes. If, indeed, the colonies paid
tribute into our treasury, if they furnished contingents
to our military force, and supplied a fixed quota of
ships and stores toward the augmentation of our navy,
—the case might be different. But they do nothing of
all this : overtaxed and overburdened England pays for
a great part of their civil government, and nearly the

* Wakefield's Art of Colonisation, p. 98.

Q 3

230 SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES?

whole of their naval and military requirements: the
impoverished and struggling peasant of Dorsetshire —
the suffering artisan of Lancashire — the wretched
needlewoman of London — all have to pay their con-
tribution to the defence and the civil rule of the com-
fortable Australian farmer, the wealthy Canadian settler,
and the luxurious Jamaica negro. If Sir W. Moles-
worth's statistics may be taken as approaching to accu-
racy, our colonial empire costs us at least 4,000, OOO/.
a year — a sum nearly equal to the income-tax — to the
malt-tax — to the sugar-tax; — any one of which might
be repealed, to the infinite relief of our people, in case
our colonies were abandoned.

Lastly, we govern them ill ; and, governing them as
we do from a distance, and having such an immense
number and variety of them to govern, we cannot
govern them otherwise than ill. They are perpetual
sources of difficulty and dispute; they are always
quarrelling with us, and complaining of us, and not un-
frequently breaking out into open rebellion ; they yearn
for independence, and would gladly purchase immunity
from our vexatious interference and ignorant control
by encountering all the risks and difficulties to which a
severance of the imperial connection might expose them.
— Since, then, the colonies are commercially as free as
America or Spain ; since they are no longer favoured
or enforced customers for our productions ; since they
would be at least as available to our emigrants if inde-
pendent as if still subject to our rule ; since they refuse
to help us by relieving us of our convict population ;
since they are sources of weakness and not of strength
to us in times of peril or of war ; since they pay no part
of the expenses of the mother country, and only a small
portion of their own ; since we mismanage their affairs
and impede their progress ; and since they themselves
wish to be set free from a fettering and galling yoke ; —

SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES ? 231

what argument, which will bear the test of close inves-
tigation, can be adduced to warrant our retaining them
in tutelage ?

Such is — clearly, concisely, and, we believe, fairly
stated — the reasoning we have to meet. Such are the
conclusions, deduced to all appearance from the premises
by the legitimate process of logic, against which we are
to show cause. The position is undoubtedly a strong
one ; nevertheless, we hold that there are sufficient
grounds for maintaining inviolate the connection actually
existing between the colonies and the mother country.

And, first, let us look a little more closely into the
question of their actual cost. Sir "W. Molesworth's
estimate in his speech of July 1848, is as follows : — He
finds the total colonial military expenditure for the
year 1843-4 put down at 2,556,919?., and assuming that
it has not been much diminished since, he estimates it at
2,500,000?. per annum. He then, on the ground of the
use made of our extensive colonial empire in all debates,
as an argument against any reduction of our navy esti-
mates, assumes that one-third of the ships on foreign
stations, or forty-five vessels with 8000 men, may be
debited to the colonies, as maintained simply on their
account. The cost of these, added to direct rates in the
navy estimates, he takes at 1,000,000?. The civil ex-
penditure of Great Britain on account of the colonies he
puts down at 300,000?., and the extraordinary expenses
at 200,000?., a-year — making a total of 4,000,000?.,
which he considers the colonies to cost the mother
country in actual outlay.

Now, in this account, we have several things mixed
up which have no very legitimate connection with one
another. The military and maritime stations which are
maintained in different quarters of the world as dep6ts
for our forces, as harbours of refuge, as fortresses for
the benefit of our troops in case of war, as positions ser-

Q 4

232 SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES?

viceable and necessary for our navy, or for the defence
of our general commerce, are clearly not colonies, and
ought not to be reckoned as such in the analysis of our
expenditure. They are kept up, because we imagine
them (whether rightly or foolishly is nothing to the
present purpose) important to our imperial strength and
safety as a great maritime and commercial nation, and
one of the principal Powers of Europe. We may be
wrong in keeping Gibraltar and Malta ; but in a discus-
sion as to the cost of our colonies, any allusion to them
is obviously out of place. Then our penal settlements
— in as far as they are penal settlements — must not be
confounded with colonies : the sums which we expend
there for the maintenance and safe custody of our con-
victs, form no part of the cost of our colonies. The
Parliamentary Papers very properly class our depen-
dencies under three distinct heads — Plantations and
Colonies, properly so called, such as Canada, West and
South Australia, and the West Indies ; Maritime and Mi-
litary Stations, as Malta, Gibraltar, the Ionian Islands,
&c. ; and Penal Settlements, as Sydney, Van Diemen's
Land, and Bermuda. This last place, however, being
partly kept up for military and naval purposes, is classed
in the second division, as is also Mauritius, though a pro-
ductive colony, because in the late war it was found ab-
solutely essential to possess it as a means of protecting
our commerce in those seas (prizes to the amount of
seven millions having been carried in thither before we
seized it), and because it has been deemed necessary to
incur considerable expense in repairing arid completing
its fortifications. Now let us separate the sum, which
Sir W. Molesworth lumps under one head, into its
proper divisions. The total cost in 1843-4, charged
upon the military purse of Great Britain, was (throwing
out 48,941/. of " general charges," which we cannot well
appropriate) 2,509,026^. thus: —

SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES? 233

Military and maritime stations - £952,934

Penal settlements 189,005

Plantations and colonies proper - - 1,367,087

£2,509,026

- The military expenditure for our colonies-proper, then,
instead of being, as Sir W. Molesworth stated, above
two millions and a half, was little more than one million
and a quarter. But even this sum has since been
reduced,- — how much we cannot precisely say ; but we
find by a Parliamentary Paper bearing date April 27.
1849, that the average annual cost for pay and com-
missariat expenses charged to Great Britain on account
of our different dependencies, for the five years ending
1847, stood thus: —

Military and maritime stations - £831,193

Penal settlements 134,769

Plantations and colonies proper - - 982,508

£1,948,470

The just proportion of our naval expenditure, which
should be charged to colonial account, it is impossible
to estimate with any precision ; because, though we
know the number of vessels attendant on our purely
military and maritime stations, it is impossible to say
what proportion of the force employed on foreign service
is required for the protection of our commerce, and what
for the defence and supervision of our colonies. With
our ships spread over the whole world, even to the
remotest corners, with our merchants settled in all parts
constantly claiming the interference and protection of
government, and prompt and vehement in their com-
plaints whenever their representations do not meet with
instant attention, a numerous and widely-scattered
naval force would still be required, even if our colonies
were independent, or abandoned to other alliances. Sir

234 SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES ?

W. Molesworth's estimate — forty-five ships and 8000
men as fairly chargeable to the colonial service — is
only a guess, and we can do little more than oppose to
it another guess made by Mr. Danson after a careful
examination of the reasons adduced by the Committee
on Navy Estimates, which sat in 1848, for the naval force
employed on each station. Mr. Danson's conclusion is
that only fifteen ships and 3200 men properly belong to
colonial account. This would reduce the expenditure
more than one-half. We are, however, enabled to
present our readers with a return which will give us at
least some ground for forming an approximate judgment
of the force employed on colonial service, properly so
called, as compared with that required for political
objects, or for the protection of our general commerce.
The pendants flying on foreign stations were in 1850
(exclusive of nine on the packet service) 121 in number,
and were thus, distributed : —

Colonial quarters of the world : —

East India, China, and Australia - - 19
Cape of Good Hope - 8

N. American and West Indies - 13

—40

Non-colonial quarters : —

Mediterranean - - - - 20

Coast of Africa - - 31

West Coast of America - 11

S. E. coast of America - - 12

Western squadron, Tagus, &c. 7

—81

121

Now, the Cape of Good Hope is generally regarded as
much more a military station than a colony proper, and*
is classed under the former head in the public accounts
Moreover, the vessels reported as on this station include

SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES? 235

those of Mauritius, and also those employed in the sup-
pression of the slave trade on the eastern coast ; so that
not more than four vessels with 800 men can be fairly
allowed for the colonial demand. So vast a portion of
our trade is carried on with China and the East Indies
and Australasia*, that, under any circumstances, a large
force would be required in those seas, to ensure the
safety of our merchant ships, especially as piracy, to a
formidable extent, still prevails in the Indian Archi-
pelago. Four of the vessels reported on this station are
detached for the use of Australia and New Zealand ;
and the unsettled state of our relations with China have
rendered necessary a great addition to our naval force.
Of the nineteen vessels it is very doubtful whether more
than six are devoted to strictly colonial service. Our
trade to North America and the West Indies, in which
quarter thirteen vessels are stationed, amounted, in 1849,
to more than one-fourth of our whole foreign commerce,
and would still, if our colonial empire were abandoned,
require the presence of a considerable force, probably
half that at present maintained. From this summary it
would appear that from sixteen to eighteen vessels with
about 3600 to 4000 men, may fairly be charged to
colonial account (in addition to a sum varying from
74,000/. in 1843-4, to 82,400/. in 1846-7, which appears
in our naval estimates for expenditure on shore), in
place of the forty-five vessels and 8000 men debited to
it by Sir W. Moles worth.

A sum of 200,000/. is put down by him for " extra-
ordinary expenses," an item we are not prepared to dis-
pute; but when he states our civil expenditure on
account of the colonies at 300,000£. per annum, he is
again in error. The total cost to Great Britain of the
civil government of all her dependencies, had reached

* In 1849, 11,000,OOOJ., out of a total of 59,000,000/. of exports.

236 SHALL WE RETAIN OUll COLONIES?

its maximum in late years in 1846-7, when it was
492, 192/., since which time it has been greatly reduced.
In 1850. it was estimated at 441,527/. But when we
come to analyse this amount, we find it thus appor-
tioned:—

Military and maritime stations - - £92,780

Penal settlements - - 259,804

Plantations and colonies proper - 139,608

£492,292

In 1850, the sum chargeable to actual colonies was
about 136,OOOZ.

"We will now bring into one single glance the various
items of the actual cost of our colonies, properly so
called, compared with the rough estimate of Sir W.
Moles worth.

Sir W. M.'s Estimate. Actual Cost.

Military expenditure - £2,500,000 £1,367,087

Naval „ - 1,000,000 500,000

Civil government - 300,000 136,000

Extraordinary expenses - 200,000 200,000

£4,000,000 £2,203,087

The cost, fairly calculated, to Great Britain of her
colonial empire, is, then, somewhat more than two
millions yearly. There was a time, unquestionably,
when it was far greater. In the old days of protection
the arguments of those, who are for abandoning our
colonies on the score of their costliness, might have been
based upon far stronger and more startling facts. At
a time when the protective duties on the produce of
our sugar colonies alone were calculated to cost us
5,000,000/. a year, and those on Canadian timber at
least 1,000,000/. more, it would have been difficult to
maintain that these dependencies did not cost us more

SHALL WE RETAIN OUB COLONIES? 237

than they were worth, and more than we could easily
or wisely pay. But now, when all these objectionable
discriminating duties have been abandoned in principle,
and when the few remains of them are in rapid process
of extinction ; when the burden of our colonial empire
is reduced to the simple pecuniary outlay of two millions
annually ; and when the East Indies, the most valuable
portion of it in a commercial point of view, not only
costs us nothing at all, but actually pays 60,000£.
annually into our military chest, towards defraying the
expense of a larger reserve force than might otherwise
be necessary ; the time does seem singularly ill chosen
for proposing to abandon this empire, on the plea of our
inability any longer to endure the burdensome expense.
We must, however, do Sir W. Moles worth the justice to
admit that this suggestion of abandonment does not
proceed from him. His proposal is limited to a reduc-
tion of imperial expenditure, on account of the colonies,
to a sum of two millions — more, as we have shown,
than it actually amounts to : and towards the attain-
ment of this object he makes several useful suggestions,
which have received the attention they deserve, and
some of which have been partially followed out.

Since, then, there is no foundation for the idea that
we need to abandon our colonies from sheer inability to
retain them, we may proceed to point out a few of the
reasons which may be urged for preserving the con-
nection inviolate, and which we think will be deemed
conclusive by the nation at large, if not by all political
parties in it.

In the first place, not a single one of our colonies is
inhabited by a homogeneous population. In none, is
the British race the sole one ; in scarcely any, is it the
most numerous. Some of the dependencies have been
taken from savage tribes ; others have been conquered

238 SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES?

from other European nations. In Trinidad we have
seven distinct races ; in the Cape colony at least jive ; in
Canada four; in Mauritius four ; in Ceylon at least
three ; in Australia and New Zealand two. The Austra-
lian colonies are the only ones which, from the unim-
portance of the native savages, we can venture to con-
sider as peopled by a purely British race. In Lower
Canada, the French form Jive-sevenths of the population ;
and taking the whole of our North American provinces
together, more than one-fourth of the inhabitants are of
French origin or descent. In the West Indian group
the whites are only one in fifteen of the whole ; the re-
mainder are, mainly, recently emancipated slaves, still
retaining (as the late visitation of cholera brought
painfully into view) much of the ignorance of their
African origin, and many of the feelings of their servile
condition. The population of the Cape, in 1847, is
stated at 170,000, of whom 72,000 were whites, and of
these 52,000 were Dutch ; the rest were Caffres, Hot-
tentots, and Negroes. The population of Mauritius was,
in 1845, 180,000, of which number (though we have
no certain record later than 1827), probably not more
than 10,000 at the outside were whites, the remainder
being Coolies and Negroes. In Ceylon the estimate
for 1847, gave 1,500,000 as the number of the native
or immigrant coloured races, chiefly Cingalese, and
5572 as the number of the whites, some of these being
Portuguese, and many being Dutch, from whom we
took the island. In New Zealand, the natives, a hardy,
intelligent, and noble race, amount, it is calculated, to
120,000, and the inhabitants of European descent to
not more than 18,000, at the latest dates.

Now, with what show of decency or justice could
England abandon to their own guidance and protection
countries peopled by such various, heterogeneous, and
often hostile races, — even if any considerable number

SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES? 239

of their inhabitants were unwise enough to wish it ?
What inevitable injustice such a step must entail upon
one or other section of the colonists, what certain peril
to the interests of them all, and of humanity at large !
Let us follow out this inquiry in the case of two or
three of them. We will assume that Canada would go
on without any serious disturbances, now that the
various populations which inhabit it have been so much
more amalgamated than before by being pressed together
into one legislature. We will suppose that the Austra-
lian colonies would be able to stand on their own feet,
and to maintain their own interests, and would manifest
that marvellous faculty for self-government and social
organisation which has always been the proud distinc-
tion of the Anglo-Saxon race. We will concede that
the settlers in New Zealand would succeed in civilising
the wild tribes around them, and would make them
friendly fellow-citizens, and useful subjects and auxi-
liaries ; though we should not be without some appre-
hension as to the result, since with a warlike, shrewd,
and energetic people seven to one is fearful odds. But
what would be the result in Jamaica, in Mauritius, at
the Cape, and in Ceylon, where the blacks outnumber
the whites in overwhelming proportion, and where the
whites themselves belong to disunited and hostile na-
tions ? In Jamaica, and our other West Indian posses-
sions, one of three results would follow, — either the
whites would remain as now, the dominant class, and
would use their legislative power for the promotion of
their own interests, and for the compression of the
subject race; — would induce large immigration, would
prohibit squatting, would compel work; would tax
the necessaries of life rather than their own property or
their own commerce, — perhaps might even strive to
restore a modified slavery : or, the blacks, easily ex-
cited, but not easily restrained when once aroused by

240 SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES ?

their demagogues and missionaries, would seize upon
the supreme power, either by sudden insurrection, or
by gradual and constitutional, but not open force ; and
in this event few who know the negroes well, who have
watched them during the prevalence of cholera in
Jamaica, or who have the example of Haiti before their
eyes, will doubt that another Haiti would ere long,
though not perhaps at once, be the issue of the experi-
ment : or, lastly, the whites, fearing the second alterna-
tive, and finding themselves too feeble to enforce the
first, would throw themselves into the arms of the
United States, who would, as we are well aware, receive
them with a warm welcome and a covetous embrace, and
would speedily reconvert 800,000 freemen into slaves.
This we think far the most probable alternative of the
three. But is there one of the three which any philan-
thropist, any Briton, any friend to progress and civili-
sation, could contemplate without grief and dismay ?
Or is there any fourth issue of the abandonment of these
colonies which bears even the shadow of likelihood
about it ? Whether the Negroes subdued the whites,
and established a black paradise of their own, or the
whites, with the help of the Americans, reduced the
Negroes to slavery, the result would be almost equally
deplorable. All the hopes which England has nourished
of civilising and redeeming the African race must be
abandoned, and all the sacrifices she has made so un-
grudgingly for this high purpose will have been thrown
away. But, apart from this consideration, we have
simply no right to abandon the blacks to the possible
oppression of the whites, nor the whites to the dubious
mercies of the blacks. We cannot do so without a
dereliction of duty, amounting to a crime. Towards
both races we have incurred the solemn obligations of
protection and control; both have acted or suffered
under a tacit covenant, which it would be flagrant dis-

SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES ? 241

honesty to violate ; towards both we have assumed a
position which we may not without dishonour abdicate,
on the miserable plea that it would be convenient and
economical to do so.

In the case of the Cape, where the Dutch outnumber
the English colonists in the proportion of Jive to two,
and where the coloured races are more numerous than
both put together, even if we take no account of the
subject tribes recently added to our sway, what would
be the result of a separation from Great Britain ? —
Either the resumption of her old dominion by Holland,
or a struggle for superiority between the two white
nations (the Hottentots in the meantime looking on
with amazement and contempt) ; which, however it
might end, would be disgraceful and disastrous, and
which, if numbers afford any ground for predicting the
result, might probably terminate to the advantage of
the Dutch. And no one who has read the early history
of that settlement, and the barbarous and habitually op-
pressive treatment of the natives by that people, would
not regard such a catastrophe as a step backwards in
civilisation, and an event to be deprecated and averted
by every means in our power. An abandonment of
this colony by England would be at once a shameful
breach of faith to those of our citizens who have gone
thither on the strength of the imperial connection, and
to those native tribes whom we have rescued from the
brutality of their former masters. In Ceylon, — where
a small nucleus of five thousand Europeans are sur-
rounded by a hostile population of fifteen hundred
thousand Orientals, and where a formidable and san-
guinary insurrection, only just quelled, has given us an
intimation of what may be expected from such a people
when worked upon by native priests and foreign dema-
gogues, our responsibilities are equally serious. A
desertion of our post as masters must be accompanied

VOL. II. R

242 SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES?

by an ample and costly indemnity to those European
settlers, whose position, through such a step, would be
no longer tenable or safe, and most probably by the
loss of the whole or the greater part of a commerce
which has now reached an annual amount of one million
and a quarter. Instead of abandoning it, Sir W. Moles -
worth proposes to hand it over to the East India Com-
pany.

Colonies with mixed and aboriginal populations such
as these, then, we simply could not abandon ; colonies,
with a population exclusively or overpoweringly British,
come under a different category. But even with these,
we think it is not difficult to see that the interests of
civilisation will be far more effectually served by their
retention than by their abandonment, — by still main-
taining them as integral portions of the British empire,
— than by casting them adrift to run the chances of a
hazardous voyage unassisted and alone. They would
"go ahead" far faster, we are told, if independent, than
if still subject to the hampering rule of the mother
country ; and the example of the United States is tri*
umphantly appealed to in confirmation of the assertion.
We reply, that we -can well believe that they would go
ahead far faster if free than if fettered, but not than
they will now, when colonial legislatures have been
created and endowed with the powers of managing all
strictly colonial concerns. There is scarcely an advan-
tage conferable by freedom, possessed by the United
States since their separation from Britain, that will not
now be enjoyed in an equal degree by our North
American and our Australian dependencies. Moreover,
there are figures on record which appear to show that,
vast as has been the progress of the United States, it
has been not only equalled but surpassed by the strides
forward of our principal colonies in recent years. Be-
tween 1790 and 1850 the population of the United

SHALL WE RETAIN CUE COLONIES? 243

States multiplied from four millions to twenty-four, or
an increase of 500 per cent. That of Lower Canada
multiplied between 1784 and 1848 from 113,000 to
770,000, or 600 per cent.; and that of Upper Canada,
between 1811 and 1848, from 77,000 to 723,000, or
840 per cent. Between 1830 and 1850, the United
States' population increased from 12,866,000 to
23,674,000, or not quite 83 per cent. ; that of the two
Canadas, between 1831 and 1848, from 746,600 to
1,493,290, or more than 100 per cent.; while the
population of the Australian group sprang up from
51,910, in 1826, to 350,000, in 1848, showing an
increase of nearly 600 per cent, in twenty-two years.
In commerce also the comparison is very favourable.
While the commerce of North American and Australian
colonies (imports and exports) increased in seventeen
years, between 1829 and 1846*, from 8,150,000?. to
14,900,000/. yearly, or more than 80 per cent., that of
the United States had increased in the same period from
$146,000,000 to $235,000,000, or 60 per cent.

If, indeed, it were true, as is often ignorantly alleged,
that the colonies hated Great Britain, and were anxious
to cast off their allegiance to her, much might be urged
against the policy of retaining unwilling and therefore
troublesome and dangerous dependencies. But, we
believe the statement to be the reverse of true. They
may hate the Colonial Office : they do not hate England.
They are often indignant, and sometimes we think they
have been so with justice, at the vexatious interference,
the injudicious control, the irritating vacillations, the
sad mistakes of the authorities at home ; they often
bluster and sometimes rebel; they nurture in their
bosom, as does every community, a noisy knot of tur-
bulent and disaffected men ; they talk largely at times

' We have not been able to procure complete returns for any
earlier or later years.

R 2

244 SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES?

of their desire of independence, and occasionally even
forget themselves so far as to hint at " annexation."
But this is the mere effervescence of political excitement.
Let us hear the testimony of one who knows the
colonies well, whose name is peculiarly associated with
them, and whose vehement hostility to the Colonial
Office renders his statement on this point of singular
value.

" The peculiarity of colonies," he says, " is their attachment
to the mother country. Without having lived in a colony —
or at any rate, without having a really intimate acquaintance
with colonies, which only a very few people in the mother
country have or can have — it is difficult to conceive the inten-
sity of colonial loyalty to the empire. In the colonies of
England, at any rate, the feeling of love towards England, and
of pride in belonging to her empire, is more than a sentiment ;
it is a sort of passion which all the colonists feel, except the
Milesian-Irish emigrants. I have often been unable to help
smiling at the exhibition of it. In what it originates I cannot
say, perhaps in a sympathy of blood or race ; for the present
Anglo-Americans (not counting those Milesian- Americans who
pass for belonging to the Anglo-Saxon race) feel in their hearts'
core the same kind of love and respect for England, that we
Englishmen at home feel for the memory of Alfred or Elizabeth :
but, whatever may be its cause, I have no doubt that love of
England is the ruling sentiment of English colonies. Not colo-
nists, let me beg you to observe, but colonial communities ; for,
unfortunately, the ruling passion of individuals in our colonies
is the love of getting money, How strong the collective love
of England is, how incapable of being ever much diminished by
treatment at the hands of England, which is calculated to turn
love into hatred, you will be better able to judge when I shall
come to our system of colonial government. Here I must beg
of you to take my representation in a great measure upon trust.
If it is correct, the fact shows that the possession of dependen-
cies which are also colonies, conduces to the might, security,
and peace of the empire ; not merely by the prestige of great-
ness, as other dependencies do, but also by the national par-

SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES? 245

tisanship for England, of the communities which she plants.
To her own strength there is added that of a large family of
devoted children." *

We entirely concur in this representation. So strong
do we believe this sentiment of pride and attachment to
be, and so warmly do we think it is reciprocated by the
mother country, that if, in an evil hour, the counsels of
the counterfeit economists were to prevail, and England
were to resign her children to the vanity and feebleness
of independence, we feel certain that the very first peril
they encountered from without, the very first time they
were menaced either with insult or with conquest by
a foreign power, they would instinctively and undoubt-
ingly appeal to England for assistance and protection ;
and England would respond to their confidence with
the most prompt and generous aid. It is idle to imagine
that Great Britain would stand tamely by to witness
the oppression or danger of any of her children, or that
politicians who should coldly advise such conduct,
would not thereby condemn themselves to future power-
lessness and obscurity. The spirit of the nation would
ensure her being dragged in as principal into any
serious quarrel in which any of her former dependencies
might be involved. We should have to bear the
expense of defending them from attack, without having
any control over their conduct in incurring it.

Finally : there is one other consequence which would
ensue from the abandonment of our colonial empire
which demands to be most deliberately weighed, — and
by none more deliberately than by that section of the
free traders who are foremost in recommending so
entire a reversal of our old national policy. If we
emancipate our colonies, and cast them on their own
unaided resources both for self-government and self-

* Wakefield's Art of Colonisation, p. 100.
R 3

246 SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES?

defence, they will of course immediately look about
them for the means of securing these primary objects.
However economically they may manage — however
small the salary they may assign their governors —
however homely and republican the style of life they
may require their officials to adopt — they can neither
govern themselves, nor defend themselves, without a
considerable revenue. An appeal to the example of the
"United States has no validity as a reply. The United
States are surrounded by no ambitious neighbours;
they are liable to no attack from without ; they have no
wars or quarrels to fear but such as they pertinaciously
insist upon bringing upon themselves. They are an
aggressive, not a defensive people. In spite of these
advantages, we know too that their revenue is large.
What their actual expenditure for civil and military
purposes actually is we do not know, and shall perhaps
never clearly ascertain; inasmuch as before we can
come to any conclusion on the matter we must be able
to add the expenditure of each State of the Union to
that of the Federal Government, which alone is pub-
lished to the world. Nay, further, we must be able to
add the cost of their militia and volunteer forces to the
cost of their standing army. Now though we cannot
authenticate with any precision all the facts we need,
we are not without some disclosures from which much
instruction and some startling inferences may be safely
drawn. The organised and enrolled militia of the
States amounts to the immense force of 2,008,068 men,
who cannot be clothed, armed, trained and drilled, it
has been estimated, at a less cost, either to the State or
to themselves, than $7,500,000 a year. Then we learn
from the last report of the American Secretary to the
Treasury that the annual aggregate federal expenditure
alone reached $21,278,000 before the Mexican war,
$41,734,000 while that war lasted, and $38,974,000

SHALL WE KETAIN OUR COLONIES? 247

on the average of three years since its termination.
If we compare this last figure of 8,000,000£. with our
British budget of 20,000,000^. for the same purposes,
and reflect that ours includes the demands of a vast
colonial empire, and that theirs does not include the
outlay of each separate State for State purposes ; that
their population is short of 24,000,000, and that
ours (exclusive of India, which costs us nothing) is
32,000,000; — we shall not be disposed to imagine that
even a cheaply managed republic like America can
dispense with a large revenue, nor that any of our
emancipated colonies — whose very defencelessness
would tempt the covetousness and ambition of the
whole world — could be more successful in solving such
a problem. How then must their revenue be raised ?

There are three sources from the combination of
which it might be derived: the sale of waste lands,
direct taxation, or customs duties on imported articles.
The first of these sources could never produce much ;
for, in order to attract settlers or purchasers, the price
must not materially vary from that current for land of
equal quality elsewhere. The price in the United
States is a dollar and a quarter an acre ; a price even
twice as high would go but a very small way in raising
a colonial revenue. Direct taxation is always burden-
some, irritating, and unwelcome, — the ready and
common resort of despotic governments, but invariably
avoided, as far as possible, by republican ones, —
eschewed by every country generally in proportion to
the influence which the people exercise on their financial
ministers. In colonies where the population is scanty
and scattered, there would arise peculiar and insuper-
able obstacles in the way of levying a capitation-tax, a
land-tax, or an income-tax, — obstacles which will
suggest themselves at once to every mind. The source
of indirect taxation alone remains ; and from this ac-

B 4

248 SHALL WE "RETAIN OUR COLONIES ?

cordingly we should find that the revenue of the eman-
cipated colonies would inevitably be raised. A farther
option has to be made in the choice between import and
export duties ; when the former, among a commercially
educated people, will obviously be the most popular, and
will certainly be adopted.

Now, in a densely populated and luxurious country
like England, moderate duties suffice to procure a large
revenue ; and, as a matter of experience, moderate
duties are commonly found more productive than high
ones, because among thirty millions of people an increase
of consumption speedily makes up for a reduction in the
rate of charge. But this could not be the case in a
thinly peopled colony ; a low scale of duties could never
raise an ample or adequate revenue ; the money must
be obtained, and objectionable and burdensome as such
a way of obtaining it would be, and would be acknow-
ledged to be, . still, as it would be less burdensome, less
irritating, and more practicable, than any other, it would
be adopted as a matter of course. The first effect, then,
of our proclaiming the independence of our colonies
must inevitably be, the enactment by them of a high
tariff on all imported commodities ; and as the commo-
dities required by new countries are, by the nature of
the case, articles of manufactured rather than of agri-
cultural produce, and as England is the chief manufac-
turing country in the world, it would be chiefly on our
productions that this high tariff would press, however
unintentional such a result might be, and however, in
diplomatic language, it might be " regretted and
deplored."

The rate of the duties imposed by such a tariff it is
in vain to guess ; this must depend primarily on the
necessities of the State imposing it. If, however, the
example of the United States is of any service in help-
ing us to a conjecture, it may be observed that her

SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES ? 249

tariff imposes duties of from 30 to 50 per cent, on all
our chief productions, and that a powerful section of her
people are clamorous for an augmentation of these rates.
We have no reason to suppose that a lower scale would
meet the requirements of Canada, Australia, or the
Cape. Now, a high tariff is necessarily, ipso facto, and
without any malicious intention, a protective one. Each
of our colonies contains a number of artisans, conversant
with all the processes of English manufacture, trained
in English factories, familiar with the use and con-
struction of English machinery; most of our colonies
are rich in raw materials : and it is idle to suppose that
a protection of 30 or 50 per cent, will not suggest to
the unsleeping enterprise and energy of some of our
colonial brethren the idea of manufacturing for them-
selves the wool or the cotton which they produce, and
clothing themselves as well as feeding themselves at
home. To many of those expatriated artisans a manu-
facturing occupation cannot but prove far more con-
genial than fighting through the difficulties of the
untamed wilderness ; and an industrial interest is thus
certain of springing up, — the result of protection, and
requiring, therefore, the continuance of a protective
policy in future. Even now there are symptoms how
easily such an interest might be excited into being, even
in our most purely agricultural dependencies. It is
only a few months since a friend of ours returned from
New South Wales clad in woollen pantaloons, grown,
spun, woven, and dyed in the colony, of most excellent
quality, and furnished to him cheaper than any English
tailor would have supplied them.

Now, if Mr. Cobden, after having spent the last ten
years of his energetic and useful life in abolishing pro-
tective tariffs at home, should wish to spend the next
ten years in establishing them in every other corner ot
the world, and in laying the foundation of a reactionary,

250 SHALL WE EETAIN OUR COLONIES ?

policy which shall close the markets we ourselves have
planted in the wilderness, one after another, to the
produce of our spindles and our looms, — we cannot
hinder him ; — but we should wish him to do it with his
eyes open.

We hope we have succeeded in making it clear that
our colonies are far too valuable portions of our empire
to be lightly laid down or put away ; and that if they
should not continue to be so, the fault will lie in some
sad mismanagement of our own. Many of them, in
simple justice to the native population, or to those
British subjects who have settled there on the faith of
the imperial connection, we could not possibly abandon.
Others the interests of civilisation and humanity compel
us to retain. All of them ought to be, and will be if
we govern them aright, sources of strength and pride
to us. The very interests of that free and enlightened
commercial policy for which we have fought so long
and sacrificed so much, forbid us to entertain the
thought of severing the time-hallowed connection be-
tween Great Britain and the communities which have
gone forth from her bosom. Nor is there any call or
motive for such a step ; the cost of our colonies, though
less by one-half than it has been represented, we could
easily sustain were it twice as great : the affection of
the colonists it is easy to preserve, or to recover where,
through misjudgment or misunderstanding, it has been
shaken or impaired. By ruling them with forbearance,
steadiness, and justice ; by leading them forward in the
path of freedom with an encouraging but cautious
hand ; by bestowing on them the fullest powers of self-
government wherever the infusion of British blood is
large enough to warrant such a course ; in a word, by
following out the line of policy announced and defended
by Lord John Russell in his speech on the introduction

SHALL WE RETAIN OUR COLONIES? 251

of the bill for the government of the Australian colonies
in February of last year, — we may secure the existence
and rivet the cohesion of a vast dominion blest with
the wisest, soberest, most beneficial form of liberty
which the world has yet enjoyed, and spreading to
distant lands and future ages the highest, most prolific,
most expansive development of civilisation which Pro-
vidence has ever granted to humanity. To abandon
these great hopes, — to cast our colonial empire to the
winds, with the sole aim of saving two millions a year,
— is a line of policy which, we sincerely think, is
worthy only of a narrow and a niggard school ; which
will be counselled only by men who are merchants
rather than statesmen, and whose mercantile wisdom
even is confined, short-sighted, and unenlightened ;
one, which, we feel assured, can never be adopted by
England till the national spirit which has made her
what she is, shall have begun to wane and fade away.

252

THE RELATION BETWEEN EMPLOYERS AND
EMPLOYED.*

IT is a glorious achievement, and a rich reward for long
years of toil and thought — for the worldly sacrifices
which a studious life imposes, and the weariness of
brain which it entails — to have reached a standing
point of mental height and distance from which history
can be seen as a connected whole ; from which the long
perspective of ages, so confused and perplexing when
viewed from within, from below, or in detail, presents
itself to the mind of the observer as a continuous
stream, meandering constantly indeed, and flowing with
varying swiftness and directness, but ever, amid all its
wanderings, approaching nearer and nearer to its ocean-
goal. Gazing from this focal elevation at that vast
aggregate of facts, now glorious, now gloomy, which
make up the sad story of humanity, it is sometimes
given to us dimly to discern the meaning and the mys-
tery which pervades its course, and to catch glimpses
of that luminous thread of purpose which permeates
and irradiates the whole ; which, often clouded, often
disappearing, is yet never lost ; and which, wherever
discoverable, illuminates both past and future with a
revealing splendour.

" The poet in his vigil hears

Time flowing through the night —
A mighty stream, absorbing tears,
And bearing down delight :

* From the " Westminster Review."

1. The Claims of Labour. London: 1844.

2. Responsibilities of Employers. London: 1849.

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 253

There, resting on his bank of thought,

He listens, till his soul
The voices of the waves has caught —

The meaning of their roll."

At first little is discernible but wars and conquests —
savage conflicts of savage men — the display of restless,
objectless, untameable energy — barbaric virtues shining
through the darkness of barbaric crime. But soon
states and empires are seen to emerge from the chaos of
conflict and of passion ; the spirit of God moves over
the face of the waters ; and light and order begin to be.
Then one element of human nature after another is
developed in startling distinctness, but in dangerous
singleness, predominance, or disproportion ; one form of
civilisation after another rises, culminates, and sparkles ;
but no one of them endures, for no one contains within
it all the ingredients of permanence. Still, through all
these partial, transient, and spasmodic evolutions, man's
nature acquired expansion, vigour, and enlarged ca-
pacities ; each faculty gained strength even by its
preternatural and one-sided excitation ; and the race
made vast, though fitful, tentative, and staggering steps
towards the distant goal. It marched, though in
irregular fashion, along the path assigned to it. But
in the ripeness and fulness of appointed time a new
element was introduced, bearing the form and stig-
matised with the name of barbarism, yet rich in the
materials of a rougher and stronger civilisation ; and
from this — over- riding, yet amalgamating with and
adopting, all that was vital, permanent, and noble in
the Greek and Roman development, and fused and
interpenetrated by those mightier influences emanating
from Palestine — has issued the modern European — the
product and embodiment of all the past efforts of hu-
manity towards the fulfilment of its destiny and the
attainment of its ideal —

254 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

" The heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of Time," —

in whom we may hope to see the realisation of all that
is possible to man, and the gradual and not wholly un-
conscious approach towards the accomplishment of that
informing and pervading purpose which gives light and
consistency and meaning to his history.

Of the three great battles appointed to humanity, we,
in this land at least, have fought and gained two. We
have wrestled with wild Nature, and have subdued her
to our service and tamed her to our will. Over the
powers and obstacles of the material world we have
achieved victory after victory — each more wonderful
than the preceding one ; we have pushed our pioneers
and founded our cities in the remotest recesses of
primeval forests ; we have planted our footsteps and
fixed our flag in the barrenest as in the richest regions ;
the sea has become to us a bridge, and not a gulf — a
highway, not a barrier; climate has scarcely been an
obstacle ; even the burning deserts of Africa and the
wastes of Arctic and Antarctic snows have scarce re-
pelled us ; the most stupendous engineering difficulties
suggest no question as to "whether they can be over-
come ;" but only " at what cost can they be overcome ;"
rapidity of communication and facility of intercourse
have reached a point which it is not easy even for ima-
gination to surpass ; even pain has found a conqueror
in science ; and, on the whole, if physical life were all
we had to look to, and physical enemies the only ones
we had to strive with, it would be difficult to believe
that the goal of human progress, and the boundary line
of human capability, was not close at hand. The first
great battle of civilisation has been fought and won in
a manner and with an issue which history may well
record with pride.

But there was another and a sterner struggle to be

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 255

gone through — another and a nobler victory to be won.
Man had to be emancipated from a dwarfing and para-
lysing thraldom, and given back into his own posses-
sion. His limbs had to be unfettered, and his energies
to be electrified by the healthy and bracing atmosphere
of freedom. Liberty of action had to be won from the
tyrant, and liberty of thought from the priest. To
the conflict of man with nature, succeeded the harder
and far sadder conflict of man with man. As the aim
was nobler, so the struggle was longer, the progress
slower, and the martyrs more numerous by far. Age
after age the tide of war swayed to and fro, with
varying fortunes and in changed localities, but with no
cessation ; as combatant after combatant fell, another
stepped into the vacant rank; as one weapon was
blunted or broken, another and another was discovered
of better temper and of keener edge ; unexpected aid
came often from around, sometimes from above; as
defeat and despair darkened the horizon in one quarter,
hope dawned upon it from another ; till, thanks to our
forefathers, who were made of sterner stuff, cast in a
more stalwart mould, and gifted with a singler eye,
than we who had our birth amid milder antecedents —
thanks to the goodly fellowship of our reformers, and
the noble army of our martyrs — we have now no
impediments to our future progress save such as our
own imperfections may create for us — such as may be
heaped upon our path by indistinctness of vision, in-
firmity of purpose, or a halting and enfeebled will.

But we have now to trim our lamp and gird on our
armour for a final work, which cannot be put by, and
which must not be negligently done. The last battle of
civilisation is the severest — the last problem, the knot-
tiest to solve. Out of all the multitudinous ingredients
and influences of the past ; out of the conquest of
nature and the victory of freedom ; out of the blending

256 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

and intermixture of all previous forms of polity and
modifications of humanity; — has arisen a complex
order of society, of which the disorders and anomalies
are as complex as its own structure. We are now
summoned to the combat, not with material difficulties,
nor yet with oppressors nor with priests, but with an
imperfect and diseased condition of that social world
of which we form a part — with pains and evils ap-
palling in their magnitude, baffling in their subtlety,
perplexing in their complications, and demanding far
more clear insight and unerring judgment than even
purity of purpose or commanding energy of will. This
conflict may be said to date from the first French
revolution ; and it has been increasing in intensity ever
since, till it has now reached to a vividness and solem-
nity of interest which surpasses and overshadows the
attractions of all other topics. Socialism, Communism,
St. Simonism, Fourierism, Chartism, are among the
indications of its progress. Gradually it has drawn all
classes and orders of men into its ranks. The student
in his library, the statesman in his cabinet, the mer-
chant at his desk, the artisan at his loom, the peasant
at his plough, are all, in their several departments,
working at the same problem, intent upon the same
thought. It has enlisted and consecrated science; it
has merged or superseded ordinary politics, or has
given them a holier purpose and a deeper meaning ; it
pierces through every organ of the periodic press ; it
colours all the lighter literature of the day, provides
fiction with its richest characters and its most dramatic
scenes, and breathes into poetry an earnestness arid a
dignity to which the last age was a stranger. The tales
of rough passion or of tender sentiment which charmed
the readers of Richardson and Fielding find few ad-
mirers now ; even the superb romances of Walter Scott
— though " an everlasting possession," to our language

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 257

— have no longer the unrivalled popularity they once
enjoyed ; and a new class of novels, of which " Oliver
Twist " and " Mary Barton " are the type, harmonise
more closely with the taste and temper of the times.
The rich conceits of Cowley, the stately elaboration of
Gray, the sublime melancholy of Young, fall flat upon
our excited minds ; even the fine versification and solid
thought of Pope can find few real votaries now ; and
the wild conceptions, unequalled melody, and splendid
imagery, in which Lord Byron poured forth the turbid
and passionate sensibilities of his soul, have no longer
the magic power they once wielded over all hearts —
for we, in our generation, are stirred in yet inner
depths, inured to sterner sorrows, worn by more
genuine emotions. The progressive transfer in the
allegiance of the day from Southey, Scott, and Byron,
to Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, marks the growth of
an earnest spirit of universal social sympathy which
was never so aroused as now. The whole tone of
society bears witness to the same change: social in-
terests, the concerns of the whole community, bear
away the palm from every other topic of thought or
feeling ; and even the conversation of polished circles
is characterised by an unwonted gravity. The finest
minds in every order of intelligence " are enlisted into
this great strife, and led to meet this unknown enemy ; "

— men who might have carried off the prizes in oratory
or in law, in the realms of imagination or of history, or
of abstruser learning, are irresistibly attracted to aid
in that great work which has been given us to do, and
to contribute their exertions and their sagacity to the
solution of those problems which this age must solve if
it would live and prosper — which it can neither pass
by on the other side, nor push off upon its successor.

Of these problems, the true and fit relation between
employer and employed is one of the most pressing and
VOL. n. s

258 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

the most perplexing : to ascertain what it ought to be,
and to make it what it should be, is one of the first tasks
allotted to our epoch and our country; and our present
purpose is to contribute a few suggestions towards
clearing away that confusion which, in most minds,
hangs around the subject, and hides its real root and
kernel from our view.

Viewed from the lofty point of vision of which we
spoke just now, one uniform, ceaseless, pervading ten-
dency is discernible through modern history, as far, at
least, as the Western world is concerned — the tendency
towards the equalisation of social conditions. Amid all
vicissitudes, and in despite of all reactions, the progress
is obvious, and the goal constantly in view. A clue is
thus obtained to the purposes of Providence — a light
which at once irradiates both past and future, which
marshals the lessons of experience, which guides our
further speculations, and wonderfully clears up the path
of practical duty. From the birth of the existing order
of things, an irresistible current has set in, which bears
on its bosom institutions and hierarchies, principalities
and powers, towards the ocean wherein all will be
merged and moulded into their destined forms. It is
not towards this or that form of republicanism that we
are tending — not towards these or those political insti-
tutions— not towards this or that special mode of social
organisation : these are but the shell and husk of the
interior reality ; — it is towards an abolition of partial
privileges ; towards a paring down of inessential dif-
ferences ; towards an equality, not perhaps of wealth, or
of mind, or of inherent power, but of social condition,
and of individual rights and freedom. The times when
men were separated by barriers of rank and circumstance
which made them almost different beings, are withdrawn
far into the past : the times when even those divisions
which yet remain will dwindle and vanish away are

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 259

coming rapidly and visibly nearer. Everything tells on
the march, or is pressed into the service, of this perpetual
but silent social revolution ; the efforts of those who
have striven for it, the struggles of those who have
opposed it ; the vices of some, and the virtues of others ;
the energy of one generation, and the lassitude and
supineness of another — have all been overruled to for-
ward and to favour the supreme design. Of all political
philosophers, no one has seen this so clearly, or described
it so graphically, as M. de Tocqueville : it would be
difficult to condense, and impossible to amend, his
sketch.

" Let us recollect the situation of France seven hundred years
ago, when the territory was divided among a small number of
families, who were the owners of the soil and the rulers of the
inhabitants ; the right of governing descended with the family
inheritance from generation to generation ; force was the only
means by which man could act on man ; and landed property
was the sole source of power.

" Soon, however, the political power of the clergy was founded,
and began to exert itself; the clergy opened its ranks to all
classes, to the poor and the rich, to the villein and the lord ;
equality penetrated into the Government through the Church ;
and the being who, as a serf, must have vegetated in perpetual
bondage, took his place as a priest in the midst of nobles, and
not unfrequently above the heads of kings.

"The different relations of men became more complicated
and more numerous as society gradually became more stable and
more civilised. Thence the want of civil laws was felt ; and
the order of legal functionaries soon rose from the obscurity of
the tribunals and their dusty chambers, to appear at the court
of the monarch, by the side of feudal barons in their ermine
and their mail.

"Whilst the kings were ruining themselves by their great
enterprises, and the nobles exhausting their resources by private
wars, the lower orders were enriching themselves by commerce.
The influence of money began to be perceptible in state affairs.
The transactions of business opened a new road to power, and

s 2

260 EMPLOYEES AND EMPLOYED.

the financier rose to a station of political influence in which he
was at once flattered and despised.

" Gradually the spread of mental acquirements, and the
increasing taste for literature and art, opened chances of success
to talent ; science became a means of government, intelligence
led to social power, and the man of letters took a part in the
affairs of the state.

" In the course of these seven hundred years, it sometimes
happened that in order to resist the authority of the crown, or
to diminish the power of their rivals, the nobles granted a
certain share of political rights to the people; or, more fre-
quently, the kings permitted the lower orders to enjoy a degree
of power, with the intention of repressing the aristocracy. In
France the kings have always been the most active and constant
of levellers. When they were strong and ambitious, they spared
no pains to raise the people to the level of the nobles ; when
they were temperate or weak, they allowed the people to raise
themselves.

" As soon as land was held on any other than a feudal tenure,
and personal property began in its turn to confer influence and
power, every improvement which was introduced into commerce
and manufactures was a fresh element in the equality of con-
ditions. Henceforward every new discovery, every new want
which it engendered, and every new desire which craved satis-
faction, was a step towards the universal level. The taste for
luxury, the love of war, the sway of fashion, the most superficial
as well as the deepest passions of the human heart, co-operated
to enrich the poor and to impoverish the rich.

(e From the time when the exercise of the intellect became the
source of strength and of wealth, it is impossible not to consider
every addition to science, every fresh truth, and every new idea,
as a germ of power placed within the reach of the people.
Poetry, eloquence, and memory, the grace of wit, the glow of
imagination, the depth of thought, and all the gifts which are
bestowed by Providence with an equal hand, turned to the ad-
vantage of the democracy ; and even when they were in the
possession of its adversaries, they still served its cause by
throwing into relief the natural greatness of man.

" In perusing the pages of our history, we shall scarcely meet
with a single great event, in the lapse of seven hundred years,

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 261

which has not turned to the advantage of equality. The
crusades and the wars of the English decimated the nobles and
divided their possessions ; the erection of communities introduced
an element of democratic liberty into the bosom of feudal
monarchy ; the invention of fire-arms equalised the villein and
the noble on the field of battle ; printing opened the same
resources to the minds of all classes ; the post was organised so
as to bring the same information to the poor man's cottage and
the palace gate ; and Protestantism proclaimed that all men are
alike able to find the road to Heaven. The discovery of America
offered a thousand new paths to fortune, and placed riches and
power within the grasp of the adventurous and the obscure.

" Nor are these phenomena at all peculiar to France. Wher-
ever we turn our eyes, we shall witness the same continual
process throughout the whole of Christendom. The various
occurrences of national existence have everywhere turned to the
advantage of democracy ; all men have aided it by their ex-
ertions : those who have intentionally laboured in its cause, and
those who have served it unwittingly; those who have fought
for it, and those who have declared against it, — have all been
driven along in the same track, have all laboured to one end,
have all been instruments in the hands of God.

" The gradual development of equality of conditions is there-
fore a providential fact, and possesses all the characteristics of a
divine decree ; it is universal, it is durable ; it constantly eludes
all human interference ; and all events as well as all men con-
tribute to its progress."

Now, in the course of these operations, and under the
influence of this constant tendency, the relations of rich
and poor, of capitalist and labourer, of employer and
employed, have undergone great change; while the
enormous development of manufacturing industry which
recent times have witnessed has introduced into those
relations additional and most important modifications.
The result of these alterations and complications, com-
bined with a want of due study and comprehension of
their nature, and of a consequent acceptance of and
adaptation to them, has been a state of things which is

s 3

262 EMPLOYEES AND EMPLOYED.

universally but vaguely felt to be eminently unsatis-
factory, while few see clearly what is in fault or who
are in the wrong, — where the root of the evil lies, and
in what direction a remedy is to be sought. We shall
endeavour to do what in us lies towards dispelling these
mists ; — but first we must guard ourselves against
being supposed to echo the prevailing cry that the actual
relation between employer and employed in this country
is as thoroughly and generally defective as it is said to
be ; or that, where it is unsatisfactory and blameable,
the sin is all on the one side, and the suffering all on
the other. It is unquestionably true that in the case of
those engaged in shops, in domestic service, in agri-
cultural labour, or in manufacturing processes, the
relation between them and their employers is on the
whole far from being such as justice or benevolence
would wish to see it, and must hope to make it ; — but
it is equally true that every year sees fresh attention
aroused and fresh steps taken towards the amendment
of this relation. It is certain that day by day the evil
seems to grow and press upon our pained and startled
vision ; but it is surely as certain that this is only
because day by day we open our eyes wider to the
gloomy fact : it is not the object that grows in magni-
tude, but our sight that grows in comprehending and
penetrating power. It is true that among the employers
of labour in all departments there are numbers who
have never awakened to their duties, and numbers who
habitually violate or neglect them ; but it is no less true
that there are others of a better class, daily increasing
in note, in numbers, in publicity, who have a high stan-
dard and a bright ideal, and who faithfully, though it
may be often failingly, endeavour to approximate to
both — who see what ought to be done, and who show
what may be done. In the multiplication and improve-
ment of schools and reading-rooms — in the erection of

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 263

baths and wash-houses — in the shorter hours of labour
— in the earlier closing of shops — in the more frequent
payment of wages — in the increasing number of cases
of masters who really fulfil all their relations with ex-
emplary assiduity, and who have done so for years before
their names and labours came to light, — we have cheering
indications that the desired exertions are not as scanty
nor the desired object as distant as it is usual carelessly
to affirm. The state of things offers much to grieve
over, and much to do ; but writers and declaimers paint
it as more unchangingly dark and more wholly unre-
lieved than is consistent with the truth. Even authors
like those of " The Claims of Labour," and " The Ke-
sponsibility of Employers," while drawing a sad picture
of duties universally neglected, and relations utterly
poisoned and perverted, do much to neutralise their re-
presentations by the numerous delineations they are led
to give of instances in which those duties are sedulously
performed, and those relations beautiful and righteous —
instances which appear, by contrast, to have opened
their eyes to the prevalent deformity, and to have sug-
gested most of the amendments which they advocate.
It may be undeniable — we fear it is — that in many
cases a bitter and a hostile feeling still subsists between
those who should be bound together in affection as they
are in interest ; but our conviction is that this is gra-
dually giving way before better mutual acquaintance
and a clearer mutual insight, and that, where yet miti-
gated or exacerbated, the sin lies at the door of those
who, from passion, prejudice, or mean and selfish aims,
are perpetually irritating the still sensitive but closing
wound, by the cantharides of their malignant insinua-
tions and their wild harangues.

Nor do we think those representations more correct
which assume, or seem to assume, that the neglected
duties are all on the part of the employer, and the dis-

s 4

264 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

regarded rights all on the side of the workman. From
the former, indeed, in the ratio of his superior intelli-
gence and more cultivated powers, we may fairly
demand a wider comprehension and a stricter discharge
of the obligations of his station ; to the latter, in con-
sideration of his ignorance and inculture, we may pardon
much obliquity of vision and much misreading of his
claims. Still it is undeniable that the workman has
duties towards his employer, the neglect or languid and
reluctant performance of which almost entails a corre-
sponding dereliction on the other party ; or at least
surrounds his obligations with needless and artificial
difficulties. Through obstinate wilfulness the operative
often thwarts, through unwarrantable and ill-founded
mistrust he often baffles, the most sincere and earnest
efforts of his employer to serve him and to raise him ;
preferring the advice and guidance of men who have
never shown sympathy for him save by loud professions
and mercenary declamations, to accepting the leader-
ship of those who, while refusing to flatter his passions,
have laboured hard and sacrificed much to promote his
interests.

Still we unreservedly admit that even after full
justice has been rendered to all that has been done to
realise a better ideal for the relation of master and men,
and to all the difficulties that lie, or have been thrown,
in the way of doing more, a vast field lies open to us,
earnestly calling for culture ; ideas have to be cleared,
examples to be followed, plans to be digested, errors to
be eliminated, and a sound systematic footing to be
found on which the disorganised and unsatisfactory
relation can be readjusted.

The clearing of our ideas is the first requisite. We
must recognise the changes which the progress of time
has introduced into the relation of employer and em-
ployed, and understand the position which it has now

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 265

assumed, or towards which it is rapidly and inevitably
tending. It is not by ignoring the conception which
lies at the bottom of the actual and modern form of
that relation, still less by transplanting into it and
endeavouring to engraft upon it the incongruous con-
ceptions which belonged to its earlier modifications, that
we can hope to arrive at the true solution of the pro-
blem. The first form of the connection between master
and servant, or master and workman, was that of pos-
session or absolutism on the one side, and slavery or
serfdom on the other; the second was that of recog-
nised inferiority and admitted vassalage, or the feudal
relation ; the third, which we are everywhere approach*
ing, and have in some cases reached, is that of contract
between two independent parties. The idea that lies at
the bottom of these several states is distinct and defin-
able : that neither party have fully mastered, or loyally,
and without arriere pensee, accepted the distinction,
does not affect the reality or correctness of it, though it
is the source of many of our difficulties and of much of
our dissatisfaction. We have arrived at or are fast
setting towards the third stage of the relation, and have
almost completely cast aside the habits and basis of the
previous ones; but we have not uniformly perceived
this, and do not always remember it ; we import into
the present relation rags and fragments of the past ; we
confound and intermix the rights and obligations of
two wholly different conditions ; we confuse the ideas
which belong to the one with the recollections and
associations which survive of the other ; we put new
wine into old bottles, and sew new pieces on the old
garment ; and then we feel wonder and disgust at the
rents and explosions which ensue.

Each of these relations may have been fitting and
necessary in its time. Nay, some remains of the
circumstances which made it fitting may survive to

266 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

another age, so as to perplex both our perceptions and
our conduct. There may be much in the relations
which are gone by more soothing to our pride, more
attractive to our fancy, more pleasing to our affections,
possibly even more harmonising with our notions of
what is just and desirable, than in the relation which
has succeeded them. But it is idle to repine, and
useless to hark back upon the past. The wheels of
society, any more than those of nature, were not made
to roll backwards. The change is come ; it is come in
the regular course of that progressive revolution which,
as we have seen, bears upon it every stamp and signet-
mark of a divine decree ; and, like every other dispen-
sation of Providence, it is not to be repelled or ignored,
but to be recognised, accepted, and turned to good
account.

In the earliest times, when differences of station were
salient and strongly marked ; when power and wisdom
belonged so paramountly to the few, and ignorance and
helpless incapacity were so undeniably characteristic of
the many, that rulers and chiefs were looked upon less
as superiors than as demi-gods ; when absolute supre-
macy seemed to be needed over the mass of men, both
to direct and to enforce the performance of their duties ;
and when this supremacy was assumed on the one side
and admitted on the other as a matter beyond question
or dispute, and having its origin in the " fitness of
things ; " when kings had the power of life and death
over their subjects, and parents over their children; —
in those days the relation between employer and em-
ployed was naturally simple in the extreme: it was
that of master and slave ; the subjection was complete,
and the authority was absolute. If the servant or
workman were not his master's property, at least he
had no separate existence or independent will ; he lived
and acted only by order ; his master told him what to

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 267

do, showed him how to do it, compelled him to do it,
and in one way or other fed, clothed, and housed him
while doing it. Out of this simple relation sprang
certain reciprocal claims and obligations : the slave
owed his master faithful service and unreserved obe-
dience ; the master owed his slave guidance and control,
protection from danger, maintenance through life, aid
in sickness, a provision for old age. The relation had
its beauties and its suitabilities ; it was adapted to an
age when intelligence was only partially developed,
when social rights were imperfectly understood, when
the dignity and capability of man as man was as yet an
unborn exception, and when the doctrine of human
equality had not dawned upon the world. If the duties
springing out of the relation were on both sides faith-
fully performed, there was nothing in it necessarily
degrading to the one party, or corrupting to the other ;
for, as M. de Tocqueville observes, " men are not cor-
rupted by the exercise of power, or debased by the
habit of obedience, but by the exercise of a power
which they know to be illegal, arid by obedience to a
rule which they consider to be usurped and oppres-
sive."

But this could not be the case now ; new notions
have sprung up in the minds of the lower orders as to
their inherent claim to libert}^ ; new ideas have germi-
nated in the minds of the ruling classes as to the
intrinsic impropriety of absolute dominion. A re-
newal of the servile relation is not only impossible, but
would be criminal, because to both parties it would
involve a violation of their new-born sentiments of
justice. It is true that many of the grounds which
justified and originated this relation in former ages
exist here and there still, even among ourselves ; it is.
true that cases may be pointed out, where the gulf
between the two ranks seems to be as wide and deep as.

268 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

it ever was ; where the labourers seem so helpless,
stupid, impracticable, and perverse, that they need to
be driven to their duties and coerced to their good ;
where the compulsions of nature seem inadequate, and
the intimations of instinct appear to be unheeded ; and
where a strong case can be made out for a forcible
recurrence to a state of pupilage. But it cannot be :
the grown-up man may be as silly, as wilful, as infirm
of purpose, as the child; yet, though in the eye of
reason he may need the same treatment, he cannot be
replaced under the old subjection. We may regret
that this should be forbidden, but we cannot deny that
it is forbidden, by the altered spirit of the age.

In this, it will be seen, we are at issue with the
most brilliant and influential writer of the day. Mr.
Carlyle, who has a gigantic faculty for seizing hold of a
great truth, and dressing it up in such wild exaggera-
tions that it looks like falsehood, conceives that, in
the case of the Irish at least, and many of our English
poor, the one thing needful is the organisation of regi-
ments and captains of industry, on a footing of the
most unbounded and relentless despotism ; which regi-
ments, or the raw materials of such he thus addresses : —

" Vagrant Lackalls ! foolish most of you, criminal many of
you, miserable all ; the sight of you fills me with astonishment
and despair. What to do with you I know not ; long have I

been meditating, and it is hard to tell Vagrant

Lackalls, I at last perceive all this that has been sung and
spoken for a long while about enfranchisement, emancipation,
freedom, suffrage, civil and religious liberty over the world, is
little other than sad temporary jargon, brought upon us by a
stern necessity, but now ordered by a sterner to take itself
away. Sad temporary jargon, I say; made up of sense and
nonsense, — sense in small quantities, and nonsense in very large;
and if taken for the whole or permanent truth of human things,
it is not better than fatal infinite nonsense, eternally untrue.
.... As for you, my indigent, incompetent friends, I have

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 269

to repeat with sorrow, but with perfect clearness, what is plainly
undeniable, and is even clamorous to get itself admitted, that
you are of the nature of slaves. . . . Emancipation ! Foolish
souls, I say the whole world cannot emancipate you. Fealty
to ignorant unruliness, to gluttonous sluggish improvidence, to
the beer-pot and the devil, who is there that can emancipate a
man in that predicament ? Not a whole Reform Bill, a whole
French revolution executed for his behoof alone ; nothing but
God the Maker can emancipate him by making him anew.

" To forward which glorious consummation, will it not be
well, O indigent friends, that you, fallen flat there, shall hence-
forth learn to take advice of others as to the methods of standing ?
Plainly I let you know, and all the world and worlds know,
that I, for my part, mean it so. Not as glorious unfortunate
sons of freedom, but as recognised captives, as unfortunate
fallen brothers requiring that I should command, and, if need
were, control and compel you, can there henceforth be a relation
between us? .... Arise, enlist in my Irish, my Scotch
and English regiments of the new aera ! Enlist there, ye poor
wandering banditti ; obey, work, suffer, abstain, as all of us
have had to do ; so shall you be useful in God's creation, so shall
you be helped to gain a manful living for yourselves; not

otherwise than so Here is work for you ; refuse to

strike into it; shirk the heavy labour, disobey the rules; — I
will admonish you and endeavour to incite you ; if in vain, I
will flog you; if still in vain, I will at last shoot you, — and
make God's earth, and the forlorn hope in God's battle, free
of you ! Understand it, I advise you !"*

Some such summary method may, indeed, appear to
be suggested by the circumstances of the case ; some
such method might, were it possible, be perhaps the
shortest and simplest way to the attainment of our end ;
but we cannot thus at will step back into the olden
time ; we cannot borrow the garments and the gyves of
a bygone age ; it is not in regress, but in progress, that
our solution and our safety must be sought, — not in
importing and engrafting the obsolete things of the

* Latter Day Pamphlets, No. I. p. 55.

270 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

past, but in drawing on the resources which lie dormant,
but ready, in the vast storehouse of the future.

The relation of slavery passed away with the age to
which it was appropriate and permissible : the relation
of vassalage or modified serfdom succeeded. In this a
great step was made towards the recognition of defined
and positive rights on the part of the labourer, and of
defined and positive limits to the claims of his employer.
It was an intermediate condition between the servile and
the equal state. The connection between the parties
was commonly permanent and life-long ; it was far more
complex than either that which it replaced or that which
it preceded ; the serf had certain fixed obligations to
discharge, in return for which he enjoyed the patronage
and protection of his master. He lived upon his
master's land, often in his master's house ; the same
families served the same chiefs from generation to gene-
ration, till they became a portion of them ; they were
identified with their interests, partook of their pride,
shared their fortunes, were illuminated by their splen-
dour. In this relation, amid much that was rude and
brutal, there was also much that was touching and
affectionate. On the part of the vassal, there was often
hereditary attachment, sublime devotion, and a marvel-
lous abnegation of self. He respected his feudal lord as
a superior being, loyalty to whom was not unfrequentiy
a stronger feeling than the family affections. On the
part of the master, the sentiments of regard and pro-
tection were proportionately developed ; he looked upon
his dependents as a secondary class of children, whom
he loved, and whom both pride and duty bound him to
foster, to govern, and to serve. In war, the vassal
shared the dangers and hardships of his lord, and stood
by him through captivity and death ; in peace he tilled
his lands, ranged in his woods, and sported in his park ;
in sickness or distress he was certain of attention and

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 271

assistance ; and when aged or disabled, he often tended
his master's children and fed at his master's board. In
the obedience of the inferior there was nothing mean or
servile ; in the authority of the superior there was
nothing arrogant or oppressive ; — love on both sides
hallowed the unequal union. In theory, probably, if
inequalities as great as then prevailed were to be the
permanent law of society, the relation was as perfect as
could be formed ; and even now, numbers look back to
it with a sort of regretful admiration, and are unwilling
to believe that it may not still linger, or can ever wholly
pass away. In its revival, the Young England party
seek the remedy for the disjointed relations of society ;
they would push us back into the middle ages, and re-
organise modern life upon the old foundation. The
desire is natural ; and there is much beauty in the pic-
ture which they draw. A class of submissive and
attached dependents, sedulous about their duties and
unanxious about their rights, looking to their master
for the guidance of their course, and taking from him
the key-note of their life ; and a chief or employer,
penetrated with the responsibility imposed upon him,
proud of the trust reposed in him, and grateful for the
attachment shown him, dutifully using his superior
wisdom to direct, and his superior power to shield and
succour, those confided to his charge, and repaying their
pathetic devotion with a devotion as touching and as
true; — such a state of things, could it be recalled or
realised, would be a welcome exchange for that which
now too commonly prevails. But to make it possible,
to make it righteous, you must revive, not only the
circumstances out of which that relation rose, and by
virtue of which it subsisted, but the sentiments which
hallowed it and infused into it a sacredness and a beauty
not of necessity its own. You must recreate the in-
stinctive loyalty to rank and power, now shaken to its

272 EMPLOYEES AND EMPLOYED.

base by democratic notions ; the quiet hereditary con-
viction— now disturbed for ever — that the superiority
on the one side, and the inferiority on the other, were
permanent and providential facts, to be accepted, as of
coilrse, like any other law of nature; the undoubting
creed — now desecrated and dethroned — that the exist-
ing order of things was holy, just, and true. If you
cannot do this, you may set up the old form, but you
cannot breathe into it the old life ; the whole fabric will
be artificial and unhallowed ; the authority will corrupt
the man who wields it ; the obedience will degrade the
man who pays it ; and over the whole contrivance will
brood the blighting and paralysing spirit of a sham.

The third relation between employer and employed is
that which subsists in all democratic communities, and
which is more or less recognised and established in pro-
portion as the democracy is pure and perfect. It is
that which already prevails in France and in America,
and which is theoretically received, and is fast being
translated into practice in this country. It is that of
simple contract, of equal bargain, of independent ar-
rangement between the parties. In democracies there
can be no other. The master and the servant, the
employer and the workman, are equal in the eye of the
law. The superior has no longer recognised power
over the inferior, as in the servile relation ; the vassal
no longer needs the protection of his lord, as in the
feudal times ; the supremacy of law is over all ; by the
fundamental assumption of democracy, every man is as
good and as free as his neighbour, as entitled to think
for himself, as qualified to act for himself, as competent
to distinguish and to take care of his own interests.
The servant contracts to perform certain defined ser-
vices for his master in return for a fixed consideration ;
he can leave him when his term of contract is expired ;
he can compel him to perform his portion of the contract;

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 273

neither party is obliged, for, by the supposition of the
case, each party obtains an equivalent for what he gives.
In like manner the workman engages to perform a
certain amount and kind of labour for his employer, in
consideration of a stipulated remuneration ; the em-
ployer can exact no more and no other labour than that
agreed upon; the employed can compel a rigid ad-
herence to the contract as easily as the employer ; the
former has sold his exertions, and he renders them —
the latter has purchased these exertions, and he pays
the purchase money ; if either has made a bad bargain
— caveat emptor — he was free to do so; if, from any
extraneous circumstance, either party was placed under
a disadvantage, and parted with his money or his ser-
vices for what was not a full and fair equivalent, the
theory was not fully translated into practice; but the law
knows nothing of such exceptions, and the advantage
which was on one side to-day, may be on the other side
to-morrow. Redundant numbers in the labour-market
may compel the labourer to sell his services for less
than a comfortable maintenance; deficient numbers
(in proportion to the field of employment and the
capital seeking employment) may compel the master to
purchase those services at a price which leaves him less
than a reasonable profit : these are varying accidents,
which in no way affect the theory of their mutual
relation. Where all men are free and equal before the
law, the basis of the relation betAveen employer and em-
ployed can obviously be no other than we have stated ;
for if, in addition to the stipulated equivalent in wages,
the workman demands from his employer assistance,
forbearance, protection, and control, he admits his in-
feriority ; if, in addition to the stipulated equivalent of
service, the master demand from his servant respect,
submission, gratitude, obedience in matters beyond the

VOL. II. T

274 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

limits of their contract, lie in his turn virtually denies
the equality and violates the freedom. In a state in
which the law recognises and the people tolerate no
differences between man and man, there — apart from
the reciprocal obligations of citizens and Christians — no
man can owe another anything, or claim from another
anything, beyond the terms of their mutual agreement :
" We cannot find it : 'tis not in the bond."

Now, in France, and the free states of America, all
this is admitted and assumed : it is not yet fully recog-
nised in England. Though the law here, as there,
invests every man with equal freedom, yet the habits
and notions of democracy have, not yet so completely
pervaded our minds, and penetrated all our social rela-
tions, as with them.

"I never saw a man in the United States," says M. de
Tocqueville, " who reminded me of that class of confidential and
attached servants of whom we retain a reminiscence in Europe.
The Americans are not only unacquainted with the kind of man,
but it is hardly possible to make them understand that such
ever existed. It is scarcely less difficult for them to conceive
it, than for us to form a correct notion of what a slave was
among the Romans, or a serf in the middle ages. In de-
mocracies, servants are not only equal among themselves, but
they are in some sort the equals of their masters. Why then
has the former a right to command, and what compels the latter
to obey ? — the free and temporary consent of both their wills.
Neither of them is by nature inferior to the other ; he only be-
comes so for a time by covenant. Within the terms of this
covenant, and during its continuance, the one is a servant, the
other a master ; beyond it, they are two citizens of the com-
monwealth— two men. The precise limits of authority and
obedience are as clearly settled in the mind of the one as in that
of the other. The master holds the contract of service to be the
only source of his power, and the servant regards it as the only
cause of his obedience. On their part, masters require nothing
of their servants but the faithful and rigorous performance of

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 275

the covenant ; they do not ask for marks of respect * ; they do
not claim their love or devoted attachment ; it is enough that as
servants they are exact and honest." f

Now in England, we are yet far from this complete
comprehension of our case. We have not yet clearly
perceived, nor frankly and loyally accepted, the change
which time has introduced into the relations of the
several classes. The habits, notions, and expectations
of the aristocratic condition have survived and been
carried over, mutilated and infirm, into the democratic
condition. We are in a transition state, in which men's
minds fluctuate between the aristocratic notion of sub-
jection, and the democratic notion of free, optional,
limited, and purchased obedience. Each party is dis-
posed to borrow some of the claims of the defunct re-
lation, without the corresponding obligations. The
master cannot divest himself of the idea, that in virtue
of his rank, he is entitled to deference and submission ;
and the workman conceives that, in virtue of his com-

* The following anecdote is very illustrative of our text: — "At
Boston I was told of a gentleman in the neighbourhood who, having
engaged a farm servant, found him very satisfactory in all respects,
except that he invariably came into his master's room with his hat
on. * John,' said he to him one day, ' you always keep your hat on
when you come into the room.' 'Well, sir, haven't I a right to?'
' Yes, I suppose you have.' ' Well, if I have a right to, why
shouldn't I ? ' This was a poser from one man to another, where all
have equal rights. So after a moment's reflection, the gentleman
asked, 'Now, John, what'll you take — how much more wages will
you ask to take off your hat when you come in?' 'Well, that
requires consideration, I guess.' ' Take the thing into consider-
ation, then, and tell me to-morrow morning.' The morrow comes.
' Well, John, have you considered what additional wages you are to
have for taking your hat off?' 'Well, sir, I guess it's worth a
dollar a month.' 'It's settled then, John, you shall have another
dollar a month;' and the gentleman retained a good servant, while
John's hat was always in his hand when he entered the house in
future." — Johnston's Notes on North America, vol. ii. p. 425.

f Democracy in America, vol. iv. p. 43.

T 2

276 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

parative poverty, he is entitled to assistance in diffi-
culty, and to protection from the consequences of his
own folly and improvidence. Each party expects from
the other something more than is expressed or implied
in the covenant between them. The workman, asserting
his equality and independence, claims from his employer
services which only inferiority can legitimately demand ;
the master, tacitly and in his heart denying this equality
and independence, repudiates claims which only the
validity of this plea of equality and independence can
effectually nonsuit or liquidate. Ideas on both sides
want clearing up. If the master exacts more than
stipulated service, he must reciprocate with more than
stipulated wages ; if the workman expects more than
just and covenanted money remuneration, he must
render more than bare and covenanted labour. If the
former demand, in addition to his bargain, deference,
gratitude, and affection, he must show, in addition,
interest, succour, and regard (or, as in the case just
cited, he must purchase these or their counterfeits with
added dollars) ; if the latter demand forbearance, self-
denial, and personal attention, he must deserve these
by the fore-named correlatives.

In that democratic state of things, then, which pre-
vails elsewhere, which England has already reached in
theory, and is fast approaching in actual fact, the
relation between employer and employed is and must
be that of simple contract — a contract into which the
covenanting parties may insert whatever conditions
they may mutually agree upon, but which contract con-
tains the sum total of the respective claims and obliga-
tions arising out of the relation into which they have volun-
tarily entered with each other. They have, as we shall
presently see, other reciprocal claims and obligations;
but these arise out of another and wholly distinct
relation, which must not be confounded with the one

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 277

we are now treating of. It is of the last importance,
both in order to prevent mutual disappointment and
irritation, and to establish a sound basis for action, that
this distinction should be clearly understood, and con-
stantly kept in view by the contracting parties them-
selves, and by those moralists and legislators who are
in the habit of dealing with this subject. We therefore
take the broadest democratic ground — the ground of
the future, even more than of the accomplished and
completed present — when we affirm, that the reciprocal
duties of employers and employed, as such, are com-
prised within the limits of their covenant ; and that it is
a mistake to attempt to engraft on this " meagre rela-
tion" (as it has been termed), the claims and obligations
either of the servile or the feudal state. But this
" meagre relation" is obviously not the only one in
which the parties stand to one another ; nor are the obli-
gations of slavery or vassalage the only ones which can
be engrafted upon it. In remembering this, we may
find both the solution of our problem, and the dissipa-
tion of apparent contradictions. The employer and em-
ployed, even in the most democratic state, stand to each
other, as do all the rest of the community, not in this
relation only, but in that of fellow-citizenship, and of
Christian neighbourhood. What, then, are the reciprocal
duties and claims which arise out of this superadded and
inescapable relation? As fellow citizens, every man
owes to every man rigid justice and respect for each
others' rights ; as neighbours, all owe to all mutual
sympathy and aid. aWho is my neighbour?" My
neighbour is the man whom I can help out of the ditch,
the man into whose wounds I can pour oil and wine.
My neighbour is the man who needs my services, and
whom I am in a position to serve ; and the degree of
neighbourhood and the imperativeness of his claim are
in proportion to his need and to my power.

T 3

278 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

It is true that the matter is somewhat complicated in
appearance by the remains of the old feudal relation
which still linger among the agricultural population,
and the incidental powers which landed property occa-
sionally gives to its possessors, as well as by the virtual
inequality which redundant numbers sometimes create
in the bargain between employers and employed in
the departments of manufacturing industry ; but the
former complication is yearly dying out, and the latter
is subject to constant variations ; we can even imagine
that the ultimate results of Irish emigration may place
the inequality on the other side. It is to be observed
also, that in the case of domestic servants, another com-
plication is introduced by the family relation being
partially superadded to that of employer and employed ;
bat on the whole, and exceptions apart, we are satisfied
that the view we have taken of the special relation we
are considering is the true one, and the only one which
will render possible a clear conception and scientific de-
finition of its duties and its rights. Let us proceed to
elucidate our position.

Over and above, then, the strict fulfilment of the
special contract entered into, every man owes service to
every man whom he is in a position to serve : the nature
of this position points out the sort of service to be ren-
dered, and its superiority points out the degree. Our
power is the measure of our duty ; and the sole reason
why the employer owes more than other men to the
people 'he employs is, that his connection with them is
closer, and his relation to them more specific and defined,
and his means and capacity of serving them consequently
greater. The circumstance of having entered into an
engagement with them to exchange his money against
their labour in fair equivalent proportions, does not of
itself confer upon them any claims, or entail upon him
any obligations, any more than the circumstance of

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 279

having sold to a customer a piece of cloth for an equi-
valent bank-note would do : the fact, that this mutually
profitable and strictly equal engagement, brings him
into a relation with them, which augments his power of
influencing their conduct, guiding their character, and
affecting their happiness, does generate such obligations
and such claims. His responsibilities spring not out of
the contract itself, but out of its secondary consequences.
They are entailed upon him, not as the employer of
these men, but because his employment of them makes
him in a peculiar sense their ''neighbour." If the
manufacturer and the country squire owe duties to their
workmen, from which the independent gentleman living
idly on his income exempts himself, it is not, as this
latter and the world at large are apt loosely to imagine,
because they have accepted from those they employ
services for which money wages are only a partial and
inadequate repayment. On the contrary, by the punc-
tual discharge of their portion of a fair and equitable
bargain, they have already performed a duty and ren-
dered a service to their workpeople, which the idle gen-
tleman has forgotten or shirked. They have assisted
in increasing that national wealth, which sooner or later,
directly or indirectly, must benefit every individual in
that nation. The idle gentleman has not even done
this. Like the manufacturer whom he blames, he has
omitted to discharge the duties of protector, assistant,
or Christian neighbour, to the poor labourer ; unlike the
manufacturer, he has not even rendered him the service
of making his capabilities productive ; he has not even
purchased at a fair price the article the poor man has to
sell. There has always seemed to us great folly, and
some feelings even less excusable, in the abuse which
the Pharisaic fundholder and the lazy mortgagee — who
have carefully shunned the responsibilities and anxieties

T 4

280 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

which" belong to an industrial connection with the
working classes — lavish on the great employers of
labour for collecting together large numbers of workmen
arid rendering their labour available for the joint benefit
of both parties, as if by so doing they had incurred,
more than other men, the obligation of supporting, in-
structing, and controlling them. These complacent
critics of the bearers of burdens which they will not
touch themselves, forget that the duty which the em-
ployer owes to his people after he has paid their wages
sacred as it is, is a duty which belongs to him in
common with every citizen and every neighbour —
which they, as well as he, are called upon to perform in
their sphere and to the utmost of their power ; and that
they, who have done nothing, cannot shift upon him,
who at all events has done something, the entire burden
of their common obligations. Of two equally rich men,
living in the same neighbourhood, possessed of the same
authority, exercising or qualified to exercise the same
influence over the poor around them, the laborious
manufacturer owes to them no more obvious duties,
incurs no more sacred obligation, than the idle mil-
lionaire. The tie of Christian " neighbourhood " is as
close in the one case as in the other: the claims of
Christian neighbourhood may be preferred as undeniably
in the one case as in the other. The former has dis-
charged the simple duty of employer in directing and
remunerating the employment ; there remains, over and
above, the duty of man to man, and this his wealthy
fellow citizen owes as well as he. If he has greater in-
fluence over the conduct and character of his workpeople
greater means of aiding them, greater power of con-
trolling them, then in virtue thereof is his vocation
wider and his obligation more imperative ; but it is so
in virtue of his influence, not in virtue of his mastership
Again, of two poor families, living near a great man

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 281

equally needing his assistance, equally guidable by his
counsel, equally swayed by his example, but one of
whom he employs, and the other he does not, he owes
to the former no more than to the latter, for his obliga-
tions as employer are already discharged by the perfor-
mance of his portion of the contract ; and his obligations
as neighbour remain, and are equally binding towards
both.

It is unquestionably true that this equality of power,
out of which equality of duty springs, can seldom exist
as completely as we have supposed. The position of
master, even in this comparatively democratic age, will
generally give a vantage-ground of influence, and imply
a vantage-ground of social and intellectual superiority,
which mere rank, wealth, and residence can seldom
bestow. On the other hand, especially in the manufac-
turing districts of this country, the same position entails
certain consequences which materially impair this in-
fluence, and sometimes go far wholly to counteract it.
Between two parties who bargain together there is
almost inevitably something of mistrust and antagonism.
Where genuine conscientiousness and love of justice
does not prevail on both sides, it is difficult for them to
believe in their mutual disinterestedness ; and the best
advice of the master is often neglected, and his wisest
efforts thwarted, by the suspicion that both are dictated
by some sinister and selfish motives. Hence a relation
of simple neighbourhood, into which no pecuniary con-
siderations enter, is not unfrequently more easily effi-
cient for good than the apparently more powerful one
of employment. Still, in a majority of cases, the position
of employer does, and always will, carry with it certain
means of influence which, in spite of counterbalancing
disadvantages, involve the gravest responsibility — a
responsibility which is in a direct ratio to the social and
intellectual superiority implied in the position, and which

282 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

diminishes in proportion as equality either in condition
or intelligence is approached.

The relations of employer to employed may be classed
under four heads : — manufacturing employment ; agri-
cultural labour; employment in shops ; and domestic
service. In the following remarks we shall chiefly have
the first of these in view, but the principles evolved will,
with slight modifications, apply themselves to the others
also. The manufacturer is the employer of labour on
the greatest scale ; he is the party who, inaccurately
enough, is popularly regarded as most negligent of the
duties of the relation ; and he is the party whose position
towards his workpeople most nearly, in actual fact,
approaches to that which we have defined as the demo-
cratic form of that relation. His workpeople are the
most intelligent and democratic portion of the labouring
classes; the difference between his rank and theirs is
less marked and fixed than in the other cases, from the
greater facility of rising and the greater number who
have risen from the lowest position ; and lastly the large
sunk capital of the master gives to the men an advantage
in their bargain with him which no other class of work-
people enjoy.

The first duty which the great employer of labour
owes to those who work for him is to make his business
succeed. This is his first duty, because it is the primary
object which he has in view in starting it. No man
builds a mill, or commences a manufacture, for the
distinct purpose of employing or benefiting others.
His paramount and special aim is to earn a living for
himself, or to improve his condition in the world ; his
desire and intention of doing justice to and ameliorating
the condition of those he employs is, however zealous
and sincere, an indirect and secondary purpose, and the
man who forgets or fails in his primary is not likely to
succeed in his derivative object. Secondly r, it is his first

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 283

duty, because it is necessary to the performance of his
other duties and the attainment of his other ends. If
he does not make his business answer, all his plans and
arrangements for the improvement of his workmen, how-
ever wise or benevolent, necessarily fall to the ground.
Thirdly, it is his first duty, because, when the existence
of numbers is bound up in his success, any failure or
catastrophe on his part involves numbers in misery. It
is true that he has at all events employed them regularly
and paid them well as long as he was prosperous, and
has so far done them much service, and that but for his
undertaking they might never have known what full em-
ployment was ; and so far he cannot be accused of
having deteriorated their position ; but it is possible, also,
that he may have withdrawn some of them from more
permanent sources of occupation, and in any case it re-
mains true that want of success on his" part, and conse-
quent stoppage or frequent interruption of his works, is
certain to entail grievous misery on all whom he employs.
This obligation to make his undertaking answer involves
several matters which are not usually enough regarded
in the light of duties. In the first place he is bound not
to enter upon it without capital sufficient to carry him
over those periods of depression and loss to which all
manufacturers are subject. It is quite true that his
workmen ought theoretically, and often may, and in
time probably will, save enough out of the earnings of
prosperous times to meet and bear the adverse times
which follow. It is theoretically true no doubt — and,
when social and intellectual equality shall be more
nearly reached, may be laid down as a principle — that
the workman has no right to throw upon his employer
the duty of being provident for both, and of not only
paying him good wages when the concern is profitable,
but of continuing to pay him wages when it has ceased
to be so ; and this is ample reason why the master

284 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

should not be expected, as he now so often is, to give his
men full employment and their usual wages when he
can only do so at a loss to himself; but it does not ex-
onerate him from the duty of counting the cost before
he begins the tower — of ascertaining that he possesses
the means of meeting, without ruin to himself and his
dependants, those fluctuations and vicissitudes which
should be calculated upon beforehand as part of the or-
dinary chances of trade. It is part of the tacit contract
between manufacturers and their operatives — and in
this it differs from the case of hand-loom weavers and
their employers — not indeed that they should be kept
fully at work during all the changing fortunes of com-
mercial life, but that that degree of steady employment
should be secured to them which the capital of masters
in general has enabled them to establish as the custom
of the trade.

In the second place, this obligation of success imposes
upon the employer the duty of not allowing any bene-
volent plans or sentiments of lax kindness to interfere
with the main purpose in view. The secondary aim
must not be allowed to override the primary one. He
must not scruple to reduce wages where the well-being
of the undertaking renders this change indispensable ;
nor must he gratify himself with the luxury of paying
higher wages than his neighbours, either out of vanity
or from benevolence. If he does this, it is rarely that
he will reap gratitude ; it is still more rarely that he
will escape serious loss and crippled means, if not posi-
tive impoverishment. But, above all, he must be strict
in exacting from his workpeople the performance of their
part of the bargain. He must not allow any moral
qualities or personal recommendations to pass muster as
a substitute for the stipulated quantity or quality of
work. The rigid enforcement of the covenanted terms
is equally essential for the good of both parties. A lax

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 285

and indulgent master will never be successful, and
scarcely ever popular.

It may, perhaps, be observed that these remarks are
unnecessary, as few masters are likely to err on the side
of forgetting the main money-making object of their
business, or of postponing it to philanthropic considera-
tions. But even if this were more universally true than
it is, our observations would not be the less called for,
to meet the precepts and inculpations of those legislating
moralists who urge that it is the duty, and imagine
that it is within the power, of the great employer to
prefer his workmen's interest to his own — to afford
them, independently of considerations of profit, wages
adequate to their comfortable maintenance, and to con-
tinue to employ them, or to support them in idleness,
after they have ceased to be competent and efficient
operatives. Neither of these things can the manufac-
turer be called upon to do, because neither is compatible
with that professional success which is his primary aim
and his first duty, both to his workpeople and to himself.
It seems, no doubt, selfish and hard to dismiss workmen
who have served us long, and given us the exertions of
their most active and energetic years, as soon as, from
age or failing powers, they become incompetent to the
full toil of their several departments. It seems hard,
too, as men grow old and grey, to reduce their remune-
ration in the ratio of their diminished capability of
service. All men of benevolence, who are large em-
ployers of labour, feel this to be one of the most painful
necessities laid upon them. Yet it is clearly both just
and inevitable. It is just, because, on our fundamental
supposition, the bargain has been a fair one, and the
services rendered during the prime of life were paid for
at their full value, and in that stipulated payment a
retiring pension for old age was not included. It is
necessary, since, if a concern is to be worked by old

286 EMPLOYEES AND EMPLOYED.

servants, because it seems unfeeling to replace them by
younger and more efficient hands ; or if full wages are
to be paid to them after they have ceased to be equal to
full work ; or if the concern is to be burdened with the
maintenance of the aged and infirm who have served it
in their better days, — no profits made in these times, at
least, could enable such a manufacturing undertaking
to keep its head above water. A provision for those
periods of weakness and incapacity, which come sooner
or later to us all, should, and in a healthy state of things
almost always may, be laid by out of the earnings of
those years of vigour which have been passed in steady
labour, and sold for an adequate remuneration. Most
manufacturers do endeavour to keep old servants by
them as long as they can do so with safety, and continue
to pay them more than they are strictly worth : not a
few have carried this too far, and have thereby, for a
time or permanently, impaired the efficiency and im-
perilled the success of their concerns. Very generally,
when compelled to dismiss them, or displace them to
lower and easier work, they ease their fall with a
pension ; but this is, or should be, done rather in their
individual capacity as kind-hearted " neighbours," than
as employers. It never can be the manufacturer's
duty, for it never can be safe for himself, or real kind-
ness or justice to the whole body of his operatives, to
work with inefficient or decrepit tools, whether those
tools be human or mechanical.

The same considerations may serve to show us the
mistake of those who conceive it to be the duty of the
employer to pay such wages to his workpeople as will
supply them with an adequate subsistence, though those
wages should be higher than will leave him a profit, and
higher than many others are willing to accept. The
first, it is evident, he cannot long continue to do. If
he pays a rate of wages which leaves him no profit, or

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 287

none worth the risk and toil of carrying on the business,
he will soon cease to pay wages at all. But the duty
of always refusing to pay lower wages than will afford
a decent subsistence to the labourer — however great
may be the numbers, and however clamorous the neces-
sities of those who are anxious for employment at even
still reduced earnings, and who prefer a scanty liveli-
hood to none at all — has lately been maintained in all
its breadth by a writer of singular logical clearness,
candour, and ability.* Wrong as we think him, he is
yet a most valuable reasoner, because he sees and is
willing to accept the consequences which flow from the
position he assumes. He considers it heinous to " force
down wages to the market minimum " and the " clear
duty of a master to employ a few on decent remunera-
tion, rather than many on the verge of ruin." To go
fully into this discussion now would divert us from our
more immediate subject; but a passing remark will
show where, as it seems to us, the fallacy of the view
lies. In the first place it is inaccurate and misleading
to speak of employers as " forcing down wages." This
is not the modus operandi. Employers are seldom the
chief agents in this process. The practical question is
not whether a master shall force down wages needlessly
and artificially, but whether, in order artificially to
maintain a rate avowedly above the market price of
labour, he shall turn a deaf ear to destitute multitudes
who come to him begging for employment; — whether he
shall be guilty of the cruelty of turning from his door
men in vigorous life and in the prime of their capacities,
and with families dependent upon them, who beseech
him at once to benefit himself and them by giving them
work at lower wages than those which he is actually
paying — preferring scanty earnings to no earnings at

* " Prospective Review," vol, xxvii. p. 276.

288 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

all. Surely, it is at least as harsh to refuse their prayer
— to bid them go and starve — as it would be to reduce
the wages of his own workpeople. The theoretical
question reduces itself to this: — whether it is better
that the "wages fund" should be confined in ample
portions to a limited number, or be distributed in
scantier allotments over all claimants; — whether some
shall be comfortable and the rest be starved, or whether
all should "share and share alike." Our personal
feelings, as those of nearly every man, would probably
prefer (with the writer we are criticising) the former
arrangement, if the rejected claimants for employment
could either be secure of other work, or be supported in
idleness by the rest of the community; but we doubt
the practicability, or permanence, or wisdom, or justice
of these alternatives — and we are scarcely prepared, as
this writer is, to face even starvation as a preferable
thing to a lowering of the price of labour. In the
second place, the same principle, carried out, would
forbid a master manufacturer to "work short time:"
when periods of pressure come, he must not keep his
men together and divide the pressure equally among
them all ; he must dismiss some and retain the others
in full employment. Yet this very " short time " the
reviewer, in the passage we are citing, speaks of with
approval as a just and humane contrivance. In the
third place, the reviewer commits the common oversight
of forgetting the consumer in his exclusive gaze at the
producer. He does not appear to have remembered
that from lower wages arises increased cheapness ; that
from increased cheapness spring up extended markets ;
that from extended markets flows augmented employ-
ment ; and that augmented employment tends to make
wages actually higher, while increased cheapness makes
them again virtually higher, by making them go further.
Thus, in the natural course of events, those very wages

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 289

become sufficient for comfortable maintenance which it
was held sinful to offer, because so scanty and inadequate.
The manufacturer who employs 500 men at moderate
wages, where he could only have employed 300 at the
high wages which the reviewer would make obligatory
and permanent, has this to set off against the first evils
of a reduction — that he employs 200 men who would
otherwise have starved or subsisted on charity; that he
enables many to buy shirts who would otherwise have
gone without them ; and that he makes the wages of all
the 500 go further, that is, purchase more, than they
did before. It cannot be replied that these 200 men
whom he took in, would, if rejected, have found profit-
able occupation elsewhere: if this were the case they
would never have solicited work at insufficient earnings.
But the practical answer to this reviewer, for our
present purpose, is simply this : that the manufacturer
who, by rejecting those who offered their services at
reduced wages, attempted to keep up an artificial price
of labour, would soon find himself distanced in the
race; his competitors would be carrying on their es-
tablishments at less cost than himself ; his means would
be crippled, and his profits disappear and be replaced
by loss ; and the ultimate effect of his unscientific be-
nevolence would be, that his power of doing practical
good would be at an end. If it were attempted to
evade this consequence by maintaining the artificial
price of labour by legislative or by any over- riding
social influence, and the attempt should be successful,
the only result could be the transference of our supe-
riority to foreign rivals, and the diminution of demand
for our fettered productions. The individual manu-
facturer in the one case, the whole nation of manu-
facturers in the other, would find that the issue of their
kindness — the consequence of their resolution to give
good wages only to a few — would end in their having

VOL. II. U

290 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

no wages at all to give to any. The plain truth is, that
neither the most boundless benevolence, nor the most
consummate ability, can fight against the clear moral
and material laws of the universe. If the field of
employment is too limited for the numbers who crowd
into it, no power and no goodness can prevent wages
from falling ; and all schemes, whether old or new, for
enabling labourers to be redundant, and yet to evade the
consequences of their redundancy, must corne to nought.

Having secured his position and performed his first
duty, of making his undertaking profitable, and enabling
himself to keep his people employed, the employer is at
leisure to sift and attend to secondary claims ; and of
these the duty of making his factory and the processes
carried on there as healthy as care and sanitary science
can render them, will probably present itself to his mind
as one of paramount clearness and importance. This is
the more incumbent upon him, as it is little likely to be
thought of or demanded by his workmen. It is a topic
on which his cultivated intelligence is almost sure to
place him far ahead of them ; and out of the superiority,
as we have seen, springs the obligation. We cannot
place this matter in a better light than by quoting a
few lines from one of the works at the head of this
article — " The Claims of Labour."

" It would seem an obvious thing enough that, where a man
collects a number of his fellow-men together to work for him, it
would be right to provide a sufficient supply of air for them.
But this does not appear to have been considered as an axiom ;
and in truth we cannot much wonder at this neglect, when
we find that those who have to provide for the amusement of
men, and who would be likely, therefore, to consult the health
and convenience of those whom they bring together, should
sedulously shut out the pure air, as if they disliked letting any-
thing in that did not pay for admission. In most grievances, the
people aggrieved are very sensible at the time of the evil they
are undergoing ; which is not, however, the case with those who

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 291

suffer from an impure atmosphere. They are in general almost
unconscious of what they are enduring. This makes it the more
desirable, in the case we are considering, that the manufacturer
himself, or the government, or the community at large, should
be alive to the mischief arising from want of ventilation in these
crowded assemblages of men, and to the absolute necessity of

providing remedies for it

" Each branch of manufactures has its peculiar dangers and
disadvantages; and it behoves the master to be frequently
directing his attention to remedy the peculiar evils of his manu-
facture. He is to be the pioneer to find out for his men ways
of avoiding these evils. It cannot be his duty to study only
how to make his fabric cheaper, and not to take any pains to see

how it can be made to cost less of human life In a

thickly-peopled country like this, an employer of labour, if his
work does not require much skill, can generally get any number
of men to serve him, which would be a strange reason, how-
ever, for making the health of any one amongst those whom he
does employ less precious in his eyes. Human labour may be
ever so abundant, but human life cannot be cheap."

As far as large manufacturing establishments are
concerned, a vast improvement has taken place in this
respect in the last twenty years, and in the best of them
little is left to be desired ; but in the minor workshops,
and especially in the work-rooms of tailors and semps-
tresses, the employers are still, for the most part, un-
awakened to the importance and imperativeness of this
class of obligations. The health of thousands is sacri-
ficed from pure ignorance and want of thought. Truly
may the author of "The Claims" remark that "the
careless cruelty in the world outweighs all the rest."

A third mode of serving those who work for him,
which the position and capital of the great employer of
labour generally place within his reach, and which
should be especially valued by him, is the providing for
them decent and comfortable dwellings. In villages
and in country districts this is almost always in his

292 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

power ; in towns often so ; and always, if he can as-
sociate others with him in his plans for the attainment
of the object, and in his estimate of its importance. On
the whole, we are bound to say that the conduct of the
great proportion of manufacturers in this matter is de-
serving of high praise. In almost all country establish-
ments, and in most of those in the smaller towns, they
have been careful to surround their mills with sub-
stantial and well-built cottages, often with gardens
attached to them, containing four rooms, kitchen, scul-
lery, and two bed-rooms, — cottages which are let for
rents which at once remunerate the owner and are easy
for the occupier. In large towns, like Birmingham,
Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield, it has not been so
easy to do this. It is not often possible there to have
the dwellings of the workmen close to the mill, us this
latter must be near rivers or canals for the sake of the
water, and the land so situated becomes too valuable to
be used for 'mere cottages. In these cases, therefore,
the workpeople seldom live in houses belonging to their
employer : they are scattered over the town, and occupy
streets built generally by some speculator, who looks to
nothing but a secure and ample return for his outlay.
But even in these cases much may be done, and much
has been done, by benevolent employers, to introduce a
better style of house, and ampler accommodation, both
by building "Model Lodging Houses" of their own,
and by promoting the formation of " Societies for Im-
proving the Dwellings of the Poor," such as already
exist in the metropolis and elsewhere. By efforts of
this sort, combined with the tardy but now energetic
attention paid by the constituted authorities to sanitary
regulations, a vast amelioration has of late years taken
place in the houses of the working classes, both as to
healthiness and amount of accommodation, at least as
far as the manufacturing population is concerned. But

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 293

in the prosecution of plans of this sort two points re.
quire especial consideration.

In the first place, the employer is not called upon by
any duty to build houses for his people of a more costly
kind, nor to let them at a lower rent, than will afford
him a fair remuneration for his outlay ; — and this for
the reasons alleged when speaking of that which we laid
down as his first and paramount obligation. Nay, more,
he is bound not to do so ; for if he does, he is not doin£

7 ' O

justice, he is conferring charity ; he is less setting an
example likely to be followed, than affording a beacon
likely to be shunned; and he is interfering with the
property of those who build houses for the sake of
letting them at a rent which will yield a fair interest
for their money, just as much, and in the same way, as
if he were to sell the goods he produces for less than
they cost him. Some mischief has been done by ne-
glecting this simple rule ; but, if judiciously managed,
there is scarcely any portion of a manufacturer's ex-
penditure which pays him better than that which is
devoted to building a superior class of cottages for his
workpeople. His rent is secure ; and the people are
generally now willing to pay a higher rent for a better
house than formerly.

" In this good work the employers of labour may be expected
to come prominently forward. Many a man will speculate in
all kinds of remote undertakings; and it will never occur to
him that one of the most admirable uses to which he might put
his spare capital would be to provide fit dwelling-places for the
labouring population around him. He is not asked to build
almshouses. On the contrary, let him take care to ensure, as
far as he can, a good return for the outlay, in order to avoid
what may possibly be an unjust interference with other men's
property ; and also, and chiefly, that his building for the poor
may not end in an isolated act of benevolence, but may indicate
a mode of employing capital likely to be followed by others.

u 3

294 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

Still, it is to their benevolence, and not to any money motives,
that I would mainly appeal. The devout feeling which in
former days raised august cathedrals throughout the land might
find an employment to the full as religious in building a humble
row of cottages, if they tell of honour to the Great Creator, in
care for those whom he has bidden us to care for, and are thus,
as it were, silently dedicated to his name."

This is pre-eminently true, as well as beautiful.
Those who have witnessed the effect of a filthy and
crowded cottage — where the sexes are in close and
perilous contact night and day, where decency is diffi-
cult and comfort impossible — in breaking down the
barriers of modesty, in obliterating all the sweet and
saving attractions of a home, in weakening and dese-
crating all domestic ties, in brutalising the manners
and lowering the desires ; and those, on the other
hand, who have traced the influence of an ample, well-
ordered, and wholesome dwelling, in eliciting all that
is good., in cultivating all that is gentle and decorous,
in fortifying all that is strong, and repressing all that
is evil, in the nature of the poor, will feel with us that
the estimate of the good which, by attention and as-
sistance on this point, the great employer of labour is
able to accomplish, can scarcely be too high. But is
he to stop here ? Having provided decent dwellings
for his workmen, is he — under the relation democra-
tically based — to compel them to keep them decent ?
Having performed his duty in affording them ample
accommodation for all purposes of propriety and com-
fort, has he — being no longer their feudal superior, but
only their fellow in an equal covenant — the further
duty of forbidding them to overcrowd these dwellings
by taking in lodgers for the sake of the profit thus
obtained ? We will specify a case in point. A bene-
volent proprietor, desirous to give all his dependants
the power of a complete and easy separation of the

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 295

sexes, built a number of cottages with three bedrooms,
so that the parents might occupy one, the boys another,
and the girls a third; and found them willing to pay
an increased rent for the increased accommodation.
But he soon found that the result was simply that more
lodgers were taken, and the inmates were as indecorously
and promiscuously crowded as before. Had he a right,
and was it his duty, to interfere to prevent this indirect
defeat of his purposes ? Clearly he had the right ; not
as their employer or superior, but as one of the parties
to a reciprocal engagement. He could have no right,
as employer, to dictate to those he employed any portion
of their household arrangements ; but as landlord he
was obviously entitled to lay down the conditions on
which alone he would let his houses. Whether much
good could be done by enforcing this right ; or whether,
if enforced, the motives to occupy one of these superior
dwellings would not be so weakened or destroyed as to
render the erection of them no longer a paying specu-
lation, is much more questionable. Probably the plan
practically advisable would be found to be this; to
build only a few of these superior dwellings for those
who were competent to appreciate and willing to in-
habit them at the rent and on the conditions prescribed,
and to trust to time, and the slow and silent influence
of education and example, to create a demand for
similar accommodation among the other workpeople.
The effect of too rigid terms upon people unable to
perceive the judiciousness or the importance of them
would probably only have the effect of driving them
into an inferior set of dwellings, where they would be
at liberty to be as dirty and as crowded as they pleased.
The erection both of better family dwellings, and of
model lodging-houses for unmarried men and girls, is
sure to meet, and has met, with much disappointment

u 4

296 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

and discomfiture at the outset ; but if persevered in
with caution and tact, can scarcely fail to work a
gradual though a slow amendment in the habits of the
poor.

But while there is much to applaud and to imitate in
the conduct of the manufacturing employers of labour,
as regards their efforts to supply fitting house accom-
modation for their workmen, the proceedings of many
great landed proprietors in the south of England offer a
scandalous and painful contrast. Not only are the
dwellings of the peasants in too many districts scanty,
miserable, ill drained, and ill built, but of late years it
has been largely the custom to discourage and even pro-
hibit the building of new cottages; and even, where
opportunity offered, to pull down any that were vacated.
The object of this policy was to keep down the poor
rates, by preventing any increase of numbers from
obtaining settlements in the parish ; and its operation
has been, in the first place, to cause a most noxious and
indecent overcrowding of the remaining dwellings ; and,
secondly, to drive a large proportion of the peasantry to
reside in adjoining towns and villages, whence they have
several miles to walk to their labour in the morning,
and whither they return at night, wearied and foot-sore.
The extent to which this system has been carried, as
well as the evil it entailed, was partially unveiled by the
official report, published some years ago, " On the em-
ployment of women and children in agriculture," and it
has since been much increased.* The moral as well as

* The extent to which this system has in some places been carried
may be conjectured from the last census, where we find no fewer
than 50 districts or unions in which the number of inhabited houses
had diminished between 1841 and 1851 ; and in 31 of these the
population had diminished also. There are, besides, many parishes
in which the number of houses has been stationary, or nearly so.

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 297

physical mischief of the system is very great, and its
cruelty and selfishness utterly inexcusable. For one
landowner, or the combined landowners in the parish to
say : " We have here no employment for any increase
of the population, and therefore we will not encourage
or facilitate that increase by providing or permitting
house accommodation for it," may be fair and right;
but for them to say : " We will compel those who till
our fields and reap our harvests to live at a distance
from those fields, and so double the amount of their
fatigue and increase their hours of labour with no added
remuneration, in order that we may throw upon others
our legal burden of maintaining them in times of destitu-
tion," is about the most naked robbery and the most
barbarous injustice ever perpetrated under the forms of
civilisation and behind the screen of law. It is not only
the neglect of a duty ; it is the commission of a crime.

Fourthly. There is one great service which a master
may render to his workmen, and which; in virtue of his
superior knowledge or means of knowledge, he is espe-
cially bound to render. Among manufacturing opera-
tives, shop assistants, and domestic servants, the habit of
saving is now general — almost universal. These sav-
ings, most of them, are in the form of weekly subscrip-

Those districts where an actual diminution took place are as
follows : —

In Hampshire - - 1 Brought up - - 31

Suffolk - - 2 Carmarthenshire - - 3

Wiltshire - - 4 Pembroke - - 1

Dorset - 2 Cardigan - - 4

Devon - - - 6 Brecknock - - 2

Cornwall - - - 5 Radnor - - - 2

Somerset - - - 4 Montgomeryshire - 4

Gloucestershire - - 4 Denbigh - - - 1

Shropshire - 3 Merionethshire - - 2

Carried up - - 31 50

298 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

tions to Sick Clubs, Friendly Societies, Building schemes,
Burial Clubs, and the like. Of course the security of
these savings, and the desirability of these investments,
depend entirely on the soundness of the principles and
the accuracy of the calculations on which these clubs
and societies are based, and on the means they possess
of preventing and detecting fraud among their officers.
Defalcations are frequent among them, to the great
distress of those who have trusted them, and to the
great discouragement of provident habits among the
poor. These defalcations are sometimes the result of
deliberate villany, but oftener of a fallacy in the scale of
their payments and allowances, which any competent
actuary would have detected. Something has been
done by parliament to remedy this evil ; but notwith-
standing, it is believed that a large proportion of the
friendly societies in the kingdom — enrolled as well as
unenrolled — would now be found insolvent, or in the
way to become so, if their condition were closely scruti-
nised. Now an employer should consider it one of the
chief duties imposed upon him, by his position and
his education, to explain to his workpeople the principles
on which all such associations should be founded, to
examine the constitution and condition of all with which
any of them are connected, and to point out to them
which are sound and which are unsound — leaving them,
of course, their inalienable right as freemen to adopt the
unsound, if they will. By a little trouble taken in this
matter, the employer might not only do much good
among his dependants, but go far towards gaining their
confidence ; for here no sinister motive could be attri-
buted to him.

Lastly, one of the most obvious, sacred, and important
of the duties which a master owes to those whom he
employs, is a careful and conscientious selection of those
whom he places in authority over them. Hard-hearted

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 299

or immoral managers or overlookers may do more
mischief and inflict more suffering in a month than the
employer can countervail during his life. They come
more closely into contact with the workmen ; their in-
fluence over them is thus often both greater and more
constant. The master, therefore, who in the appoint-
ment of this class of men, regards only their economical
and intellectual, and in no wise their moral qualifications,
is guilty of a very manifest and very serious dereliction
of the obligations which his station imposes upon him.

A wide field of usefulness still remains to him in the
establishment of schools, reading-rooms, baths, wash-
houses, and the like, of the value of which it is unneces-
sary to speak here. Their importance has been long
and widely discussed ; and many examples of their
successful existence might be pointed out. But we wish
strongly to urge that, in all these schemes, the great
employer of labour should bear in mind that his rela-
tion to his workpeople is passing, if not passed, from
the feudal into the democratic stage ; and therefore that
his cue should be, not so much to establish, still less to
enforce, all these desirable institutions, as to encourage
and facilitate them. He should cultivate every wish
for them, meet every demand for them half-way, and
show his sense of their value ; but he should not fore-
stal the wish too much. If given, not gained, they are
little esteemed. If given before wanted, half the good
of them is thrown away. If bestowed on an unpre-
pared, unaspiring, and unappreciating body of workmen,
they not only take no root, and soon wither away, but
they are like pearls cast before the feet of meaner
animals — creating no gratitude towards the donor, and
no respect for the gift. Moreover, in this case, they die
out with the individual employer, having been indebted
for their existence to his personal influence alone.
These remarks are the fruit of experience, and doubtless

300 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

will find favour only with experienced readers ; so we
will fortify ourselves with a quotation from the wise
and good man, whose suggestions we have already cited
more than once.

t( In all your projects for the good of others, beware lest your
benevolence should have too much of a spirit of interference.
Consider what it is you want to produce ; not an outward
passive conformity to your plans, but something vital, which
shall generate the feelings and habits you long to see manifested.
.... How slowly are those great improvements matured,
which our impatient nature might expect to have been effected
at a single stroke ! And can you think that it is left for you to
drill men suddenly into your notions, or to produce moral ends
by mere mechanical means? You will avoid much of this
foolish spirit, if you are really unselfish in your purposes ; if, in
dealing with those whom you would benefit, you refer your
operations to them as the centre, and not to yourself. ....
Consider how a wise father acts as regards interference. His
anxiety will not be to drag his child along, undeviatingly, in the
wake of his own experience, but rather to indue him with that
knowledge of the chart and compass, and that habitual observa-
tion of the stars, which will enable the child himself to steer
safely over the great waters. The same with an employer of
labour ; for instance, if he values independence of character and
action in those whom he employs, he will be careful, in all his
benevolent measures, to leave room for their energies to work.
For what does he want to produce? Something vital, not
something mechanical."*

Such are a few of the more obvious duties which the
relation between employer and employed, even in its
modern and democratic phase, imposes on the former ;
which, in fact, are grafted on that relation by the closer
and more sacred tie of Christian "neighbourhood."
We have pointed them out but briefly, having been less
anxious to descant upon obligations which have already
been so ably and largely treated by others, than to call
attention to the modified form which those obligations
* Claims of Labour,

EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED. 301

assume from the equalising tendencies of the present
age, and to show how much that is rich, beautiful, and
useful, may be superinduced upon that relation of
"simple contract" which it is customary to represent as
so meagre, so unsatisfactory, and so unchristian. We
are, of course, far from meaning that the duties we have
enumerated form the sum total of what the labourer
may reasonably ask, or the employer conscientiously
render. If the latter be duly impressed with the great
principles we have endeavoured to elucidate ; if he have
fairly mastered the true nature of his position, as that,
not of a patron who has legitimate right and power to
guide, and who is therefore bound to govern and pro-
tect, — but of a wealthier and wiser equal, whose supe-
riority entails upon him claims, in exact proportion as
it gives him means of influence ; if he have an earnest
sense of the responsibility of talents, and of all the vast
meaning involved in the answer to the question, " Who
is my neighbour?" — he will confine himself to no
formal decalogue of " Thou shalt," and " Thou shalt
not ;" he will discover new duties every day springing
up, like flowers, along his path ; he will find the relation
between himself arid his workmen, which at first seemed
so scanty and so barren, growing richer and more
fruitful hour by hour ; he will learri how much good
may be done by casting aside all idea of keeping them
in leading-strings, and by being content to watch and
aid, rather than to urge and control ; and what great
results may flow from the exertions of the man who is
content to sow the good seed, yet leave Time and Provi-
dence to ripen the assured harvest — who is able at once
to labour, and to wait. In the vast establishments of
modern industry, the mere existence of men penetrated
with a sense of duty is of itself an immeasurable good ;
and no employer who views his position rightly, and
comprehends its full significance, who can tread his

302 EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

path steadfastly, and see its goal distinctly, can avoid
dropping showers of seeds and blessings on his way. It
is to a want of a true perception and thorough realisation
of the nature of the position, that we may trace the sad
impatience, the bitter disappointments, and the many
failures — the wrecks and the skeletons — which strew
the history of philanthropic effort; — and therefore it is
that we have taken pains to place the matter in a light
more correct, as we think, than that in which it is
generally viewed.

Of the correlative obligations of the workman, and of
the degree in which his employer's power to serve him
must depend upon himself — upon his sense of fairness,
his rationality, his unsuspicious docility — we have left
ourselves no room to speak: — our sole anxiety has
been, by a searching analysis, to place the relation itself
on a proper footing. It may be, as some think, that the
third stage, which, as we have shown, that relation has
now reached, is not to be its permanent and final one,
but that, with advancing intelligence and developed
circumstances, the relation itself is destined to cease
altogether, and merge in the wider one of association —
that capitalists are ultimately to become their own
workmen, and workmen their own employers. Time
will show. Doubtless the future has great changes in
store for us. Society, in its progress towards an ideal
state, may have to undergo modifications, compared
with which all previous ones will seem trifling and
superficial : of one thing only can we feel secure —
namely, that the loyal and punctual discharge of all the
obligations arising out of existing social relations will
best hallow, beautify, and elevate those relations, if they
are destined to be permanent ; and will best prepare a
peaceful and beneficent advent for their successors, if,
like so much that in its day seemed eternal, they, too,
are doomed to pass away.

303

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.*

WITHIN one generation three statesmen have been sud-
denly called away in the zenith of their fame, and in
the full maturity of their powers. All of them were
followed to their graves by the sincerest sorrow of the
nation ; but the nature of the grief thus universally felt
was modified in each case by the character of the indi-
vidual, the position which he held, and the nature of
the services which the country anticipated from him.
When Sir Samuel Romilly fell beneath the overwhelming
burden of a private calamity, the nation was appalled
at the suddenness of the catastrophe, and mourned over
the extinction of so bright a name. He had never held
any very prominent public office, though the general
estimation in which he was held designated him ulti-
mately for the very highest. He had achieved little,
because he was a reformer in a new path, and had to
fight his way against the yet unshaken prejudices of
generations, and the yet unbroken ranks of the veteran
opponents of all change ; but thoughtful men did honour
to the wisdom and purity of his views, and there was
steadily growing up among all classes of the community
a profound conviction of his earnestness, sincerity, and

* From the " Westminster Review."

1. Life and Times of Sir Robert Peel. By W. C. TAYLOR.
London: 1848.

2. Speeches of Sir Robert Peel. (In course of publication).
London: 1851.

3. Political Life of Lord George Bentinck. By B. DISRAELI.
London: 1852.

4. History of the Whig Administration. By J. A. ROEBUCK.
London: 1852.

304 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

superiority to all selfish and party aims, and a deep and
hearty reverence for the stern, grave, Koman-like virtue
which distinguished him from nearly all his contempo-
raries. It was universally felt, that if he had lived he
would have risen high and have done much ; and that,
whether he lived or died, the mere existence of so lofty
and spotless a character reflected lustre on the country
where he shone, and raised the standard by which public
men were judged. It was felt, that although England
might not suffer greatly by the loss of his services, it
would at least be the less bright and glorious for his
departure ; and hence he was mourned for with an un-
usually unselfish and single-minded grief. — The regret
of the nation at Canning's untimely death was at once
more bitter and more mixed. A brilliant " spirit was
eclipsed;" the voice that had so long charmed us was
henceforth to be silent ; the intellect that had served the
country so long and so gallantly could serve her no
more. All this was sad enough, but there was some-
thing beyond this. There was the feeling that the
curtain had fallen before the drama was played out,
when its direction had just been indicated, but while the
issue could as yet be only dimly guessed. There was a
general impression that, with his acceptance of the
Foreign Office in 1822, a new era and a noble line of
policy had commenced for England, and that, with his
accession to the premiership in 1827, the ultimate tri-
umph of that policy was secured ; that the flippancy
and insolence which had made him so many enemies in
early life, were about to be atoned for by conscientious
principle and eminent services; — that years and expe-
rience had matured his wisdom, while sobering his
temper and strengthening his powers ; — that the wit
and genius which, while he was the ill-yoked colleague
of Pitt, Sidmouth, and Castlerea-gh, had too often been
employed to adorn narrowness, to hide incapacity, and

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 305

to justify oppression, would now be consecrated to the
cause of freedom and of progress ; — and that the many
errors of his inconsiderate youth would be nobly re-
deemed by the dignified labours of his ripened age.
With one memorable and painful exception, his former
antagonists were yearning to forgive the past, and to
form the most sanguine visions for the future ; and the
dismay which his elevation spread among the tyrants
abroad, was the measure of the joy with which it was
hailed by the Liberals at home. When, therefore, he
died, after only four months' tenure of his lofty station,
the universal cry was, that the good cause had lost its
best soldier and its brightest hope. Men could scarcely
forbear from murmuring that so brief a sceptre had been
granted to one who meant so well and could have done
so much ; and to all the friends of human progress, the
announcement of his death was like thick darkness
settling down upon their cherished anticipations. But
another feeling mixed with those of sorrow and de-
spondency— a feeling of bitter indignation. Eight or
wrong, it was believed that Canning had fallen a victim,
not to natural maladies, nor yet to the fatigues of his
position, but to the rancorous animosity of former asso-
ciates and eternal foes. It was believed that he had
been hunted to death , with a deliberate malignity, which,
to one so acutely sensitive as himself, could scarcely
have been otherwise than fatal. There was much truth
in this. The old aristocrats hated him as a plebeian,
though Nature's self had unmistakably stamped him as
a noble ; the exclusives loathed him as an "adventurer ;"
the Tories abhorred him as an innovator ; powerful and
well-born rivals could not forgive him for the genius
which had enabled him to climb over their heads ; some
could not forget his past sins ; others could not endure
his present virtues ; — and all combined to mete out to
him, in overwhelming measure, the injustice, the sarcasm,
VOL. n. x

306 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

the biting taunt, the merciless invective, with which, in
days long gone by, he had been wont to encounter his
antagonists. There was something of righteous retri-
bution in the treatment which must have made it doubly
difficult to bear: — what wonder that he sunk under
the assault ? But the British nation, which instinctively
revolts from any flagrant want of generosity, and will
not endure that a man should be punished for attempt-
ing, however tardily, to recover and do right, — have
done full justice to his memory, and have never heartily
pardoned his assailants.

The sudden and untimely death of Sir Kobert Peel
gave a severe shock to the feelings of the country,
occasioned deeper and wider regret, a more painful
sense of irreparable loss, and of uneasiness and appre-
hension for the future, than any similar event since the
death of Canning. The loss of Mr. Huskisson was a
great one ; but the country felt that there were others
on whom his mantle had fallen who were competent to
follow in his steps, and to replace him at the council
board. Lord Grey, when he died, had long retired
from office ; he was as full of years as of honours, and
the nation had nothing to anticipate from his future
exertions ; thus the general sentiment at his departure
was one of simple sympathy and calm regret. Lord
Spencer, too, popular and respected as he had once
been, belonged rather to the past than to the present ;
and though regretted, he was no longer wanted. But
long as the public career of Sir E. Peel had been, no
one regarded it as closed; great as were the services
which he had rendered to his country, there were yet
many more which it looked to receiving at his hands.
The book was still open ; though no longer in the early
prime, or the unbroken vigour of life, he was in that
full maturity of wisdom with which age and experience
seldom fail to crown an existence as energetically spent

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 307

as his had been ; he filled a larger space in the eyes of
England and the world than any other statesman of his
day and generation ; and to his tried skill, his proved
patriotism, his sedate and sober views, and his un-
matched administrative capacity, the nation looked with
confidence and hope as the sheet-anchor of its safety.
We believe there never was a statesman in this country
on whose trained and experienced powers, on whose
adequacy to any emergency and any trial, both friend
and foe, coadjutor and antagonist, rested with such a
sense of security and reliance. As long as the Duke of
Wellington remained in the full possession of his powers,
the country felt that it need not fear the result of any
war; as long as Sir R. Peel was spared to us, the
country felt that it need not lose heart at any domestic
convulsion or civil crisis. Hence the universal feeling
of dismay which attended the announcement of his un-
expected death in 1849. It was not that we could not
yet boast of many men of great administrative ability }
some statesmen of profound and comprehensive views,
and several rising politicians who may, in the future,
vindicate their claim to high renown ; but Sir R. Peel
left behind him no one whom the nation esteemed his
equal — no one who, naturally and by universal accla-
mation, stepped into his vacant place, as the acknow-
ledged inheritor of his influence and his fame — no one
whom, in case of danger or emergency, England could
unanimously and instinctively place at the head of
affairs.

The time has perhaps scarcely yet come for a full
and impartial estimate of the character and career of
this eminent man. The shock of his death is still too
recent, the memory of his signal services in the great
struggle of the day too fresh in the mind of the nation,
and the possibility of crises, in which we shall incline
to turn to him with unavailing longing, too imminent,

x 2

308 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

to make it likely that we can avoid erring on the side
of lenity to his failings, and undue admiration of his
capacities and his achievements. His own papers and
correspondence, which we trust will shortly be given to
the world, are still also a sealed book ; and we may err
in our estimate of some transactions for want of the
light which the publication of these documents could
throw over them. But on the other hand, many im-
pressions are now fresh in our minds which fade away
year by year. We have always been conscientious op-
ponents of the great party with which he acted during
four-fifths of his career ; and we feel wholly free from
the bias which connection with any political school can
scarcely fail to create. We are conscious of no feelings
or prepossessions which should prevent us from trying
Sir Robert Peel by the fairest standard which morality
and philosophy can set up ; and if we should be thought,
wherever doubt is possible, to incline to the more chari-
table explanation, it is because we from our hearts
believe that, in estimating public men in England, the
more charitable our judgment is, the more likely is it
to be just.

It is interesting to observe what a vast majority of
our most eminent statesmen, during the last century,
have been commoners, and how many even of these
have sprung out of the middle class, strictly so called.
William Pitt, "the great commoner," was the second
son of a country gentleman, who had acquired parlia-
mentary importance by the purchase of close boroughs.
Edmund Burke was the son of an Irish attorney. The
father of Charles James Fox was the second son of a
country baronet of no very enviable reputation, in
Walpole's time. Canning's father was a briefless bar-
rister, whose family cut him off with an annuity of
., and whose widow was afterwards obliged to

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 309

support herself by going upon the stage. His friend
Huskisson was the son of a country gentleman in Staf-
fordshire, of very restricted means. The origin of Sir
Robert Peel was humbler than that of any, his father
having begun life as a manufacturer in a small way, in
Lancashire, and having rapidly risen to enormous
wealth. These recollections are encouraging enough ;
they seem to indicate that, whatever may be the fate or
condition of our aristocratic families, the under strata
of society are fully adequate to furnish a constant
supply of suitable candidates for the public service, and
that there is nothing in our national system which
need prevent such men from rising to their proper
station. It is worthy of note, that none of those we
have named owed their elevation to the legal profession,
which, in all times, has been a ready ladder by which
plebeian ambition could attain the highest posts.

Sir Robert Peel's father early destined him for public
life, and was resolved that he should enjoy every advan-
tage for the race he was to run. No pains was spared
in his education. At Harrow he was noted for steady
diligence, but not for brilliant parts. At Oxford he
took a double-first. He entered parliament in 1809 ;
was made Under Secretary for the Colonies in 1811;
Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1812 ; Home Secretary in
1822; Prime Minister in 1834; and again in 1841.
His parliamentary life lasted just forty years ; and
during the whole of it, whether in or out of office, he
was prominently before the public eye.

His public life exactly coincides with the eventful
period during which an entire change has been wrought
in the tone and spirit of our national policy, foreign
and domestic — a change which he, partly intentionally,
partly unconsciously, contributed much to bring about.
When he appeared upon the stage, old ideas and old
principles were predominant, triumphant, and almost

x 3

310 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

unshaken. When, at the age of sixty-one, the curtain
closed upon his career, everything had become new.
When he entered public life, we were in the midst of
the most desperate war England ever had to wage, un-
dertaken on behalf of an exiled royal family, and ended
by replacing them upon a throne from which they had
already been once driven by popular insurrection, and
from which they were soon to be ignominiously ex-
pelled a second time. Before three summers have
passed over his grave, we find statesmen of every party
— Lord Derby, Lord John Russell, and Lord Palmer-
ston — vieing with each other in proclaiming as the
guiding principle of the foreign policy of Britain, the
acknowledgment of the indisputable right of every
nation to choose its own rulers and its own form of
government. When Sir Robert. Peel became Chief Se-
cretary for Ireland at the age of twenty-four, the penal
laws against the Catholics were in full force, and seem-
ingly stereotyped in our statute book. One of his
last measures during his last term of office was to
endow in perpetuity the Catholic College of Maynooth.
When he began life, the Test and Corporation Acts
were unrepealed, and the Dissenters were fettered and
irritated by numberless injustices ; by the passing of
the Dissenters Chapels Bill before his death he helped
to sweep the last of them away. In 1809, the old
glories of rotten boroughs and purchaseable constitu-
encies were untouched and unbreathed upon; the
middle classes and the great towns to which England
owed so much of her wealth and energy, were almost
without a voice in the legislature ; and the party which
had held power, by a sort of prescriptive right, for a
quarter of a century, was pledged to resist any change
in the representation. In 1849, Parliamentary Reform
had been matter of history for seventeen years, and
rumours of a new and further innovation were be-

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 311

ginning to be heard without either alarm or incredulity.
In 1809 the most restrictive and protective commercial
policy was not only established, but its wisdom and
justice were not even questioned. In 1849, Sir Robert
Peel went to his grave amid the blessings of millions,
for having swept it away for ever. Finally, when he
entered political life, the old Tory party seemed as
rooted in Downing Street as the oak of the forest, and
the Whigs to have their permanent and natural place in
opposition. When he finally quitted office, the old
Tory party was broken up and obsolete, and even
their modified and advanced successors maintained an
unequal contest with the Liberals. Everything that
the men with whom he was first connected most
dreaded and deprecated had been done ; everything
that they pronounced impossible had come to pass.
Parliament had been reformed ; Catholics had been
emancipated ; Dissenters had been raised to a footing of
equality ; Unitarians and Quakers sat in St. Stephens ;
republics had been unhesitatingly acknowledged; the
corn laws and the sugar duties had been ruthlessly
abolished. An entirely new spirit has been infused
into our policy — the spirit of freedom and pro-
gress. If Sir Robert Peel's first chief, Mr. Perceval,
could return to life, he would find himself in a world
in which he could recognise nothing, and in which he
would be shocked at everything ; and it is hard to say
whether England or her quondam premier wrould be
most scandalised at each other's mutually strange and
ghastly apparition. And all this mighty change has
taken place during the career, and partly by the instru-
mentality, of a single statesman.

Sir Robert Peel's accession to the cabinet in 1822 in
place of Lord Sidmouth, synchronising as it did with
Canning's return to the management of our foreign
affairs, coincides with the commencement of a purer

x 4

312 SIR R. PEEI/S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

morality and a higher tone of character among public
men. Since that time there has been little jobbing, and
scarcely a single transaction that could be called dis-
graceful among English ministers. Peculation and
actual corruption, or rather corruptibility, have, it is
true, never been the characteristics of our political per-
sonages since the time of Walpole and Pelham ; but up
to the beginning of this century, jobbing of every kind
among public men was common, flagrant, and shame-
less. Even in the days of Pitt, places, pensions, and
sinecures, were lavished with the most unblushing pro-
fusion to gratify official avarice, to reward private
friendship, or to purchase parliamentary support. Mi-
nisters provided for their families and relations out of the
public purse with as little scruple as bishops do now ;
and indeed considered it as part of the emoluments of
office to be able to do so. The Prime Minister (Perce-
val, for example,) pocketed two or three comfortable
sinecures himself, as a matter of course. Public opinion
and the public press exercised only a very lax and in-
adequate watchfulness over the public purse. The trial
of Lord Melville, First Lord of the Admiralty, for mal-
versation, is familiar to every one. The same laxity of
official morality prevailed in Perceval's time, and, in-
deed, with little improvement, till Lord Sidmouth's
retirement. A glance over the pension and sinecure
list of those days is painfully instructive. In 1810 the
number of sinecures was 242, and the emoluments
attached to them 279,486^. a year: in 1834, these were
reduced to 97,800?., and they do not now exceed 17,000£.
In the reign of George III. the pension list considerably
exceeded 200,000^. a year; and even as late as 1810, it
reached 145, OOO/. : it is now reduced to 75,000/. ; and
of this sum not more than 1200/. can be granted in any
one year. The committee on official salaries, which sat
during 1850, brought out in strong relief the contrast

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 313

between the present and the past in all points connected
with the purity of our administrative departments ; and
it is impossible to read the evidence in detail without
being strongly impressed with the high morality and
spotless integrity which now distinguish our public
men. All the acuteness of our financial reformers on
that occasion could not drag to light a single job, and
scarcely a single abuse, while it placed in the very
brightness of noon -day the official probity and honour of
the existing race of statesmen.

But this is far from being the only improvement that
has taken place among them. Their notions of patriot-
ism have become loftier and more just; their allegiance
to party more modified and discriminating ; their de-
votion to their country more paramount and religious.
They are more conscientiously obedient to their own
convictions, and less submissive to the trammels of
regimental discipline. Statesmen are beginning to feel
not merely that they are playing a noble game, pregnant
with the most thrilling interest, and involving the
mightiest stakes — but that they are called upon to
guide a glorious vessel, freighted with richer fortunes
than ever Ca3sar carried with him, through fluctuating
shoals, and sunken rocks, and eddying whirlpools, and
terrific tempests; that on their skill, their watchfulness,
their courage, their purity, their abnegation of all selfish
aims, depend the destinies of the greatest nation that
ever stood in the vanguard of civilisation and freedom ;
that they must not only steer their course with a stead-
fast purpose and a single eye, and keep their hands
clean, their light burning, and their conscience clear, —
but that even personal reputation and the pride of
consistency must be cast aside, if need be, when the
country can be best served by their ifhmolation. They
must act

" As ever in their Great Taskmaster's eye,"

314 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

and must find in these lofty views of a statesman's
honour and requirements the only counteraction that
can be found to the mean struggles, the wearisome de-
tails, the unworthy motives, the low and little interests
with which they are brought daily into contact.

The key to all the enigmas, all the imputed guilt, all
the peculiar usefulness to his country of Peel's career,
is to be sought in the original contrast between his
character and his position. Of a cautious and observing
temper, and conscientiously desirous to do the best for
his country whenever that best became clear to him, he
was the son of a Tory of the narrowest and stiffest sort,
whose mind had been enlarged by no culture and whom
no experience perhaps could have taught ; and he was
at once enlisted into the ranks and served under the
orders of men who rarely doubted, who never in-
quired, into whose minds no suspicion ever entered that
what was best for their party might possibly not be best
for the nation also, to whom every article in their own
creed appeared unquestionably right, and every article
in their opponent's creed as unquestionably wrong. In
those days — in all times perhaps to a greater or less
extent — the young men whose birth or connections or
parental position destined them for a political career,
entered public life, as our young clergymen enter the
church now, with the thirty-nine articles of their faith
put, ready cut and dried, into their hands — unex-
amined, unquestioned, often unread ; their opinions,
like their lands, were a portion of their patrimony ; and
they no more suspected the soundness of the one than
the value of the other. As at Oxford and Cambridge
men are educated for the clerical profession not by a
searching critical and philosophical investigation into
the basis of the creed they are to teach — not by an
acquisition of all those branches of knowledge which
alone could entitle them to form an independent opinion

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 315

on its merits — not by a judicial hearing of all that can
be said against it as well as for it — but simply and
solely by a memorial mastery of the items which com-
pose it, and a competent acquaintance with the stock
arguments which the learning and ingenuity of all times
have discovered in its favour; — so were the young
politicians of Peel's day prepared for the arena into
which they were cast and the strife they were to wage
. — not by a careful study of political science in the
works of the masters who have thrown light upon it
from all sides — not by a profound acquaintance with
the wisdom which is learnt from history — not by
mastering the difficult problems of political and social
economy — not by a conscientious appreciation of the
truth that lay in the views of their antagonists and a
sedulous elimination of the error that had crept into
their own, — but merely by habitually seeing and hearing
only one side of every question — by imbibing every
prejudice, reflecting every passion, learning to echo
with thoughtless confidence every watch- cry of the
party for whose service they were designed. And as
our young clergymen begin their theological studies —
as far as those studies consist in the first great duty of
ascertaining and following the truth — only after they
have assumed the livery and sworn the oath of fealty
and of faith, only when the fatal document has been
signed and the investiture of slavery received, only
when their doom is irrevocably fixed, and when earnest
and single-minded inquiry incurs the awful hazard of
landing them in doctrines which they have vowed, and
were enlisted, to combat and destroy, and — if they be
honest men — of casting them forth upon the world
with the blighted prospects and the damaged character
of renegades and apostates, or at best with the stigma
of instability and inconsequence for ever clinging to
their name; — so did the young statesmen of Peel's

316 SIR E. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

epoch begin their political education when they had
already taken their seats in parliament, returned by a
particular interest, and on the faith of definite or under-
stood professions : they began to examine and reflect
on political questions when such deliberation was es-
pecially difficult, because in the midst of an exasperating
contest, and especially dangerous because, if sincere, it
wTas as likely as not to lead them to desertion and
damnation. Hence, with the members of both pro-
fessions, it has been the too common practice — natural
and, from human weakness, scarcely avoidable and only
gently to be condemned — to shut their eyes and fight
blindly on, endeavouring to believe themselves con-
scientious so long as they were consistent and satisfied,
so long as they used the old weapons, marched under
the old banner, and stood by the old friends.

Great as is the public evil, and severe the individual
misery, arising from the source just indicated, few who
reflect how large a portion of the opinions of all of us
is hereditary, will be disposed to deal severely either
with the sinners or the sufferers. We naturally adopt
the views of those whom we have loved and honoured
from our infancy, and it is right we should. We natu-
rally imagine that those who have been wise and faith-
ful in all that regards ourselves, are equally wise and
faithful in matters that lie beyond the scope of our
present knowledge. We naturally believe that doctrines
against which we have never heard anything said, are
doctrines against which nothing can be said ; and we
find it hard to conceive, that what we have always heard
treated as axioms of science, are among the most dis-
putable matters of opinion. Not only our positive
creed, but our tone arid turn of mind, are framed in-
stinctively after the model of those among whom we
live ; and thus it becomes a matter of the greatest dif-
ficulty both to enter into and do justice to the views of

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 317

others when presented to us, or to divest ourselves even
of what may hereafter be proved erroneous in our own.
No man can start in life, whether in a political, religious,
or literary career, with his mind a carte blanche : few
can wait to take up a definite position till they have
thoroughly mastered and impartially weighed all sides
of the great questions with which they have to deal.
In public affairs, especially, action is an essential requi-
site to a complete understanding of them ; it is only by
being involved in them that you can see deeply into
them ; it is only in parliament that the education of a
member of parliament can be completed. It is not till
you hear views diametrically opposed to those you have
inherited, stated by an opponent whose powers you
cannot but recognise as superior to your own, and
whose sincerity of conviction you cannot doubt, that
you perceive, with amazement and dismay, how doubt-
ful appears much that you had always considered as
self-evident, and how plausible seems much that you
had been taught to regard as monstrous and indefen-
sible. An abyss seems to open beneath your feet : the
solid ground is no longer stable ; and all the landmarks
of your mind are shaken or removed. Much change,
many inconsistencies, some vacillation even, should be
forgiven to all who serve the country as senators or
statesmen, especially to those who enter on her service
young.

Few men have drawn more largely than Sir Robert
Peel on this wise indulgence, and few have had a
stronger claim to have it extended to them in overflow-
ing measure. It was his irreparable calamity to have
been thrown by nature into a false position. His birth
was his misfortune — a sort of original sin which clung
to him through life. Born in the very centre of the
Tory camp, in a period when Toryism was an aggres-
sive principle, an intolerant dogma, a fanatic sentiment,

318 SIR n. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

— in a period, too, when party passions were virulent
and unmeasured to a degree of which we, in our times,
have had only one brief specimen, and when Toryism
was rampant, dominant, and narrow, in a manner which
amazes and shocks us as we read the contemporary
annals of those days, — Sir Robert Peel was yet en-
dowed with native qualities which could not fail to place
him at once in antagonism with his position, for he had
a solid intellect, an honest conscience, an innate sense
of justice and humanity, an acute observation, and a
keen spirit of inquiry, which were incompatible with
Toryism as it then existed, — mental and moral endow-
ments which, from the moment he entered public life,
placed him among the most liberal and enlightened of
his own party, which speedily created a sort of secret
uneasiness among them, and which clearly showed that
he was destined either to drag them on with him, or to
march on before them and without them. To this ori-
ginally false position may be traced nearly all those
obliquities and inconsistencies which have laid Sir
Robert Peel's career so open to hostile criticism.
Created of the stuff out of which moderate Liberals are
made, but born into the ranks in which only rigid
Tories could be found, his whole course was a sort of
perpetual protest against the accident of his birth — an
inevitable and perplexing struggle between his character
and his circumstances, his conscience and his colleagues,
his allegiance to principle and his allegiance to party.
As his mind ripened and his experience increased, he
was compelled, time after time, to recognise the error
of the views which he had formerly maintained, and
which his colleagues still adhered to ; and like all pro-
gressive statesmen, he was frequently obliged to act on
his old opinions, while those opinions were in process of
transition, and to defend courses, the policy of which
he had begun to suspect, but had not yet definitely

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 319

decided to abandon. Hence, if we look at his strange
and incongruous career in a severe and hostile spirit,
we see a minister who through life was incessantly
abandoning doctrines he had long pertinaciously upheld,
and carrying out systems of policy he had long de-
nounced as dangerous and unsound — deserting and
betraying his own party, and usurping the victory of
his opponents. Looking at the same career from a more
generous, a more philosophic, and, as we deem it, a
juster point of view, we see a statesman born in intole-
rant times, and cast among a despotic and narrow-
minded party, whose path through history may be
traced by the exuvice he has left lying by the wayside,
by the garments he has outgrown and flung away, by
the shackles from which he has emancipated himself, by
the errors which he has abandoned and redeemed.

The political progress of a country, with free institu-
tions and a parliamentary government like that of
England, is brought about by the perpetual struggle
between two great parties, each of whom is the repre-
sentative— often imperfect and unworthy enough — of
distinct principles and modes of thought. The predo-
minant idea and feeling of one party, is reverence for
ancestral wisdom and attachment to a glorious past,
beautiful in itself, but unduly gilded by a credulous and
loving fancy: — the predominant sentiment of the other
is aspiration after a better future. The efforts of the
first are directed to preserve and consolidate what is left
to us : those of the second, to achieve whatever is not
yet attained. From their contests and compromises —
contests confined within fixed limits, and conducted
according to certain understood rules of war — compro-
mises by which one party foregoes something to obtain
an earlier victory, and the other sacrifices something to
avert an utter defeat — results the national advance

320 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

towards a more humane, just, and comprehensive policy.
The progress bears the stamp of the mode in which it is
wrought out ; it is slow, fragmentary, and fitful ; but it
is secure against retrogression, and it never overleaps
itself, It exhibits none of those mournful, disappoint-
ing, and alarming spectacles with which the political
struggles of the Continent abound. The party of the
past, however mighty in possession, and however dog-
gedly entrenched, is never able wholly to resist. The
party of the future, however elastic with the energy,
and buoyant with the hopes of youth, is never power-
ful enough to carry all before it. Those who pull for-
ward and those who hold back, never fairly break
asunder. All move together — against the wish of the
latter — but far more slowly than the former would
desire. Neither party entirely separates from the other,
as in Germany. Neither party entirely overpowers the
other, as in France.

Now this peculiar character of our progress, to which
must be attributed both its durability and its safety, is
due to a class of men to whom England owes more than
to almost any of her sons, and to whom she is in general
most scandalously ungrateful — viz., the Liberals in the
Conservative camp, and the Conservatives in the Liberal
camp. Unappreciated by the country — misrepresented
by the press — misconstrued and mistrusted by their
friends — suspected of meditated desertion — reproached
with virtual treason — suffering the hard but invariable
fate of those who are wide among the narrow, compre-
hensive amid the bornes, moderate among the violent,
sober among the drunken— condemned to combat against
their brethren-, and to fraternise with their antagonists
— they lead a life of pain arid mortification, and not
unfrequently sink under the load of unmerited obloquy,
which their unusual, and therefore unintelligible, con-
duct brings upon them. -The Liberals call them timid

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 321

and lukewarm Laodiceans ; the Tories call them
crotchetty, impracticable, and fastidious. They do the
hardest duty of the conscientious patriot, and are re-
warded by the bitterest abuse that could be lavished on
the common enemy. Lord Falkland was one of these
men ; Burke was another ; Lord Grey, in a measure,
was a man of the same stamp. These were all Con-
servatives among the friends of progress. Sir Robert
Peel was a Liberal, cast among the friends of stationari-
ness and reaction. In the march of the nation towards
securer prosperity, sounder principles, and a wiser
policy, he occupied for more than a quarter of a century
that post of pain, calumny, and mortification — but of
inestimable importance also — the Leader of the Laggards,
—the man who chained together the onward movement
and the backward drag — the Reformers and the Tories;
who saved the latter from being left utterly behind —
stranded, useless, and obsolete ; and checked the too
rapid advance of the former, by acting as the bond
which compelled them to draw the reluctant conserva-
tism of society along with them.

Peel's naturally just and liberal sentiments showed
themselves in various small indications early in life, and
excited some uneasy misgivings in the minds of his own
bigoted colleagues. As early as 1812, when he was
Irish Secretary, and when such notions were rare among
his party, he expressed in parliament his anxiety for
the extension of education among the Irish peasantry;
and in 1824, when he was Home Secretary, he gave
great offence to the Ultra-Protestants of his party by
expressing himself thus : — "In the education of the
poor in Ireland, two great rules ought now to be
observed : first to unite, as far as possible, without vio-
lence to individual feelings, the children of Protestants
and Catholics under one common system of education ;
and secondly, in so doing, studiously and honestly to

VOL. II. Y

322 SIB B. PEEL'S CIIABACTEB AND POLICY.

discard all idea of making proselytes. The Society
whose exertions had been referred to [the Kildare
Street Society] seemed to him to have erred in the latter
respect." When lie came into office, after the Eeform
Bill, as is well known, he steadily supported and firmly
administered the system of mixed education introduced
by the Whigs. As soon as he entered the Cabinet in
1822 he directed his immediate attention to the amelio-
ration of our prison discipline and the mitigation of the
scandalous severity of the criminal code, and in June of
that year announced that government were preparing
measures on these important topics. In March, 1826,
he introduced two valuable Bills, for " the Improvement
and Consolidation of the Criminal Laws," in a speech of
singular modesty, discretion, and good feeling; but
most unhappily he omitted to do justice to the harder
labours of his predecessors in the same field ; and those
who remembered the persevering but unavailing efforts
of Sir Samuel Komilly, and Sir James Mackintosh, for
similar objects, at a time when humanity was rarer and
less reputable, could not forgive his apparently unge-
nerous silence. They ever afterwards accused him of
" gathering where he had not strewed, and reaping
where he had not sown." Three years later, when the
colleague of the Duke of Wellington, he introduced one
of the greatest administrative improvements of our time
— the new police force in place of the old incapable
nocturnal watchmen, and the inefficient and scanty
parish constables. And throughout the whole of this
term of office he showed the most earnest spirit of
economy and retrenchment, such as extorted the ap-
plause even of the Opposition. " They," says Mr. Eoe-
buck (vol. i. p. 164.), "who were most conversant with
the finances of the country considered that economy
was carried further than had been yet known, and that
a spirit of fairness and complete freedom from jobbing

SIR K. TEEI/S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 323

or nepotism pervaded every branch of the administra-
tion." Mr. Hume, who was undoubtedly the most earnest
advocate for retrenchment in the House, frankly acknow-
ledged that " the Chancellor of the Exchequer had gone
as far as he imagined he could go with safety on the
present occasion." Mr. Baring and Mr Huskisson, both
great authorities on such subjects, confessed that " the
Chancellor of the Exchequer had gone to the utmost verge
of reduction possible in the present state of the country,
without the substitution of other taxes." And generally
the selection of the taxes to be taken off was deemed
judicious — and made solely with a view to public and
not partial interests. — We have enumerated briefly
these points in Sir Robert Peel's career, to prove that
the liberalism which he showed so increasingly in later
life was no external element superinduced upon his cha-
racter by the change in his political position and party
connections, but one which had been always present,
though long kept under restraint by unsympathising
colleagues and the native caution of his temperament.

Many of Sir Robert Peel's qualities and defects as a
minister lay upon the surface, and might be compre-
hended at a glance. He was not a man of genius ; he
was not a man of consistent action ; he had nothing of
the deep-seated science of the philosophic statesman;
and till the last four or five years of his life, he displayed
nothing of the high historic grandeur of the patriot-
hero. But he had other qualifications and endowments,
which, if less grand and rare, were probably more suited
to the age in which his lot was cast, and the part which
he was called upon to play. In the first place, he was,
pre-eminently, and above all things, prudent. Cautious
by temperament, moderate by taste, his instinctive pre-
ference was always for a middle course : he disliked
rashness, and he shrank from risk ; the responsibilities
of office were always for him a sobering and retarding

T 2

324 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

weight : and those who watched his course and studied
his character, early perceived that he was not a leader
who would ever push matters to an extreme, or put to
hazard the tranquillity or the welfare of the country by
too pertinacious and protracted an adherence to per-
sonal sentiments or old opinions, or by too desperate a
fidelity to prejudice or party. He might be too tardy
sometimes in yielding ; but no one doubted that he
would yield, if it became obviously wise and necessary
to do so. He carried prudence almost to the height of
genius, and early earned for himself the most service-
able of all reputations in this country — that of being
a " safe man."

Connected with this leading characteristic was another
of the same order. He was uniformly decorous, and had
a high sense of dignity and propriety. He was a wor-
shipper of the TO TrpsTrov both in manners and in conduct.
He scarcely ever offended against either the conventional
or the essential lienseances of society. He never made
enemies, as Canning did, by ill-timed levity or heartless
jokes. His speeches and those of his brilliant colleague?
on the occasion of the Manchester massacre, place in
strong contrast the distinctive peculiarities of the two
men. Both took the same side, and nearly the same
line of defence; but the tone of the one was insolent
and unfeeling, that of the other dignified and judicial.
The language of Canning on that occasion was never
forgotten or forgiven : after a few years no one remem-
bered that Peel had ever had the misfortune to defend
so bad a cause. Peel too had, even at the beginning of
his career, too great a respect for his own character, to
allow himself to be dragged through the dirt by his
superior colleagues. Even when his position obliged
him to excuse what was indefensible, he contrived to
allow his inward disapproval to pierce through his apo-
logy. He was fortunate enough, or skilful enough, to

sm E. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 325

be out of office during the memorable prosecution of
the Queen ; and the only time that he was compelled to
speak upon that disgraceful business, he expressed a
grave regret that a suitable palace had not been pro-
vided for her Majesty, and that her name had been ex-
cluded from the liturgy.

One requisite for an English statesman — perhaps at
the present day the most indispensable of all — in which
the Whigs generally have been singularly deficient —
Peel possessed in unusual measure, at least in the latter
portion of his life — viz., a quick and instinctive percep-
tion of public opinion. He had a keen and sensitive
ear to the voice of the nation, and an almost unerring
tact in distinguishing the language of its real leaders
and movers from that of mere noisy and unimportant
declaimers. He seems first to have acquired this faculty
in 1829, or at least to have awakened to a sense of its
vast importance ; and the memorable two years during
which the Keform Bill was under discussion — a time in
which his political education advanced with marvellous
rapidity — brought it almost to perfection. This pecu-
liar tact Lord John Eussell never has been able to learn.
And in truth it is not easy to acquire it, or to say how
it is to be acquired. It is an instinct rather than an
attainment ; and an aristocracy which does not belong
to the people, or live much with them, or sympathise
promptly in their feelings, seldom possesses it. Public
opinion expresses itself in many ways; its various
organs hold fluctuating language, and give forth con-
flicting oracles ; the powerful classes are often silent ;
the uninfluential classes are generally clamorous. If
novel and important measures are proposed, those who
concur are commonly satisfied with a quiet and stately
nod of approbation : those who object are loud and
vehement in their opposition. How, amid these con-
tradictory perplexities, is a statesman to ascertain the

Y 3

326 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

sentiments of the intelligent and effective portion of the
nation ? If he goes to the members of the House of
Commons, he cannot overlook the fact that they re-
present only the feelings of their constituents, or, it
may be, of their nominators ; and that the unrepresented,
or the unequally represented, portion of the community
forms a most essential element in the popular opinion.
At best, members cannot be relied on to speak more
than the sentiments of the country at the time of their
election ; and they, like the minister, are students of
the same problem, and puzzled with the same conflicting
clamours. If he looks to petitions, he is inquiring in a
most deceptive quarter; for we all know how even
"monster" petitions can be "got up." If he looks to
public meetings, he cannot fail to be aware that their
importance and significance depend entirely on the
character and position of the people who take a part in
them ; that there are meetings of many thousands in the
open air, which it would be folly to listen to, and mere
weakness to respect ; and meetings of a few scores " in
an upper chamber," indicative of. an influence and of
sentiments which it would be absolute insanity to dis-
regard. Lastly, if he looks to the press, how is he to
know among what class of readers each newspaper cir-
culates ? How can he tell whether it is really express-
ing their sentiments, or merely seeking to lead them to
its own. How can he ascertain whether on any parti-
cular topic, such as Lord Palmerston or the Poor Law,
the " Times " is actually the organ of public opinion,
or only that of private malignity, or idiosyncratic
crotchets ? How is he to distinguish how many of its
readers read it with disgust and disagreement, like him-
self, and how many with acquiescence and credulity ?
Where the press is not unanimous, or nearly so — where
it is widely divided in its judgments, as is almost con-
stantly the case — how is the statesman to apportion to

sin R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 327

each organ its actual influence, or the number and
weight of its clients, so as to gather from the whole
something like an accurate estimate of the national ex-
pression ? It is abundantly obvious that he must be
left very much to the guidance of his own sagacity;
and with this sagacity Sir Robert Peel was endowed in
a most unusual measure. After 1832, he scarcely ever
made the mistake — which his antagonists were making
every day — of not knowing whose quiet voice to listen
to, and whose clamorous demands to disregard.

Sir Robert Peel was not certainly a statesman of the
highest order which we can picture to ourselves for the
government of a great state ; but it is by no means so
clear that he was not the most finished specimen of that
peculiar class of statesmen who alone can find a place
in a representative constitution such as ours, in which
the democratic element so largely preponderates. He
had no far-seeing plans for the preservation and regene-
ration of the empire, which he kept in view through all
vicissitudes, and to which, amid all his various terms of
office, he perse veringly made everything conduce. His
policy was based upon no profound or well-digested
system, upon no philosophic principle to which he
could adhere through good report and ill report, and
keep ever before him as the guide and pole-star of his
career. To praise like this he has no claim. He often
erred as to what ought to be done, and he often dis-
covered it deplorably too late. But whatever he had to
do he did well. He had the rare merit, among our
public characters, of being a thorough man of business.
He was a statesman of consummate administrative
ability. His measures were always concocted with the
most deliberate and patient skill. His budgets were
models of clearness and compactness. As soon as
discussion began, it was made apparent that he had
weighed every difficulty and foreseen every objection.

Y 4

328 SIR E. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

He was always master of his subject. The result was
that his proposals scarcely ever underwent any altera-
tion in their passage through parliament ; they might
be accepted or rejected ; they were never mutilated or
transmogrified. Those of his opponents, on the other
hand, even when in the plenitude of their power, and
commanding such a majority as had backed scarce any
minister since the days of Pitt, were so clipped, cur-
tailed, modified, and added to, that when they came
forth from the ordeal, the parents could scarcely recog-
nise their own offspring. Peel's measures were finished
laws before they were brought forward: the Whig
proposals were seldom more than the raw materials of
legislation thrown down on the floor of the House of
Commons, to be wrought by that manufactory into the
completed fabric. Hence grew a general conviction, that
though the Whigs were often right, yet that they could
not be trusted to embody their own ideas in suitable
and judicious enactments ; — that Peel might be often
mistaken, yet that he was always up to his work. He
was often on the wrong tack, but he always sailed well.
Peel's whole heart was in the public service. He
seemed actually to love toil. He was indefatigable and
most conscientious in the performance of his official
duties. The veriest drudge of office was not more con-
stant at his desk. The most plodding committee-man
could not rival him in the persevering regularity of his
attendance in the House of Commons. During his
short but most memorable ministry in 1835, he went
through an amount of labour that was almost incre-
dible. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as
First Lord of the Treasury. He had scarcely a single
colleague competent to afford him any efficient aid. He
had to struggle against a hostile House of Commons,
and a mistrusting country. The fight was not of his
choosing, and he knew from the first that it was a hope-

sm R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 329

less one. But he contended gallantly to the last —
toiling incessantly from seven o'clock in the morning
till long past midnight — and when at last he resigned,
he had risen fifty per cent, in public estimation.

We now come to the great peculiarity of Sir Robert
Peel's career — that which has brought upon him the
accusation of being a traitor, a turn-coat, a man of
infirm purpose, and of variable and inconstant views —
want of consistency. On three several occasions he
recanted all his previous professions — adopted the
opinions he had hitherto strenuously opposed — and
carried out the policy which he had been accustomed
to denounce as mistaken and dangerous. He did so on
the question of a metallic basis for the currency ; he
did so on the question of Catholic Emancipation ; he did
so on the question of the Corn Laws. All were topics of
first-rate magnitude — all involved great and long-con-
tested principles — on all his views underwent an entire
and radical change. For this change he was bitterly
reproached with treachery and tergiversation by those
who did not see the truth as soon as he did, and by
those who have not seen it yet ; he was ungenerously
taunted by those who were wise enough or happy
enough to see it earlier ; and made the subject of de-
preciation and grave rebuke by those who appear to
hold that if a statesman cannot discern the right path
at the beginning of his career, he ought at least to
persevere in the wrong one to the end.

Now this charge of " inconsistency " and tergiversa-
tion has so long been popularly regarded as the
heaviest and most damaging that can be brought
against the character of politicians, that it is well worth
while to spend a few moments in inquiring how it comes
to be so estimated, and how much of justice may be
awarded to this estimate, when weighed in the balance of

330 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

unprejudiced reason. When a statesman draws himself
proudly up, and declares amid the prolonged cheering of
his audience, " I never abandoned my party ; / never
changed my opinions ; / never voted in favour of mea-
sures/had spent the best years of my life in opposing,"
he imagines that he is putting forth the most irrefra-
gable claim to public confidence and admiration. When
he seeks the most fatal and irritating weapon with
which to wound or discredit an antagonist, he rakes up
from buried volumes of Hansard the expression of sen-
timents and doctrines widely at variance with those now
professed, and taunts him with sitting side by side with
colleagues who were his foes in years gone by ; and the
arrow generally strikes home ; and though none are
invulnerable by it, none seem able to refrain from using
it, and none can receive it without suffering and
shrinking. Why is this ? Why should the charge be
felt so painfully ?

The explanation is an historical one. Our morality
and our sensibility on this subject have descended to us
from those days when parliament was not an assembly
in which the interests of the nation were discussed by
the representatives of the nation with the object of
ascertaining its wishes and promoting its welfare, but
an arena in which trained gladiators contended for the
mastery — a field of battle in which two marshalled
hosts contended for the victory; days when senators
were not men selected by the people to investigate,
deliberate, and legislate for the exigencies and the pro-
gress of the country according to the best light which
science and study could bring to shine upon them — but
soldiers enlisted for an avowed cause, marching under
a known banner, owing allegiance and obedience to an
acknowledged chief. Hence the morality of parliament
then was the morality of military life ; and in the military
code desertion is the most heinous of all crimes. Again,

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 33 L

in those times from which our present party morality
has been inherited — the times of Walpole, and Pelham,
and the first Pitt — tergiversation and change of party
were nearly always traceable, or supposed to be trace-
able, to some mean or sinister motive. It was generally
accompanied and explained by the acceptance of a
peerage, a pension, or a place.

From these two circumstances, it naturally resulted
that political inconstancy was regarded less as indica-
tive of a mental process of conviction, than as involving
personal honour ; the accusation was a flagrant insult ;
the fact was fatal to a statesman's popularity and the
stainless purity of his reputation. But why the same
conventional rule of judgment should be maintained
now, when no senator is ever influenced in his changes
by the promise of a bribe or the hope of a place, and
scarcely ever by low ambition or personal pique, and
when members of parliament are not party combatants,
but deliberating legislators, it is not easy to perceive.
Still less reasonable does it seem when we reflect that
no statesman of the present generation, and scarcely
any of the last, can point to a career of unswerving
consistency. Lord Eldon, indeed, was a model of un-
changing constancy ; but it is impossible to regard this
as a virtue in him, for we know that it was the result
of a bigoted temper, and a narrow mind, and was about
the most mischievous of his many noxious qualities.

Had all his colleagues been like him, we should, ere
now, have seen a revolution as complete arid unsparing
as that of France. " What a consistent career has
Lord Eldon's been," wrote a contemporary of his in
1829, " the ever active principle of evil in our political
world ! In the history of the universe no man has the
praise of having effected as much good for his fellow-
creatures as Lord Eldon has thwarted." The consistent
career of the late Lord Grey does, indeed, present many

332 sm R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

points for admiration ; but we must remember that
Lord Grey started in life with opinions far in advance of
his day and generation, many of which were wholly
inapplicable and out of place then ; and there was more
than one occasion both in early and in later life, when
his fidelity to party led him into language and con-
duct deplorably inconsiderate, unworthy, and unjust.
Among living statesmen who can point to a consistent
career, in the ordinary sense of the term ? Is it Lord
Derby, who was at one time the fiercest assailant, and
at another the subordinate minister of Peel; at one
time the vigorous reformer, at another time the resolute
stickler for the intact existence of the Irish Church ?
Is it Sir James Graham, the Radical of early days, who
in 1831, stood in the very van of the Whig party, as
the colleague of Lord Durham and Lord Grey ; who, in
1835, was a devoted adherent of the seceding Lord
Stanley ; and in 1845, a colleague of Sir Robert Peel,
and an opponent of Lord Stanley ? Is it Lord Palrner-
ston, who has held office successively under the Duke
of Portland, Mr. Perceval, Lord Liverpool, Sir Robert
Peel, Mr. Canning, Lord Grey, and Lord John Russell ?
Is it Mr. Gladstone, either in what he has done or in
what he has contemplated ? Is it Mr. Disraeli, the
quondam Radical, the present leader of the reactionary
rump ? Finally, is it even Lord John Russell, who
made the " appropriation clause " a sine qua non in
1835, and passed a bill without it in 1838 ; who op-
posed the motion for an inquiry into the operation of
the Corn Laws in 1839 ; who proposed a fixed duty of
eight shillings in 1841, and declared for total repeal in
1845 ? We do not mean to intimate that all these
statesmen were not conscientious, and may not even
have been right in their various changes of party and
modifications of opinion ; but assuredly none of them
can lay claim to the attribute of immutability.

SIR E. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 333

There is a wise, and there is an unwise, species of
political constancy. There is a narrow and mechanical,
and there is a large and comprehensive, view of the
same great principle of rectitude. There is a steadiness
of opinion and of purpose which imbues itself with
noble sentiments, and places great objects ever before
it ; which, having studied deliberate^ the best interests
of the country and decided the direction in which it
ought to steer, keeps those interests and that goal in
view through all bewildering storms, and through every
intervening cloud ; which in each emergency selects
that policy best suited, during that emergency, for
nearing the appointed haven ; which in every danger
chooses and follows the pilot who best understands that
peculiar portion of the chart of destiny over which the
vessel of the state is at that moment steering ; and
which knows how to preserve an essential, if not a
superficial, consistency by varying its means and its
course to secure the unity of its end. And there is a
stubbornness of will, an unbending rectilinear ness of
march, like that of the Norwegian Leming, which
cannot comprehend that perils which press from one
quarter are not to be met by the same weapons and the
same attitude which is appropriate against those which
menace from an opposite direction ; which would apply
the same panacea to every social malady, and to every
condition of the patient — to the state of excitement
and the state of collapse ; which cannot conceive that
altered national circumstances may demand altered
national policy ; which, in the difficult navigation of
public life, ascertains its position and calculates its
course, not by fixed landmarks, but by floating frag-
ments— not by objects eternal in the heavens, but by
objects moving upon earth ; and which deludes itself
into a belief that it is nobly pursuing one consistent
purpose, so long as it is surrounded by the same familiar

334 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

faces, and uttering the old ancestral shibboleth of party
— though the circumstances which made its companions
patriots, and its war-cry a just and noble reality, have
long since been reversed. There is a perseverance
which is "instant in season;" there is a pertinacity
which is instant "out of season;" and there is a na-
tional purblindness which confounds the two qualities
— so diametrically distinct — in one common admi-
ration. Finally, there is a consistency — the boast of
the shallow and the vain, but often of the conscientious
too — which forms its opinions, collects its maxims,
and adopts its party according to the best light it has,
and then shuts the door of the mind against all dis-
turbing knowledge and all bewildering and novel illu-
mination,— which petrifies into impenetrability or con-
geals into a frozen fog. And there is an open and
earnest convincibility, which, aware that the utmost
wisdom it can attain at the outset of its career is at
best fragmentary and imperfect, is constantly storing
up new facts, mastering new discoveries, deliberating
on new arguments, profiting by old errors, digesting
the lessons of past experience ; which feels that the
first duty of a high position is to abjure prejudice, and
give to the country the full benefit of every added in-
formation, of every successful experiment, of every
elaborated science. Men of this stamp of mind are
marked out for misrepresentation and for taunt ; they
are made the butt of every Tory blockhead to whom so
unegotistical a conscience, so lofty and unconventional
a standard of public duty, are things utterly incompre-
hensible ; but they are the men who most truly serve,
and most often save, their country, and the country
generally appreciates them better than either parliament
or party.

The truth is that in a country of free institutions,
like England, of which progress is the law and life, that

SIR E. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 335

sort of inconsistency which is implied in political con-
version must be not only an admitted fact, but a re-
cognised prerogative ; and in an age of transition like
that in which we live, these conversions must be ne-
cessarily frequent and rapid. Were it otherwise —
were conversion a forbidden thing — the strife of parties
would become a war of extermination ; the nation could
advance in her course of enlarging and enlightening
policy only by the death or political extinction of the
conservative statesmen. Not only would our progress
be more tardy, but it would be more fitful, spasmodic,
and dangerous. There would be no change till by
process of election or of death the obstructions were
reduced to an absolute and permanent minority, and
then the change would be sudden and immense. We
should lose all the advantage and all the safety which
now arises from the gradual modifications which take
place in the views of the most reflective statesmen of
all parties, and by the ceaseless and often almost im-
perceptible passing over of influential politicians from
one camp to the other : those who, yielding to the
moulding spirit of the age, and the influx of new
impressions, desert the ranks of the Tories for those of
the Reformers, carrying with them many of their early
associations with a venerated past, and much of the
native conservatism of their temperament: those, on
the other hand, who having achieved the great reforms
on which they had set their hearts, or swayed by the
insensible influence of increasing years, begin to fear
the too rapid encroachments of the democratic element,
and therefore join the ranks of the retarders, carrying
with them to the quarters of their former antagonists
many of their popular sympathies, and some faint
embers of their old enthusiasm for reform. A progress
which draws the old nation along with it is not only
securer, but far more complete than one which results

336 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

from the defeat of one party and the predominance of
another; and for this it is essential that the liberty of
conversion should be upheld as one of the indisputable
privileges of our public men. But, like all other
liberties, it must be surrounded with such guarantees,
limits, and conditions as shall prevent it from degene-
rating into licence.

These conditions are three: — the public have a right
to require from a statesman who abandons his former
opinions, or party, that his changes shall not be vacil-
lations, but advances ; that they shall be fairly and
candidly avowed as soon as decided; and that they
should not, if possible, be in the direction of his per-
sonal interest ; not so much so at least as to give the
slightest fair opening for ascribing them to sinister
motives. Let us try Sir Robert Peel's conversions by
this standard.

In the first place, though a perpetually changing, he
was never a vacillating statesman. His course was
essentially progressive. Every step he took was a step
forward. He never "tried back." From the Peel of
1812 to the Peel of 1829, the advance is rapid and
remarkable : from the Peel of 1829 to the Peel of 1849,
the improvement is so wonderful that individual iden-
tity is almost lost. He began life as the underling of
Lord Sidmouth — the shallowest, narrowest, most borne,
and most benighted of the old Tory crew. He ended
life leading the vanguard of the most liberal of the
matured statesmen of the age. He began life the ad-
vocate of the civil disqualifications of Catholics and
Dissenters. He ended it the advocate of complete reli-
gious freedom. He was born a monopolist ; he passed
through many phases of gradual emancipation, and at
last died a free-trader. Unlike Lord Stanley, who
started from the front rank of the Reformers, and has
now, in his course of retrogression, reached almost the

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 337

rear rank of the Obstructives, — Sir Robert Peel started
in the race with every disadvantage, clogged with every
weight and fetter which could impede his progress;
but he cast them one by one aside, and advanced, with
slow and timid, but not oscillating footsteps, to com-
plete emancipation from early prejudices and from old
connections.

Further, in all his changes, as soon as he saw his
way clearly, he stood to his colours manfully. "When
he was ambiguous, unsatisfactory, reserved, and tor-
tuous," says Mr. Disraeli, " it was that he was perplexed,
and did not see his way." When once he had fixed
upon his line, he never attempted to shirk the con-
sequences or corollaries of his new policy. He not only
accepted, cheerfully and candidly, the deliberate de-
cisions of the legislature, even when opposed to his own
opinions, as settled and accomplished facts (as in the
case of the Reform Bill) ; but when his ripening con-
victions, or the wisdom which time and experience
brought with them, compelled him to retreat from a
position, to retract a policy, or avow a change, he never
attempted to deny the fact, or extenuate the magnitude
of that change — he was never guilty of the common
subterfuge of little minds — of endeavouring, by petty
and underhand manosuvres, to counteract the effect of
the course he was publicly obliged to take. He did
not do things by halves, or in a niggard and reluctant
spirit. When, in 1.819, a careful inquiry in a committee
of the House of Commons produced an entire change of
opinion on the subject of our metallic currency, the bill
which he then introduced for the resumption of cash
payments was a complete and thorough measure, and
formed the basis for all his subsequent action on the
same topic in 1834 and 1844. When in 1829 he felt
obliged, in direct contravention of all his previous
policy, to concede emancipation to the Catholics, the

VOL. n. z

338 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

measure he brought forward was a complete and gene-
rous one. There were no needless reservations of the
high places of the state ; there was no attempt to save
appearances by the enactment of fancied securities ;
there were no evasive clauses, to undo by a side-wind
the manifest and declared intention of the measure. It
was as graceful a surrender at discretion as could well
be made; and not only did he subsequently show no
wish to undo his work, or to escape from its conse-
quences, but in his steady support of the Irish national
education system, in his augmentation and establish-
ment of the Maynooth Grant, and in his erection of the
" Godless Colleges," he uniformly proved himself pre-
pared and resolved to act in the spirit of his own great
measure. The Reform Bill was carried against his
most strenuous opposition ; but having been carried,
after deliberate discussion, by the pronounced will of
the nation, Sir Robert Peel struck no back-handed blow
at its efficiency. And when, in 1846, he at length per-
ceived the wisdom and necessity of a resignation of the
corn laws, he proposed, not the half-way house of a
fixed duty, but total abolition — while admitting that
in so doing he laid himself open to the deepest obloquy
and the most unsparing criticism. And ever afterwards
he supported ministers manfully, whenever this measure,
or any of its consequences, was in question. When,
therefore, a statesman's changes have thus invariably
been slowly and cautiously made, honestly avowed,
resolutely and unflinchingly carried out, and when,
above all, they have always been in one direction — not
backwards and forwards, but invariably onward — what
more can be said in defence of inconsistency, if incon-
sistency in a statesman be allowable at all ?

Secondly, Sir Robert Peel always fulfilled the other
conditions we have specified as required to sanction
change of opinion and to redeem it from moral reproba-

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 339

tion. In many of the most important measures of his
life, he adopted the views and carried out the plans of
his opponents ; but (save on one occasion, which has
been already noticed) he was always careful to render
honour where honour was due — to give the credit of
the triumph of the principles he had tardily embraced
to those who had early maintained them. Thus in 18 1 1,
just after his entrance into public life, and probably
before he had time to give any consideration to the
subject, he adopted the views of his ignorant and bigoted
old father on the Bank Restriction Act, and voted
against the celebrated bullion resolutions of Francis
Homer. But when, in 1819, in compliance with the
order of a select committee of the House of Commons,
he introduced his measure for the resumption of cash
payments, we find him saying : " I am ready to avow
without shame or remorse that my views on this subject
were materially different when I voted against the reso-
lutions brought forward in 1811 by Mr. Horner, as
chairman of the bullion committee; but having gone
into this inquiry determined to dismiss all former im-
pressions, to apply to the subject my unprejudiced atten-
tion, and to adopt every inference that authentic infor-
mation or mature reflection could offer to my mind — I
now conceive the principles laid down by Mr. Horner
to represent the true nature and laws of our monetary
system ; and it is without shame or repentance that I
thus bear testimony to the superior sagacity of that
distinguished statesman." In 1829, in bringing forward
his memorable bill for Catholic emancipation, Sir Robert
Peel spoke as follows : — " The credit of this measure
belongs to others, not to me. It belongs to Fox, to
Grattan, to Plunket, to the gentlemen opposite (the
Whigs), and to an illustrious friend of mine (Mr. Can-
ning), who is now no more. By their efforts, in spite
of my opposition, it has proved victorious." Again, in

340 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

1846, on the night when he took leave of power after
the final carrying of the repeal of the corn-laws, the
crown and consummation of a long series of measures in
the direction of free trade, he spoke thus : — ." The name
which ought to be associated with the success of these
measures, is not the name of the noble lord opposite,
nor is it mine. The name which ought to be and will
be, associated with those measures, is that of one, who
acting, as I believe, from pure and disinterested motives,
has, with untiring energy, made appeals to our reason,
and has enforced those appeals with an eloquence the
more to be admired because it was unaffected and
unadorned — the name which ought chiefly to be asso-
ciated with the success of these measures is the name of
Eichard Cobden."

Sir Robert Peel never attempted to disguise or di-
minish the fact of his change of opinion. When decided
and complete, it was always manfully avowed as soon
as circumstances would permit. The tergiversation
which has brought upon him the severest animadversion
was that which took place on the Catholic question. In
the passionate language of the time, it was designated
by no gentler name than that of treachery. It is worth
while, both for the sake of the individual and for the
elucidation of political morality, to go a little closer into
the facts of this remarkable question. In the first place,
it is alleged that to change at all on such a topic reflects
no honour on his sagacity : for this was no new ques-
tion, with respect to which want of knowledge or of
previous consideration could be pleaded. The subject
was one specially connected with his earliest official
situation : it had always been a prominent one : he had
been in the habit of discussing it for seventeen years.
Every argument in favour of the principle of Catholic
emancipation had been repeatedly urged upon him,
and been repeatedly repudiated by him. Every danger

sin R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 341

likely to arise from its refusal had been pointed out in
the clearest manner, and with wearisome reiteration,
and had been by him denied, undervalued, or despised.
How came the truth to dawn upon him so slowly, and
to be admitted so reluctantly ? And how can the long
persistence and the tardy recantation be reconciled with
any character for statesmanship ?

Little can be said to weaken the force of these repre-
sentations, except that the whole history of the question
shows the peculiar character of the man's mind. It
was his nature to yield to conviction slowly and reluc-
tantly. He was born on the wrong side, and it cost
him seventeen years of warfare to get right. That,
with his hereditary notions as to the sanctity and
authority of the English Church, he should shrink from
throwing open the doors of the constitution to the here-
ditary and irreconcilable enemies of that church, does
not surprise us. That, knowing the Irish Catholics as
he did, he should dread and deprecate the introdution
of such men into the British legislature, surprises us
still less. The conduct of the " Irish Brigade" in recent
years has shown us that he was not wholly wrong.
But that a man naturally so just and equitable should
not have shrunk from denying to so large and respectable
a body of his fellow- subjects the full rights of citizen-
ship, does, we confess, appear incongruous. And that
so keen an observer and so cool a reason er should have
so long continued blind to the danger, increasing every
year, arising from the internecine strife, is quite inex-
plicable, and clearly shows that at this period of his life
he read "the signs of the times" far less truly and
promptly than he afterwards learnt to do. But it must^
be observed that he himself placed the cause of his
yielding in 1829 what he had till then opposed, upon
its right footing. It was a change of policy, not a
change of opinion. He held as strongly as ever his

z 3

342 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

conviction of the desirableness of Catholic exclusion.
But it was no longer possible. Circumstances had
changed. Through the organising and agitating powers
of Mr, O'Connell, the danger of refusing had at length
become greater than the danger of conceding, — and
therefore only did he yield. He chose then, as he had
chosen hitherto, that which he believed to be the least
of two evils for his country. Catholic emancipation
and civil war were both mischiefs to be dreaded and
averted ; but the latter was the worst mischief of the
two. When the alternative was put thus clearly before
him, he logically and inevitably gave way. " According
to my heart and conscience," said he, " I believe that
the time is come when less danger is to apprehended to
the general interests of the empire, and to the spiritual
and temporal welfare of the Protestant establishment,
in attempting to adjust the Catholic question, than in
allowing it to remain any longer in its present state.
.... Looking back upon the past, surveying the pre-
sent, and forejudging the prospect of the future, again
I declare that the time has at length arrived when this

question must be adjusted I have for years

attempted to maintain the exclusion of Roman Catholics
from parliament and the high offices of the state. I do
not think it was an unnatural or unreasonable struggle.
I resign it in consequence of the conviction that it can

no longer be advantageously maintained I yield,

therefore, to a moral necessity which I cannot control,
being unwilling to push resistance to a point which
might endanger the establishments that I wish to
defend." In plain words, he saw that he was defeated,
and therefore capitulated, to save useless bloodshed and
a worse catastrophe. This was not the language of a
great or a foreseeing statesman ; but it was the language
of a prudent and conscientious minister, and of an
honest man.

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 343

"But," it is said, "if such were his views, he should
not have proposed Catholic emancipation at all. He
should have resigned, and have left the settlement of
that great question, with its satisfaction and its glory,
to those whose opinions regarding it were thus proved
to have been right." Undoubtedly he would have con-
sulted both his own feelings and his own fame by acting
thus; and under ordinary circumstances this would
have been the proper course to have pursued. But
higher than mere personal considerations were here in-
volved. Let us look into the details of the case: in
them we believe we shall find his complete justifica-
tion.

The state of affairs, as already stated, produced,
towards the close of the year 1828, in the minds both of
the Duke of Wellington and Sir Kobert Peel, a strong
conviction that the government of Ireland, on the old
system, had become impossible, and that Catholic eman-
cipation must be conceded, if they were not prepared to
hazard the alternative of civil war. Having arrived at
this conviction, the first point was of course to secure
that a measure for this purpose should be carried ; the
second, longo intervailo^ wTas that it should be carried by
the proper parties. Fortunately, the publication of
Lord Eldon's correspondence has thrown great light
upon the ministerial difficulties at this crisis. Lord
Eldon, who hated the Catholics like poison, was in con-
stant communication with the King, and has described
his state of mind in vivid colours. George IV., whose
conscience had never in the course of sixty years with-
held him from the indulgence of any bad passion or the
commission of any agreeable crime, felt an insuperable
objection, partly of mortified pride, partly of alarmed
scruple, to conceding Catholic emancipation. He could
not, however, turn a deaf ear to the representations of
his ministers. He at length assented to their proposals.

z 4

344 sm R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

Then he withdrew his assent. He played fast and
loose with them ; entreated them to forego their inten-
tions ; entreated them not to desert hirn ; empowered
Lord Eldon to see if he could not rescue him from
them ; kept them in doubt up to the last moment
whether he would not break his pledged word, and by
pronouncing the royal veto give the signal for civil war.
These difficulties with the King ministers could not ex-
plain— could scarcely even hint at; and hence their
explanations always seemed incomplete and unsatisfac-
tory. The history of the case was this, as we know it
now from authentic sources.*

In August, 1828, after the close of the session, Sir
Robert Peel wrote confidentially to the Duke of Wel-
lington, explaining to him in the clearest manner the
absolute necessity of at once settling this great question,
which had now reached a position which made all
government impossible, and concluding in this inanly
language : —

" I must at the same time express a very strong opinion, that
it would not conduce to the satisfactory adjustment of the ques-
tion, that the charge of it in the House of Commons should be
committed to my hands.

(( I put all personal feelings out of the question. They are,
or ought to be, very subordinate considerations in matters of
such moment ; and I give the best proof that I disregard them,
by avowing that I am quite ready to commit myself to the
support of the principle of a measure of ample concession and
relief, and to use every eifort to promote the final arrangement
of it.

" But my support will be more useful, if I give it with the
cordiality with which it shall be given, out of office. Any au-
thority which I may possess, as tending to reconcile the Pro-
testants to the measure, would be increased by my retirement.
I have been too deeply committed on the question — have ex-

* "Lord Eldon's Life and Correspondence." Speech of Sir R.
Peel in the House of Commons, Dec. 17. 1831.

sin n. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 345

pressed too strong an opinion with respect to it — too much
jealousy and distrust of the Roman Catholics — too much ap-
prehension as to the immediate and remote consequences of
yielding to their claims — to make it advantageous to the King's
service that I should be the individual to originate the measure."

From that period to the end of the year the ministers
were occupied in endeavouring to obtain the consent
and to fix the mind of the false and vacillating monarch.
When this consent was finally obtained, and it became
necessary to prepare for meeting parliament on the new
footing, Sir Eobert Peel, on the 12th of January, 1829,
again wrote to the Duke, praying for permission to
retire, stating, "that retirement from office was the
only step he could take which would be at all satis-
factory to his own feelings, and deprecating in the most
earnest manner his being the person to bring forward
the measure in the House of Commons." But in the
mean time the difficulties of the Duke had been greatly
increased by the announced hostility of the bench of
bishops, and he intimated to Sir Kobert Peel that he
could not maintain his ground if he (Sir Kobert Peel)
persisted in resigning. " The earnest appeal, also, made
to him by the King, not to shrink from proposing a
measure which, as a minister, he advised the King to
adopt, left him no alternative, consistent with honour
and public duty, but to make the bitter sacrifice of
every personal feeling, and himself to originate the
measure of Eoman Catholic Relief. Could he, when
the King thus appealed to him — when the King re-
ferred to his own scruples, and uniform opposition to
the measure in question — when he said, c You advise
this measure — you see no escape from it — you ask me
to make the sacrifice of opinion and consistency — will
not you make the same sacrifice V What answer could
he return to his sovereign but the one he did return ?
viz., that he would make that sacrifice, and would bear

346 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

his full share of the responsibility and unpopularity of
the measure he advised."

The plain and brief truth of the case was this : — the
safety of the country required that Catholic emancipa-
tion should be at once conceded — of this there was no
doubt. The Whigs, no doubt, ought to have carried it,
— but the King, it was well known, would not endure
a Whig ministry, and the King was impracticable, testy,
and prevaricating, and manageable by no one but the
Duke. If the Duke had resigned, he would have thrown
himself into the hands of the old Tories, emancipation
would have been refused, and civil war and national
retrogression and disgrace would have been the conse-
quence. But the Duke's resignation would have been
necessitated by Peel's retirement. As an honest and
disinterested patriot, therefore, Sir Robert Peel, in our
judgment, had no option but to act as he did act.

Considerable blame was thrown upon Sir Robert
Peel at the time, on the ground of the apparent sud-
denness of his conversion. In 1828, it is said, he de-
clared that his opinion as to the impolicy of concession
remained unchanged, while at the beginning of 1829,
he himself proposed concession. And, more than this,
he allowed his brother and brother-in-law to deliver
speeches at public meetings in various parts of the
country, most violent and decided in their denunciations
of Catholic emancipation at the very time when it
appeared he had advised his sovereign to grant eman-
cipation, and shortly before he himself proposed it to
parliament. With regard to the latter charge, which
brought upon him much odium and the bitter indigna-
tion of his relatives, it will suffice to observe that not
only could he not, consistently with his oath and duty
as a cabinet minister, have given them any intimation of
the change under consideration, — but that from the
vacillation and unreliableness of the King, ministers

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 347

themselves felt no security till the speech from the throne
was actually delivered, that they would be allowed to
bring forward their proposals, and that infinite mischief
and embarrassment would have resulted from permitting
their intention to leak out before the monarch was
publicly committed on the subject. With regard to the
suddenness of Sir Robert Peel's conversion, we know
now that it was rather apparent than real ; and of
sudden ministerial changes in general a more honourable
explanation can be given than is commonly supposed.
Men in public life, and more especially ministers in
actual office, when new facts, deeper reflection, stronger
arguments, or altered positions, come to shake their pre-
vious opinions and produce an incipient change, are
placed in a situation of singular difficulty. They can
seldom retire or lie by till the inchoate operation is
complete ; their position often calls upon them for con-
stant action and perpetual speech ; in the meantime,
they are obliged to conceal from the public the mental
process which has just commenced, so long as it is im-
perfect and uncertain ; they must speak and act in
accordance with their past, not with their future selves ;
if they speak, they must speak in conformity with the
old opinions over which doubt is gradually creeping ; if
they act, they must act on the principles which they
are beginning to abandon, not on those which they are
beginning, but only beginning, to adopt. This is a hard
and painful position ; yet it is one which duty to their
colleagues and their country not unfrequently compels
public men to endure. Like other men, if they are
honest, inquiring, and open-minded, they must inevitably
find modification after modification coming over their
opinions in the course of their career, as knowledge
ripens, as facts develop, as wisdom matures. Yet for a
leading senator to be silent, or for a chief minister to
retire, every time he felt the first warning symptoms of

348 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

such an alteration, would be simply impracticable in
actual life, though no doubt the most comfortable course
for his own feelings, and the safest for his reputation.
Thus he is in a manner obliged, by the requirements of
his position, to continue making the best defence he
can for his old course and his old principles till his
suspicion of their unsoundness has risen into a clear and
settled conviction; and when, having arrived at this
point, he suddenly and conscientiously avows his change,
there is unquestionably, primd facie, a very dark case
against him. We believe we have here indicated the
secret of that course of conduct which brought down
so much obloquy upon Sir Robert Peel on two memo-
rable occasions in 1829 and in 1846. We do not affirm
that it presents a full justification : but we do hold that
it affords a fair and not discreditable explanation of
many apparently sudden or too rapid changes in the
opinions and measures of public men.

In the third place, a statesman's changes, we have
said, ought never to be so manifestly in the direction of
his personal advantage as to leave any decent ground
for attributing them, either wholly or in part, to sinister
or interested motives. On this head, Sir Robert Peel's
tergiversations stand free from the slightest suspicion.
Whatever might have been said in the angry surprise
of the moment by a deserted and disappointed party,
everyone now feels not only that all his changes were
conscientious, but that all of them were made at the
most bitter sacrifice of personal feeling. His first
inconsistency — on the currency question, in 1811 —
brought him into immediate and very unpleasant col-
lision with his father, who even spoke before him in the
debate ; and it is understood that the old gentleman
scarcely ever heartily forgave his son for his change of
opinion, either on this occasion or in 1829. Few men,
indeed, ever made greater sacrifices than Sir Robert Peel

SIR E. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 349

to his views of public duty ; for he deliberately sacrificed
to them — what to minds as ambitious and as sensitive
as his, is far dearer than place, or power, or popular
applause and admiration — the attachment of his party,
the good opinion of his personal friends. In 1829, he
incurred — knowingly and manfully, though with ac-
knowledged pain and reluctance — the reproaches and
indignation of a great party, the fury of those bigots
who had long regarded him as their safest and most
presentable champion, the rupture of many private ties,
the blame of many dear connections, and the represen-
tation of the University of Oxford, to which he had
long clung with honourable pride, and which Canning
had so ardently desired ; and what, perhaps, to a proud
man was worst of all, the humiliation of avowing an
ignominious defeat, and the mistake and short-sighted-
ness of years. " The tone of his observations," observes
Mr. Roebuck, " proved how acutely he felt the suffering
of the fiery ordeal to which the indignation of his former
friends had subjected him, how his mind still lingered
about the objects of his former solicitude, and with what
pain he divested himself of the character of the great
Protestant leader."

" Allusion has been made," he said, indignantly, " to the
sacrifice of the emoluments of office, which, it is insinuated, ought
to have been preferred to the course I have adopted. Good
God ! I cannot argue with the man who can place the sacrifice
of office or emolument in competition with the severe, the
painful sacrifice I have made — a sacrifice which it seems to be
supposed I have consented to in order to retain my office. . . .
Perhaps (he concluded) I am not so sanguine as others in my
expectations of the future ; but I have not the slightest hesita-
tion in saying that I fully believe the adjustment of the question
in the manner proposed, will give better and stronger securities
to the Protestant interest and the Protestant establishment
than any other that the present state of things admits of, and
will avert evils and dangers impending and immediate. What

350 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

motive, I ask, can I have for the expression of these opinions,
but the honest conviction of their truth ? . . . I well know I
might have taken a more popular and selfish course. I might
have held language much more acceptable to the friends with
whom I have long acted and to the constituents whom I have
lately lost. ( His ego gratiora dictu alia esse scio ; sed me vera
pro gratis loqui, et si meum ingenium non moneret, necessitas
cogit Vellem equidem vobis placere ; sed multo malo vos
salvos esse.' "

What it must have cost Sir Kobert Peel, and what it
did cost him, in pride, in affection, in repute, to break
loose from his party in 1846, and propose the repeal of
the corn laws, we can now fully estimate.* The deser-

* Mr. Disraeli, in his " Life of Lord George Bentinck," gives a
graphic sketch of the memorable night when the Protectionists re-
venged themselves on their leader by voting with the Whigs on the
Irish Coercion Bill, and so ejecting him from office. It was the
evening when the repeal of the Corn Laws had finally passed the
House of Lords : —

" At length, about half past one o'clock, the galleries were cleared,
the division called, and the question put. . . . More than one
hundred Protectionist members adhered to the minister ; more than
eighty avoided the division ; nearly the same number followed Lord
George Bentinck. But it was not merely their numbers that at-
tracted the anxious observation of the Treasury bench, as the Pro-
tectionists passed in defile before the Minister to the hostile lobby.
It was impossible he could have marked them without emotion — the
flower of that great party which had been so proud to follow one
who had been so proud to lead them. They were men, to gain
whose hearts, and the hearts of their fathers, had been the aim and
the exultation of his life. They had extended to him an unlimited
confidence, and an admiration without stint ; they had stood by him
in the darkest hour, and had borne him from the depths of political
despair to the proudest of living positions. Right or wrong, they
were men of honour, breeding, and refinement, of high and generous
character, and of great weight and station in the country, which they
had ever placed at his disposal. They had been not only his fol-
lowers, but his friends ; had joined in the same pastimes, drank from
the same cup, and in the pleasantness of private life had often for-
gotten together the cares and strife of politics.

" He must have felt something of all this, while the Manners, the

sm R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 351

tion of many with whom he had long acted — the rage
of the country gentlemen whom he had disappointed —
the bitter indignation of those whom he dragged over
the grave of their pledges and their prejudices to
support his new policy — the merciless sarcasms, the
unsparing imputations of premeditated treachery, nightly
cast at him by the impotent fury of the deceived, and
the deep malignity of the baffled — altogether formed a
combination of painful and formidable obstacles, which
would have deterred from such a course any man who
loved his country less, or valued his reputation and his
comfort more. But he faced all with a grave and
sorrowful fortitude, which has not been without its
reward. The nation saw and appreciated the earnest
and unselfish sincerity of the man ; did full justice to
the honesty of his purpose, and the difficult firmness of
his resolution, and in the end placed him on a pinnacle
of popularity achieved by no statesman since Lord Grey.
Never has it been the fate of a statesman to do his duty
to his country in the face of so many difficulties —
difficulties, it is true, the main portion of which were
created by his own antecedents — and at the cost of so
complete a surrender of all that statesmen hold most
dear. In the course of thirty years, he changed every
opinion, violated every pledge, broke up every party,
disappointed every prophecy, deserted every colleague

Somersets, the Bentincks, the Lowthers, and the Lennoxes, passed
before him. And those country gentlemen — those * gentlemen of
England' — of whom but five years ago this very same building was
ringing with his pride of being the leader — if his heart were hardened
to Sir Charles Burrell, Sir William Joliffe, Sir Charles Knightly,
Sir John Trollope, Sir Edward Kerrison, Sir John Tyrrell — he
surely must have felt a pang when his eye rested on Sir John Yarde
Buller, his choice and pattern country gentleman, whom he had
himself selected and invited but six years back to move a vote of
want of confidence in the Whig government, in order, against the
feeling of the court, to instal Sir. R. Peel in their stead."— P. 300.

352 SIR K. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

whom he could not draw along with him ; yet, in spite
of all, at the time of his death he stood in public esti-
mation and respect the unquestioned chief, longo inter-
valloj of all the statesmen of the day. And why was
this ? — but because it was clear to all that sincere
conviction, and conscientious, unselfish devotion to his
country's service, were throughout the actuating prin-
ciples of his conduct — were at the bottom of every
changed opinion, of every broken pledge, of every
scattered combination, of every severed friendship, of
every disappointed hope. It occurs to many public men
to sacrifice place, power, and friends to their principles
and their faith : it was reserved to Sir Robert Peel to
sacrifice to them his reputation — and this, not once, but
time after time, — and yet to find it, like the widow's
cruse, undiminished by the daily waste.

Of all Sir Robert Peel's conversions, his conversion
to free trade and the repeal of the corn laws is the one
which brought upon him the greatest obloquy and the
heaviest charges, but we think with little justice. If,
indeed, when he took office at the head of the Conserva-
tive party, in 1841, after ousting the Whigs — who, in
their hour of danger and despair, had begun to tamper
with the protection hitherto afforded to the agricultural
and the colonial interests — he had already discerned
the necessity, and made up his mind to the wisdom of a
surrender, and yet led his party on to the attack, and
assumed power in the name, and for the defence, of the
old party, — then no language can be found severe
enough to condemn such black and premeditated
treachery. But there is not the slightest ground for
believing this to have been the case. When, after the
general election of 1841, he was summoned to take
office by the large majority of a parliament elected
under the combined influence of a general conviction of
Whig incapacity and mismanagement— aided by the

SIB B. PEEL'S CHABACTEB AND POLICY. 353

alarm created among the agriculturists by their proposal
of a fixed duty, and among the West Indians by their
attempt to reduce the differential duties on slave sugar
— he found the country in a condition calling both for
immediate action to rescue it from misery and depres-
sion, and for a sincere and searching study of the causes
which had plunged it into such adversity. The finances
were deplorably dilapidated. The deficit was animal,
and annually increasing ; and the' Whigs had tried in
vain to cure it. The trade of the country was lan-
guishing, manufacturers were failing, many mills were
closed, bread and meat were scanty and dear, want of
employment and want of food were driving many to
despair, and goading others into violence. Altogether,
it was a gloomy period, the suffering and despondency
of which are even now fresh and painful in our memory.
It was one of those epochs which make all men earnest,
and cause many to think and question who never thought
or questioned before. Sir Eobert Peel met parliament
in the autumn, passed the necessary routine measures
for the service of the country, and then steadily refused
to give any intimation of the plans by w^hich he pro-
posed to meet the alarming state of matters, till he had
had the five months of the recess for careful delibera-
tion. Those months were spent by himself and his
colleague, Sir James Graham, in anxious investigation
and reflection. Few men are aware how effectually, in
all worthy and honourable minds, the awful responsi-
bilities of office during a time of national distress, crush
and drive away all selfish and personal considerations ;
how they tear away the veil from the flimsy arguments
which sufficed to answer an objection or silence an
opponent ; how they shrivel into nothing the claims of
consistency, the prejudices of connection, the pride of
reputation ; and how they compel the most sincere and
laborious efforts to arrive at truth. The impression
VOL. n. A A

354 SIE E. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

made upon the two leading ministers by that dreadful
time never faded from their minds. Those who knew
them then saw an unwonted gravity upon their faces.
Those who knew them afterwards heard them say that
no party or political considerations would induce them
to risk the recurrence of such a period of suffering and
gloom. It was the remembrance of 1842 that shaped
their course in 1846 ; they saw a similar period ap-
proaching, and they dared not, and could not, meet it
with any restriction on a starving nation's supply of
food.

Sir E. Peel met parliament in 1842, with bold and
statesmanlike proposals : — He saw that it was necessary
to restore the finances, to relieve and unfetter industry,
and to increase the supply of food for the people. So
he imposed a property tax to enable him to modify a
prohibitive and oppressive tariff ; he greatly reduced the
duties on the raw materials of manufactures, and he
admitted foreign cattle and meat at moderate rates of
duty. Further than this he would not go; because
further than this he did not see his way. His new corn
law was scarcely an improvement on the old one ; and
he was aware of this himself. On that subject* his
opinions, though shaken, were still undecided. He did
not see his way ; and his language showed this. Those
who reproached him with ignorance and cowardice for
not repealing the corn laws then, and those who re-
proached him with treachery and tergiversation for
repealing them four years later, alike showed that they
had not studied his career, and did not understand the
peculiar character of his mind. He was, as a statesman
exactly what the English are as a nation. They are,
in spirit, essentially Conservative. They instinctively
venerate what is old, dread what is novel, mistrust what
is untried. They are ever unwilling to make a change
till unrnistakeable expediency or necessity forces it upon

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 355

them. They hold by precedent and custom till the
position in which these retain them has become no longer
tenable or safe. They hate rash experiments, but they
love substantial justice. Hence, during the greater part
of his life, Sir Robert Peel was a man after their own
heart. He was pre-eminently a tentative, not a scientific,
statesman. He had nothing of the political philosopher
about him : he never formed a theory, and then followed
it out systematically to its consequences ; he always felt
his way. He felt his way in criminal law reform ; he
felt his way in the concession of equal institutions to
Ireland ; he felt his way on the currency question ; he
felt his way in his financial measures ; he felt his way
in his liberal commercial policy. His first steps towards
free-trade, in 1842, were made in doubt and trembling:
it was obvious that he had no thorough confidence in
the principles of the free-traders, and that he still
thought there was much weight in the reasonings and
the fears of their antagonists, but he perceived that the
effect might be serviceable, and it was desirable that the
experiment should be tried ; and it was not till he saw
how buoyantly the commerce of the country sprang
forward under the timid and tentative relief which he
had given, showing that at least he had done no harm
and made no mistake, — that he began to see his way
more clearly, and to announce his opinions more cour-
ageously, and with fewer reservations and misgivings.
Had bad harvests, instead of good ones, followed his
first tamperings with the old protective tariff, and the
distress of the country been exacerbated instead of
being relieved, we believe he would have concluded that
he had been wrong, and that the further alterations of
1843, and the systematic revision of 1845, would have
been indefinitely postponed.

In the same way he proceeded with the corn laws.
No one could see his countenance and hear his speech

AA 2

356 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

when, after six months of anxious reflection, he proposed
his new scale of duties in 1842, without being convinced
that he had begun to feel thoroughly doubtful of his
ground : — the fearful distresses of his countrymen had
compelled him to look into the subject more closely than
he had ever done before, and to listen with more can-
dour and attention to the reasonings of his opponents.
The consequence was, that his mind became utterly un-
settled; he had to propose a law at a time when his
old views had been greatly shaken, but when the antago-
nistic views of the free-traders had not yet wrought
full conviction : hence he defended his measure by ar-
guments wholly unworthy of an intellect like his, and
for three years insisted on giving it a fair trial. But
during all this period, as was evident from his altered
and hesitating language, his mind was gradually ripen-
ing for the final change: it was impossible for him,
charged as he was with the destinies of England, to sit
night after night in the House of Commons, listening to
the lucid expositions, the crushing logic, of the small
but indefatigable band of the champions of commercial
freedom, without finding first, doubt, then admiration
and surprise, then conviction, successively creeping over
him. We well remember, as he sat silent after one of
the calm, clear, irrefutable speeches of Mr. Cobden (re-
garding the effect of the corn laws on grazing and dairy
farmers), which made an unwonted impression on the
House, — the dismayed country gentlemen began to
whisper anxiously from the back benches : " This will
never do ! Why don't Peel get up and answer him?"
Sir Kobert Peel turned half round and muttered in a
low voice : " Those may answer him who can."

When his conversion was thus almost completed,

came the memorable and terrible summer of 1845

incessant rain, a damaged and defective harvest, and the
universal potato-rot — and the work was done. Peel

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 357

felt that he dared not encounter another period of dis-
tress and scarcity with the corn laws still unrepealed :
he saw starvation in prospect for Ireland, and possibly
for England also ; and he recognised the impossibility
of maintaining any impediments to the most unlimited
supply of foreign food. The more he thought, the more
he listened, the more he observed, — the clearer became
his vision, and the more resolute his purpose. At the
beginning of November he proposed to throw open the
ports ; but his colleagues were by no means unanimous,
and he felt it was not a step to be taken with divided
councils. Later in the month, Lord Morpeth joined the
league : on the 22nd, Lord John Eussell wrote his
celebrated letter to the electors of London : he, too, like
his great rival, was a convert to the pressure of the
times and the arguments of the leaguers. A week after,
Sir R. Peel resigned, after recommending the Queen to
send for Lord John Eussell, and placing in her Majesty's
hands a written promise to assist his rival, by every
means in his power, in effecting the now necessary
settlement of this great question. The issue is well
known : Lord John Russell could not form a ministry,
and Sir R. Peel again took office with all his colleagues,
except Lord Wharncliffe, who died, and Lord Stanley,
whose prejudices were too stubborn to yield to facts,
and whose heart was not yet touched by the prospective
sufferings of his fellow-countrymen. He carried the
repeal of the corn laws in the session of 1846, after a
hard contest, and the most savage and bitter personal
attacks, and then, according to a tacit understanding,
gracefully laid down his power, and retired for ever
from official life.

That a tentative and gradually progressive policy
like his, does not indicate the possession of the highest
qualities of statesmanship, we readily concede. The
merit of the prophetic mind that sees far into the future

A A 3

358 SIR B. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

belongs not to Sir R. Peel. Few politicians ever read
the present better, or the future less. He was clear-
sighted, rather than far-sighted. " His life was one
perpetual education," says Mr. Disraeli. " He was not
a Vapid learner," observes Mr. Roebuck, "but he was
continually improving. He was ever ready to listen to
the exposition of new ideas." — The truth is, as Mr.
Disraeli perceived, Sir R. Peel was not an original mind :
he drew his inspiration from others. He was not of
that order of great men who early embrace vast objects
and prolific principles, inoculate the country with them,
and educate the country up to them through long years
of effort, obloquy, and misconstruction. He was not
even of those who say, with Artevelde, —

" I will not wait upon necessity.
And leave myself no choice of vantage ground ;
But rather meet the times while still I may,
And mould and fashion them as best I can."

He scarcely ever anticipated the verdict of the country ;
he was never too early ; often too late. But when we
reflect how great a change has of late years come over
the political action of the country ; how completely the
general rules, and many even of the smaller details, of
our policy are now decided by public opinion out of
doors*; how entirely both ministers and parliament

* Mr. Disraeli, indeed, conceives that much of this change lies at
the door of Sir Robert Peel. "No minister," he says, "ever di-
minished the power of government in this country so much as this
eminent man. No one ever strained the constitution so much. He
was the unconscious parent of political agitation. He literally forced
the people out of doors to become statesmen, and the whole tendency
of his policy was to render our institutions mere forms." There is
much truth in this : but surely the Whigs must share the guilt — if
guilt there be — for what party of late years have so constantly com-
pelled the country to modify their measures and make amends for
their deficiencies ?

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 359

have become mere instruments to legalise, embody, and
execute those decisions to which the exertions of inde-
pendent thinkers and associated bodies have gradually
led the national mind, — it may be questioned whether
a man who sympathises and adopts, is not more needed
at the helm, in our times, than a man who initiates —
still more than one who anticipates or misreads. The
day is past when British rulers could govern according
to the dictates of their own wisdom ; nothing can now
be done that the country is not ripe for ; and a minister
who is too forward for his age, finds himself simply
powerless.

" Had the intellect of Sir Robert Peel," says Mr. Roebuck,
" been of a bolder and more original cast, he would probably
have been a less successful minister, as in that case he might
often have proposed reforms before the nation was prepared to
receive them, and thus have diminished his power as a minister
while earning the renown of a philosopher. . . . The phi-
losopher who discovers great truths, and collects the evidence
by which they are eventually established, must be content to
have his reward in the reverence and gratitude of posterity, and
must be satisfied with the consciousness of the real value and
importance of his discoveries. But the statesman, to be useful,
must be powerful ; and in a government like ours, and among a
practical people like the English, the safest course for a re-
forming minister is never to be before his age. Let him not be
obstinately wedded to any views or opinions — let him be ever
ready to hear, and carefully and respectfully listen to, all sides
of every question — but let him religiously abstain from appro-
priating or assenting to any novel conception, until the public
thoroughly understands and earnestly adopts it." — Preface, p. xix.

On one memorable instance, however, Sir Robert
Peel hung back behind his age. He did not recognise
the demand of the nation for reform, and when he did,
he refused to bow to its wishes. He opposed the
Reform Bill to the last ; though when passed, he pro-

A A 4

360 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

claimed it to be "a final and irrevocable settlement
of a great constitutional question, which, no friend
to his country would attempt, directly or insidiously,
to disturb;" and set himself diligently and with con-
summate sagacity to the task of reconstructing the dis-
organised Conservative party, on a basis suited to the
altered circumstances of the times. Yet it is to be
observed that no man contributed more largely to the
success of the Reform Bill than Sir Eobert Peel himself,
— since, if it had not been for the breaking up of the
Tory camp caused by his proceedings in 1829, that
great measure could not have been carried, and indeed
would never have been proposed. The effect, too, of
the discussions on that measure, the conduct of the
people regarding it, and their subsequent course at
elections, in completing his political education, and
making him thoroughly comprehend the middle classes,
can scarcely be too highly estimated.

Mr. Disraeli thus sums up his able and discriminating,
but somewhat hostile, estimate of his great opponent : —

" One cannot say of Sir Robert Peel, notwithstanding his
unrivalled powers of dispatching affairs, that he was the greatest
minister this country ever produced ; because, twice placed at
the helm, and on the second occasion with the court and the
parliament equally devoted to him, he never could maintain
himself in power. Nor, notwithstanding his consummate par-
liamentary tactics, can he be described as the greatest party
leader that ever flourished among us, for he contrived to de-
stroy the most compact, powerful, and devoted party that ever
followed a British statesman. Certainly, notwithstanding his
great sway in debate, we cannot recognise him as our greatest
orator, for in many of the supreme requisites of oratory, he was
singularly deficient. But what he really was, and what posterity
will acknowledge him to have been, is the greatest MEMBER OF
PARLIAMENT that ever lived."

Mr. Roebuck's estimate is juster and more compre-
hensive:—

SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 361

" His strongest sympathies were with the nation, and not
with a dominant section or party ; and in this he was pre-emi-
nently distinguished from the Whig statesmen to whom he was
through life opposed. . . . His conduct during his last ad-
ministration, though it gave offence, never to be forgiven, to
some of his immediate partisans, made him the most popular
minister, and the most powerful statesman known in England
since the days of the first William Pitt. The nation had con-
fidence in his prudence ; they believed him sincerely anxious to
promote the welfare of his country, and to have real sympathies
with the industrious millions of our people. There was a feel-
ing, every day growing stronger, that he was destined to be the
people's minister ; — that he would be able, by means of popular
support, to which at length he could alone look for aid, to
depart from the rule by which the whole government of the
country had hitherto been placed exclusively in the hands of
the aristocracy, and to unite upon the Treasury bench a really
national administration. . . . Entertaining the hope that
such was to be the ultimate mission of Sir Robert Peel, the
nation looked with eager expectation to his future career. He
rose in their affections in proportion as he lost the favour of his
party, and was never so powerful as when by that party he was
at last scouted, and deemed to be for ever dismissed."

This is quite true. During the four years that
elapsed between his resignation of office and his death,
he grew daily in intellectual and moral stature, and in
favour with the great body of the people. For the first
time in his long life he was free — unshackled by any
party ties, and liberated from all embarrassing ante-
cedents. He stood there as the great "Moderator" —
a sort of consulting physician to the nation, to be called
in when ordinary doctors were at fault. There was one
service especially which it was hoped he might live to
render. Rich in official experience, but unhampered
by official connection — exempt from the snares and pre-
judices of ambition, because no ambition could aspire
to a higher eminence than he had already reached —
apart and aloof from all the embarrassments of party,

362 SIR R. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY.

since he had for ever and voluntarily ceased to be a
leader — it was felt that he, and he only, was the states-
man competent to examine and report upon the whole
machine of our government — to point out the defects
in its system, and to suggest the quarter in which a
remedy was to be sought ; in a word, to reform Down-
ning Street, and recall both the Legislature and the
Executive to their original and proper functions. To
enter further upon this topic — prolific as it is — would
lead us into a digression now, for which we have no
space left.

We must conclude. When the Duke of Wellington,
on receiving the melancholy tidings of Sir Robert Peel's
death, emphatically pronounced him to be "the most
honest man " he had ever known, the world was some-
what surprised at the peculiar terms of the eulogy.
We were not. We can quite understand what the
Duke meant. He intended to declare that in all his
course his colleague had always appeared to him per-
fectly single-minded and conscientious. The praise
was discriminating and deserved. We fully believe
that Sir Robert Peel at all times did what he thought
best for the country, according to his light and the
scope of his vision ; that whether he walked straightly
or tortuously — whether he changed or persevered —
whether he led his party or deserted them, he acted in
each and every case as his conscience, in its then state
of enlightenment, dictated.* He did this at the cost of
much personal pain, for he was a man acutely sensitive

* It is an interesting fact, and one that lias come to us on high
authority, that, for many of the latter years of his life, Sir Robert
was in the invariable habit, at whatever hour he returned from
Downing Street or the House of Commons, of reading for half an
hour in some serious or religious book, before retiring to rest. It
was only by this habit, he said, that he could keep his mind calm
and clear after the distractions and irritations of the day.

SIR E. PEEL'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 363

to the opinions and feelings of those around him, — at
once proud a,nd sensitive. Therefore we place him
morally, though perhaps not intellectually, in the very
first rank of public men. Would that all had his
singleness of mind, his genuine patriotism, his honesty
in seeking truth, his candour and courage in avowing
error !

Sir Robert Peel was a scholar, and a liberal and dis-
cerning patron of the arts. He was a man of fine and
sensitive organisation, and of judicious and ready bene-
volence. Though not social, he had many literary in-
terests, and much elegant and cultivated taste. Pos-
sessed of immense wealth, with every source and avenue
of pleasure at his command, it was no slight merit in
him that he preferred to such refined enjoyment the
laborious and harassing service of his country. He had
his recompense. By his unblemished private character,
by his unrivalled administrative ability, by his vast
public services, by his unvarying moderation, he had
inspired, not only England, but the world at large,
with a respect and confidence such as few attain. After
many fluctuations of repute, he had at length reached
an eminence on which he stood — independent of office
and of party — one of the recognised potentates of
Europe; face to face, in the evening of life, with his
work and his reward ; — his work, to aid the progress
of those principles on which, after much toil, many
sacrifices, arid long groping towards the light, he had
at last laid a firm grasp ; his guerdon, to watch their
triumph and their influences. Nobler occupation man
could not aspire to ; sublimer power no ambition need
desire ; greater earthly reward, God, out of all the
riches of his boundless treasury, has not to bestow.

364

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.*

IN a country in which action is so rapid, interests so
varied, arid occupation so intense and unremitting, as
with us — where men of business, philosophers, and
politicians, pursue each their own special object with
exclusive and overestimating eagerness — where the
whole nation is engaged with healthy cheerfulness in
unremitting effort and an unpausing race, it is not easy
for those to find a hearing who would call upon the
actors in this exciting drama to draw up for a brief
space, and consider themselves, their position, and their
aims, as becomes beings —

" Holding large discourse,
Looking before and after."

Yet these breathing moments in the hasting course
of time — these Sabbatical hours of the world's quick
existence — in which we may review the past, estimate
where we are standing, and ascertain whither we are
tending, in which we may calculate our progress and
catch a clear vision of our goal, may take stock of our
acquisitions and achievements, investigate the value of
our objects, and compare them with the price we are
paying for them, and the means which remain to us of
obtaining them — such pauses for reflection, introspec-

* From the " North British Review," May, 1852.

1. History of the Whig Administration of 1830. By J. A. ROE-
BUCK. London: 1852.

2. Latter-Day Pamphlets, III., IV., V., and VI. By THOMAS
CARLYLE. London : 1850.

3. The Statesman. By HENRY TAYLOR. London: 1836.

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 365

tion, and foresight, are particularly necessary if we
would not sink from the dignity of men —

" Who know themselves, and know the ways before them,
And from among them choose considerately,
With a clear foresight, not a blindfold courage ;
And having chosen, with a steadfast mind
Pursue their purposes " —

into mere unconscious instruments of destiny, mere un-
resisting floaters on the stream of time.

In politics especially, a mere " hand-to-mouth" ex-
istence— living, as the French express it, au jour le
jour — can never be worthy of men who boast to be
free and claim to be progressive. Yet it is the beset-
ting peril, and has always been the peculiar reproach
of our busy British statesmen. Overwhelmed as they
constantly are with a mass of routine work, which must
be got through ; and having literally to fight their way
inch by inch against a host of antagonists, whose sole
business is antagonism ; knowing that every step will
be a struggle, and, therefore, naturally enough, stepping
less where they wish and think they ought than where
they must and think they can, they can rarely get
sufficiently out of the press and throng to see far, or
sufficiently free from the urgent demands of the mo-
ment to deliberate or muse. The position apart, the
dry ground of security above, which are indispensable
to the profound and patient thought out of which
wisdom emerges, are almost wholly denied them. The
country, too, seems content that it should be so ; it is
satisfied to be served by men who do the duties of the
day with capacity and decorum; it is never "over-
exquisite to cast the shadow of uncertain evils ; " it
goes on from generation to generation, meeting un-
foreseen emergencies with extemporised expedients,
stopping up a gap with anything that comes to hand,

366 PROSPECTS OF BEITISH STATESMANSHIP.

caulking a shot-hole with the nearest hat, slitting open
the leather where the shoe pinches, putting in a casual
patch when the rent in the old garment becomes ab-
solutely indecent and unbearable, cobbling up the old
house as the family enlarges, or the roof decays, or the
walls crumble and fall away, adding here a buttress
and there a shed, and sometimes, in a crisis of severe
pressure or unwonted ambition, joining a Grecian colon-
nade to a Gothic gable. In this strange style we have
proceeded almost for centuries, till the incongruities of
our dwellings, our clothing, and our policy, have grown
obvious even to our unobservant and accustomed eye.
We go on swearing against the Pretender long after his
last descendant has been laid quietly in a foreign grave ;
guarding with testy jealousy against the power of the
crown long after the crown has been shorn of its due
and legitimate authority ; risking the loss of our liber-
ties from foreign aggression, rather than support an
adequate standing army, because in past times those
liberties were threatened by a standing army in the
hands of a domestic tyrant ; exacting oaths in a court
of justice as a security for truth, long after experience
and reflection have shown us that those who refuse
oaths are the most truthful of all witnesses, and long
after our inconsistent liberality has extorted from us
the permission to every man to swear after his own
fashion; — and committing a host of similar solecisms,
all showing how entirely we are still governed by the
ideas and traditions of an obsolete and inapplicable age.
In an era of new requirements and encircled by new
conditions, we are drawing on the arsenals and speaking
in the language of the past ; and while young and
mighty perils, from hitherto undreamed of quarters,
are threatening the precious commonwealth, we are
haunted by the ghost of some ancestral enemy, or are
gibbetting the carcase and demolishing the tomb of

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 367

some old danger that was long ago gathered to its
fathers.

Our present object is to awaken among our country-
men some degree, not of uneasiness, indeed, but of per-
ception of our dangers and our requirements, some
serious and anxious inquiry into the difficulties which
we have to meet and into our means of meeting them.
Our foreign and international relations are becoming
strangely complicated ; and the principles which are to
guide them in future require to be considered and de-
cided, that our due influence be not impaired by weak-
ness or vacillation. Our relations with our offsets and
dependencies are changing and enlarging with the lapse
of time ; and the principles which are to regulate our
colonial policy for the future, must be discussed and
laid down in such a manner as to avoid any risk of a
disruption of our empire or of dissension among brethren.
The social problems which press upon us for solution at
home become daily knottier, more urgent, and more
complex ; and it is essential both to our safety and our
welfare that they be neither evaded nor postponed.
Finally, the duties of actual administration become
every year more difficult and laborious as our wealth
and numbers multiply, as our vision of what is needed
becomes keener, and as our standard of requirement
becomes higher. Now, for all these calls, but most
especially for the last, we need statesmen not only of a
high but of a peculiar order of talent; and as these
calls increase and enlarge, we require both more nume-
rous and more able statesmen. Already it is felt that
the work in every public department is augmenting
and its difficulties thickening in a most perplexing de-
gree. We are opening our eyes to the extent to which
we have been misgoverned, arid we are rapidly raising
our conception of what government might or ought to
be ; day by day defects are being discovered and abuses

368 ^PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

are being ferretted out and exposed in every ministerial
office ; and the voice of the country demands that they
shall be remedied at once and shall be precluded for the
future. We need more and exact more from our public
men than at any former period. What means have our
public men of meeting this need and these exactions ?
and what is our immediate prospect of a supply of states-
men adapted to the fu actions and equal to the necessities
of their position ?

Perhaps there has never been a period in our recent
history where so poor a present had the prospect of
being succeeded by a still poorer future. Generally
speaking, each of the great parties in the state has
been able to muster a sufficient number of men to
form a cabinet capable of undertaking the destinies
of the country, — men whose views, indeed, we might
deem erroneous, but of whose proved capacity there
could be no question. Now, it is probable, that if an
accident or an epidemic were to sweep off three or four
of our oldest and most acknowledged leaders — whose
end in the natural course of events cannot be far distant
, — all parties together could scarcely supply the fifteen
ministers needed to complete a cabinet, of individuals
whose fitness for such a position has been tried and
is admitted by the nation. Our list of actual states-
men is alarmingly scanty ; our list of potential ones is
scantier still. Peel and Wellington — the great parlia-
mentary and the great military genius of the age —
have both passed off the stage. After a life of toil, the
one has found rest and the other is hourly looking
forward to it. Who remain to replace them ? Of the
veterans who, by universal consent, hold a first rank,
there are only four — Lord John Russell, Lord Derby,
Lord Palmerston, and Sir James Graham. (We need
take no account of their contemporaries, for Lord Lans-
downe, never brilliant, but always sensible and mode-

PKOSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 369

rate, is now seventy-two years of age, and is weary,
broken down, and anxious for immediate retirement;
Lord Aberdeen, amiable and honourable, but yielding
and never distinguished, is now sixty-eight, and may,
without disrespect, be spoken of in the preterite tense ;
Mr. Herries and Mr. Goulburn, both verging on their
seventieth year, were always more or less so). But
the four above named are all first-rate men. We may
dissent from their policy, we may oppose their measures?
we may dislike their persons, but it is impossible not to
admit their full competency. Lord Derby is a gallant
and brilliant nobleman ; Lord John Russell is a states-
man of thorough education and long experience and
chivalric honour ; Sir James Graham is unquestionably
the ablest administrator in parliament ; and Lord Pal-
merston, beyond rivalship, the most complete and skilful
diplomatist of his time. But these four are all of that
rank and standing that remain to us ; and Lord Derby,
the youngest of them, is such a martyr to the gout, as
almost, if not quite, to disqualify him for the toils of
office. Far from being always ready for any call, he
can never foresee whether he will be able to go down
to the House on any given day, or whether he may not,
for weeks at a time, be as unfit for business as the first
Lord Chatham. Lord John Russell, whose health was
never strong, is now sixty years of age ; Sir James
Graham the same ; and Lord Palmerston is six'ty- eight.
When these men fail or disappear, as they soon must,
who are they who will step into their places by right of
natural inheritance ? — the younger statesmen of the
second rank.

It is in this class that our poverty is most apparent.
It affords only three men qualified by capacity and
character for the chief offices of State — Lord Cla-
rendon, Lord Grey, and Mr. Gladstone. On these men
we may soon have to place our main reliance. The

VOL. II. B B

370 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

first is already marked out by the general voice as our
future premier. He, of all men, would be best fitted
to unite all that remains of vigour and adaptability in
the old Whig party with the rising talent and bolder
views of the more able Radicals, and to command the
allied forces. He has high rank and aristocratic con-
nections ; he is noted for firm purpose and conciliating
manners ; he has shown first-rate ability, both as a
diplomatist and an administrator ; whatever he has
had to do he has done well ; his views are sound, com-
prehensive, and generous ; and he is free from those
narrow' trammels of connection and tradition which so
often cloud the vision, complicate the measures, and
paralyze the energy of Lord John Russell. Moreover,
though a man of thoroughly broad and statesmanlike
capacity, and nothing of a doctrinaire, he is known to
sympathize more largely than any of his class with
the opinions of the more sober and reflective of the
popular party ; he will be freer than any other states-
man to act as he deems right, because more exempt
than any other from embarrassing antecedents ; and
the skill and courage with which he has governed
Ireland, afford a guarantee of his competency to the
far easier task of governing England. Happily he is
still young (fifty-two), and may possibly be our pilot for
nearly a quarter of a century before his powers decay.
His brother, Charles Villiers, fought the battle of the
corn-laws side by side with Richard Cobden, and he
himself was known to sympathize largely with the
people in that memorable contest.

Mr. Gladstone is a man whom everybody respects,
and whom all who know him love. He has many of
the qualities of an English statesman, — wide know-
ledge, thorough training, a conservative temper, and
singular caution. He is, moreover, a man of un-
stained and lofty character, gentle and generous feelings,

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 371

and a most sensitive and elaborate conscientiousness.
But the tone of his mind is delicate and fine rather
than strong ; he is inclined to scholastic niceties, which
greatly impair his efficiency in political life ; and though
his mental and moral qualities will always make him
influential, yet his subtle and refining temperament will
prevent him from ever becoming a popular statesman.
He may be a valuable adviser and a useful moderator,
even perhaps a fair administrator, but scarcely a great
leader.

Lord Grey raised great hopes of his future eminence
and usefulness so long as he was out of office. " Om-
nium consensu capax imperii, nisiimperasset." Though
always deplorably tainted with some of the worst faults
of the Whig aristocracy — their narrow sympathies,
imperious dogmatism, and cold haughtiness of temper
— he was a laborious and thoughtful politician. His
views were always worthy of attention, often original,
sometimes bold and comprehensive. He promised to
become what England so much wants — a philosophical
reformer. But office — that great test and touchstone
of genuine capacity — has not only lowered his reputa-
tion, but we fear has damaged it so effectually as to
render him almost unavailable for future service. Not
only has he disappointed all hopes, made innumerable
enemies, and done nothing well, but all his early defects
seem to have been aggravated ; and any such improve-
ment as will again qualify him to become a leading
statesman can scarcely be hoped for from a man who is
too impatient to listen, and too proud to learn.

It may seem strange that in our survey of the pro-
spective servants of the country, we should pass over
such members of the late Cabinet as Sir Francis Baring,
Mr. Fox Maule, Lord Carlisle, and Mr. Labouchere.
But the first has never greatly distinguished himself,

BBS

372 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

and is understood to have a rooted dislike to the
fatigues and annoyances of office. The second is a
man of talent and industry, but has scarcely made
his way into the category of statesmen. Lord Carlisle,
though he has been a laborious and most useful minister
in his day, arid though his genial manners, genuine,
wide, warm benevolence, and ready popular sympathies,
will always make him an ornament and a source of
confidence to any cabinet which he may join, is un-
questionably not a man of commanding ability. He is
an honour to his station and his country, but he would
be the first to confess his own incapacity for' the position
of a leader. Sir George Grey's health is quite broken.
Mr. Labouchere is a soft-minded, philanthropic, and
honourable man — one of that class of rich, cultivated,
noble country gentlemen, of whom England has so
much reason to be proud ; but his talents are not
shining, and he has far too little ambition to allow us
to count upon him as a permanent candidate for office.
Two noblemen remain, of whom the highest hopes
are entertained by those who know them, and who will
probably henceforth take rank among our leading states-
men— Lord Granville and Lord Dalhousie. Both are
in the prime of life, and seem endowed with all the
needful qualifications ; but they can scarcely yet be
said to have been sufficiently proved for us to predict
their future with any certainty. Of those younger still,
three have already appeared above the horizon, and
may become stars in time. All are men of talent and
of high name and connection. The Duke of Argyll has
manifested already in his writings comprehensive views
and a masterly logical faculty, and seems resolved to
devote himself to public life. Lord Stanley, though
an inferior man to his father, and though he has most
injudiciously and prematurely announced his attach-
ment to the falling cause of protection, is said to

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMENSHIP. 373

possess very considerable powers. Mr. Frederick Peel
is cautious, able, and fond of work, and has avoided his
father's early fault, ranking himself at once among the
moderate but advancing liberals.

Here ends our list of rising and proximate statesmen
from all the great parties which have hitherto divided
political power between them, and it must be allowed
to be an alarmingly meagre one. We do not mean that
among the holders, past and present, of the subordinate
ministerial offices there are not several men of great
ability, whose capacity to render good service to their
country we in no way doubt. Lord Stanley of Alder-
ley is a man of respectable powers and business habits,
and Mr. Wilson is a politician and administrator of
vast industry, and no ordinary talent ; but the number
of such men is not large, and they are not leaders, nor
perhaps qualified to be so. " But," it will be asked,
" are there in parliament no other men of capacity and
eminence, who, if not yet finished statesmen, are, at all
events, fitted to become such ; who, though hitherto
undreamed of for official posts, are yet only excluded
by virtue of their opinions ; and who, as the country
gradually advances in the career of liberalism, will be-
come the exponents of its views, and therefore the na-
tural administrators of its destinies?" — We think not.*
Mere opinions exclude men only for a time : character
and habits of mind exclude them for ever. In the first

* This was written before the formation of the present cabinet,
the list of whose members has amazed the world. But we do not
feel disposed to alter or qualify any of our observations. With the
exception of Mr. Herries (who is passe), the only known member of
that cabinet in the House of Commons, is Mr. Disraeli, of whom all
that can be said is, that, as far as he can be j udged of by the past, he
unites the maximum of parliamentary cleverness with the minimum
of statesmanlike capacity.

B B 3

374 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

case, their day inevitably comes round: in the second,
no lapse of years and no change of public sentiments
can float them into power. Now, there are at present
five men of great weight, and value, and prominence in
the House of Commons, whom no one thinks of with
much hope — scarcely even without dread — as possible
ministers. It seems generally felt, and not among
aristocratic and official circles only, that notwithstanding
their undoubted ability and vigour, their natural and
permanent place is in the opposition. They either have
not the needful endowments of statesmen, or they have
qualities and defects which neutralize and overpower
these endowments. Mr. Disraeli is the apparent leader
of a party, is undoubtedly its spokesman, and is by far
the most brilliant and formidable rhetorician in the
House. His prominence there, if backed by the suitable
qualities, would indubitably make him a cabinet minister
and secretary of state if ever the Tories, or their ghosts,
the Protectionists, came into power. The House always
fills to hear him speak; and the fierce and polished
sarcasms which he launches on his opponents are the
nightly delight of his associates. Yet no one ever
dreams of him as a leading minister. The country
would not endure his appointment to any important
post, and his undeniable parliamentary claim to such is
well known to be a source of serious embarrassment to
his party. He is felt by all parties to be a mere adven-
turer,— a man without fixed principles or deliberate
and sincere public aims, — a man to whom political life
is a game to be played (as respectably as may be) for
his own advancement. Neither his character nor his
abilities give him any weight with any class or party.
Moreover, he is universally admitted to be destitute
both of the statesmanlike capacity, the statesmanlike
knowledge, and the statesmanlike sobriety and solidity
of mind and morals. He belongs, not to the bees, but

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 375

to the wasps and the butterflies of public life. He
can sting and sparkle, but he cannot work. His place
in the arena is marked and ticketed for ever. — Mr.
Bright is a man of very vigorous though rough ability,
his diligence is very meritorious, and he is gradually
gaining the ear of the House ; but his education is im-
perfect, his views narrow, his tone low, dogmatic, and
somewhat vulgar; he has nothing of the statesman
about him, and we do not imagine that he can ever
soar above the position of a " tribune of the people."
No one looks to him for a moment as a future minister.
— Mr. Cobden's mind is of a far higher order, his views
more comprehensive, and his whole being and organisa-
tion cast in a far finer mould ; but his opinions and his
language are too often extreme, and he has the great
misfortune of being linked with a party altogether in-
ferior to, and unworthy of himself; and it is to be
feared that —

" He will lower to their level day by day,
What is fine within him growing coarse, to sympathize with
clay."

Moreover, he also, like Mr. Bright, labours under the
almost insuperable defect of an incomplete early educa-
tion. It is not that his knowledge is not far greater, and
his comprehension of social questions often far juster,
than those of many men who are useful and even eminent
in official life ; but he wants that indescribable enlarge-
ment and refinement of intellect, the faculty for under-
standing other minds, and appreciating hidden wants
and sympathies, which is indispensable to those who
would aspire to govern a nation of cultivated men, and
which an early acquaintance with the more elegant and
profound branches of learning can alone confer. A man
who could say that a copy of the " Times " contained
more wisdom and sound information than the whole of

B B 4

376 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

Thucydides, even were it but in a hasty explosion of
spleen, must be wanting in some of the most essential
endowments and sensibilities of a true statesman. — Sir
William Molesworth and Mr. Roebuck are not open to
this objection : they are both men of finished training as
well as of popular sympathies, and perfectly capable of
comprehending the requirements of a country like ours,
and of taking wide and ample views of the science of po-
licy. But Sir William is rich and lazy — social rather
than ambitious ; and though commanding the confidence
of the people, would, we suspect, prefer being "proxi-
mate" to being actual minister. — Mr. Roebuck's valuable
qualities are sadly clouded by certain constitutional
defects. He is bold, honest, and courageous as few men
are ; but he is too apt to imagine that he has an absolute
monopoly of these great gifts. He speaks truth both to
constituents and to colleagues with an unflinching con-
scientiousness that is too seldom seen, but he takes care
to put this truth in its most unpalatable and irritating
form. He is far less extreme in his opinions than in
his manner of stating them ; and if he had added the
suaviter in modo to the fortiter in re, he could scarcely
fail to have been by this time far advanced on his way
to high office. As it is, it seems to be generally admitted,
even by those who think him one of the ablest poli-
ticians of the day — and we confess ourselves to be of
this number — that his temper utterly precludes him
from entering any ministry ; since it is a temper which
not only makes him unnecessarily and often unin-
tentionally offensive to those with whom he comes in
contact, but colours his whole views of men and things.
He is a sort of radical Lord Grey; arid it would, we
imagine, be even less difficult to find a cabinet that would
act with him, than a cabinet with which he would not
consider it derogatory to act.

Let us now sum up the strength of our available and

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 377

regular ministerial army, rank and file, on which the
country will have to rely when the four worn and
veteran statesmen whom we first named have retired or
died. We have three cabinets to provide for — Tory,
Liberal, and Medium. For the first we have literally
no one : for the second we have Lords Clarendon,
Granville, and Carlisle ; with Mr. Fox Maule, Mr. Wilson,
and Mr. Frederick Peel : for the third we have Lord
Dalhousie, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Sidney Herbert, and Mr.
Cardwell, among the tried men ; the Duke of Newcastle,
the Duke of Argyll, and possibly Lord Stanley among
the prospective ones. The coalition of the whole set —
proved men and hopeful men — could scarcely form one
complete and competent ministry among them: and
such a coalition we have not seen since the time of
Pelham, and cannot look for in these more earnest and
conscientious days. When Lord Derby has fallen a
victim to the gout, Lord John Russell to feeble health,
Lord Palmerston and Sir James Graham to the course
of natural decay; when Sir George Grey has sunk
under combined illness and toil, and Sir Francis Baring
and Mr. Labouchere have yielded to their wish for ease
and peace — all of which events must happen soon, and
may happen to-morrow — we shall have to construct a
ministry fit to govern and to guide our great empire
out of the scanty materials we have enumerated. We
must have a Premier, a Chancellor of the Exchequer,
three Secretaries of State, a First Lord of the Admiralty,
a Secretary or Lord Lieutenant for Ireland, and a Pre-
sident of the Board of Trade — eight in all, who must
be men of superior and tried capacity and character,
besides nine others of respectable ability ; and we have,
taking all parties together, only six adequate for chiefs,
and about seven for secondary parts. Truly, our poli-
tical army is in lamentable want of recruits.

To some parties, however, this state of affairs pre-

378 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

sents no cause for uneasiness. " In a country and an
age so enlightened, so free, so self-governing as ours, we
do not," they say, " need statesmen of lofty and surpass-
ing genius to rule us. We can dispense with ' great
men.' ' There is some truth in this view ; but it is
partial and superficial truth. We can dispense with great
men better than most nations, but we cannot dispense
with them altogether, nor without mischief and without
danger. Or rather, we can dispense with the kind of
greatness which we do not require, but not with that
kind which we do require. Ministers of vast philo-
sophic capacity, like Bacon ; of profound, systematic,
thorough-going policy, like StrafFord; of commanding
and predominating genius, like Chatham ; of imperious
and overbearing resolve, like Pitt ; or of haughty and
unbending will, like the Duke of Wellington, — we per-
haps do not need now. Their age is past. They would
find no fitting scope, and no decorous place in our
democratic and balanced constitution. Much of their
superiority would be thrown away, and much of their
power would be wasted in fruitless contest with the
municipal and self-ruling element in our national cha-
racter. Nor do we need as we once did — and valuable
as such would still be — statesmen endowed with the
special and glorious gift of legislative genius, — men
who possess a penetrating and unerring insight into the
character of the people, a thorough knowledge of their
wants, and that peculiar organising and arranging
faculty, which can adapt laws and decrees to these two
guiding conditions. The nation has now so many
ways of explaining its own character, and proclaiming
its own wants, that no one who can read and listen
needs to misunderstand them, or remain ignorant of
them; while at the same time it abounds in men of
quick observation and of deep thought, whose united
action in speech and writing even more than supplies

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 379

the place, which, in less free or less developed countries,
is filled by individual statesmen of paramount and com-
manding power. With us a hundred sensible and re-
flective men combine to do the work of one great man.
Through the mighty, pervading, unresting engine of
the press, they instruct, persuade, inoculate, and guide
the people, as formerly and elsewhere a Clarendon, a
Burleigh, a De Witt, a Hardenberg, or a Washington,
might have done. More and more the policy of Britain
is directed, its opinions formed, the tone of the national
mind decided, its tendencies developed, its legislation
modified, amended, and matured, by its writers rather
than by its formal and oificial politicians. In matters
of legislation, the unrecognised are often far more in-
fluential than the recognised statesmen of the day. In
books and pamphlets, in newspapers and reviews, on a
hundred noisy platforms, and in a thousand silent
studies, the great national work is carried on ; and
carried on, in all likelihood, with a far greater aggregate
of national benefit, if with less rapid and exact attain-
ment of the immediate end, than if it were entrusted to
a single statesman, towering far above the mass. Even
in parliament, it is probable that sounder views are
elicited, and more ultimate good effected by the crude
and wild discussions and the bewildering and shallow
contributions of many men of imperfect knowledge and
superficial understanding, than would be produced by
the calm and elaborate exposition of one loftier mind.
For the last half century the nation has done its own
work. The union with Ireland was probably the last
great act of individual legislative statesmanship. Ca-
tholic emancipation was extorted by the Irish people.
Parliamentary reform was carried by the English people.
The re-organisation of the poor-law was the work of
men out of parliament and scarcely heard of at the
time: they studied the subject, elaborated the plan,

380 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

informed and prepared the country, — while ministers
were scarcely persuaded to adopt so bold, masterty,
and complete a measure. And the last great change
in the spirit and direction of our policy — the adoption
of Free Trade — was due to no section of statesmen,
but solely to the middle classes and their self-elected
leaders.

It is not, then, chiefly for the purpose of compre-
hensive and philosophic legislation that we require
public men of superior and commanding ability, but for
the purposes of government and administration. In-
capacity in this department the floating talent and
sense of the country cannot supplement, or can do so
only imperfectly and at enormous cost. Incapacity in
this department is productive of the most fruitful suf-
fering and evil ; it may continue to work its mischief
for months and years before it is discovered and pro-
claimed ; yet the press can do nothing but expose it,
and parliament can do nothing but discard the actual
delinquents and replace them by others who may be no
less incompetent. The functions and the powers of
ministers, even in this country, where they are so con-
stantly badgered and so closely watched, are vast and
appalling. A thousand eyes are constantly observing
them, a thousand tongues constantly calling them to
account, with all the vigilance of mingled envy, ani-
mosity, and patriotism ; yet how small a proportion of
their daily actions ever come to light or become the
subject of public animadversion ! How still fewer are
discovered, reprehended, and counteracted, before they
have run a long course of misery and mischief! We
imagine that a hostile and ambitious opposition affords
us a sufficient guarantee against matters going much or
long amiss. We are deplorably mistaken : it affords
us, indeed, a security that ministers will act under a
nervous sense of responsibility, and probably, therefore,

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 381

with conscientiousness and caution ; but it affords, and
can afford, no security that they will act with judgment
or discretion. Let us consider for a moment what
their functions are.* Each of them, in nine-tenths of
the things which he has to do, is virtually absolute in
his own department. A number of cases come before
him daily in which he must act at once and upon his
own judgment and responsibility. Most of these may
be routine matters, or may appear unimportant; but
each decision may carry with it fearful consequences.
Parliament gives or refuses to each minister certain
funds for special purposes, but there its action and
control cease ; the funds are spent as the minister thinks
best. The Commander-in-Chief has the appointment
of generals in various quarters : he may appoint a
plausible fool or a superannuated friend, and the result

* " The far greater proportion of the duties which are performed
in the office of a minister, are and must be performed under no effec-
tive responsibility. Where politics and parties are not affected by
the matter in question, and so long as there is no flagrant neglect or
glaring injustice to individuals which a party can take hold of, the
responsibility to parliament is merely nominal, or falls otherwise
only through casualty, caprice, and a misemployment of the time due
from parliament to legislative affairs. Thus the business of the
office may be reduced within a very manageable compass, without
creating public scandal. By evading decisions wherever they can
be evaded ; by shifting them on other departments or authorities,
where by any possibility they can be shifted ; by giving decisions
upon superficial examinations, categorically, so as not to^expose the
superficiality by propounding the reasons ; by deferring questions
till, as Lord Bacon says, * they resolve themselves ; ' by undertaking
nothing for the public good which the public voice does not call for ;
by conciliating loud and energetic individuals at the expense of such
public interests as are dumb, or do not attract attention ; by sacri-
ficing everywhere what is feeble and obscure to what is influential
and cognizable ; by such means and shifts as these the functionary
may reduce his business within his powers, and perhaps obtain for
himself the most valuable of all reputations in this line of life — that
of being « a safe man.' " — The Statesman, by Henry Taylor, p. 151.

382 PROSPECTS OF BKITIJSH STATESMANSHIP.

is and has been sad reverses, fearful slaughter, perilous
discomfiture. From indolence, prejudice, or incapacity,
he may so mismanage the internal organisation of the
army, that when an emergency arises we have scarcely
a regiment fit for efficient service ; he may retain flint
guns when every other nation has adopted percussion-
caps; he may stick close to miserable muskets when
everywhere else they have been superseded by improved
rifles ; he may allow our ordnance to fall so far behind
the age as to become our own dread and our enemy's
laughing-stock ; he may dress our soldiers so that they
cannot march, and mount our cavalry so that they
cannot charge. All this has been done ; much of it is
said to be done now. Nay more, he not only may
commit many of these errors, it is probable that he
will. Inaction is always easier and often safer than
activity ; changes are troublesome, unwelcome, and
costly; and it requires some nerve to face a parlia-
mentary debate on an increased item in the estimates.
Thus, without the public knowing, without parliament
vituperating, our army may fall into utter inefficiency,
while appearances are well kept up; and the nation
may be suddenly awakened from its apathy to trace,
when it is too late, defeat and discredit to administra-
tive incapacity, and to find itself called upon at a tre-
mendous cost to redeem the consequences of having
trusted a lazy or incompetent commander. It would
be invidious to specify too closely ; but recent history
and present circumstances may supply to every one
the needed commentary and confirmation — Again, the
first Lord of the Admiralty, and his chief Secretary,
decide what stores shall be kid in, and how and whence ;
what ships shall be built and commissioned, how they
shall be manned and armed, who shall command them,
and where they shall be sent. If this is done, as we
know it often is done, without discernment or discretion,

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 383

consequences may ensue which it will require years of
care and millions of money to obliterate. Not only
may the public money be infamously and unavailingly
squandered, but public servants may be drowned or
poisoned by wholesale. An ill-appointed vessel, under
an incompetent commander, may go down with a whole
regiment of soldiers on board. A reckless or hot-
headed captain, whose character the Admiralty ought
to have known, may involve us in a dangerous quarre
— possibly in a costly war. Mismanagement or mis-
placement of our naval strength may expose our own
shores to imminent and deadly risk, may compromise
our long-established maritime supremacy, and compel
us to submit to insult which at the moment we are un-
prepared to resist. Hundreds of thousands of pounds,
which might have commissioned a dozen ships, and
raised the wages and satisfied the wishes of whole
crews of deserving seamen, may be frittered away in
building ships that will not sail, and then cutting them
into two again ; in constructing iron steamers which
will not stand round shot, and are therefore wholly
useless ; or in making vessels too large for their engines,
and ordering engines too heavy for the ships. Hun-
dreds of thousands more may be wasted from the want
of a simple system of checks and vouchers, such as
every private establishment possesses, but such as Mr.
Ward's celebrated circular betrayed the absence of in
the navy. All this may be directly traceable to the
negligence, ignorance, or incapacity of the principal
officials ; yet the country may know nothing of it for
years, and when informed of it, can do nothing but
dismiss the offenders and appoint others who may be to
the full as incapable. All this, too, our recent annals
may amply illustrate. — The Colonial Secretary has, if
possible, still greater power of irresponsible, unchecked,
and undiscoverable mischief. He governs, nearly auto-

384 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

cratically, forty dependencies, some of them larger than
the mother country, whose dearest interests he may
irreparably damage, whose safety he may jeopardize,
and whose affections he may alienate by an injudicious
despatch, a careless decision, or a bad appointment.
He may destroy the property of hundreds, he may
undermine the commerce of a district, he may produce
or prolong wars of the most irritating and unprofitable
kind, as in New Zealand and at the Cape ; he may act
over again on a small scale, the complicated blunders and
sad catastrophes of 1776 ; and the country which he is
ruining, can neither detect nor control him. His power
of mischief is almost equal to that of the father of evil.
All this, again, the annals of Canada, Australasia, and
Jamaica, show to be no mere, no speculative possibility,
but in some degree, in some form, in some quarter, a
matter of yearly occurrence. — The same remarks will
apply with almost equal force to the Governor- General
of India, on whose judgment the most momentous ques-
tions as to war and peace in our Eastern empire almost
hourly depend. How much depends on the soundness
of this judgment, let Burmah, Scinde, Cabul, and the
Punjab, testify. — At home, indeed, we can watch the
Home Secretary more closely, and check him somewhat
more promptly, yet, in nearly every thing that relates
to the administration of justice and the disposal of
criminals, what a mass of vital arrangements depends
upon his secret and absolute fiat ! What shall be done
with condemned offenders ; whether and whither they
shall be transported, or in what hulks they shall be
confined ; what system of prison discipline shall be
adopted, and to whom the carrying out of experiments
on which so much depends, shall be confided ; what
criminals shall be left for execution, and whose sen-
tences shall be remitted or commuted ; — all these
things are decided, not by parliament, nor by the

PKOSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 385

country, but by one man and his subordinates, who act
as they think proper, and whose capacity and wisdom
are therefore questions of national importance, second
certainly to none And, to conclude, what fearful con-
tingencies often hang upon the right or wrong decision,
the tact, the forbearance, the firmness, the temper, the
discretion of the Foreign Secretary, whose line of con-
duct is fixed upon in the secrecy of his own cabinet,
and whose proceedings are seldom known to the country
till many months after they have been in operation,
and till their results, however mischievous, have long
been wholly irremediable. A European war — the ex-
tent, the termination, and the significance of which no
prophet can foresee — may depend, and has ere now
depended, on the conduct, temper, and opinions of the
single man whom we place at the head of this particular
department. And shall we be satisfied to have only a
few mediocre and untried men to select him from ?

When such are the tremendous — and though not
irresponsible, yet certainly uncontrolled — powers which
we place in the hands of those who administer our na-
tional affairs, when every decision which they take
involves the welfare and happiness of thousands, when
the country may be called upon to expiate, with its
dearest lives and its richest treasure, every blunder they
may commit through imperfect knowledge or inadequate
capacity, who shall say that we do not require in our
public men the most commanding ability — powers the
most special and the most rare ? The magnitude of the
interests at stake cannot be exaggerated ; the talents
required for the task can scarcely be estimated by too
high a standard. The wellbeing of a nation, and of that
portion of human progress which it influences and
decides, has to be provided for. How cautious, and how
deliberately tested, ought to be the choice of those to
whom it is confided ; — how rich, numerous, varied, and

VOL. II. C C

386 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

select, should be the list of candidates out of whom our
election must be made ! These considerations may lead
us to perceive the dangers which threaten us from the
paucity and poverty of administrative materials which
we have explained above : it remains to inquire into a
few of the causes whence this poverty has arisen, and
into the quarter in which a remedy for it is to be sought.
It is customary to attribute this scanty supply of
public men in a great measure to the aristocratic exclu-
siveness of the two great parties which have hitherto
divided the power and management of the state between
them. The Whigs, in particular, it is alleged, have
always been notorious for unwillingness to admit to a
real bond fide participation in either the honours or
emoluments of office, any but those who were connected
with their chiefs by family ties, or who had the privilege
of moving in their polished and fastidious circles. They
have shrunk still more than the Tories from genuine
and liberal alliances with men of no family or rank, even
when these men had rendered them the most signal aid
in their political contests, and were far superior to
themselves in administrative and parliamentary ability.
They have always been noted for breeding in and in ;
and the usual consequences of such exclusiveness have
followed. Even Burke, it is to be remembered, the great
political philosopher of his day, and long the ornament
and the strength of the Whig party — a man whose
name will live in reverence when all his colleagues and
contemporaries are forgotten — was never admitted to a
seat in the cabinet, but, when his party came into
power, was unworthily delegated to one of those offices
of secondary influence and emolument, reserved for able
and indispensable, but untitled, allies. Since that time,
Poulett Thomson and Huskisson are, we believe, the
only unconnected plebeians (out of the legal profession)
who have ever attained the dignity of cabinet ministers

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 387

among the Whigs ; and the first of these reached that
post only by slow degrees, and through the personal
friendship of a simple-minded and honourable man
(Lord Al thorp), and held it only for a short period.
Whenever a popular leader has attained such eminence
in parliament that he cannot safely or decently be passed
over, it has been customary to offer him some minor
post, the acceptance of which, though it might ulti-
mately lead to further advancement, would impose upon
its holder the duty of defending the measures of his
principals, and sharing in the disgrace attached to their
impropriety, clumsiness, or failure, without conferring
upon him the smallest share in the previous discussion
or concoction of them. Such posts are very properly
offered to rising men of promise ; but on such they are
rarely bestowed by the Whigs. Such posts can scarcely
be proposed to men whose character is high, whose
position is made, whose talents have already won for
them wide influence and independent power, without
something approaching to insult. Mr. Cobden, for ex-
ample, was perhaps too young and too inexperienced, in
1 846, for an office of first-rate dignity and power, though
fifteen years older than Mr. Pitt when he was Prime
Minister, and than Mr. Peel when Secretary for Ireland ;
— yet how would it have been dignified or decent for
him, with his position as a party leader, his vast influ-
ence in the country, and a high character to lose or to
confirm, to have accepted the offered vice-presidency of
the Board of Trade, with no seat in the cabinet, and
consequently with no control over the proceedings of a
ministry who might drag him through any dirt, and
cover him with any obloquy ? Till our great political
chiefs recognise and bend to the necessity of enlisting in
their service, on honourable and generous terms, and
thus training in 'time for future eminence, all rising
politicians, of whatever rank, who display promising

cc 2

388 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP,

capacity — till they can stoop to renew their worn-out
blood from that middle class which is so rich in strong
and practical ability — our supply of statesmen can
scarcely be otherwise than scanty.

There is considerable truth in this complaint, though,
perhaps, something exaggerated. It is certainly much
to be desired, that the ministers who are to rule the
country should be chosen from as wide a basis as possible,
and that neither wealth, rank, nor connections, should
be regarded as indispensable pre-requisites for high office

wherever middle- class men have in them the materials

of statesmen they should be appointed as freely as any
others. But does the fault lie altogether with those
who have the disposal of official places ? Have the
middle classes sent up to parliament men trained and
qualified for statesmanship ? Have the sober wisdom,
the cautious views, the comprehensive knowledge, the
wide and liberal instruction, the capacity for seeing all
sides of a question, and for looking beyond superficial
appearances and immediate and transitory consequences
— have these, the peculiar qualities which mark a man
out as fit for office, been also the qualities specially
sought for by the middle classes, and peculiarly
honoured in their representatives ? — Have not, on the
contrary, the shallow, the noisy, the violent, the flashy,
the men of narrow vision and imperfect education, the
men who echoed, rather than the men who opposed, the
passions and prejudices of the place and hour, been
chosen by preference for parliament ? How many mem-
bers have been sent up by the middle classes, from
among their own ranks, out of whom statesmen could
be made — to whom ministers, without rashness, and
without guilt, could intrust the headship of any depart-
ment ? Is it the " stump-orator " from the Tower
Hamlets ? Is it the medical, or the fashionable, member
for Finsbury ? Is it the gentleman who sits for Bolton,

PJIOSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 389

so modest, and so highly educated ? Or the gentleman
who sits for Ashton, so renowned for his sincerity ? Is
it the dethroned Railway King who represents Sunder-
land ? Or the rich man who represents one of the
Newcastles ? Is it the apostle of temperance who sits
for Derby, or the honourable member for Montrose, to
whom age has brought no experience and little enlight-
enment ? We might go on through a long list ; but it
is needless, and would sound invidious. It would be
difficult to name a single man of the middle class in
parliament who has displayed any superior ability, and
who is not either in office, or, by some peculiarity or
defect, obviously unfitted for it. Mr. Shiel, Mr. Wyse,
Mr. Ward, were all in office, till they accepted diplomatic
posts. Mr. Hawes was in office till, after repeated fail-
ures, he sank in despair upon his present feather bed.
Mr. Baines and Mr. Strutt have been in office, and will
be, we trust, again. And Charles Buller, an abler man
than any, would probably have risen to high position
but for his premature death. Mr. Wilson is in office,
or has lately been ; who will say, that Mr. Bright, Mr.
Cobden, or Mr. Roebuck, ought to be ? In the present
state of affairs, we do not believe, that if the consti-
tuencies will send up middle-class men qualified for office
there is much fear of their being passed over. There
may, indeed, be a lingering indisposition to appoint them
to the highest posts ; but to these they must fight their
way, by convincing the country of their pre-eminent
qualifications. England will not see her destinies in-
trusted to a second-rate nobleman while a commoner of
unquestioned superiority and fitness stands beside him
ready for the task. But the mistake seems to be, to
assume that popular leaders and skilful orators have ne-
cessarily any statesmanlike qualities or capacities about
them. Probably in five cases out of six their appoint-

c c 3

390 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

ment would be scarcely more fatal to the country than
to their own fame.

A more really operative cause of the phenomenon we
are deploring, may be found in the gradually increasing
tendency among our ablest and most fitting men to
retire from parliament, and shrink from public life.
Many causes contribute to strengthen and to spread this
tendency. In the first place, parliament is no longer
as comfortable or desirable a place as formerly. The
work is far harder, the dignity far less, the collateral
and sinister advantages far fewer and more uncertain
than they used to be. The labour imposed upon those
members who really endeavour to do their duty to their
constituencies and their country — and no others can
long retain their seats — is so severe, that only the
strongest frames can bear it, and only the most obstinate
ambition will encounter it. Our senators have to work
as hard as the followers of some of the most highly paid
professions ; and they reap no emolument, little fame,
and few thanks. They have to stay in town all summer
and to sit up nearly all night. They have often to put
a strong control on their own feelings, and severe re-
strictions on their own tastes. They have to be consi-
derate and courteous to all their constituents, to endure
the caprices of the fretful, the complaints of the captious,
the exactions of the unreasonable, and often the insults
of the vulgar. The title of M.P. used to be a diploma
of distinction : it is now too frequently only the badge
and livery of servitude. Formerly, it meant access into
the best society, a share in the deepest national in-
terests, admission behind the scenes of the most exciting
drama. Now, it signifies, for the vast majority of those
who hold it, nothing but enrolment in a miscellaneous
herd of over- worked and unremunerated drudges. For-
merly, too, a seat in parliament often gave a man the
means of providing for himself, generally of providing

PKOSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 391

for his friends: now, happily and righteously, these
ignominious and underhand perquisites are nearly all
swept away. What wonder then that the quiet, the
unambitious, the self-respecting — those who, undazzled
by the hollow splendour, and undeceived by youthful
dreams, can calmly measure the object against the price,
the gain against the sacrifice — should incline to keep
out of an arena where so much is to be endured, and,
unless for the exceptional few, so little to be achieved !
What wonder that one, eminent alike in literature and
in parliament, should write thus of the latter life : —
" There is little reason, in our opinion, to envy those
who are still engaged in a pursuit from which, at most,
they can only hope that, by relinquishing liberal studies
and social pleasures, by passing nights without sleep,
and summers without one glimpse of the beauties of
nature, they may attain that laborious, that invidious,
that closely watched slavery, which is mocked with the
name of power."

There is another reason, less selfish and more credit-
able, which induces many men peculiarly qualified to
influence, to guide, and to instruct the country, to
retire from public life and seek out other channels of
patriotic usefulness. Parliament is no longer the sole
nor the chief arena in which public service can be
rendered. Formerly, parliament was the only place in
which the national work was done ; a warning voice, if
raised anywhere else, was like that of one crying in the
wilderness; wisdom and information, speaking else-
where than at St. Stephen's, spoke without an au-
dience or an echo. It was there that public grievances
were made known; it was there that freedom and
justice were defended ; it was there that public delin-
quents were brought to public trial and to public
shame ; it was there that sound views of policy were

c c 4

392 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

argued and inculcated, and sound principles of morality
disseminated through the national mind. Parliament
was not only the great guardian, but the great educator
of the people. Now, the press has superseded many of
the functions of parliament, and performs them far
more ceaselessly and efficiently than parliament could
do. It ferrets out abuses, exposes jobs, and detects
secret iniquities and negligences, and strips naked hypo-
crisies and shams. It represents grievances, denounces
oppressions, diffuses information, examines doctrines,
and inoculates the country with them. Public meetings
too, associations and organisations out of doors, do
much to prepare, to instruct, and to inform. In every
town, and every circle of society, men who in par-
liament would be dumb and powerless, are actively at
work in forming and spreading their own opinions. It
has become easier to act upon parliament through the
nation, than upon the nation through the parliament.
Hence it has begun to be generally felt, that unless a
man be endowed with some rare and special faculties,
of which oratory is the first, and a peculiar social tact
the second, he will be actually more influential out of
parliament than in it. Those who have had an oppor-
tunity of tracing back public movements to their origin,
are well aware how many of the most important of them
are due to men of whom the world never hears, but yet
gifted with great ability, and that peculiar ability most
adapted for the public service, — who study in quiet
and in patience the great social questions of the day,
form their views upon them, and then, either by writing
or conversation, contrive to indoctrinate others with
them ; while ostensible members of parliament become
the unconscious instruments and mouthpieces of these
silent and obscure politicians. Both in the higher and
the middle ranks may be found numbers scattered
through the land, whose minds are incessantly occupied

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 393

with public interests, whose views are far profounder,
whose knowledge of affairs is greater, whose mastery of
subjects is more complete, and whose actual influence
on the world's march is more real and more powerful,
than is ever attained by those who are prominent before
the country, and who are its nominal rulers and ad-
ministrators.

But not only are the best men often unwilling to go
to parliament — the constituencies are often unwilling to
send them there. Those who would make the best
legislators and administrators are not always adapted to
the tastes or malleable to the purposes of the mass of
electors. The qualities which are popular on the hust-
ings are by no means always the qualities which are
suited to serve the country in a public capacity, and
large constituencies have rarely the judgment to discern
what these qualities are, or the patriotism to choose
them, when accompanied by cold manners, offensive
candour, independent feelings, or unbending tenacity
of opinion. Every general election affords instances
enough to corroborate our statement Mr. S. J. Loyd,
now Lord Overstone, a man of singular soundness and
clearness of view, better acquainted with commercial
and financial matters than probably any man living, but
too indolent and refining to be easily persuadable to
enter on the public arena, was rejected by Manchester.
Mr. Macaulay, notwithstanding his unquestioned ability
and eloquence, was rejected by Edinburgh; and being
unable to find another borough, resigned his seat in the
cabinet, and retired to the fame and comfort of a literary
life. Lord Morpeth, the most estimable and the most be-
loved of public men, was defeated in Yorkshire, and was
out of parliament for several sessions ; — and Sir James
Graham, whom all allow to be the ablest administrator
now living, has never sat twice in succession for the
same borough, and it is believed was recently prevented

394 PROSPECTS OF BEITISII STATESMANSHIP.

from taking office because he dared not risk the chances
of a new election.

But the principal cause of the evil we are considering
— the inadequate supply of public servants of com-
manding talent — lies deeper still, and is inherent in the
very constitution of a parliamentary government such
as ours. The more the country needs capable adminis-
trators, and the less it needs orators and legislators, the
more the evil will become apparent, and the more de-
fective will our system be found. By an ancient and
nearly invariable custom, our ministers are selected ex-
clusively out of our parliamentary notabilities. Yet it
is undeniable that the qualities which make men for-
midable leaders, which render them eminent and power-
ful in parliament, are very different from those which
are required for the efficient and judicious management
of government departments. The talking and the acting
faculties ; the power of doing things well, and the power
of defending them skilfully ; the talent for " dressing up
a statement for the House," and the talent for finding
the policy fitted for an empire ; administrative genius
and dialectic skill, seldom meet in one mind, and, indeed,
belong to wholly distinct classes of intellectual superi-
ority. A Chancellor of the Exchequer may be noted for
his thorough mastery of financial science, yet be wholly
deficient in the power of addressing a critical audience,
or of making out a good case for his measures. Or like
a recent appointment, he may be a brilliant rhetorician,
yet an absolute ignoramus in matters of commerce or
taxation. He may delight the House of Commons, but
terrify Lombard Street. The members of parliament
may flock down from Bellamy's as soon as they know
that he is on his legs ; while the members of the Stock
Exchange grow pale when they read of his appointment.
The Colonial Secretary, too, may rule distant depen-
dencies with the genius of Wellington or Richelieu, yet

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 395

be unable to speak two consecutive sentences in the
House, without a solecism or a blunder. Yet our system
passes by the solid governor, and selects the brilliant
haranguer.

" Under the Tudors and the early Stuarts," writes Mr. Ma-
caulay in his review of Sir W. Temple, " it was generally by
courtly arts, or by official skill or knowledge, that a politician
raised himself to power. From the time of Charles II., down
to our own days, a different species of talent, parliamentary
talent, has been the most valuable of all the qualifications of an
English statesman. It has stood in the place of all other ac-
quirements. It has covered ignorance, weakness, rashness, the
most fatal mal-administration. A great negotiator is nothing
compared with a great debater ; and a minister who can make
a successful speech need trouble himself little about an unsuc-
cessful expedition. This is the talent which has made judges
without law, and diplomatists without French ; which has sent
to the Admiralty men who did not know the stern of a ship from
the bowsprit, and to the India Board men who did not know
the difference between a rupee and a pagoda ; which made a
Foreign Secretary of Mr. Pitt, who, as George II. said, had
never opened Vattel, and which was very near making a
Chancellor of the Exchequer of Mr. Sheridan, who could not
work a sum in long division."

Now, this is a prolific source of mischief, which, as
long as parliament confined itself to its original func-
tions, was comparatively little felt, but which now, in
the course of time, and through the operation of certain
gradual and insensible changes, has become increasingly
serious and manifest. While parliament was a body of
notables assembled for purposes of deliberation and dis-
cussion, for voting or refusing taxes, for representing
national feelings and proclaiming national grievances,
the talent of ready speech, clear statement, skilful dia-
lectic, and vehement denunciation, found their proper
vocation, and did good service. But when, in process
of time, parliament took upon itself the task of close

396 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

supervision and control, and of direct and often minute
interference with the executive, when it became virtually
a governing, as well as a legislating and representing
body, very different endowments were needed in its
members ; and its fitness for its new and self-imposed
duties became yearly more questionable. Its constitu-
tion is much what it used to be, but its functions are
materially altered. As the House of Commons has
become more popular and more of a debating club, it
has also assumed more and more of the labours which
popular debating clubs are singularly unsuited to per-
form. It was admirably adapted for its ancient and
original purpose — not at all so for its modern and
superinduced one. It was originally a checking^ not an
acting, body — an assembly for securing the subject
against the oppression and encroachment of the Crown.
In this, its native and intentional function, it is inimi-
table and unrivalled ; for its subsequent and adopted
one, it is at best but a clumsy contrivance. It is excel-
lent as a defender of our liberties, and an exponent of
our wishes and our wants ; but for governing, or for
preventing misgovernment, it is tedious, ponderous, and
inefficient.

"What I had to remark," observes Mr. Carlyle, "of this
long parliament, and of its English predecessors generally, from
the times of Rufus downwards, is this perfect veracity of pur-
pose, this exact adaptation to getting the business done that
was in hand. Supplies did in some way use to be granted ;
grievances, such as never fail, did in some way use to be stated
and redressed. The silent peoples had their Parliamentum, and
spake by it to their kings who governed them. In all human
government, wherever a man will attempt to govern men, this
is a function as necessary as the breath of life ; and it must be
said the old European populations, and the fortunate English
best of all, did this function well. The old parliaments were
authentic entities ; came upon indispensable work, and were in
earnest to their very finger-ends about getting it done. . . .

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 397

Parliament now, if we examine well, has irrevocably lost certain
of its old functions, which it still pretends to do ; and has got
certain new functions, which it never can do, and yet pretends
to be doing, — a doubly fatal predicament. Its functions
growing ever more confused in this twofold way, the position of
parliament has become a false, and is gradually becoming an
impossible one, in modern affairs. It has had to prevent and
distort its poor activity in all manner of ways, and at length
has diffused itself in oceans of windy talk, reported in Hansard ;
has grown, in short, a national palaver, and is, as I said lately,
one of the strangest entities this sun ever looked down upon.
For, I think, a national palaver, recognised as sovereign, a
solemn convocation of all the stump-orators in the nation to
come and govern us, was not seen on the earth till recently.
A parliament, especially a parliament with newspaper
reporters firmly established in it, is an entity which by its very
nature cannot do work, but can do talk only — which at times
may be needed, and at other times may be very needless. Con-
sider, in fact, a body of six hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneous
persons set to consult about ' business,' with twenty-seven
millions, mostly fools, assiduously listening to them ; — was
there ever since the world began — will there ever be till the
world end, any ( business ' accomplished in these circumstances?
We may take it as a fact, and should lay it to heart everywhere,
that no sovereign ruler with six hundred and fifty-eight heads,
set to rule twenty-seven millions, by continually talking in the
hearing of them all, can for the life of it make a good figure in
that vocation."

Every page of our recent history abounds with proofs
and examples of the mischiefs and abuses which arise
from our inveterate and probably now inevitable habit
of arranging all measures and making all appointments
with a view to parliamentary considerations. Measures
are concocted, not because they are the best adapted to
the wants of the country, but because they are the most
likely to be easily passed by the Commons, and growl-
ingly sanctioned by the Lords. Men are selected for
this or that influential and responsible office, not on

398 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESiVIANSHIP.

account of any remarkable fitness for the discharge of
its functions which has been exhibited by them, or is
supposed to lie hidden within them, but because parlia-
mentary support may be conciliated, or parliamentary
hostility disarmed, by their appointment. The interests
of the country are sacrificed, that the government of the
country may be carried on. A commercial minister
may be a mere tyro in finance ; but the trade of the
country must be fettered and endangered by giving him
power to carry out his unwise conceptions, that the
votes of himself and his supporters may be secured. An
incapable nobleman is made Secretary-at-War, and
allowed by his mismanagement to sacrifice regiment
after regiment, and hazard campaign after campaign, as
in the late war, because the cabinet cannot dispense
with his brilliant debating powers in the House of
Commons. Thousands of valuable lives and millions of
valuable treasure are wasted — as at Walcheren — in a
fruitless and' wretchedly managed expedition, because
the Premier chooses to place his own brother at its
head, and the Premier is omnipotent in parliament.
An indolent, obscure, or superannuated admiral is
placed in command of an important squadron, and golden
opportunities are lost in senseless evolutions, because the
admiral has a host of parliamentary friends, whom it
would be dangerous for the ministry to offend. Similar
solecisms are committed daily, but it is only in the
critical exigencies of war, or when in peace some un-
foreseen emergency occurs, calling for qualities in
appointed servants which they do not possess, that their
full consequences come to light. We need go no further
back than the peninsular campaigns for abundant
examples. Mr. Canning was at that time Foreign
Minister, and Mr. Perceval, Premier. The latter was a
man of the scantiest ability, but had the confidence of
the Crown, and possessed enormous weight in the House

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 399

of Commons. The former was a statesman of most
brilliant genius, and a skilful and vigorous diplomatist,
but wholly destitute of the administrative capacity and
diligence to conduct the complicated arrangements of a
continental war. He was, however, the great stay of
the ministry in debate, and could not be spared. Lord
Castlereagh, a nobleman of high honour, and of great
parliamentary experience and skill, but of very small
natural capacity, was Secretary-at-War. Accordingly,
never was the blood and treasure of a country so vexa-
tiously and lamentably wasted as those of England were
by these three incapables. Their blunders were scarcely
credible, and can only be fairly understood after care-
ful study of Colonel Napier's History. Mr. Canning
scattered his agents over Spain, chose them ill, made
them independent of each other, allowed and encouraged
them to lavish money, arms, and stores on the wretched
and ungrateful Spanish generals, hampered his own
noble and consummate commander, Sir John Moore,
with senseless instructions, turned a deaf ear to his re-
monstrances and demands, and, when he failed and fell,
threw upon him the whole blame of the discomfiture
which he himself had prepared. During the long and
arduous years in which the Duke of Wellington, with
unrivalled and profound strategy, and even statesman-
ship, fought his way from Lisbon to Bayonne, his own
government was his worst enemy, his most formidable
and hopeless antagonist. In spite of repeated represen-
tations, his troops were left without stores, without
shoes, without clothes, without ammunition. The en-
gineering tools sent out were so bad that our engineers
were dependent on those captured from the French. Be-
sieging batteries, constantly demanded, were either
refused or delayed, till the Duke was repeatedly com-
pelled to carry fortresses by assault, which were only
half breached, against all the rules of military science,

400 PKOSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

and at a cost of life which was absolutely appalling.
The military chest was constantly empty, and the most
important enterprises were in consequence obliged to be
abandoned. Reinforcements both of men and money,
which were lavished on the incapable Lord Chatham,
were denied to the energetic and successful Sir Arthur
Wellesley. Officers of high rank neglected or disobeyed
his orders, and thus sacrificed his soldiers, endangered
his victories, or made them fruitless ; yet he dared not
punish or cashier them, because the parliamentary in-
fluence of their families forbade. Throughout the whole
campaign the genius of the Duke had to remedy, and
the blood of the soldiers to atone for, the blunders and
culpable negligence of Mr. Perceval, Mr. Canning, and
Lord Castlereagh. The fate of thousands of brave and
valuable men lies at the door of those three ministers,
and of the system which made such men so powerful as
they were.

To the same system — the system which places at the
head of affairs men of parliamentary influence and par-
liamentary talent, but of no other qualifications for ad-
ministration or command — may be traced, more or less
directly, most of our recent disasters: — the Afghanistan
war, with its train of discomfiture and disgrace ; the
escapades of Lord Ellenborough, whom happily even
parliamentary influence could not save from being re-
called; the unhappy mess which Governor Fitzroy
brought about in New Zealand ; the Canadian rebellion ;
and the Caffre wars. Everywhere the same story. In
war, in commerce, in administration, the governed have
had to supplement the deficiencies, correct the faults,
support the weight, and pay for the blunders of the
governors. Everywhere the sense and bottom of the
English people and the English soldiers have been called
upon to counteract the incapacity or folly of English
rulers. In this lies the explanation of what otherwise

PKOSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 401

might well perplex us, — how is it, namely, that such a
system has endured so long, and produced so much less
mischief than it seemed calculated to engender. The
people, as a whole, are supplying a constant and often
unconscious corrective.

" An English seventy-four," says Mr. Carlyle, " if you look
merely at the articulate law and methods of it, is one of the
impossiblest entities. The captain is appointed, not by pre-
eminent merit in sailorship, but by parliamentary connexion ;
the men are got by impressment ; a press-gang goes out, knocks
men down in the streets of sea-towns, and drags them on board,
- if the ship were to be stranded, I have heard that they would
nearly all run ashore and desert. Can anything be more un-
reasonable than a seventy-four ? Articulately, almost nothing.
But it has inarticulate traditions, ancient methods, and habi-
tudes in it, stoicisms, noblenesses, true rules both of sailing and
of conduct ; enough to keep it afloat on Nature's veridical
bosom after all. See; if you bid it sail to the end of the
world, it will lift anchor, go, and arrive. The raging oceans do
not beat it back ; it, too, as well as the raging oceans, has a
relation to Nature, and it does not sink, but under due con-
ditions is borne along. If it meet with hurricanes, it rides
them out ; if it meet an enemy's ship, it shivers it to powder ;
and in short it holds on its way, and to a wonderful extent does
what it means and pretends to do. Assure yourself, my friend,
there is an immense fund of truth somewhere or other stowed
in that seventy-four."

All who have had much to do with ministers, and
members of parliament, and those who come into con-
stant social or official contact with them, seldom fail to
become conscious of a certain marked and specific cha-
racter which pervades the whole genus. Originally,
they may be cast in Nature's most discrepant moulds.
They may be conservative and antique by temper and
tradition. They may be liberal and profusive in their
sentiments. They may be aggressively benevolent, or
carelessly epicurean. They may be fond of labour, or

VOL. II. D D

402 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

they may be fond of ease. They may call themselves
aristocratic, or may natter themselves that they are
popular. But the same easily recognisable stamp of
family likeness is upon them all. They are all parlia-
ment men — and no mistake. They have all been
stretched on the same Procrustean bed, fused in the
same crucible, subjected to the same annealing process.
Their native dissimilarities are not, indeed, crushed out
of them, but are all harmonised and overpowered by
the pressure of one pervading and controlling element.
They take different sides of a question, but they think
in the same conventional style. They draw their in-
formation from the same set of organs, and look at the
world through spectacles, different, indeed, in power
and colour, but all proceeding from the same work-
shop. They are all conversant with, and insensibly
moulded by, the gossip of the clubs ; they all think much
of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews ; they all
listen anxiously to the language of The Times, and are
not wholly without concern about the articles in the
Morning Chronicle, the Morning Post, and the Daily
News. But beyond these they seldom go. Opinions
which find expression in none of these party and London
organs they despise or ignore. De non apparentibus et
non existentibus eadem est ratio. The North British, the
British Quarterly, the Westminster Reviews, the Leeds
Mercury, the Manchester Guardian, wide as their circu-
lation and great as their influence is among the miscel-
laneous and the middle classes, they seldom read, arid
regard little. Sentiments may be fermenting, and doc-
trines may be spreading for years, in the interior of the
community, till they have modified the whole bent and
character of the nation, and yet these men may have
heard nothing of them till some such startling facts as
the Birmingham Political Union, the Anti-Corn-Law
League, or the Secession of the Free Church, break in

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 403

upon their apathetic slumbers, and enlarge the narrow
and artificial boundaries of their knowledge. In spite
of warning voices occasionally raised within their hear-
ing, these denizens of the conventional political world
of London and St. Stephen's remain wholly ignorant
alike of the power, the feelings, and the intellect of the
silent middle ranks ; and would be amazed and some-
what alarmed if they could know the contempt and dis-
gust which these often feel for the party manoeuvres
which occupy them, the trifles which absorb them, the
blunders which disgrace them, and the infatuation which
blinds them. The parliament, reformed as it is —
further reformed as it may be — must enlarge its
channels of information ; the officials — improved in
this respect though they are — must widen their basis,
and open their sympathies far more than they have
yet done, before they can know what the country
expects from them, and can furnish them with the
means of effecting.

There are sundry little customs which have, by the
lapse of time, attained almost the rigidity of law, by
which we contrive still further to aggravate the diffi-
culty of finding and securing the ablest and fittest men
for the public service. Some of these have grown up
gradually and insensibly, and have descended to us from
remote times ; others have been adopted to guard against
dangers which were real and imminent once, but which
have Jpng since passed away. Two, especially, require a
passing notice, as they are almost yearly operating to
our disadvantage, and not seldom to our actual suffering
and danger. The first of these is the union in the
person of the Lord Chancellor of the two functions of
Keeper of the Great Seal, and Chief Judge in Equity.
In the first quality, he is the principal adviser of the
Sovereign, keeper of the royal conscience, patron of the
church livings of the Crown, appointer of justices of the

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404 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

peace, &c., superintendent-general of charities, guardian,
in the king's name, of infants, idiots, and lunatics. In
virtue of these functions, he is essentially a political
officer, and as such, forms a part of the cabinet, and,
rightly and necessarily, stands or falls with his minis-
terial colleagues. But, in his second capacity, lie is the
supreme judge in the most difficult, complicated, and
laborious court of justice in the kingdom, exercising the
most awfully arbitrary and extensive jurisdiction, dis-
charging functions of which only the most exclusive
attention, the most unremitting assiduity, the most con-
tinuous watchfulness, can approximate to an adequate
performance. To enable him to do anything like justice
to the hard duties thrust upon him, and to the number-
less suitors, whose property, happiness, liberty, and
sometimes life, are at his disposal, it would be necessary,
not only that he should have nothing else to do, but
that he should be permanent and irremovable, and that
he should be appointed with a sole regard to his judicial
capacity and his experience in equity practice. Yet, in
contempt and seeming defiance of these obvious and
universally admitted considerations, the two offices con-
tinue to be united in one person, to the unspeakable
injury of both departments, one of which is continually
sacrificed to the other. The consequences of this
utterly indefensible arrangement are, first, That the
ablest lawyers are at times unwilling to accept an office
which, while it removes them from their former sphere
of usefulness and emoluments, they may, perhaps, hold
only for a few months, and then be subjected to eternal
idleness and obscurity ; — secondly, That causes in equity
are often heard and reheard before four or five different
chancellors, each of whom comes new and unprepared
to the hearing ; that as soon as a judge becomes expe-
rienced and competent, the chances are, that he is re-
moved to make way for a successor, who has his busi-

PKOSPECTS OF BHITISH STATESMANSHIP. 405

ness to learn at the expense of the unhappy litigants
who come before him ; and that the work, being more
than any one man can possibly get through, accumulates
and complicates, till the Court of Chancery has become
an instrument of injustice, cruelty, and oppression, such
as the Inquisition can only faintly imitate, and such as
no European country, except England, can produce or
could tolerate ; — and, thirdly ', That lord chancellors are
constantly appointed, who either are of no value to their
colleagues or their country, as political advisers, or who,
being chosen for their oratorical powers, or their parlia-
mentary influence, are wholly unfit to preside over a
court, requiring for its due conduct the rarest and
loftiest legal qualifications. Cabinets generally choose
the latter alternative, as the least evil to themselves,
though immeasurably the greatest to the nation. In-
stances are not wanting. In the early part of the cen-
tury, Lord Erskine was made chancellor, because he was
a popular pleader, an eloquent speaker, and an ardent
Whig, though he knew little of law, and was wholly ig-
norant of equity. In 1830, the same motives promoted
Mr. Brougham to the Woolsack, much against his own
will, it is said, although, while respectable as a common
lawyer, he was utterly inexperienced in equity. Lord
Cottenharn, who made an excellent Chancery judge, was
quite valueless as a political functionary; — while his
successor, again, a competent chief justice, but an inex-
perienced and incompetent chancellor, owed his appoint-
ment entirely to political considerations. An anomaly
productive of so much oppression and misery, and ad-
mitting of no defence, will surely not be endured much
longer.

The custom of requiring every member of parliament,
who accepts ministerial office, to vacate his seat and
submit himself to his constituents for re-election or re-
jection, is a fertile source of embarrassment and mischief.

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406 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

At one time, undoubtedly, it was a wise and salutary
precaution against the selection and retention by the
Crown, of ministers who did not possess the confidence
of the nation. It served, or might serve, to prevent the
monarch from employing a commoner, at least, who was
supposed to entertain designs against the liberties of the
people. Now this danger no longer exists, and the
precaution against it should cease likewise. No states-
man condemned by, or unpopular with, the House of
Commons, can now retain office a single day. The
custom, moreover, is, we think, indefensible on the
broad constitutional grounds of justice. It enables, not
the nation, but any one constituency, to put a negative
upon the indubitable right of the sovereign to choose
his own servants. It enables any one constituency —
and that perhaps the smallest, most ignorant, and most
corrupt in the community — to dismiss or forbid the
choice of a minister who may possess the confidence and
admiration both of the monarch and the parliament.
Before the Reform Bill, this evil and incongruity was
not felt, because the nomination boroughs offered an
easy mode of nullifying it. If a new minister was re-
jected by his former constituents, he was immediately
elected for some government seat, which a subordinate
vacated to make room for him, or a place was purchased
for him by the outlay of 3000£. or 4000/. of his own or
government money. Now, however, these arrangements
are not so easy, and are not always practicable, and
great inconvenience frequently arises in consequence.
On one occasion, Lord John Russell was out of par-
liament for some weeks during the middle of session,
to the great detriment of the public business, till the
member for Stroud vacated on his behalf. Sir James
Graham is the ablest administrator among our living
statesmen, and is the man of all others, whom a large
portion of the educated classes of the community would

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 407

most desire to see in power. But something in his
manners, or something which perhaps we must desig-
nate as a certain want of nobleness and generosity of
temper, makes him so personally unpopular, that, as we
have already observed, he has scarcely ever sat twice for
the same constituency, and if now appointed to office,
might very possibly be returned by none. Indeed, if
there be any truth in the rumour, that at the close of
last year, the negotiations which Lord John Russell is
known to have opened with Sir James Graham, Mr.
Gladstone, and Mr. Cardwell, were rendered abortive
because none of these gentlemen felt any confidence in
their re-election, we may now trace the advent of a
Tory ministry of unparalleled and dangerous incapacity,
the risk arising from an interregnum and a general elec-
tion at a crisis of great external confusion and uncer-
tainty, and the nuisance of having to fight the battle of
free-trade over again, to the operation of this absurd and
antiquated custom. A long- established government has
been upset, and has been obliged to resign its functions
at a most critical moment into most alarming hands,
because three constituencies — one insignificant, one
notoriously bigoted, and a third notoriously corrupt —
forbade it to call to its aid, and that of the country,
three men of tried and eminent ability.

To point out existing evils is a far easier and less
delicate task than to suggest a remedy. We well know
how slowly and reluctantly the English mind admits a
new idea, and with what distrust and distaste the public
always turns from any recommendations which have
the least air of science or system about them. Any
attempt to modify or counteract the actual present ten-
dencies of the nation — any scheme of amendment or of
safety, however cautious, moderate, arid wise, which
cannot be introduced to public attention under the aegis

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408 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

of a precedent — is almost certain to be suspiciously and
ill received. Thousands who have gone along with us
in our statement of the difficulties under which we
labour, and of the dangers which threaten us from a
defective supply of able public servants, and from the
inherent unsuitability of the source from which they are
chosen to supply precisely the right sort of men — will
turn away prepossessed or hopeless, when we endeavour
to point out the direction in which an alleviation of
these difficulties and a guarantee against these dangers
should be sought. Nevertheless we shall venture on a
few suggestions, which, when they have lain long
enough and been reproduced often enough before the
public mind for their novelty to have worn off, may
possibly meet with a dispassionate consideration.

In the first place, it would seem desirable that the
House of Commons should if possible be restored to its
original functions of an advising, representing, and con-
trolling, but • not governing body. This looks like a
hopeless recommendation, and perhaps it is so. It is, as
both our own history and the contemporary annals of
continental nations show, an inherent tendency in
popular legislative assemblies to encroach on the de-
partment of the executive, and gradually to draw to
themselves all the powers of the state. We have sinned
less than our continental neighbours in this respect, it is
true, and perhaps their example may supply us with a
timely warning; but for many years, and especially
since 1832, our movement has been undeniably in this
direction. And for a powerful body, voluntarily and
from a sense of public benefit, to divest itself of func-
tions and influence which it has usurped, would be an
unheard-of forbearance. Still something may be done
by making the public mind aware of the tendency, and
convincing it that the tendency is ruinous. Now it is
abundantly obvious, first, that actual business can never

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 409

be efficiently or promptly done by a committee or board
of 658 members ; and secondly, that by such usurpation
of the ministerial functions the responsibility which
should always cling as directly as possible to the actors,
is in the first place shifted in a great measure from the
ministers to parliament, and is in the latter body shared
among so many, and in such various and unascertain-
able proportions, as to be virtually no responsibility at
all. With these remarks, which we throw out for the
national consideration, we leave this branch of the
subject.

It cannot for a moment be imagined that the aggre-
gate of the governing and guiding talent in the whole
country has diminished, or that it is inadequate to any
demands that can be made upon it. There probably
never was a period in our history when capacity of
every kind was as rife as now, when the general intelli-
gence of the country was so cultivated in every depart-
ment, or when all ranks could furnish forth so many
minds fitted to bring them honour and to do them
service. The difficulty we have to contend with — the
first we have to meet — is not that the total national
supply of administrative and legislative ability is less
than formerly, but merely that it does not now, as for-
merly, instinctively congregate within the walls of par-
liament. Great Britain is still opulent, though St.
Stephen's may have become impoverished and meagre.
England we firmly believe to be as rich as ever in
pilots who could weather every storm, in servants com-
petent to any task, in statesmen fit to cope with any
emergency. Two things only are needed to enlist all
this floating and scattered genius in the service of the
state : — that the Sovereign should be at liberty to select
her instruments not from senators, orators, or noblemen
alone, but from all ranks, descriptions, positions, and
professions ; and that she should be enabled to outbid

410 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

all other competitors for their talents — should be em-
powered to offer them such rewards as will command
their willing and devoted labours, in the shape either of
dignity, of emolument, or of that real power of efficient
usefulness, which, to the purely ambitious and truly
patriotic soul, is the sweetest and richest recompence
which the world's treasury contains. A very simple
arrangement would suffice. Empower the Queen to call
to her councils all the administrative talent, all the states-
manlike wisdom of the country, in whatsoever rank it
has appeared, in whatsoever channel it has displayed
itself; and where the duties of the office, or the public
service makes it necessary, let the royal selection ipso
facto confer a seat, though not a vote, in parliament.

" The aristocratic class," Mr. Carlyle observes, " from whom
members of parliament can be elected, extends only to certain
thousands : from these you are to choose your secretary, if a
seat in parliament is the primary condition. But the general
population is twenty-seven millions ; from all sections of which
you can choose, if the seat in parliament is not to be primary.
Make it ultimate instead of primary — a last investiture, in-
stead of a first indispensable condition — and the whole
British nation, learned, unlearned, professional, practical, spe-
culative, and miscellaneous, is at your disposal ! In the lowest
broad strata of the population, equally as in the highest and
narrowest, are produced men of every kind of genius ; man for
man, your chance of genius is as good among the millions as
among the units ; — and class for class, what must it be ! From
all classes, not from certain hundreds as now, but from several
millions, whatsoever man the gods had gifted with intellect and
nobleness and power to help his country, could be chosen."

A considerable proportion of those whom the Queen
might thus select would probably be in parliament
already: a certain proportion, also, would not really
need to be in parliament at all. " Given, a good official
man or secretary, he ought, as far as it is possible, to be
left working in the silent state. No mortal can both

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 411

work, and do good talking in parliament, or out of it ;
the feat is as impossible as that of serving two hostile
masters." But for those officials whom it was neces-
sary to have in parliament, both to afford needful ex-
planations, and to defend — as only those actually en-
gaged can fully defend — the conduct and measures of
the administration, ex officio seats should be provided.
There really is no reasonable objection that we can
divine to such an obvious and simple solution of the
difficulty ; nor have we ever heard any urged. Not
being peers, they would of course have no votes in the
House of Lords ; not being elected by the people, they
would of course have no votes in the House of Com-
mons : the prerogative of neither House of Parliament
would be in the slightest degree infringed. Her Ma-
jesty would simply be provided with an indispensable
medium of communication with her " faithful Com-
mons," and her " trusty and well-beloved cousins."
But the proposition is not only indefeasibly reasonable :
what is a consideration of far greater weight with John
Bull, it is strictly according to, and within precedent.

The Queen can already, of her own free will, place
any one she pleases in the House of Peers, not only for
a time, but for ever, not only with the right of speech,
but with the complete and entire privileges of the
peerage. Our proposition does not go nearly this
length : it gives the Queen no powers half so extensive
as those she already wields. With regard to the House
of Commons, it surely cannot be forgotten that up to
the period of the first Eeform Bill, the Crown possessed
the power (with great additions) which we now propose
to bestow upon it : there were a certain number of go-
vernment boroughs, to the representation of which the
Sovereign could at once nominate any minister she
might please to appoint. In neither quarter, therefore,
is our suggestion open to the charge of innovation.

412 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

The amendment would be strictly in conformity with
the spirit of the constitution. It will still, as now, be
in the power of either House of Parliament to declare
its want of confidence in the administration, and in
case of necessity to compel the Crown to change it, by
withholding the necessary supplies. But it would
enable the Queen to do that which the constitution of
the realm declares to be her undoubted prerogative —
viz., to select her own ministers — more effectually than
at present: it would put it out of the power of any
single capricious or sinister constituency to annul the
appointment of the Crown, and it would no longer con-
fine Her Majesty's choice within the narrow circle of
those who are wealthy enough to adventure on a par-
liamentary career, ambitious enough to rush voluntarily
into the popular arena, rich enough to buy a close
borough, or hardy enough to contest an open one. It
would carry out the intention of our fundamental sta-
tutes, and make this part of our boasted constitution a
reality and not a sham.

But something more than this would be required.
It can have escaped the attention of none who have
long watched the management of public affairs in this
country, that much mischief arises, and much more is
permitted to continue, in consequence of the entire
absorption of the time and strength of all our ministers
with the daily and indispensable business of their several
departments. Their whole energy is barely adequate
to do what must be done, and to meet what must be
met. Sufiicient, and more than sufficient, to each day
is the evil and the labour thereof. They are obliged to
postpone and put aside everything that is riot urgent
and clamorous for attention. They are wholly without
the leisure either of time or mind, to take a deliberate
and comprehensive survey of the several changes or
amendments which the public service needs, but does

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 413

not demand. They cannot dive deeply into the maladies
of the nation, or the tendencies of the times. Not only
can they not calmly and profoundly study what is for
the public good, but they have scarcely even time care-
fully to examine the wisest schemes and the most
beneficial proposals which are made to them. Thus all
the rich suggestions with which official experience and
insight must be laden are profitless, or nearly so, to
them and to their country. They wait to propose what
is needful, and to grapple with what is intolerable, till
the nation discovers what their greater opportunities
must have made known to them for years, and becomes
so clamorous on the subject, as to render it the most im-
portant and pressing matter of the day. Then, and not
till then, it is attended to. And then, being taken up
under the influence of " pressure from without," it is too
commonly dealt with ignorantly, hastily, and clumsily.
Instances might be specified without number: we will
confine ourselves to one. For many years our entire
system of dealing with the criminal population has been
in a position fitted to engage the most anxious attention
of any wise and far-seeing statesman. Crime has been
increasing, and the means of directly dealing with it
have been diminishing. One or other branch of the
subject has excited in its turn a partial and passing
public interest, and something has been done, but done
carelessly, un systematically, and empirically. An out-
cry was raised against capital punishments ; and capital
punishments were virtually abolished. Much indigna-
tion was excited about the state of the prisons; and
prison inspectors were appointed. The system of trans-
portation was vehemently denounced ; and the govern-
ment proclaimed their determination to abandon it.
Benevolent people declared that criminals should be re-
garded rather as unfortunate men who had been misled,
and ought to be pitied and reformed, than as public

414 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

enemies and dangers against which the nation had to
be protected ; and, accordingly, the government have
done their best to pet prisoners and " make them com-
fortable." Thus, the whole matter has got into an
inextricable mess. We may not hang malefactors ; we
may not transport them ; we may not even punish
them with due severity at home. We may not make
prisons the effective penitentiaries they ought to be,
because the country would not bear the cost of its own
maudlin tenderness for guilt, or because, at least, minis-
ters think so, and, therefore, dare not apply to parlia-
ment for the necessary funds. Public and magisterial
feeling shrinks from condemning infant criminals to
the hardening and corrupting influence of adult gaols ;
yet, nothing is done to provide juvenile and reformatory
ones, because the public has not demanded them, and
we have no statesman to forestall what is not demanded.
And we have thousands of our youthful population
annually educated into crime as a most lucrative pro-
fession ; yet we do not boldly stop this fertile source of
suffering and perplexity, by taking them at once out of
the hands of their educators, because we are not yet
prepared to interfere with " the liberty of the subject,"
or to rescue children from parents who are training
them for hell ! The whole awful question — so momen-
tous when looked at both from the moral and the poli-
tical point of view — is suffered to drift on, waiting till
it shall " resolve itself," — because our ministers have
neither strength, genius, nor leisure, for the discharge
of real statesmanlike functions, and because we have
not yet gathered to the service of the country the men
qualified to supply their deficiencies.

A very simple remedy might be found by allowing
to each of the chief officers of state a sort of unofficial
council in the background, to assist and advise him in
matters relating to his special department, — the mem-

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 415

bers of which, three or four in number, he would be at
liberty to choose from any quarter and any class, and
to remunerate in such a manner as to enable him to
command the fittest minds the country could afford.
Their functions should be to examine into the wants of
the nation with a profoundness, and to deliberate on
remedial measures with a care, which the routine and
heavy duties of their chief make impossible for him ; to
consider suggestions ; to prepare plans ; to regard per-
manent ameliorations rather than temporary expe-
dients ; and generally to be to their principal a secret
and reliable supply of that statesmanship, which is emi-
nently needed, but which a life of incessant activity
and antagonism effectually forbids. The country, duly
searched, could furnish numbers of men, admirably
fitted for such functions, — men aloof from and above
the strife and turmoil of party ; thoroughly acquainted
with the temper of the nation as well as with its wants ;
with minds inured to labour, trained to political and
historical investigations, and enriched by the studies of
ancient and modern wisdom ; enlarged, sober, and phi-
losophic ; and bringing to their task an independence
of feeling, a comprehensiveness of view, and a passion-
less serenity of judgment, which those engaged in the
rough warfare of the political arena can never attain.

We are glad to be able to confirm our views by those
of a writer long engaged in official life himself, and
accustomed to look beyond the claims and interests of
the passing hour. Mr. Taylor says : —

" Further, it is one business to do what must be done, another
to devise and do what ought to be done. It is in the spirit of
the British government as hitherto existing, to transact only
the former business ; and the reform which it requires is to
enlarge that spirit so as to include the latter. Of and from
among those measures which are forced upon him, to choose that
which will bring him the most credit with the least trouble, has

416 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

hitherto been the sole care of a statesman in office ; — and as a
statesman's official establishment has been heretofore constituted,
it is care enough for any man. Every day, every hour, has its
exigencies, its immediate demands; and he who has hardly
time to eat his meals, cannot be expected to occupy himself in
devising good for mankind.

" I am aware that under popular institutions, there are many
measures of exceeding advantage to the people, which it would
be in vain for the minister to project until the people, or an
influential portion of them, should become apprised of the ad-
vantage, and should ask for it ; many which can be carried only
by overcoming resistance ; much resistance only to be overcome
with the support of popular opinion and general solicitude for
the object. And, looking no further, it might seem that what
is not immediately called for by the public voice was not within
the sphere of practical dealing. But I am also aware, that in
the incalculable extent and multifarious nature of the public in-
terests which lie open to the operations of a statesman in this
country, one whose faculties should be adequate would find in
every month he should devote to the search, measures of great
value and magnitude, which time and thought only were
wanting to render practicable.

" He would find them — not certainly by shutting himself up
in his closet, and inventing what had not been thought of before,
— but by holding himself on the alert ; by listening with all
his ears (and he should have many ears abroad in the world) for
the suggestions of circumstances ; by catching the first moment
of public complaint against real evil, encouraging it, and turning
it to account ; — ... Such means and projects will suggest
themselves in abundance to one who meditates the good of
mankind, ' sagacious of his quarry from afar,' — but not to
a minister whose whole soul is and must be in the notices of
motions, and in the order-book of the House of Commons, and
who has no one behind to prompt him to other enterprise, no
closet or office-statesman for him to fall back upon as upon an
inner mind.

" This then is the great evil and want — that there is not
within the pale of our government any adequately numerous
body of efficient statesmen, some to be externally active and
answer the demands of the day, others to be somewhat more

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 417

retired and meditative, in order that they may take thought for
the morrow. How great the evil of this want is, it may require
peculiar opportunities of observation fully to understand and
feel ; but one who with competent knowledge, should consider
well the number and magnitude of those measures which are
postponed for years or totally pretermitted, not for want of
practicability, but for want of time and thought ; one who
should proceed with such knowledge to consider the great means
and appliances of wisdom which He scattered through this intellec-
tual country, — squandered upon individual purposes, not for
want of applicability to national ones, but for want of being
brought together and directed ; one who, surveying these things
with a heart capable of a people's joys and sorrows, their happy
virtue or miserable guilt on these things dependent) should duly
estimate the abundant means unemployed and the exalted aims
unaccomplished, — could not choose, I think, but say that there
must be something fatally amiss in the very idea of statesman-
ship on which our administration is based, or that there must be
some mortal apathy at what should be the very centre and seat
of life in a country.

" Yet such is the prevalent insensibility to that which con-
stitutes the real treasures and resources of the country — its
serviceable and statesmanlike minds — and so far are men in
power from searching the country through for such minds, or
men in parliament from promoting or permitting the search,
that I hardly know if that minister has existed in the present
generation, who, if such a mind were casually presented to him,
would not forego the use of it, rather than hazard a debate in
the House of Commons upon an additional item in his esti-
mates ! Yet till the government of this country shall become a
nucleus at which the best wisdom in the country contained shall
be perpetually forming itself in deposit, it will be, except as
regards the shuffling of power from hand to hand and class to
class, little better than a government of fetches, shifts, and
hand-to-mouth expedients." — The Statesman, p. 156.

When the government has been thus empowered to
call to its aid all the administrative and statesmanlike
capacity of the country, it will be for the country to see
that this capacity is so summoned to the rescue ; that

VOL. n. E E

418 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

no official indolence or jealousy, no aristocratic prepos-
sessions, no shallow or shortsighted economy, shall pre-
vent its being so summoned. Thenceforth it will be
the nation's fault, if the nation be ill-governed, or
governed by its narrower and scantier minds. Thence-
forth we may hope to see the dawning of a new legis-
lative and administrative era for our country. Of one
thing we may feel quite secure — that if all the superior
floating political genius of the country be not arrayed
in the service of government, it will assuredly be
arrayed against it ; if it be not obtained as a coadjutor
and ally, it will make itself felt as an obstructor and
antagonist ; if it be not allowed to strengthen the
hands, to support the course, to prepare the measures of
government, it will take the initiative and drag the
government ignominiously in its train. This cannot
be done without damage and without risk ; it is a dan-
gerous thing for a nation to feel itself abler and wiser
than its rulers ; reverence is impaired, obedience is un-
dermined ; the character of public men sinks and
suffers ; the language of public warfare becomes more
bitter, more contemptuous, and more unmeasured ; the
national strength is diminished, and the national in-
fluence weakened, because the people grudge great
means to men in whom they do not feel full confidence.
There are many indications that we are at present tend-
ing towards such a state of things ; perhaps the voice
of warning may be heard in time.

The work by Mr. Roebuck which we have placed at the
head of this article will not materially alter the estimate
which the public has already formed of his abilities or
of his character. It has evidently been composed with
great care and diligence, and apparently with a sincere
desire to give a faithful account of a most important
era in our national history. The style, indeed, is rough

PKOSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 419

and uncouth, and rather that of a ready speaker than of
a practised writer, but it is almost always clear. The
characters which he draws of the principal actors of the
time, appear to be the parts of the book on which he
has bestowed most thought and pains ; they are skilful,
discriminating, and generally, we think, correct, — those
of Mr. O'Connell and Sir Robert Peel especially so. Yet
notwithstanding these merits, we have read the book
with much disapproval and with sincere pain. It is not
only deeply tinged, but is altogether coloured and per-
vaded, by Mr. Roebuck's besetting sin — a disposition to
think ill and to speak harshly of every one around him.
This tendency, whether arising from infirmity of temper
or distorted vision, has greatly impaired his usefulness
in public life, and will equally detract from his merits
as an historian. Ever ready to put the worst construc-
tion upon ambiguous conduct ; to speak with sarcastic
doubt of every reported instance of purity and gene-
rosity; of all possible motives which could have in-
fluenced public men in a given course of action to
assign the lowest as most probably the true one ; unable
apparently to believe in the existence of lofty and con-
scientious patriotism among statesmen, or conceiving
himself to have the entire monopoly of this virtue, — he
is about the most unpleasant companion in a historical
journey that can be imagined. No man with any
respect for himself or any tenderness for his fellow-men,
likes to walk through the market-place, arm-in-arm
with Diogenes and his lantern. The whole book is one
continuous snarl, sarcasm, and sneer, delivered with the
gravity and sternness of an ermined judge. It is a
philippic delivered from the bench. In the guise of an
elaborate history it is, in fact, a party pamphlet
directed against the Whigs. Its object seems to be to
show — the opinion of the writer certainly is — that the
great Reform Bill brought forward by Lord Grey was a

E E 2

420 PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP.

mere hasty and improvised party move ; that a real
regard either for the people or the welfare of the
country had no share whatever in inducing its proposal ;
that it was decided upon, concocted, and arranged with
no purpose or idea but that of transferring the reins of
government from the Tory to the Whig aristocracy ;
that all its details were planned for this end ; and that
none were more alarmed than the proposers of the
measure, when they saw the earnestness of the great
body of the nation in the matter.

" The Whigs have ever been an exclusive and aristocratic
faction, though at times employing democratic principles and
phrases as weapons of offence against their opponents. It is the
fashion of the writers who advocate their cause and eulogise
their party, to describe them as representing the principle of
advance and change, in the hope of improvement, which must
be ever acting with a people who are themselves continually
improving; but this assumption is not justified by experience.
The Whigs employ the phrases of liberality upon compulsion.
They are liberal, because they need some means of exciting the
nation. When out of office, they are demagogues ; in power,
they become exclusive oligarchs. In the one case and the other,
they pursue without scruple what they believe to be their
party interest. . . .

" That the Whigs, as a party, sought more than their own
party advantage, [in carrying the Reform Bill,] / see no reason
to believe. That they both overrated and underrated the effects
of their own measure, their subsequent conduct, I think, proves.
They overrated it, in supposing that they had really annihilated
the political power of their opponents, and firmly established
their own supremacy ; they overrated it also, in fancying that
they had given a dangerous power to what they called alter-
nately a republican and a democratic party. They underrated
the effect of the new Act, and mistook its influence altogether,
when they supposed that the coming contests in the House of
Commons were to be between themselves — representing mo-
narchy, aristocracy, wealth, and order, on the one hand, and a
small but fierce and active body of republicans and anarchists
on the other." — Vol. ii. c. v.

PROSPECTS OF BRITISH STATESMANSHIP. 421

Now, there is unquestionably much truth at the
bottom of these representations ; but it is a truth exag-
gerated and embittered. The Whigs have always been,
it is true, an exclusive and aristocratic party ; their basis
has been narrow, and their views rigid, pedantic, and
confined, and these defects are now working their
downfall. But it is not true that they have generally
been either selfish, ungenerous, or corrupt, — they have
been steady champions of constitutional freedom, the
bold denouncers of injustice and oppression, and the
energetic friends of religious liberty. To many of them
we owe much gratitude and deep respect. Lord Grey
in particular, though we cannot approve of much of his
early political conduct, though much of it he regretted
and condemned himself, was yet a pure patriot and
a noble statesman. Through a long life he held aloof
from place and power, because they would not have
enabled him to further the objects for whose sake alone
he valued them. He lived to see the day when place
and power were offered to him, and the terms which he
was enabled to make were a people's emancipation.
Nor, we confess, can we see the object to be gained by
impressing on the minds of the nation the conviction
that their rulers are selfish and cold-hearted intriguers ;
by sapping all reverence for public men, and encouraging
the people to look upon them with enmity or with sus-
picion, or by inculcating, as the spirit in which statesmen
should be judged and watched, a temper that thinketh
much evil, and that covereth no sins.

E E 3

422

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.*

As the season advances, the new measure of Parlia-
mentary Reform, which Lord John Russell announced
for the beginning of the session, begins to excite public
attention. Conjectures as to what it will be, sugges-
tions as to what it ought to be, have appeared in several
journals, and been made at a few public meetings.
While some have ventured to prophesy its chief features,
and others have gone so far as to dictate its minute
details, we shall content ourselves with a humbler func-
tion; and, assuming neither the right to prescribe, nor the
power to foresee, shall simply attempt to clear the way
for a fair and dispassionate consideration of the measure
when it shall be propounded, by fixing the mind of the
nation on the most prominent and turning points, — for
instance, on the meaning of the British constitution, the
object it has in view, the modifications already intro-
duced in furtherance of that object, and the residue
which yet remains to be accomplished. The effect of
past alterations may guide us in our opinion of the ne-
cessity, and in our choice of the direction, of those now
demanded or proposed ; and the experience of our pre-
decessors and our neighbours may be brought in aid of
our own wisdom. From a consideration of these things
we shall endeavour to infer what it would be wise to
desire and reasonable to expect ; — starting from a
serious conviction that the subject is by no means as

* From the "Edinburgh Review," Jan. 1852.

1. Electoral Districts. By ALEXANDER MACKAY, Esq. London :
1848.

2. National Reform Association Tracts. London : 1851.

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 423

easy, the treatment of it as simple, or the decision re-
garding it as obvious and indisputable, as many of our
fellow-reformers delight to represent it.

The Eeform Act of 1832, as every year will render
more and more perceptible, effected a vast and radical
alteration in the action, though not in the theory, of
our constitution, and entailed changes of corresponding
magnitude in the conduct of public affairs, and in the
relations of the various elements of our complicated
polity. These changes may be regarded as operating in
a threefold direction : —

In the relation of parliament to the country and to
legislation.

In the reciprocal relations of ministers and parliament.

In the functions and qualifications of ministers.

The immediate and most obvious effect of the Reform
Bill was, for the first time, fully and fairly to bring to
bear upon parliament the feelings and opinions — the
prejudices and passions — the well or ill-understood
interests of the country. The House of Commons
became the bond fide representative, not indeed of the
people, as that word is commonly and inaccurately used,
but of that influential and educated portion of the
members of the community which more properly deserves
that name. It became, imperfectly it is true, but to a
far greater extent than it had ever been before, not
indeed the echo of the popular voice, but an instrument
largely played upon by that voice wherever distinctly
expressed. It was, indeed, not yet the nominee of the
masses, but it ceased to be the nominee of the Whig or
Tory aristocracy, and became the nominee of that com-
bination of the upper and middle classes of which the
constituencies are composed. Since the Reform Bill,
the parliament has never tuned a deaf ear to the demands
of public opinion: — it may have been sometimes in
doubt as to the extent or unanimity of that opinion ; it

E E 4

424 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

may have been perplexed as to its precise meaning and
demands ; but it has never been chargeable either with
careless inattention or sullen and dogged resistance.
Some measure of the influence in this respect which has
been exercised by the Keform Bill may be gathered by
remembering that, while during the forty-six years
which elapsed between the downfal of the coalition
ministry in 1784 and the formation of Lord Grey's
administration in 1830, the Whigs came into power only
once, and then held office only for a single year, — of
the twenty years which passed since, they have held
office for sixteen. In addition to this, all parties have,
as it were, been pushed on many steps in advance of
their previous position. The Whigs have become more
Radical, and the Tories more Whiggish than they were.
Indeed, it would be more correct to say that the old
boundary lines between the various sections of poli-
ticians have been swept away, and that they differ no
longer in kind, but only in degree ; — they are describ-
able, not as the opponents or the advocates of progress,
but as distinguished only by the rate of their pro-
gression, and the limits at which they respectively pro-
pose to stop.

But a still greater and more significant change has to
be noticed. As parliament became more and more
influenced by public opinion, and more sensitively and
promptly responsive to popular sentiment; — as the
country became more conscious of its power, and more
cognisant of its direct action on the proceedings of the
legislature, it was natural that its interest- in those pro-
ceedings should increase. So long as its operation on
the decision of great political questions was dubious,
languid, and remote; so long as it felt that these
matters were settled by a body, in the selection and
control of which its voice was little more than nominal ;
there was comparatively small inducement, on the part

THE EXPECTED KEFORM BILL. 425

of men unconnected with public life, to acquire inform-
ation, or form opinions, or propagate discussion, on
such matters. So long as the question put before them
at elections was, not — " What is your opinion upon
this important measure ?" — but, " Will you vote for the
nominee of this or that great aristocratic party ?" they
naturally concerned themselves far more with men than
with measures, and were likely to be influenced rather
by considerations of personal interest or affection than
of the public welfare. But in proportion as their power
of influencing parliamentary decisions increased, their
interest in these was enhanced, and the duty of quali-
fying themselves to form a sound judgment upon them
became more obvious and pressing. Hence all English-
men were on a sudden more completely and habitually
transformed into politicians than at any period previous
to 1382 ; — the middle ranks, because the real power of
ultimate decision was placed in their hands, — the lower
orders, because they perceived how closely their in-
terests were affected by decisions over which they de-
sired to have their share of control, and the control of
which seemed to be now brought more visibly within
their reach. Before the Reform Bill, parliament was
the arena where, by the theory of the constitution, and
with nominally closed doors, the affairs of the nation
were discussed and settled ; — it was the body to which
the people delegated the task of thinking and acting for
them in all political concerns; — having chosen their
representatives, or ratified the choice of others, their
political duty was at an end, their influence and in-
terest in the matter ceased ; or if any eccentric indi-
vidual still had a fancy to watch and criticise the con-
duct of parliament or particular members, and pronounce
judgment on specific operations, he did so as a work of
amusement and supererogation. Within the walls of
St. Stephen's the elite (by assumption and courtesy) of

426 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

the nation — men trained to the task by study and ex-
perience— nightly investigated and discussed those
knotty arid perplexing topics, and weighed those stu-
pendous imperial interests, which mere common minds
were not qualified to comprehend ; and by means of
this division and delegation of labour, the mass of the
community were enabled to go about their own private
concerns with security and undivided attention, leaving
public affairs to their specially appointed guardians.

But now all this is changed. The alteration, which
had begun before the Keform Bill, was hastened and
consummated by the agitation and discussion attendant
on that great national struggle, and has been becoming
yearly stronger and more marked ever since. Parlia-
ment is no longer the only, nor the chief arena for
political debate. Public meetings and the press are fast
encroaching upon and superseding its originally ex-
clusive functions. Every man has become a politician,
and exercises his judgment far less upon the qualifica-
tions of the individual member whom he sends to the
House of Commons to represent him, than upon the
principle, bearing, and detail of the specific measures laid
before that House. Nay, the change goes further even
than this. The country often takes precedence of the
legislature, both in the discussion and decision of public
affairs. Public opinion is formed out of doors ; and is
only revised, ratified, and embodied within. Active
and able individuals — sometimes men of business, some-
times philanthropists, sometimes theoretical economists
— study some especial branch of political philosophy or
social well-being, form their opinion upon it, arrange
their arguments, collect their facts, promulgate their
views, inform the public, agitate the country, excite,
and at length get possession of, the press ; and, when by
these means the community at large has become suffi-
ciently inoculated with their doctrine, they bring it

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 427

before parliament in the form of a specific proposition ;
— and parliament examines, discusses, perhaps mo-
difies, and retards, but never finally rejects, unless the
popular feeling which has urged the measure so far
forward should prove to be only a partial or transient
phase of public opinion. The functions of parliament
are no longer initiatory ; or in a far less degree than
formerly. It has become too busy, too confused, too
unphilosophical for that. The independent thinker
originates ; the country listens, disputes, sifts, ripens ;
the parliament revises and enacts. Like its synonyme,
the old parliament of Paris, it has become a body in
which lits-de-justice are perpetually held, to register the
decrees, not of the sovereign prince, but of the sovereign
people. Whether it is desirable that this should be so,
may admit of doubt ; — the fact that it is so, admits of
none.

A considerable change has also been wrought by the
Eeform Act in the character and general aspect of par-
liament, in consequence of the different class of men
who are sent up, and the more efficient and vigilant
control exercised over them by their several consti-
tuencies. It is very questionable whether the House of
Commons comprises a greater amount than formerly of
commanding genius or eminent wisdom. It may even
be doubted whether the natural arid necessary tendency
of that measure, as of every measure which popularises
the legislature, has not been to exclude one order of
superior minds, and that the highest order. There is a
class of men of refined tastes, of philosophic temper, of
profound thought, of wide and comprehensive views,
who, being capable of seeing all sides of a question, can
adopt no side with that passionate and exclusive zeal
which is demanded by its fanatical supporters; who,
penetrating too deeply the weaknesses, the selfishness,
the blunders of every party, can attach themselves de-

428 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

votedly to none ; who, foreseeing more clearly and pro-
foundly than their fellows the full and remote effects
of every promising enactment on which the popular
fancy may successively fix its affections, estimate each
more justly, and by consequence, more moderately ;
who know too well how surely excessive expectations
lead to disappointment and reaction, to be able often to
share the general enthusiasm ; who, gifted with too keen
and subtle a discernment of " the soul of goodness in
things evil," are regarded by the multitude as para-
doxical, fantastic, and impracticable ; who cannot soil
their lips by repeating the hollow or dishonest watch-
words of the hour, nor stain their conscience by bearing
a part in the violence and injustice which often mark
periods of national excitement, nor bow their haughty
honour to follow even their own banner through miry
ways or to a tarnished victory. These are precisely the
men a large infusion of whom in any legislative as-
sembly is imperatively needed to elevate its character,
to dignify its tone, to moderate its excesses, to counter-
act the tendencies, and control the impulses to which all
such assemblies are naturally prone. Yet they are
precisely the men whom popular constituencies can
least appreciate, and by whom the sacrifices and con-
cessions needed to please popular constituencies can
least be endured.

Of this order of men, therefore, there would neces-
sarily be fewer in a reformed parliament than under the
old regime. It is probable, also, that there are fewer
men of surpassing powers of any kind. But at the same
time there is at least as great an aggregate and as high
an average of talent. The level may not be higher, but
there are many more who come up to it. There are
more men of business, more men of competent capacity
to enter into and discuss the merits of the various
questions which come before them. There is less high

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 429

and commanding eloquence than formerly ; less also,
perhaps, of lucid statement and masterly grasp of un-
derstanding ; but for one man who took a part in the
debates of former times there are at least five who bear
their share — and a creditable share — now.

Before the Reform Bill, members of parliament, with
few exceptions, belonged to two classes; — those to
whom politics was a profession, hereditary or selected,
— who entered public life as others enter the navy or
the Church, feeling a special aptitude for it, either from
character or circumstances, arid resolved to devote
themselves to it, and to sink or swim with its vary-
ing fortunes; — and those who looked upon a seat in
parliament as conferring a sort of titular dignity, im-
plying a social distinction, and promising agreeable ex-
citement, who eschewed all labour, who cared nothing
for their constituents, thought little even of their own
votes, and rarely felt any deep interest in the subjects
that came before them for discussion. Parliamentary
reform has nearly extinguished this class of senators,
while it has introduced another of a widely different
stamp. Many boroughs, especially those newly en-
franchised,— and some counties, especially those in
which industrial interests are influential, — rejected at
once both the professional and the dilettanti politicians,
and chose their representatives from among themselves,
—men who had, perhaps, made themselves known and
valued for local exertions, or who were distinguished
among their fellow-citizens for their capacity in busi-
ness, or their respectability of character ; who, perhaps,
had little ambition, and no great liking for the office ;
who quitted private life rather reluctantly than other-
wise, and who went up to parliament simply to do their
parliamentary duty, and retire as soon as it was done.
The number of these men who were elected, — a number
which has been steadily increasing, — when added to the

430 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

other influences of the time, completely altered the cha-
racter of the House of Commons; it became a really
working body, — a body, the severity of whose labours
during the session is equalled probably by no other
board, firm, or assembly. It is true that much time is
habitually wasted, and that often little real work is
actually performed ; but this arises rather from the
confusion incident to an excessive, multifarious, and ill-
organised activity, than from indolence or negligence.
The " men of business " who were sent up not only
leavened the whole mass of members with their own
energy and diligence, they were distinguished also, —
not, we admit, by the comprehensiveness of their views,
the soundness of their judgment, or the delicacy of their
tact, but, — by qualities far rarer arid almost novel in
that House; by a tenacity of purpose, which was re-
butted by no obstacles ; by a directness of proceeding
which often baffled the most experienced and diplomatic
opposition ; an unfeeling stubbornness, on which all
blandishments were wasted ; a rough hardhandedness,
which tore away all flimsy pretexts, and exposed all
hollow plausibility ; and a certain pachydermatous in-
sensibility, on which the delicate weapons of sarcasm
and satire were tried in vain.

That a most valuable element has here been intro-
duced, and that parliament has thus been made, in fact,
to square more nearly with its ideal constitution, is not
to be denied. But the change is one involving certain
consequences which are not without their drawbacks,
and, at all events, are too important to be overlooked.
It behoves us fully to understand and appreciate them,
in order to guard against their possible excess, or their
noxious operation. The House of Commons, among
other changes, has become far more of a general debat-
ing club. There is less of concert and co-operation than
there used to be. Each member considers himself com-

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 431

petent, not merely to decide, but to propose ; not merely
to criticise, but to enunciate. Hence the history of
each session is a catalogue of abortions : such an
immense amount of amateur work is sketched out, that
the necessary business of the country can scarcely be
got through, and night after night is consumed in dis-
cussions which can lead to no practical result, and of
which the benefit, if there be any, is distant, casual, and
incidental. This, however, is an evil, which, as soon as
it becomes excessive enough, will work its own cure ;
and we may therefore leave it to its natural corrective.

But there is another evil, of which the tendency is
rather to increase than to diminish, and which all
friends to representative institutions should watch with
a vigilant and jealous eye. In proportion to the close-
ness of the connection between constituency and deputy,
and to the directness of the control exercised by the
former over the latter, will be the tendency of represen-
tation to degenerate into delegation ; and in the degree
in which it does so, it loses its special virtue and its
healthy operation. It is not that delegation in itself is
not an intelligible and consistent system ; it is not that
in some nations, and under certain conditions of society,
it may not work safely and beneficially * ; but it is a
system utterly unknown to the constitution of these
realms. It cannot, however, be denied, that the ten-
dency of the Reform Bill lay in this direction ; and the
shorter duration of parliament, and other measures on
which the present class of Reformers insist so positively,
would alarmingly aggravate that tendency. The very
aim of these men is to render representatives more

* It reached its complete ideal and its maximum of mischief in
the old constitution of Hungary, where all measures were debated at
the county sessions, and the delegates who were sent thence to the
Central Diet, received special instructions, and were sworn to vote in
accordance with them.

432 THE EXPECTED REFOKM BILL.

immediately dependent upon their constituents, and
more promptly amenable to their control, — to make
them a more close copy, a more sensitive barometer, of

the varying feelings and wishes of the electors, to

reduce them, in a word, from the position of the select
men of the nation, appointed to deliberate calmly on
national interests, to that of mere organs and mouth-
pieces of the popular will.

Now, every scheme having this change for its aim or
effect we regard as wholly objectionable and mischievous ;
and certain, if successful, to exercise a most fatal opera-
tion on the character, the dignity, and the true utility
of parliaments. Any such change cannot but aggravate
past cure the existing tendency in parliament to become
mere -courts of registration for the national decisions,
instead of assemblies in which those decisions are formed.
Constituents who regard and treat their members as
" mere acoustic tubes, through which their commands
are blown to the legislative chamber/' and who en-
deavour to reduce them to this disreputable level, must
be content to be served by an inferior order of men. No
man fit to be a representative will submit to be a delegate.
He will not choose to perform a service which might be
as adequately performed by a piece of parchment or a
paid agent. He goes to parliament as an integral por-
tion of the collective wisdom of the nation ; to consult
with others how the welfare of the state may be best
promoted ; and, if he is worthy of his high position, he
will not allow himself to be degraded into the mirror
and the medium of the shifting passions or the shallow
caprices of any section of the people. It is impossible
to disguise the truth that, from the tendency we have
mentioned, as well as from other circumstances, the
position of a member of parliament is becoming yearly
less desirable. Not only is it one of incomparably
severer labour than before the Reform Bill, but it is one

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 433

also of less dignity, less freedom, and less power. It is well
that the idle loungers who formerly infested the House
of Commons should no longer be tolerated. It is well,
that from every one who goes there there should be ex-
acted the faithful and diligent discharge of the duties of
the station he has accepted. But it is not well, that, by
rough bullying, by angry invective, by jealous and
prying restlessness, by mean and low suspicions, the
position should be rendered one which proud and high-
minded men will not aspire to, which honourable men
will not endure, which quiet and thoughtful men will
shun. It is true that there will never be any lack of
candidates for the office : old associations will cling to
it for long years, and render it still an object of am-
bition ; and even after these have been extinguished,
men with a certain rude competence will always be
foun 1 to step forward into the arena and perform the
thankless service. But the right men — the men whom
the country for its own sake ought to seek out and send
— will shrink back and turn, Coriolanus-like, away ; and
their successors will be men of a lower range of capacity
and with a less elevated estimate of a political career ;
and the ultimate mischief will be far greater than it .is
possible to calculate beforehand. If the people wish to
be honestly and ably served, they must be careful not
to convert their service into one which no man with a
due regard to his own character can undertake. In
proportion as it is a service of responsibility arid of toil,
should it also be made one of dignity and honour.
Otherwise, they may rely upon it, the connection will
be sought by none but the servile, the incompetent, and
the interested. " Gentlemen," said Mr. Burke, " we
must not be peevish with those who serve the people.
Depend upon it, the lovers of freedom will be free. None
will violate their conscience to please us, in order after-
wards to discharge that conscience which they have

VOL. II. F F

434 THE EXPECTED EEFORM BILL.

violated, by doing us faithful and affectionate service.
If we degrade and deprave their minds by servility, it
will be absurd to expect that they who are creeping and
abject towards us, will ever be bold and incorruptible
asserters of our rights against the most seducing and
the most formidable of all powers. If, by a fair, indul-
gent, gentlemanly behaviour to our representatives, we
do not give confidence to their minds, and a liberal
scope to their understandings ; if we do not permit our
members to act upon a very enlarged view of things,
we shall at length infallibly degrade our national repre-
sentation into a confused arid scuffling bustle of local
agency."

The reciprocal relations of ministers and parliament,
and the peculiar code of ministerial proprieties, have
likewise undergone considerable modifications in con-
sequence of the Keform Act ; though these modifications
have scarcely yet been generally admitted, nor do we
remember to have ever seen them stated either by
writers or by statesmen in the senate. They are va-
rious and important.

Before 1832 the House of Commons consisted, for the
most part, of two great regiments, bearing specific
names, carrying well-known banners, serving under
recognised leaders, and representing the two powerful
aristocratic interests which had up to that time divided
the government between them. There were few de-
nizens of the cross-benches ; and those who sat there
were regarded by the great majority as sad nuisances,
though insignificant in influence and strength. They
were considered impracticable, crotchetty, and unim-
portant, — isolated and impotent individuals : while
the section which now so unfairly arrogates to itself the
title of the Party of the Country was not yet organised.
Then, too, the questions which were discussed were

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 435

stirring, momentous, and well defined, and for the most
part involved some great principle. The vote of every
man was known beforehand ; partly, because, as we
have said, the matters at issue involved some decided
principle, on which those who acted together could not
well hold different opinions ; and partly also because it
was the recognised and universally admitted duty of
every man to vote with his set, and to merge any pecu-
liar and idiosyncratic fancies of his own in the great
object of the triumph of his party. Now, on the con-
trary, these mighty questions of principle have been
nearly all disposed of, or the principle has been conceded
on all hands, and parties differ only as to the time and the
extent of its application ; and thus a wide field is un-
barred for the admission of varieties and individualities
of opinion. Both constituencies and ministers must be
tolerant of open questions. All the great battles which
formerly divided Whigs and Tories have been won.
Parliamentary reform has been obtained; religious li-
berty has been won ; peace and economy are the watch-
words and professed objects of all parties alike. The
topics and the measures now discussed, being of lesser
magnitude and more limited range, and involving con-
siderations rather of detail than of theory, and of expe-
diency than of right, admit of far greater differences of
view among colleagues, and of far greater freedom of
individual action ; and the moral cohesion of parties is
in a great measure broken up. The party bond is also
much weakened by the fact noticed above, of the closer
union and more direct amenability of the representative
to his constituents. This connection is now often
stronger and closer than that between the member and
his party ; and the habit has thus been gradually intro-
duced, to a degree unknown before, of deciding each
question rather on its real merits than on its party or
ministerial bearings. Moreover, the circumstances of

F F 2

436 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

the great questions of principle having been disposed of,
and freer scope being thus given for the exercise of
private judgment ; of new topics having come up on
which comparatively few men were committed, or fettered
by antecedent declarations; and of the Tory party having
been beaten from their old positions, and thus compelled
— unless they were prepared either to retire from
public life, or to deny and resist les faits accomplis —
to take- up new ones far in advance ; all served to
familiarise the minds of public men with the idea of
progress and of change.

The consequence of all these combined operations has
been a most notable change in the standard of political
morality. It has become at once sounder, more rational,
and less conventional ; and will be acknowledged to be
purer and higher as soon as we can outgrow our old
associations, Consistency is no longer the idolised
virtue that it used to be ; indeed, we are beginning to
question whether, as it was formerly understood and
practised, it was a virtue at all. A change of political
opinions or parliamentary connections used to be re-
garded as damnatory and disgraceful, and was always
attributed to sinister and dishonourable motives. And
when, as we have said, clear principles were involved in
nearly all public questions, and when those questions
had been long — often for generations — under discus-
sion, so that no one could be charitably conceived not
to have made up his mind upon them, there was some
excuse for this universal distrust of a change. The
feeling had become almost instinctive. But now, when
new questions come up for consideration, to which old
axioms will not at all, or only partially apply ; when
men, agreed upon many points, find themselves at the
same time divided by a conscientious difference upon
others no less important ; and wThen old party walls,
both doctrinal and personal, have been so thoroughly

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 437

shaken and breached, it would be idle to regard the im-
putation of inconsistency and change as conveying any
longer the reproach which once clung to it. Consistency
means unswerving adherence to opinions, to party, or to
principle. Fidelity to principle, — that is, to the cause
of order, of freedom, of loyalty, of patriotism, — is what
all public men lay claim to ; and most of them, we
believe, with justice, as far as their light extends. But
it is clear that this fidelity, now at least, admits and
often will demand the greatest variation both as to the
measures which it may dictate, and the men with whom
it may require us to act at different times. That con-
sistency which lies in steady fidelity to high and wise
aims, is a noble virtue : that consistency which lies in
obstinate adherence to the same means and the same
men, in spite of new knowledge, varying circumstances,
and altered character, is a stupid blunder, an idle and
disreputable boast. As one question passes away and
gives place to its successor, it naturally and properly
gives rise to new, and at first sight, perhaps, somewhat
startling, combinations among leading politicians; yet
if we consider the matter rightly, without any just im-
putation on their consistency and honour. Men, who
were relentless foes while the subjects on which they
differed occupied the first place in public interest, be-
come, by the mere force of circumstances, friends and
allies as soon as subjects on which they agree come
uppermost, and become of paramount and engrossing
moment. The antagonists of yesterday naturally be-
come the colleagues of to-day; arid will now be firm
and faithful fellow-labourers just in proportion as they
were honourable and irreconcilable antagonists before.
The very same unflinching integrity, the very same
fidelity to their convictions, which divided them hitherto,
unites them now ; arid both the coalitions and the split-
tings-asunder among public men in recent years, which

F F 3

438 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

are so often laid to the charge of inconsistency or per-
sonal and selfish interests, may be, and we believe
generally are, the natural, the logical, the fit result of
adherence to their own views, and a desire to promote
those views, on topics which they regard as, at that
time, the most prominent, pressing, and momentous.
What should we have thought of statesmen in the
Buonapartean wars, who agreed in their foreign policy
and in their notions of the line of conduct to be pursued
throughout the great crisis, and yet refused to act
together, because they differed on the unborn questions
of the Sugar Duties or the Jew Bill ? or continued to act
together after these matters had superseded the others ?
What judgment should we have pronounced on men
who, in 1829, had refused to join with colleagues who
agreed with them on Catholic Emancipation, but differed
from them as to the Regency Bill or the African
Squadron ? Or how should we have condemned all
hearty reformers, who, in 1832r had wrecked the
prospects of the country by an aversion to coalesce with
men who held discrepant opinions on the resumption of
cash payments, which was a matter long gone by, or on
the Corn Laws, which was a matter not yet come up ?
And, in like manner, what sentence should we now pro-
nounce on public men who, agreeing on the vital question
of free commercial policy, so paramount at present,
should scruple or refuse to join their forces against the
especial peril of the hour, because they differed on
questions buried in the oblivion of the past, or hidden
in the womb of the future.

If adherence quand meme to former colleagues be not
then per se a virtue, neither, assuredly, is adherence
quand meme to former opinions. If indeed a man could
start on his course endowed with mature and perfect
wisdom, possessed of a gift of forecast almost amounting
to the primaeval faculty of prophecy, he might be im-

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 439

mutable and consistent without danger. But such God-
like capacity is not lavished on common mortals. Is
there one in the course of centuries who can boast of
such rare endowments ? With the mass even of the
most honest and highly gifted statesmen, political
wisdom is the slow growth of years, the product of long
experience, of wide and patient observation, of experi-
ments tried and failed in, of blunders made, recognised,
and profited b}^ Altered times, new circumstances,
past errors, teach their own lessons. Political convul-
sions bring to light new dangers, and explode old theo-
ries ; recluse philosophers investigate and perfect subtle
sciences which overturn many venerable notions and
time-honoured prejudices ; and the minister who would
be truly wise and suited to his generation, must hasten
to learn all that new discoveries and reasonings can
teach him, however they may shatter the antiquated
knowledge of the past. How can a man be deemed fit
to guide the fortunes of an empire, whose mind is not
always open to hail any new light which can enlarge his
conceptions or modify his doctrines ? Yet how can
any one, who keeps his mind thus conscientiously alive
and open, dare to hope that he can escape having
change after change, correction after correction, forced
upon him ? In times like ours — indeed in all times of
progress — resolute adherence to old opinions in a states-
man is equivalent to saying either, — "My principles are
fixed : I will open my mind to no new light which can
disturb the settled creed I have avowed;" or, "I will
adhere to my old course, even though new knowledge
or greater experience has convinced me it is wrong."
Which of these translations of our idolised consistency
will entitle a politician to the confidence of his country ?
Or can we hesitate about transferring the imputed guilt,
if guilt there must be, from the year of enlightenment to

F F 4

440 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

the years of error which preceded it ? from the late re-
cantation to the long persistence ?

The loosening of party ties, and the introduction into
the House of the class of new men of whom we have
already spoken, inured to no conventional routine, and
trammelled by no antiquated notions of senatorial eti-
quette, have contributed, though perhaps unconsciously,
to change the functions of parliament, and to modify
its relations to the Ministers of the Crown. Since the
Reform Bill, the House of Commons has followed the
course which seems instinctive with all legislative assem-
blies, and, though without intention, has encroached on
the province of the executive. Formerly, it was little
more than a council for deciding on propositions sub-
mitted to it by the ministers, for controlling them if
they showed a disposition to go astray from a constitu-
tional and patriotic course, and for making them ac-
quainted, through a legitimate channel, with the wants
and feelings -of the country. When the sovereign had
appointed his ministers from the party which was for
the time predominant in parliament, these ministers
were omnipotent, within the limits of the Constitution,
till parliament was ripe for demanding their dismissal.
The independent members were powerless, and as it
were non-existent, because few and isolated : the Oppo-
sition was what its name implies, — a body whose
function was to grumble, criticise, and object — but who
waited for actual measures till its turn of office came.

The initiative of all legislation, as well as the direc-
tion of national action, lay almost as much with the
executive, as if it had been a constitutional maxim.
Now, not only the Opposition, but independent members,
originate measures, and interfere with every proceeding
of the administration, to a degree formerly quite un-
known. Ministerial bills, twenty years ago, used to be
passed pretty much as they were introduced ; amend-

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 441

merits were scarcely ever carried, and were proposed
chiefly as the formal mode of introducing a discussion.
The Opposition, too, agreed upon the specific amend-
ment which should be made their cheval de bataille
against the government and its measure, and, when
defeated, the struggle was over. But now, in addition
to these principal pieces de resistance, a number of sup-
plementary amendments and suggestions issue from
the cross benches, or from individuals both on the
Treasury and the Opposition side of the House, — all of
which are sure of a respectful hearing, and some of
which are not unfrequently carried by the aid of volun-
teers from all sections. Ministers can now no longer
bring forward propositions embodying simply and dis-
tinctly their own private opinions, and rely upon the
unanimous aid even of their own supporters to force
them through the House : some portions have always to
be modified to weaken the vehemence of the organised
opposition ; others, to neutralise the hostility of influen-
tial members of the independent section ; others, again,
to conciliate the fancies of individuals among their own
party ; — so that by the time the measures become laws,
they are really, as well as nominally, the production of
the parliament as well as of the executive. Nor can it
with justice be maintained, that this representation
holds good only of an incompetent and feeble ministry :
it is not likely that we shall again see, except in rare
and transient periods of crisis, an administration to
whom it will not with more or less exactitude apply.
The days of what are termed strong governments are
probably wholly gone by. Parties are no longer as
compact, as obedient, or as well disciplined as formerly.
A minister who should endeavour to force his proposi-
tions through the House of Commons with the vehement
despotism of Lord Chatham, or the cold and haughty
arrogance of his son, would probably be driven from

442 'THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

power at the end of a single session, however decided
may have been his original majority. Premiers of the
old school, who should attempt to introduce into a re-
formed parliament the arbitrary stubbornness which
was possible in the days of nomination and corruption,
would soon be convinced that they had entered on a
new arena, where ancient tactics were no longer suitable.
The effect of this change has been obviously to weaken
the power of ministers, and in the same proportion to
diminish their responsibility ; for the two must always
be correlative. A parliamentary majority which loyally
obeyed the minister of the day as its first duty, might
well throw upon him the entire responsibility of the
measures which it carried, or the proceedings which it
sanctioned, at his bidding. A minister of these days,
whose measures are clipped and clogged by a legislative
assembly over which he has no control, beyond such as
his powers of reasoning or persuasion can exercise over
the minds of -each individual member, is fairly entitled
to call upon that assembly to divide with him, in a most
liberal proportion, the paternity of the bad measures so
emasculated and transmogrified. To deny or to disre-
gard the change which has been introduced in these
respects, — to expect from a minister the same tenacious
adherence to his own plans, the same impenetrable
deafness to suggestions from allies, the same obstinate
resistance to modifications by opponents, the same
stubbornness in battle, the same conduct in defeat,
which were suitable and practicable under the old
regime, — is simply inconsiderate and unfair. Yet, from
want of having realised and understood this change,
how often do we hear the most inconsistent sentences of
condemnation proceed from the mouths of the very same
men ! How often do we hear one minister blamed for
his pliability, and another for his unyielding pertinacity !
And how often do we hear the same minister inveighed

THE EXPECTED REFOKM BILL. 443

against, to-day for resigning in a pet because he is out-
voted, and to-morrow for retaining office after he has
ceased to command a majority !

This brings us to another change which has been in-
sensibly wrought by the operation of the Reform Bill.
The code of ministerial propriety in the matter of re-
signation has been greatly modified, though the nature
and cause of the modification has never, so far as we
know, been officially laid down, and is not generally
appreciated, nor consistently remembered. So long as
parliament was composed of two parties, distinctly de-
fined, and systematically organised, arrayed under
recognised leaders, and embodying all the available
political opinion of the country, the duty of a minister
when defeated was clear and indubitable. He was
defeated because his opponents had become stronger
than himself. He was left in a minority because his
opponents commanded a majority. His constitutional
course, therefore, was at once to resign his power into
the hands of those opponents ; and the same superio-
rity which enabled them to defeat him, enabled them
also, and required them, to step into his vacant place.
But now, when a third and somewhat anomalous party
has been formed, capable of holding the balance between
the other two, and of determining the victory in favour
of either ; and still more, when affairs have become, as
we fear they are now, still further complicated by the
formation of a fourth section (the Irish party), which
seems disposed often to hold itself aloof, and to act on
altogether different principles, — the course to be pursued
by a minister under defeat has been greatly modified
and perplexed. The party of his habitual supporters
may still be stronger than any other single section of
the House, but not strong enough to outnumber all
these sections, or two of them, united. He may be
beaten, not by his principal antagonists and rivals, but

444 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

by the casual and transient junction of their forces with
those of a third party, generally more hostile to them
than to himself * ; to resign in such a case would be to
throw the reins of government into the hands of a party
even weaker than his own, and sure, therefore, to be
speedily placed in a similar predicament. This, there-
fore, clearly cannot be the proper or constitutional
course to adopt. The principle at issue is, however, the
same as before ; and the comprehension of this will
greatly serve to elucidate our views. The duty of the
minister, now as heretofore, is to bow to the decision of
the majority ; but to resign, in the case supposed, would
not be to bow to this decision, but to thwart it ; for the
majority does not wish to supersede the government and
to place its recognised competitors in office. The ma-
jority is a majority pro hac vice only : the House has
expressed its will, not on the question of a change of
ministry, nor on a question which is supposed to involve
one, — but simply on the special question then before it ; —
the constitutional obligation, therefore, of bowing to the
decision of the majority, is now confined to the adoption
of the resolution come to by that special vote. The
British constitution requires that the country shall be
governed in conformity with the will of a parliamentary
majority, and by the men whom that will maintains in
power. For ministers to resign their power to a mi-
nority in parliament, is, in consequence, at once uncon-
stitutional and futile ; and now that parliament is
divided into three parties instead of two, for defeat to
be constantly followed by resignation, as it was formerly,

* Precisely the same thing recently occurred in the French Cham-
bers, where the ministers were beaten by the junction of their three
mutually irreconcilable antagonists : they resigned in consequence ;
but it was impossible for the President to choose a new ministry
from any one of the other sections, as they were all minorities, and
minorities still smaller than the one they had defeated.

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 445

would soon render any stable government impossible.
As long, therefore, as a minister is supported by a sec-
tion of the House habitually and decidedly stronger than
any other section, or than any two which habitually act
together, it is his right, and probably his duty, to
remain in office. It is for each individual minister to
consider, according to the actual circumstances of the
country, and the peculiar exigencies of the hour, how
far repeated discomfitures may so far impair his influ-
ence, damage his reputation, and cripple his capacity for
effective service, as to render his retirement at once
desirable and patriotic. But it would clearly be both
indecorous and oppressive were he to make use of his
peculiar position, — except in those crises which bring
their own duties, and teach their own lessons, and carry
their own justification, — to coerce the independent sec-
tion into the support of measures they regard as in-
jurious, by the threat of throwing the government into
the hands of a party whose possession of office they
would consider as more injurious still.

Under this new and complicated position of affairs
which has grown out of the Reform Bill, it is impossible
to lay down any fixed rules. The code of morality and
etiquette will be formed by degrees. Each case must
be judged on its own merits. Each statesman must
decide according to his own light, according to the
measure of his patience, and the measure of his patri-
otism. All that we have endeavoured to make plain, is
the injustice and impracticability of applying to a novel
and altered state of things the formal precepts of an
obsolete era; — that resignation under defeat may often
be a clearer obligation than resignation in consequence
of defeat ; — and that it may frequently be the duty of
ministers to embody and carry out the wishes of parlia-
ment, even when these wishes are not their own.

Simultaneously with a diminution in the power of

446 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

ministers and a division of their responsibility, has been
a considerable increase in their labour. Official service,
especially in the higher departments, is becoming more
onerous every year; yet we know what Pitt and
Castlereagh, and Canning found it, and how Peel felt
under those precedents. As population and commerce
have increased ; as the interests of the empire have
become more involved and complicated ; as new subjects
of attention have risen up, and new claims and duties
have been forced upon the executive ; as a higher poli-
tical vitality, and habits of keener vigilance, have been
diffused through the nation ; the exertion and devotion
demanded from ministers have been incalculably aug-
mented. Their position is now one of severe, unremit-
ting, and exhausting labour, such as the physical powers
of few men can long sustain. Not only have they to do
more, and to think of more, but they have to act far
more cautiously, and to think far more profoundly, than
was formerly, found necessary. They have to act and
think in the face of adversaries of more unsleeping vigi-
lance, and far better information, than of old. They
have to present a firm and invulnerable front to a
greater number and variety of antagonists. They must
make no blunders under the idea that they may possibly
escape detection. They must be satisfied with no
superficial comprehension of their subject, if they are
not prepared to have their deficiencies mercilessly ex-
posed. In a word, they have to act under far more
effective and prompt responsibility than formerly. The
result of all this is, that while more is exacted from
them, they have less means than in old times of meeting
these exactions. Their whole time and strength are
taken up in despatching the incumbent business of the
day, and defending themselves against the assaults of
inveterate and omnipresent adversaries. They really
have no leisure, either of time or mind, for that patient

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 447

investigation, that quiet reflection, that cairn and com-
prehensive survey of a nation's wants, that deliberate
penetration into its character and tendencies, from
which alone the origination of great and wise measures
of policy can spring. Yet such measures are clamo-
rously demanded from them. Truly the public has
become a hard and Egyptian taskmaster. It demands
from its servants service, which at the same moment it
deprives them of the means of rendering. It insists
upon wisdom, and refuses leisure. It exacts perfection,
and compels haste. It calls for schemes carefully con-
cocted, thoroughly digested, armed at all points against
hostile criticism, — and requires them at the hands of
men whose life, by its own exactions, it has made one
perpetual hurry, one distracting and exhausting strife.
The evidence taken before the Official Salaries Com-
mittee of last session, presents a curious and instructive,
but somewhat melancholy, contrast between the una-
nimous declaration of all who were or had been mi-
nisters, that they were cruelly over-worked, and that
the public service suffered from the undue pressure,
and the relentless determination of the self-accredited
guardian of the public purse, to increase this pressure,
and augment the mischief, by the abolition or amalga-
mation of those offices which, by their comparative
leisure, were able to relieve and assist the inordinate
toil of the others.

The plain truth is, that a reformed parliament now
expects from ministers service which, under a reformed
parliament, they cannot possibly render, and for the
neglect or imperfect performance of which it is there-
fore unjust or irrational to blame them. If we expect
the policy of ministers to be as wise, as profound, and
as far-sighted as it ought to be ; if we wish their
schemes to be grandly conceived and perfectly wrought
out, so that parliament shall have, as of old, no task

448 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

beyond that of deciding on their acceptation or rejec-
tion ; we must either allow them leisure to prepare
these plans themselves, or instruments to do the work
for them.

If something of this kind be not done — and there
are various ways of doing it — it is to be feared that
the tendency which has already set in will be greatly
and dangerously enhanced : ministers will become more
and more mere able and active administrators ; but the
science of statesmanship, properly so called, will be lost
to official life, and find its sole students and expositors
in philosophic writers, who live apart from the current
of affairs, and who, however sound in their principles
and comprehensive in their vision, can rarely possess
the experience or sagacity needed for the wise appli-
cation of their views. The remedy might be sought in
two directions — as to the respective advantages of
which the opinions of practical men will probably differ
widely : — either much of the routine and parliamentary
work of the various departments might be devolved
upon the under secretaries (whose number and powers
should be proportionally augmented), so as to leave the
chief minister at liberty for the higher offices of delibe-
rate and forecasting statesmanship ; or each minister
might be allowed a semi-official council of individuals

o

chosen out of the community at large, and selected for
their general wisdom and their knowledge of the branch
of service to which they are attached, — who should
have the dignity of privy councillors, and a fixed emo-
lument,— and whose function it should be to examine
all suggested schemes, to investigate national wants, to
comprehend thoroughly the direction of public feeling ;
and by their systematic studies, their grounded prin-
ciples, their timely advice, to rescue statesmanship from
that hand-to-mouth character which is now so frequently
its just reproach. Our object in this Paper, however,

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 449

is less to propound plans than to trace those changes
which reform has introduced into the functions and
powers of ministers, — in virtue of which they can no
longer supply what yet the country needs as much as
ever.

Till now, it has been the almost invariable practice
of our statesmen to propose no reform which the public
did not call for, nor even then, unless the public had
called for it a long time ; to remove no grievance which
had not been heavy enough to excite a general outcry,
and never to remove it till the outcry had become
menacing and overpowering. This conservative and,
in many respects, salutary habit — though much con-
firmed by the excessive and overwhelming toil which
ministers have to encounter, and which leaves them no
time or strength for works of supererogation — has its
origin in the peculiarities of the English mind, and
harmonises with the spirit of the British Constitution.
There is much to be said in defence of it. Whatever
exists, and has long existed, may plead more than mere
prescription in its favour : the public mind is attuned
to it ; the public temper has accommodated itself to it ;
public ingenuity has adjusted its pressure and diluted
its mischief. It is moreover very doubtful whether, in
a constitution so practically democratic as ours, a states-
man is called upon, or would be wise, to originate mea-
sures for which the nation has not shown itself fully
ripe ; to propose organic ameliorations for which the
nation sees no necessity ; or to abolish abuses from
which it feels little practical inconvenience. So strong
is the conservative element within us ; so averse are we
to change, as change ; so potential is that vis inerticer
which is the main ingredient of political stability ; that
a statesman who should thus anticipate national de-
mands, forestall national feelings, and march in advance
VOL. n. G G

450 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

of national requirements, — whose deep foresight and
matured sagacity should induce him to propose in
1830 reforms for which the country did not perceive
the necessity till 1850, — would step out of the range of
sympathy of the people whom he governed, and would,
ipso facto, become powerless. His very superiority of
wisdom would defeat and dethrone him. It is only
through the people themselves that popular reforms
can be effected. It is only by preparation of the na-
tional mind that national progress can be achieved.
Were it otherwise, our advance might perhaps some-
times be more rapid, but would assuredly not be so
steady. We should fluctuate and retrograde. We
should do and undo. A step once gained would not,
as now, be gained for ever. We should often have
misgivings and reactions, and should from time to time
be harking back upon our course. What the nation
had not long desired, it might not be resolute to retain.
What it had not valued enough to demand, it would
not value enough to defend. Reform, like freedom, is
secure only where it is gained — not where it is given.

Of course there is evil as well as good in this mode
of proceeding. On the other hand, abuses retained till
public indignation has acquired vehemence enough to
sweep them away like a torrent, will have accumulated
round them a needless degree of animosity, so that,
when they are abolished, they may be abolished with
too great a disregard for vested interests and feelings.
Reforms, delayed till long postponement or refusal had
exasperated the public desire into a passion, are apt to
be carried in a tumult of popular excitement, which
leaves little leisure for the cool and deliberate con-
sideration of details and consequences. If statesmen
proclaim to the world, as their principle of action, that
no changes, though confessedly desirable, will be yielded
till the voice of the country has pronounced itself upon

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 451

them in a manner not to be mistaken, they are offering
a most tempting premium to that popular agitation
which, both in England and in Ireland, has already
become a sore evil and a serious danger.

Undoubtedly in this as in most other matters, there
is a middle course in which true wisdom and safety
may be found. The right rule must be for statesmen
not to shoot over the heads of the people, or run too
far ahead of their consolidated feelings and matured
opinions, — but, while preparing the public mind by
their speeches and writings, and gradually educating it
up to the required standard, to abstain from action till
the intelligent part of the community are in full
harmony with their views : Yet, on the other hand they
must be even more careful not to delay till wishes have
become impatience, and till the mass of the people have
begun to mingle their angry clamours with the demands
of the educated classes. The rule is easy enough to
lay down ; the difficulty begins when we attempt to
apply it.

One of the rarest and most difficult, yet at the same
time one of the most necessary, qualifications of a
statesman in a popular government like that of Great
Britain, is the faculty of discerning what THE NATION
really desires and thinks ; of distinguishing between
the intelligent and unintelligent public opinion, — be-
tween the orators and the organs that have weight, and
those that have none, — between the voice which is in-
fluential, and the voice which is only loud — in a word,
between that popular pronundamento which it would be
weakness and wickedness to listen to, and that which it
would be unpardonable to disregard, and idle to dream
of opposing. The task demands no little care and no
ordinary tact ; it belongs to a sagacity partaking of the
character of an instinct which some men of very mode-
rate genius have in perfection, of which others of far

G G 2

452 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

loftier intellects are entirely destitute. It requires sin-
gular accuracy of judgment and acuteness of perception ;
a practical acquaintance with every rank and class of
the community, or that intuitive insight which with
some men appears to supply its place; and a mental
ear so fine, sensitive, and subtle, as to be able (so to
speak) to hear the language of the silent as well as that
of the outspoken and the noisy, and to discriminate
between the tones of resolute earnestness, arid those of
mere bustling loquacity. In no branch of his profession
is a statesman, devoid of this unerring and peculiar
instinct, more likely to be mistaken ; in none is a
mistake more mischievous. He is for ever steering
between two dangers : that of opposing a stolid and in-
sensible defiance to the real and serious demands of the
popular will ; and that of yielding a weak obedience to
the noisy outcries of a worthless, insignificant, and
powerless few, and incurring thereby the infinite disgust
of the influential but silent and contented mass.

In the present case we do not think there can be
much mistake about the matter. There clearly is no
call for parliamentary reform on the part of any large
or influential class. There is no zeal about it, one way
or the other. An extension of the franchise is wished
for by some, and thought proper and desirable by
many ; but it is not an actual want largely felt, nor is
the deprivation of the franchise a practical grievance,
clear enough, tangible enough, generally recognised
enough, to have given rise to a genuine, spontaneous,
extensive demand for redress. There is a general lan-
guor and want of interest on the subject, manifested
nowhere more plainly than in the tone and character of
the meetings got up by the Reform Association for the
sake of arousing public feeling. The nation, as a whole,
is undeniably indifferent ; the agitation is clearly arti-
ficial. It is notorious, as we shall soon have occasion

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 453

to show in detail, how few of the ten-pound house-
holders have taken the necessary steps to place them-
selves upon the register by paying their own rates, by
securing a sufficient length of residence, and maintaining
their claims before the revising barrister, and how few
of those registered took the trouble at the last election
to record their votes. The Freehold Land Societies
alone show some electoral activity ; but here an invest-
ment for their savings is in view, as well as the franchise.
A remodelling of the franchise (magnified into a new
Keform Bill) has been promised by the ministry; a
general election is near at hand ; active, energetic, and
experienced agitators are doing their utmost to arouse
the country from its torpor ; but in vain. A universal,
genuine, unmistakeable expression of public interest in
the matter, or of earnest desire for an amendment and
extension of the suffrage, they find themselves utterly
unable to elicit.

Now, whether this general indifference is to be re-
garded as indicating a favourable or unfavourable state
of things for a reconsideration and extension of the
suffrage, is a question which will be answered by every
man one way or another, according to the view which
he takes of parliamentary and ministerial obligations.
If the legislature is to be confined to the function of
discerning, embodying, putting into shape, and carrying
into effect the deliberate decisions of the nation, then
parliament would be clearly premature in moving in a
matter of such vital moment as organic change, since
the nation has not summoned it to action, and has
enunciated no opinion as to the extent and direction of
that action. Quieta non movere is, in political affairs,
as often a maxim of wisdom as of laziness. And when
so many serious and crying practical grievances are
clamorous for reform ; when the principles of taxation

G G 3

454 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

are still only half thought out ; when its practice is a
jumble of empirical expedients and indefensible incon-
gruities, in which old notions and new are forced into a
strange and unassimilating juxtaposition, but in which
no clear paramount conception, no pervading and master
idea can be discerned ; when our colonial relations have
all to be discussed, consolidated, and readjusted ; when
we have only just entered on the vast enterprise of Law
Reform — an undertaking demanding the most con-
centrated strength, labour, and devotion ; — then, to
rush into the disputed field of Franchise Alteration, —
to open a question which cannot fail to absorb much
time, to complicate political relations, to split parties
and to sever friends, to distract, divide, and fritter
away the reforming energy of the nation, and to dissi-
pate that vigour which can only be effective by being
concentrated, — does seem, at first sight, like the superer-
ogatory zeal of men who begin to build without counting
the cost, arid go forth to meet their adversary without
previously measuring their strength.

But, on the other hand, if gradual amendment and
extension be the law and essence of our constitution ; if
one of its chief merits lies in its elastic adaptability to
advancing requirements and riper developments of cha-
racter ; if it be a tacit fundamental principle that the
suffrage should be coextensive with the fitness to ex-
ercise it ; and if the mental and moral progress of the
nation, therefore, logically draws after it the enlarge-
ment of the franchise, then it is probable that no times
are so suitable for the widening of our electoral basis
as those in which no impatient excitement is in being
to hurry deliberation or embarrass action, — in which
legislative wisdom, not popular passion, points the di-
rection and assigns the limits of the change. And if
advantage be taken of the quiescent attitude of the
public rnind to look deeply and consider cautiously, — to

THE EXPECTED EEFOEM BILL. 455

examine the subject from a higher and broader point of
view than party men can often attain to, and to regard
this or that measure or suggestion, not as it affects
present political relations, but as it bears upon perma-
nent national development, — to discuss the question
less as senators and politicians than as statesmen and
philosophers, — then, indeed, the general silence and
indifference may powerfully aid us in facilitating a wide
and profound consideration, and in coming to a sound
conclusion. But the measures to be "proposed must
stand upon their own merits alone : there is no popular
cry or fancy, by falling in with which they can borrow
artificial strength ; there is no popular excitement which
can carry a crude or unworthy scheme to unmerited
success. Those who undertake the responsibility of
initiating the new Reform Bill will do well to remember
that, as there will be no enthusiasm in its favour, but
much certain opposition, its only chance of success will
depend on its being so judiciously constructed and so
fully weighed as to command the suffrages of the mode-
rate and thoughtful of all classes. If, indeed, a measure
were proposed so wide and wild as nearly to embrace
the Charter in its amplitude, a large army of zealous
and energetic supporters would be enlisted in its de-
fence; but such support would be dearly purchased
and more than countervailed by the falling away of the
more cautious, reflective, and conservative reformers,
and by the augmented and better based hostility of the
Tory opposition. A proposal which united the Char-
tists in its behalf would unite all other sections of the
community against it ; and such no Whig ministry
would dream of bringing forward. Anything short of
this will be assailed by the Protectionists as dangerous,
and by the Radicals as inadequate and not worth fighting
for ; and it must, therefore, if it is to be carried, be

G G 4

456 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

such as will stand the brant of all reasonable criticism ;
as will approve itself to the understanding of every one
who has any claim to the title of Reformer ; as will, in
a word, fight its way to victory by virtue of its unde-
niable excellence and intrinsic recommendations only.
As it cannot hope for triumph by an appeal to popular
excitement, it must seek that triumph by satisfying the
deliberate wisdom of the legislature.

Those who compare the state of public feeling on the
subject of parliamentary reform now with what it was
in 1830, will admit that the two epochs present no
similarity whatever. Then it had been before the
country for a long series of years as a question of pri-
mary magnitude and interest, — as the one measure
which was the necessary key and prelude to all others.
It had been the cheval de bataille of that great party in
the state with which all popular hopes and feelings
were identified. It was the project, the creed, the
banner of those who for generations had fought the
battle of freedom, mercy, and justice. It had been the
field on which the great contest between the friends of
progress and the friends of stagnation was to be brought
to issue. It was the one thing needful. With parlia-
mentary reform every subsequent achievement would
be easy : without it, all further amelioration would be
hopeless. With rotten boroughs would fall every in-
tolerable abuse and every cruel grievance which had
been perpetuated through their instrumentality. With
the enfranchisement of the great towns and the middle
classes would be ushered in a new reign of right and
progress. Now experience has somewhat damped the
enthusiasm with which the battle of reform was fought,
and disappointed several of the brilliant expectations
which were formed from the victory then won. Further
electoral changes have become less generally interesting
as they are seen to be less imperatively needed, and as

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 457

the operation of them has become more questionable and
uncertain. People have become more disposed to use
their tools than to sharpen them, or multiply them, or
change them. It has become obvious that many prac-
tical enterprises call for completion, and many pressing
grievances for cure, which are far more essential than
any electoral amendments. It has become obvious that
administrative reforms are far more needed than organic
changes. It has become obvious also, that, incomplete
and theoretically imperfect as our actual franchise is,
parliament yet does, in fact, respond, with very great
sympathy and promptitude, to the ascertained wishes
of the country, and that nearly all retrenchments and
ameliorations which are desirable and desired, can be
obtained through the instrumentality of the House of
Commons even as at present chosen. An extension of
the suffrage, therefore, which in 1830 was the question
of questions — almost the sole question, in fact, — is
now only one of many, and one by no means of the
first magnitude or of the most indispensable and para-
mount importance. It no longer occupies the same
space in the public mind that it then did and deserved
to do. It has descended from being the demand of
the nation, to be the programme and watchword of a
section.

Moreover, in 1830 the people knew what they wanted ;
now they seem to have no definite or united aim. Then
reformers, comparatively speaking, were agreed as to
their wishes and their claims : now they are split into a
number of parties, and differ as widely as antagonists in
the nature and extent of their demands. Then, they
sought the removal of an intolerable and deeply-felt
evil, — the conferring of a vast and clear practical boon.
Now, what they desire is rather the rectification of a
theoretical injustice, the removal of a disfiguring blemish,
the satisfying of a natural desire. Hence, in 1830 they

458 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

struggled, as Englishmen will do, with immense resolu-
tion and pertinacity for a manifest and tangible good.
Hence, in 1851, they regard, as Englishmen will do,
with lukewarmness and languor, the contest for retouch-
ing an imperfect but still admirable system. They are
somewhat bewildered, too, by the multiplicity of con-
flicting schemes, and look shyly on the movements of
an army so divided against itself as is that of parlia-
mentary reformers now. They distrust the recommen-
dations of men who cannot agree among themselves
what to recommend, and are inclined to postpone for
the present the consideration of plans which have
assumed neither the defined shape nor the unity with
which it is possible to deal. A ten-pound county quali-
fication, household suffrage, complete suffrage, manhood
suffrage, universal suffrage, (to say nothing of more
complex schemes) — all contending for public approval,
— leave upon the matter-of-fact mind of a Briton an
undefined impression that the contest regards rather a
speculative principle than an actual claim of justice or
national advantage.

Then, again, the ranks of parliamentary reformers
are strangely altered and weakened since 1830. At
that time all Liberals were in favour of an extension of
the suffrage. They differed somewhat as to the degree
of that extension, but all agreed that a large one was
not only desirable, but was imperatively called for.
The bill brought forward by Lord Grey's ministry
united every reformer in the country in its behalf.
What Reform Bill would do so now ? At present there
are many undoubted Liberals — true friends to freedom
— zealous labourers in the ranks of practical reforms —
advanced pioneers in the path of progress — who depre-
cate any further extension of the franchise ; many who
doubt the wisdom of it yet ; many who will oppose it
with the utmost weight of their character and talents.

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 459

Numbers who were innovators then, are Conservatives
now: not that any change has passed over their senti-
ments ; but they have got what they aimed at ; they
have pushed progress as far as they thought desirable ;
to use their own metaphor, they have dragged the state
coach into the middle of the road out of one ditch, and
see no necessity for upsetting it into the other. This
change of position and feelings is inevitable. Every
victory gained augments the number of the satisfied ;
every reform conceded thins the ranks of the reformers ;
every abuse remedied diminishes the enemies of the
existing order of things. The men, too, who thus suc-
cessively pass over into the camp of the Conservatives
are not the least considerable among the army they
have quitted ; they are the cautious, the moderate, the
reasonable : those who give weight and dignity to the
party of progress in the eyes of the world, and win for
it respect and deference even in the sight of its antago-
nists. Numbers of these men, who gave to the refor-
mers their overwhelming strength and high character
in 1830, have now carried that strength and character
to the side of their former opponents.

But the difference of feeling on the subject of parlia-
mentary reform between those days and these, is as
nothing when compared with the difference of circum-
stances. A long course of continued amelioration, our
inveterate habit of grumbling, and a universal dis-
position to depreciate the value of what has been ob-
tained, and to exaggerate the value of what has been
refused, have combined to blind us to the enormous
contrast between the state of things immediately pre-
ceding the Great Reform Bill, arid their state now,
when that measure has been operating and bearing
fruit for twenty years. Then, nearly everything had
to be done ; now, most of the great things have been
accomplished. Then, the very tools and materials were

460 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

wanting; now, the building is more than half com-
pleted. What were distant desiderata then, have passed
into history as achievements now. What were /agenda
then, are now facia. In 1828, which we may take as
the last year of the firm old Tory dominion, the claims
of religious liberty which the greatest statesmen of all
parties had joined in advocating, were still denied. At
least ten millions of Romanists and Dissenters were
debarred from the exercise of their civil rights. The
Catholic Emancipation Act was not yet passed. The
Test and Corporation Acts were not yet repealed.
Now, men of every shade and sect of Christianity are
on an equal footing in the eye of the law, and the same
equality is on the point of being extended to the Jews.
In 1828 the Civil List was extravagant and indefen-
sible, and the Pension List lavish, unchecked, and by
no means unstained by corrupt influence. Now, both
have been so reduced, purified, and re-arranged, that
no abuse can- possibly creep in. In 1828 the repre-
sentation was simply a mockery. It bore the stamp of
an age and of circumstances which had long passed
away. The aristocracy and the government returned a
large majority of the House of Commons. Old ruins
sent their two members to parliament. Vast cities
bursting with affluence, vivid with enterprise, radiant
with intelligence, had no representatives. A vast pro-
portion of the middle classes, whose united wealth
could have bought up all the peerage, and whose talents
and achievements might well put it to shame, was
excluded from the franchise, which en revanche was
lavished upon thousands of the lowest and most venal
of the population. Seats and votes were openly bartered
and sold ; and every election was a saturnalia of license
and corruption. Parliament sat aloof and secure ; in-
dependent and careless of its clients and creators ;
turning a deaf ear to any remonstrance that spoke in

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 461

tones less loud than a rebellion ; cherishing every abuse
that did not threaten to breed an insurrection.

Look at the change now. Aristocratic influence on
the construction of the Lower House is not abolished
— probably it never can be — but it is reduced within
far narrower limits. And though the late disclosures
at St. Albans, and the evidence of Mr. Coppock, forbid
us to suppose that anything like the same impression
has been yet made on the inveterate habit of bribery,
we trust that its worst days are over. An inquiry,
such as that at St. Albans, will have shown that parlia-
ment is in earnest : the parties themselves must be de-
terred by being subject to examination under the new
Evidence Bill ; and public opinion is gathering strength,
and speaking more intelligibly, year by year ; so that
other remedies may at last be found effectual against
these the most crying evils of our small boroughs,
- bribery and intimidation, — short of the popular
panacea of numbers and the ballot. Elections are
finished at present in a clay, with little more excitement
or disturbance generally than attends a public meeting
or a vestry contest. Every householder among the
middle classes has a vote, unless he chooses voluntarily
to forego it ; and many of the more deserving of the
lower classes — though confessedly fewer than is de-
sirable— are on the register. The middle classes, in
fact, now return nearly all the borough members, and
a considerable portion of the county members also.
The voice of the country is deferentially listened to in
parliament ; its feelings anxiously interrogated ; its re-
monstrances and representations received almost with
submission. If parliament delays a measure, it is to
give the country time to make up its own mind : if it
refuses a popular demand, it is because the people are
not agreed upon the question. However it be got
together, it cannot be denied that the House of Com-

462 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

mons is now, on the whole, a faithful representative
and servant of the intelligence and influence of the
country. It is no longer the nominee of the great : it
is not yet the nominee of mobs.

Then, in 1828 the corporations were scenes of the
grossest jobbing and the most unrestrained misgovern-
ment ; now, the management of them is almost every
where in the hands of the tax-paying classes, and often
of the humblest portion of those classes. Ten-pound
householders, shopkeepers, and small tradesmen are
almost omnipotent now in municipal elections. What-
ever of mal-administration is at present to be charged

upon them, is the doing of the people themselves In

1828, the masses were ground down by the most unfair
and oppressive taxation. Every year since the Reform
Bill has seen taxation more and more taken from the
shoulders of the poor and laid upon those of the rich,
till it has become very questionable whether the limits
of justice and policy have not been overstepped in the
opposite direction. In 1828, the education of the
people had been wholly neglected by the state, and left
to the zeal of private individuals. Now, a quarter of a
million yearly is voted in support of a system which,
though by no means perfect, is becoming undeniably
and increasingly more reasonable and effective. In
1828, industry was tampered with in every conceivable
mode ; and the food of the masses was curtailed in
quantity and enhanced in price by one of the most
partial and oppressive enactments ever endured in
patience by a free and thinking people. Now, commerce
and manufactures are set wholly free, and all restric-
tions on the importation of food are entirely swept away.
And the result is that industry has never been so
flourishing, and the people never so well off as now.
The employments of the working classes have been
sedulously examined, with a view to render them less

THE EXPECTED REFOKM BILL. 463

severe and more healthy ; in some branches of labour
the hours of work have been reduced ; in others, regu-
lations favouring the operatives have been enforced;
and our whole legislation has been marked by a zealous
and conscientious attention to their welfare — not the
less genuine because sometimes misdirected and un-
wisely shown.

Now all these things are due, beyond contradiction,
directly or indirectly, to the Reform Bill of 1832. The
objects for which that great enactment was desired are
for the most part accomplished. Nearly every demand
sternly urged at that time has been already granted ;
nearly every abuse then rampant, has been already rec-
tified or abated; nearly every want then experienced
has already been supplied. The arguments, therefore,
which were cogent and unanswerable then, are disarmed
and powerless now. All the great battles have been
fought. All the great victories have been won. All
the more stupendous works have been achieved. All
the more formidable difficulties have been surmounted.
And the reflecting portion of the people naturally feel
that the instruments which have accomplished the
harder tasks and conquered the mightier antagonists,
must surely suffice for the minor and easier enterprises
which remain.

The essential difference, then, between the condition
of the representation in 1830 and in 1851, would
appear to resolve itself into this : that whereas formerly
hundreds of thousands were destitute of the franchise,
whose exclusion was a positive hindrance to good go-
vernment and an actual injury to the community, now,
the exclusion affects only a certain number whom it
would be most desirable to include, and a far larger
number whom, on principle, it is conceived that it is
unfair to exclude. Reform was demanded in 1830, in
order that notorious abuses might be rectified, that a

464 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

just and beneficial administration of public affairs might
be enforced : it is demanded now, in order that our
representative system may be adjusted on a more per-
fect and more defensible plan. It was demanded in the
name of practice then : it is demanded in the name of
theory now.

" Not so " (say the leaders of the Keform Associa-
tion) ; " there are still existing abuses which only a far
wider franchise will remove ; grievances, which only an
extended basis of representation will redress ; reforms,
needed by the people, but opposed by the vested in-
terests of the great, which only a remodelling of electoral
divisions will enable us to obtain. Things are not done
which would be done if the people had the choice of the
House of Commons really in their own hands : and
things are done tardily and imperfectly which would
then be done thoroughly and in time. A new Reform
Bill is required, not merely to remedy an eye-sore, to
complete a picture, to elaborate and polish up a rough
and angular system, to remove plausible grounds of dis-
content, but to obtain most real and most needed boons."
We believe this to be a mistake. Admitting at once
that many evils still remain to be remedied, and many
ameliorations to be effected, which the public good re-
quires, we think it is not difficult to show that the real
obstacles in the way of the desirable enactments, lie, not
in the restricted basis of the representation, but in the
fact that either the nation has not made up its mind as
to their desirability, or that the objects aimed at lie
beyond the reach of parliamentary omnipotence ; which
is far more limited, both for good and evil, than popular
leaders like to admit. Regarded as means towards an
end, good government, — and few wise men value them
otherwise — an extended franchise, household suffrage,
" complete suffrage," " manhood suffrage," the six points
of the Charter, are neither necessary for the attainment

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 465

of that end, nor yet the shortest way to its attainment.
The end is more accessible than the means : half the
time and half the labour that would be spent in pro-
curing new tools, would suffice to accomplish the object
with the tools we have. For what are the measures
which the organic reformers have in view, and for the
accomplishment of which they deem a vast popularisa-
tion of the legislature indispensable ? Are they not a
frugal expenditure of the public money, equitable taxa-
tion, cheap and prompt justice, unfettered freedom of
industry, the abolition of unjust and barbarous laws, the
protection of the rural population against the abusive
temptations of the game laws, and gratuitous, or at
least easily accessible, education ? If they have any
other aims more sinister and less fair than these, they
do not avow them, and we therefore need not insinuate
or discuss them. Now it is abundantly clear, that
measures embodying all these great objects may be ob-
tained from the House of Commons, as now constituted,
in half the time that it would take to extort from it
" complete suffrage," which, when extorted, would
after all be only the first step towards these legislative
measures. For let us remember that no measure of
retrenchment, education, financial or administrative
reform, will so divide Reformers, and so unite Conser-
vatives, as " complete suffrage," or the charter. No
measure of practical good will combine so small a body
in its favour, or will concentrate against it so numerous,
so powerful, so resolute an opposition. Hundreds of
thousands of the middle and upper classes, who would
join the Chartists in a firm demand for economical ex-
penditure and a revised taxation, would join the Tories
in opposing the charter, or any franchise-measure which
resembled it. The self-government of our colonies ; the
strict revision of our public expenditure ; the reduction
of our army and navy estimates to the lowest point

VOL. II. H H

466 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

consistent with national safety ; the equalisation of
imposts ; the extension of the legacy and probate duties
to landed property ; national education ; and a juster
law between landlord and tenant ; — all these would be
conceded in a single session, if the whole of the unen-
franchised classes were to join that large majority of the
middle classes, who are now favourable to these changes,
in demanding them. No legislature and no government
could resist, or would dream of resisting, claims so
reasonable and so backed. But against the charter or
any cognate scheme, the government, the legislature,
the upper classes, and a very large proportion of the
middle classes, would fight with the determined resolu-
tion of men who felt (rightly or not) that they had
sense and justice on their side ; and that they were
struggling, not for their own privileges, but for the
honour and welfare of their country. And in this
vain, useless, and exasperating contest would be wasted
all those years which, properly employed, would have
given the Chartists their ends but not their means ; would
have sufficed to remove every removable grievance, and
to confer every boon within the reach of legislation.

Let us lay well to heart the history of the Anti- Corn-
Law Agitation, for it conveys a wise and wholesome
moral. No popular movement was ever so pregnant
with encouragement and instruction. It commenced
with a few thoughtful, searching, practical, educated
men, whose views expanded and matured as they went
along. It trusted to the spread of information, the
weight of argument, and the confirming lessons of ex-
perience alone. It gradually drew all sects and classes
— the Chartists last of all — into its ranks. It confined
itself, with severe and unswerving self-control, to one
object alone ; and that object was a practical economical
reform, bearing directly and powerfully on the most
intimate interests of the people. It refused to be mixed

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 467

up with the Chartist demands. It stood aloof from
all political parties. It commenced among the Radicals,
recruited itself from among the Whigs, and ended by
converting the chief of the Conservatives. It disdained
and disclaimed the temporary strength which it might
have gained by alliance with factions less single in their
aims, less scrupulous in their means, less stainless in
their character, than itself. And thus it went on, con-
quering and to conquer, by the very purity, directness,
and simplicity of its course. It asked for no change in
the representation, no remodelling of the constituencies,
no extension of the suffrage, as essential pre-requisites
to its success. But by the simple might of truth and
justice, sobriety and union, it wrung Free Trade, by
the votes of an immense majority, from a Protectionist
House of Commons, elected for the express purpose of
refusing the reform, and putting down the agitation.
After this, who will say, who can think, that any other
reform equally beneficial and as clearly just, sought by
means as pure, by a course as direct, with a purpose as
honest and as single, may not be obtained far easier
and far sooner ? Against what administrative improve-
ment or social blessing will there ever be arrayed a
phalanx as formidable from rank, wealth, numbers, old
associations, and hereditary strength, as that which
gave way before the quiet might of the Free Traders ?

If, then, " complete suffrage" was not a necessary
preliminary for the great victory of 1846, why should
it be so for any future one ? If not indispensable then,
why is it indispensable now ? If the repeal of the Corn
Laws could be gained without it, a fortiori, can equit-
able taxation, rigid economy, colonial reform, cheap
justice, liberated industry, and general education, be
gained without it. " But (we shall be told) the con-
tinued existence of the evils we deplore and the abuses
we admit, is a standing refutation of our argument, —

H H 2

468 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

a refutation which stares us in the face, which meets us
on the threshold. Why (it is asked) do partial and
unjust laws remain on the statute-book, if, as you say,
the popular voice has power sufficient, even with parlia-
ment as at present constituted, to procure their re-
moval ? Why, if the rights and interests of the working
classes can secure a fair and favourable hearing from a
House of Commons not elected by them, do institutions
and customs still maintain their ground which are
inimical to their interests and a clear violation of those
rights?" Our reply is ready: — Where such cases
exist, where the evil is recognised, the cure obvious,
and its application within the reach of parliamentary
enactment, for its delay the agitation for the Charter is
to blame more than any other cause. This agitation
has diverted the attention of the mass of the people
from the accessible to the inaccessible, — from practical
reforms which were sure to be granted, to organic
changes which were sure to be refused, — from measures
of which the benefit was certain, to schemes of which
the effect was at best dubious and problematic. Is it
true that parliament has declined to listen to or grant
any great claim of justice or beneficence which the un-
enfranchised classes have clearly and steadily agreed in
demanding ? Can the Chartists point to any one such
claim — for an end, not a mere instrument — which they
have as a body firmly and systematically put forward ?
Have they ever joined their voice to that of the tried
and laborious reformers who have toiled for years for
the amendment of our law, for sanitary regulations, for
the purification of our criminal jurisprudence, for the
extension and improvement of education ? Have they
not, on the contrary, habitually stood aloof from the
advocates of practical reforms, thwarted them, weakened
them ? Have they not perversely persisted in demand-
ing what they knew could not be granted, and in not

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 469

demanding what they knew could not be refused ? It
is neither fair nor loyal to complain that parliament is
deaf to the popular voice, because it declines to en-
tertain topics on which the popular mind is not made
up, and on which the popular voice has never loudly
and distinctly spoken. Still less is it fair to divert
public feeling into the channel of suffrage reform, and
then to exclaim that parliament will not listen to the
public demand for financial, judicial, or educational
reform. Our conviction is rooted and deliberate, that
the only reason why we have not already obtained all
the fiscal, legal, and administrative changes recognised
as just and beneficial, is, that they have never yet
been demanded by the clear, unmistakeable, intel-
ligent voice of the people ; and the fault lies with
those who, having the guidance and organisation of
public sentiment out of doors among the classes in
question, have chosen to direct it into another channel
— the most ineffective in which popular desires can
flow.

The plain truth is — as the honest and intelligent
Chartists would be the first to discover as soon as they
had obtained that command over the legislature which
they desire — that the main evils of their lot lie far
beyond the reach of any legislative chamber ; that the
causes of these and the cure of them are to be sought
for, not in the region of politics, but in that of social
and individual morals ; and that parliamentary enact-
ments, though mighty to aggravate, would be impotent
to remedy. After they had abolished two or three op-
pressive and inequitable laws — relics of class legislation
or of clumsy administrative arrangements (which, how-
ever, they never think of now, and which they would
require to have pointed out to them by laborious phi-
lanthropists already in parliament), they would begin
to perceive that the thing wanted was not (as they had

H H 3

470 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

supposed) a more popular, but a more profound and
sagacious legislature, — a wiser, not a more democratic
parliament. They would discover that the real diffi-
culty was, not to overcome selfish obstacles to the ap-
plication of acknowledged remedies, but to ascertain
what applications would really be remedial ; — that the
difference between parties regards what ought to be done
for the mitigation or eradication of social sufferings, —
not whether what ought to be done shall be done ; —
that the delay in rectifying what is wrong arises, not
because the selfish and the powerful refuse to adopt a
cure agreed upon as safe and effectual by the wise and
good, but because the wise and good have not been able
to discover and agree upon a cure. Their task, when
the charter had given them the supremacy they imagine
to be the one only thing needed, they would find, to
their surprise and dismay, was exploratory, not enacting,
— to study and investigate, not to abolish or to decree.
They would not be slow to learn that the remedial
power of parliament was incomparably more limited
than they had believed, and the direction and mode in
which that power should be exerted incomparably more
difficult to decide. They would have obtained autho-
rity to enforce their own wishes and decisions ; but
they would, if honest and patriotic, find themselves
much less clear and positive than at present, what those
wishes were and what those decisions ought to be.

On the great majority of plans for social amelioration,
the intelligent and thoughtful of the Chartists and
" complete suffragists " differ among themselves nearly
as much as members of the present parliament. Some
would be the advocates of unlimited freedom of industry ;
others, as the Socialists, under the phrase " organisation
of labour," would fetter and direct it by a multitude of
minute, vexatious, and oppressive regulations : some
would be thorough-going free-traders; others would

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 471

insist on protection to native produce : some are earnest
in favour of a " more liberal poor-law," which should
make the paupers really comfortable ; others, aware of
its double operation, and dreading such liberality as at
once cruel to the struggling rate-payer, and fatal to the
independent energies of the labourer, scout the idea of
any such mischievous augmentation of the burdens on
the industrious : some want an agrarian law and the
creation of a mass of "peasant proprietors;" others,
warned by the example of France, look with doubt
and mistrust on a scheme which bears so fair and
attractive an outside. On one point they would pro-
bably all agree — one reform they have long been
taught by their leaders to regard as the most important
and unquestionable of all, — viz. a reduction in the
amount, and an alteration in the incidence, of taxation.
For years, the enormous weight and unequal pressure
of taxation has been dinned into their ears as their
prime grievance — the chief source of all their misery.
To this, therefore, their attention would be most imme-
diately and unanimously directed ; from this they would
expect the most certain and the most prompt relief.
They would proceed at once to reduce the national ex-
penditure ; to substitute direct for indirect taxation ;
and to " equalise burdens," as it is called, i. e. compel
the rich to pay that " fair share " which it is assumed
and asserted they now evade.

Now our limits will not allow us to enter into any
details to show how soon inquiry would cause our sup-
posed legislators to pause, to hesitate, to start, as they
gradually perceived how unfounded were many of their
previous ideas, how noxious and suicidal would be many
of their proposed improvements, even on this apparently
clear and beaten path. Had we space, it would be easy
to prove our rapidly a suspicion would dawn upon
them — how surely in time this suspicion would grow

H II 4

472 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

into a certainty — that the amount of expenditure on
which a saving could be effected consistently with
national good faith, was far smaller than they had
imagined — was in fact only 22^000,000^. instead of
50,000,000^. ; — that many items of this expenditure
required, for the good of the people themselves, to be
augmented instead of being curtailed — those, namely,
for education, for sanitary reforms, for the treatment of
criminals, for the administration of justice ; — that a
mischievous parsimony, not a dangerous profusion, is
the real "rock a-head;" — that the effect of pushing
direct taxation further than at present would be most
indubitably to augment its pressure on the working
classes ; — that (what would astonish them more than
all) there is good reason for believing, and would be no
great difficulty in proving, that the rich — the en-
franchised, electoral classes at least, who are supposed
to shift their burdens on the unenfranchised — do actually
pay not only their " fair share," but, in all probability,
considerably more ; — and lastly, that while the taxation
which the poor impose upon themselves is enormously
heavy, the amount of that which they are compelled to
contribute to the state is beyond example light.*

We recur, then, to our first position — that a new
measure of parliamentary reform is demanded, rather in
the name of theoretical propriety than of practical ad-
vantage. This, however, is much, though less to the
English than to most other nations. We are no ad-
mirers of the French turn of mind, which loves to
arrange political institutions according to a scientific
and harmonious plan, which frames constitutions of
most rectangular perfection on paper, but fated to
prompt shipwreck as soon as they are launched on the
rough waters of the actual world. Still we are far from

* See Porter on the Self-imposed Taxation of the Working
Classes. Also Vol. L, art. Principles of Taxation.

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 473

saying that general principles are to be neglected, or
lightly set at nought. We could go nearly as far as
Mr. Carlyle in denouncing shams. An institution
should be as much as possible what it professes to be.
It should perform its promises. It should work out its
original, or at least its actual purposes. It should be
true to its own idea. It should correspond with its
theory, as far as difficulties of practical action will
permit. It should be brought into harmony with itself,
as far as this can be done without incurring from change
greater evils than those consequent upon inaction.

But is our present representation so untrue to its
theory as the democratic party are wont to allege ? In-
consistent with the democratic theory now put forth it
unquestionably is : is it so inconsistent with the genuine
theory of the British constitution ? We think not. Parlia-
ment may be viewed in two lights, as the embodiment
of one" or other of two ideas. It may be conceived
either to comprise the collective wisdom of the nation, or
to represent the collective opinions and feelings of the
nation. Whichever of these be the true theory — or
whether the genuine conception be not a modification
of the two — the democratic proposals are equally wide
of carrying it out. If the object of the representative
system be to collect into one body the elite of the nation,
the best, the wisest, the most experienced men it con-
tains,— then assuredly a widely extended suffrage would
be a most strange and clumsy device for attaining such
an end. Its successful working would demand a dis-
cernment, a self-knowledge, a self-denying virtue which
no history warrants us in regarding as the character-
istics of popular and imperfectly educated masses. The
wisest men are often the most retiring, and would not
seek popular suffrages ; they are always the most diffi-
dent and moderate, and would not command them ;
they are often the most unbending, and would not con-

474 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

ciliate them ; they are habitually the most far-seeing,
and would soar out of the region of their sympathy.
The best men are the most quick to feel and the sternest
to reprove the wrong desires, the selfish passions, the
unhallowed means, so often paramount among popular
masses, — and they would disgust and repel the very
people whose suffrages the theory requires them to
unite. The most experienced statesmen — those who
have been longest at the helm — are often less likely
than newer and more untried men to be selected by the
popular voice. They will have inevitably disappointed
many unreasonable expectations, offended many senseless
prejudices, rebuked many unwarrantable claims. They
must often have imposed salutary but galling restraints.
They must have repressed with wholesome severity,
dangerous, though perhaps excusable excesses. They
must often have sown precious seed for future harvests,
which seed, to visions less profound and prophetic than
their own, will seem to have been wastefully thrown
away. They must often have imposed present burdens
of a most onerous pressure for the sake of a distant good
not yet achieved, and only dimly seen. In the course
of their strict duty as wise and conscientious men, they
must infallibly have cooled the zeal of many friends, and
heated the animosities of many enemies. Yet the
theory requires that the most numerous and least culti-
vated classes in the community shall have discernment,
faith, and forbearance to select them, in spite of all
these repulsive antecedents, from among rivals un-
damaged by a trial. If the best and wisest men are to
be chosen, the good and wise of the nation should be
the choosers. If the parliament is to be the elite, you
must have something like the elite for your electors.

If, on the other hand, as democratic orators allege,
the intention of the representative system is, that par-
liament should consist of men specially acquainted with

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 475

the wants, conversant with the interests, sympathising
in the feelings of the nation, — that it should be a faithful
reflex of the sentiments, opinions, and wishes of the
whole community, — then "complete suffrage" would
appear to offer the surest means of failing of the end
desired. For what is a Nation, in a highly advanced
and complicated state of civilisation like ours ? Not a
mere aggregation of millions ; not a homogeneous mass
of units ; but a congress of ranks and classes, bound
together in an ancient and time- cemented union ; having,
it is true, one common, real, ultimate interest, but vary-
ing in their characters, occupations, and immediate
aims ; called to special duties, discharging separate
functions, guided by peculiar tastes and desires, repre-
senting different phases of intellect and opinion, and
considering questions of government and social policy
from widely divergent points of view. Some are by
nature attached to the old, the venerable, and the sta-
tionary ; others are by temperament impatient of stag-
nation, and eager for novelty and change. Some con-
ceive that the true evolution of our destiny lies in
progress ; others would dwell for ever in the ancestral
homes of wisdom and content. Some represent that
element of restless enterprise which has subdued con-
tinents and traversed seas ; which has stimulated the
wonderful achievements of art, and has robbed science
of her secrets; and which has laid every other land
under contribution to enhance the amenities of our own.
Others, again, embody the tastes and characteristics
proper to the placid and plodding occupations of keepers
of sheep and tillers of the soil. Some have the ideas of
government which are natural to the leisure and refine-
ment of aristocracy ; others embrace those of an im-
petuous, energetic, unreflective democracy. And the
proposed project for obtaining a fair representation —
a faithful reflex of all these varieties — of the conserva-

476 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

tive and the progressive, the religious and the reckless,
the submissive and the turbulent, the noble and the
plebeian — is to adopt such a system of election by
numbers, as, if really operative, would virtually throw
the whole representation into the hands of one class only
— the class assuredly the most numerous, the most
mobile, the most easily misled ; but neither the most
various, the most catholic, nor the most competent.

Such a scheme would clearly bring about at least as
inequitable a distinction of political power, as is alleged
by its critics to characterise the present system. Uni-
versal suffrage, " manhood suffrage," or any near ap-
proach to either, would be the most obvious and flagrant
piece of class -legislation on record. It would hand over
the entire power of the State to one section of the com-
munity. It would enable the working classes to swamp
and over-ride every other class, and, when they pleased,
all other classes together.* The old unreformed fran-
chise gave preponderating influence to the aristocracy :
the present system has transferred this to the middle
ranks : the change demanded by the " complete suffra-
gists" would give it in overwhelming measure to the

* " In Leeds," says Mr. Baines, " if the parliamentary franchise
were extended as far as the municipal franchise, it would more than
double the present number of voters ; we believe it would bestow
the suffrage on a number of the working classes equal to all the
other classes of voters together. If all householders were admitted
to the franchise, the voters among the working classes would out-
number those among all other classes put together in the proportion
of three to one"

Present parliamentary electors, after deducting du-
plicates - - - 5,200
Present municipal electors - 15,700
Estimated number of electors, if two years' resi-
dence were required - - 19,000
Ditto ditto if six months' residence ditto 30,000
Estimated number of occupants at a rental of 51.
a-year - - 18,700

This is Mr. Baines' statement, in the <f Leeds Mercury" of Dec. 6.

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 477

lower orders. Now systems which throw exclusive or
overwhelming power into the hands of any class, —
whether that class be numerous or small, — commit an
equal injustice, though it may not incur an equal danger.
But in truth we are not left to the tyranny of the many
or the tyranny of the few as our sole alternatives. Our
whole parliamentary theory is based upon a principle
calculated, if faithfully adhered to, to preclude either.
It professes to be a representation not of numbers, nor
yet of property, but of CLASSES. If it were not so, it
would be manifestly unfair, since it would then give to
certain classes, not their due share in the national repre-
sentation, but the monopoly of it. Considered from this
point of view, the theory of our constitution is un-
assailable, though it may not be adequately or con-
sistently carried out. Considered from this point of
view, the appalling incongruities charged upon it
by the Chartists constitute its peculiar merit. They
cannot be denied : and from this position only can they
be defended. If there were any foundation for the
idea of the democratic party, that our object, or that
of our forefathers, or the meaning of our parliamentary
constitution, was to represent either individuals or
pounds sterling, — its present form would deserve all
the ridicule that Mr. Carlyle has heaped upon it, and
would require all the sweeping alterations which Sir
Joshua Walmsley and Mr. O'Connor propose to intro-
duce into it. Those who look at it in such a light, may
well point with bitter derision to its monstrous and
startling anomalies *; — to the 37,000 electors of the
West Riding returning the same number of members as
the 2000 electors of Rutland ; — to 163,000 electors in
one category returning the same number of members as
6600 electors in another; — to the vote of the member
for Manchester, with a population of 250,000, neu-

* National Reform Association Tracts,

478 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

tralised by the vote of the member for Calne, with a
population of 5000 ; — to the four members for the city
of London, representing 20,250 electors, counterbalanced
in the legislature by the four members for Harwich and
Ludlow, representing 700 electors, and 9000 inhabit-
ants ; — to 21,000 electors here returning two members,
and there 106. On their principles they may well be
amazed and scandalised, that the rateable value of pro-
perty represented by each member should in Rutland
be 59,500£, while in Middlesex it is 520,000^. ; — that
the rateable property of Sussex, which is 1,169,000/.
should return 18 members, while that of Yorkshire,
which is 5,446,000^. returns only 37; — that the two
votes for Liverpool, representing assessments of the
annual value of 845,000^., should be neutralised by the
two votes for Honiton, representing an annual assess-
ment of 9890/. ; — that the rateable property of Middle-
sex, amounting to 7,293,000/., should return the same
number of members (14) as seven small boroughs with
a rateable property of only 85,000^. From the Chartist
point of view, these incongruities must inevitably appear
heinous and indefensible. From our point of view, the
result of their proposed changes would seem at least
equally so : and a system under which small towns as well
as large, sparse districts as well as populous, poor places
as well as rich, are represented, — appears indubitably
wiser and fairer than either a representation according
to numbers or a representation according to wealth.

The franchise we regard as a machine, — imperfect
and unscientific if you will, — for the attainment of a
twofold purpose ; — first, for the selection of 658 reason-
ably competent legislators ; secondly, for securing that
the aggregate of these 658 chosen men shall, fairly and
in due proportion, reflect and understand all those in-
terests, feelings, opinions, and classes of character, which
constitute the permanent elements of the nation. We

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 479

desire that the slow intellects of the country should be
represented, as well as the quick intellects of the city ;
the conservative sentiments of the sturdy drags on the
movement, as well as the keen and impatient energy of
the movement itself; the refined and philosophic, as
well as the contentious and extreme ; those who cherish
pastoral delusions, as well as those who hug the scarce
wider or more real hallucinations of bare utilitarianism ;
those who love peace, as well as those who love pro-
gress ; those who are content with an unaugmenting
competence, as well as those who " are in haste to be
rich." We should regard as one of the most dangerous
of experiments any such change as would throw the re-
presentation, exclusively and virtually, into the hands
of the energetic, and the pushing, — the men to whom
repose is torture, — the men to whom the past is all
contemptible, the present all sombre, the future all
golden. This danger the theory of our constitution
keeps at bay, and its practice has hitherto avoided.
The idea of the equal representation of every separate
individual is modern, foreign, and unknown to English
history : the idea of a representation according to pro-
perty is almost equally novel and strange : both are
French and American, rather than British. The Eng-
lish idea is the representation of classes : — the House of
Lords, to represent the peerage ; the Knights of the
Shire, to represent the landed gentry and the agricul-
tural interests ; the Burgesses, to represent the com-
mercial and industrial interests ; and the members for
the University (but a poor allowance), to represent the
interests of literature and learning. There does not
seem to have been the slightest attempt, in the early
history of our constitution, to proportion representation
either to property or to numbers. Each county sent
two knights, each borough two burgesses, without re-
ference to population or to wealth. In so far as this

480 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

system gives no representatives to the labouring classes
as such, or does not give them a fair and desirable share
in the election of burgesses and knights, in so far it
needs enlargement and adjustment to the altered cir-
cumstances of the times, and to the social and intellec-
tual elevation of those classes. The accommodation,
however, is to be sought, not in such a reversal of the
whole system as would invest these classes with power
over the whole representation of the country, but in a
well-considered modification, or a harmonising addition
appended to the existing plan. The desideratum is,
some plan which shall give to working men a greater
participation than formerly in the election of members,
proportioned to their augmented intelligence and inde-
pendence,— some plan which shall not overturn the
existing system, nor proceed on the assumption of its
incurable and radical injustice, but which shall harmo-
nise with its main features, and which can be engrafted
upon it, and dovetailed into it, so as to better attain its
purposes, and carry out its meaning. The nature of the
desideratum once agreed upon, we shall be able to pro-
ceed with some suggestions, not as to details, but as to
the principles which should guide us in our endeavours
to supply it. But, before doing so, we must give a
passing consideration to the position taken by those of
our fellow-reformers who consider our theory of the re-
presentative system to be unsound, and our statement
of its practical deficiencies to be inadequate.

The two grounds taken by those reformers, both in
parliament and the country, with whom we are at issue
on the theory of representation, are these. The first
class of doctrinaires affirm that " every man has an in-
defeasible right to choose his own rulers, and to share
in the framing of those laws which he is called upon to
obey." The second class, some of whom appear as
" household/' some as " complete," suffragists, maintain

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 481

that representation can only be just when it is co-exten-
sive with taxation — that every man who pays taxes
ought, ipso facto, and in that qualification only, to have
a vote.

Now, there is no reasoning so vague and unsatisfac-
tory as that which is based upon the alleged " abstract
rights of man;" — and therefore we shall not join issue
with the first set of schismatics from the true political
Church, on that ground, but shall content ourselves with
showing that they are themselves compelled to acknow-
ledge the invalidity and untenableness of their own
principle, by violating it as soon as they have laid it
down ; and that, if fairly worked out, it would lead to
results which at once make it manifest that some fallacy
lurks under its apparently axiomatic simplicity.

The principle laid down, it is obvious, goes the whole
length of universal suffrage : every citizen, whatever be
his age, sex, condition, or antecedents, is required to
obey the law, and is punished for resistance to it : —
every citizen, therefore, whatever be his age, condition,
sex, or antecedents, is entitled to a vote in the election
of the members of the legislature. The woman, as well
as the man, is hanged for murder ; the minor, as well as
the adult, is imprisoned for fraud and transported for
felony ; the pauper, as well as the millionaire, the cri-
minal, as well as the unspotted Briton, is compelled to
comply with every requirement of the parliament : —
all therefore have an equal claim to the elective fran-
chise. Yet no man in his senses ever ventured to push
the argument thus far. The most complete suffrage
ever practically proposed, even by the Chartists, falls far
short of universality ; and makes exceptions as arbitrary
and as fatal to the principle, as those familiar to our
existing system. The nearest approach to universal
suffrage ever seriously demanded, is, that every male of
the age of twenty-one years, — not being an idiot, a

VOL. II. I I

482 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

pauper, or a convicted criminal, — shall be entitled to a
vote. Now, consider what vast exclusions are embodied
in this proposal. In the first place, it excludes all
women ; thousands of whom hold independent property ;
hundreds of thousands of whom pay taxes ; millions of
whom are at least as competent, intellectually and
morally, to exercise the franchise as a great proportion
of those who now possess it ; all of whom are as deeply
interested in the enactment of wise and righteous laws
as their masculine fellow-citizens. Secondly, it excludes
at least a million between the ages of seventeen and
twenty-one, who are at least as capable of a wise and
honest exercise of the franchise as the freemen of
Leicester, or the burgesses of Harwich.* Thirdly, it
excludes all those who have, in the eye of the law?
manifested a character, and been guilty of a conduct,
which give reason for believing that they would not
exercise their franchise for their country's good.
Fourthly, it excludes a large but varying number of
paupers, whose misfortunes may, possibly, be their only
fault. Fifthly, it excludes all whose weakness of intel-
lect is so patent and notorious, as clearly to incapacitate
them from exercising the right of suffrage beneficially
or judiciously.

Now all these classes are called upon to obey the
laws ; all of them are interested in the process of legis-
lation ; since all suffer by partial or unwise enactments.
Yet the advocates of universal suffrage conceive them-
selves— truly, to be guilty of no injustice — absurdly, to
be guilty of no inconsistency or unfaithfulness to their

* Benjamin Franklin, in an amusing endeavour to be consistent,
grounded his demand for annual parliaments on the fact that every
year numbers of citizens came of age, and that, therefore, they were
unjustly excluded from the rights of citizenship, till a new parliament
was elected. He never perceived that his argument, if valid, would
render monthly or even daily elections necessary.

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 483

theory — in excluding them; and, if closely questioned
as to the defensible grounds of such exclusion, would
probably reply, that women and paupers are to be ex-
cluded because they are too dependent to vote freely, —
idiots and minors because they are too incapable, ig-
norant, and immature, to vote wisely, — and convicted
criminals because they are too ill-intentioned to vote
honestly. Here, then, we find the advocates of universal
suffrage driven by their own good sense to contend for
the exclusion of large classes of their fellow-citizens, on
the three several grounds of moral, mental, and circum-
stantial unfitness, — the only grounds of disqualification
which are maintained by the advocates of restricted
suffrages.

The principle, then, of an inherent, inalienable right
to the suffrage on the ground of inherent and ines-
capable liability to law, is thus virtually surrendered by
its supporters ; inasmuch as they arrogate to themselves
the right of excluding from the franchise those whom
they regard as incapacitated, either by character or
social position, from exercising it honestly, beneficially,
or wisely. They and we arrive at the same practical
conclusion, though starting from a different point. We
— premising that our object is the election of a legis-
lative chamber which shall be a fair representative, not
of the folly, the violence, or the passions of the populace,
but of the wisdom, industry, intelligence, and deliberate
opinions of the people — in a word, of all the permanent
and worthy constituent elements of the community —
would confer the suffrage and distribute the members
in the way best suited to secure this object. They —
premising that every individual has an abstract right to
the suffrage — yet think themselves entitled, and find
themselves obliged, to exclude all those classes whose
admission, they conceive, would endanger or impede the

484 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

election of a wise, competent, and faithful legislative
chamber. By acting thus, they at once tacitly admit,
and give in their adhesion to, our position, — viz., that
the elective franchise is not an indefeasible natural
right, but simply a political contrivance for the attain-
ment of a special end.

But again : let the maintainers of universal suffrage
as a natural and indefeasible right, consider the case of
a colony established, not as colonies are established in
these days, but as they were founded in ancient times.
A hundred men of property and education, finding
England too narrow (in one sense or another) to give
them a chance of maintaining their social position or
their opinions, without a weary struggle, agree to emi-
grate. They purchase a large uninhabited district from
the native possessors, collect all the needful implements
of agriculture, and take out with them all the appliances
of their actual civilisation. They further select and
carry out with them, at their own expense, a thousand
men of the labouring class, perhaps their own tenants or
artisans in the old country, and equally anxious with
themselves to escape from its difficulties, but unable, by
their own unassisted intelligence and means, to do so.
The emigrants arrive in their new home, and form a
happy and industrious community ; the labourers toiling
on the land which their employers had purchased ; the
capitalists providing them with tools, and directing and
utilising their exertions. After the first necessary work
is over, they meet to decide upon the form and prin-
ciples of government for the new state. Would universal
suffrage be either justice or wisdom here ? Would the
thousand poor have a right to bind and give law to the
hundred rich ? Would the many, in virtue of their num-
bers, be entitled to rule the land which the few had
purchased, stocked, and brought them to ? What honest
Chartist will answer in the affirmative ? Yet how can

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 485

he hesitate to answer in the affirmative without sur-
rendering the principle for which he contends ?

But we can put a still stronger and clearer case.
Another colony sets out from the mother country, com-
posed of different ingredients. Here, we will suppose
they are all equal in condition and in wealth. A thou-
sand of them are Irish, and a thousand Scotch. They
arrive at their destination, and divide the land fairly
between them, sharing as brothers should share. A
hundred years pass over their heads. During this
period the Irish have acted as Irishmen, when congre-
gated in masses, will act. They have only half-tilled
their soil, have followed the old obsolete plans of culture,
and have quarrelled with all who offered to instruct
them in a better way. They have been fond of sporting,
have lived extravagantly, married early, and multiplied
like rabbits. But they have grown poorer as they have
grown more numerous ; and have sold half their lands
to their Scotch neighbours in return for food and aid in
several seasons of scarcity which their own wilful igno-
rance or improvidence had brought about. At the end
of the century they are 8000 in number, and are pos-
sessors of only a quarter of the land. In the mean
time their fellow settlers, the Scotch, have worked hard,
lived frugally, married late, studied the science of agri-
culture and the arts of life, developed all the native
resources of the soil, brought up their families piously
and wisely, and given them a solid and useful education.
At the end of the century they find themselves 4000 in
number, and possessors, by lawful purchase or inherit-
ance, of three-fourths of the soil. What becomes of
the right of the majority to govern ? and what would
be the consequence of universal suffrage here ? Are
the 8000 idle, incompetent, and reckless, to rule and
make laws for the 4000 sober, diligent, and prudent ?
Does not the very fact of their being so great and so impo-

ii 3

486 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

verisheda majority prove their unfitness and incapacity for
governing? And would it not be the grossest of all
wrongs, and the most flagrant of all follies, in such a
case to allow the votes of the 8000 to overpower those
of -the 4000 ?

In fact, the notion which so commonly prevails, of
the natural and inherent title of the majority to govern
and decide for the minority, is the result of a hasty and
inconsiderate assumption. The supposed right — re-
garded as an original one, and prior to all convention
— can by no process of reasoning be made good. Apart
from contract and constitutional arrangements, and
ancestral and time-consolidated habit, the majority can
have no more claim to decide for and control the
minority than the minority have to decide for and con-
trol the majority. There is no abstract principle on
which such a claim can be based. The law of justice
scouts it ; the law of wisdom dreads it ; the law of force,
even, defies it almost ofterier than it submits to it. A
mere preponderance of numbers by no means implies
preponderance either of capacity, of good intention, or
even of strength. Wisdom generally lies with the
minority, fairness often, power not unfrequently.
There is, and can be, no law of nature, no axiom of
eternal morals, in virture of which three foolish men
are entitled to bind and overpower two wise men, or
three weak men two strong men. The truth we believe
to be, that the claim so broadly made, and often so
carelessly admitted — that the decisions of the majority
shall be binding on the minority, and shall have the
force of law over all — is the mere result of actual or
tacit arrangement in the constitution of society ; that
the simple majority required at our busting and in our
parliament, the positive or proportionate majority re-
quired in certain cases in America and France, the fixed
majority required in Scotch juries, and the unanimity

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 487

required in English ones — to give validity to the
decisions of the respective bodies, — are all alike matters
of arrangement, and not of natural right.

Mr. Burke, in his "Appeal from the New to the Old
Whigs," has stated the case so clearly and forcibly, that
it would be foolish to use words of our own while his
are at hand. He writes thus : —

" The power of acting by a majority must be grounded on
two assumptions — first, that of an incorporation produced by
unanimity ; and, secondly, a unanimous agreement that the act
of a mere majority (say of one) shall pass with them and with
others as the act of the whole.

" We are so little affected by things which are habitual, that
we consider this idea of the decision of a majority, as if it were
a law of our original nature. But such a constructive whole,
residing in a part only, is one of the most violent fictions of
positive law that ever has been, or can be, made on the prin-
ciples of artificial incorporation. Out of civil society, nature
knows nothing of it ; nor are men, even when arranged accord-
ing to civil order, otherwise than by very long training,
brought at all to submit to it. The mind is brought far more
easily to acquiesce in the proceedings of one man, or of a few,
who act under a general procuration for the state, than in the
vote of a victorious majority in councils in which every man
has his share in the deliberation. For there the beaten party
are exasperated and soured by the preview contention, and
mortified by the conclusive defeat. This mode of decision —
where wills may be so nearly equal, where, according to cir-
cumstances, the smaller number may be the stronger force,
and where apparent reason may be all on one side, and on the
other little else than impetuous appetite — all this must be the
result of a very particular and special convention, confirmed
afterwards by long habits of obedience, by a sort of discipline in
society, and by a strong hand invested with stationary and per-
manent power, to enforce this sort of constructive general will.
What organ it is that shall declare the corporate mind, is so
much a matter of positive arrangement, that several states, for
the validity of several of their acts, have required a proportion
of voices much greater than that of a mere majority. These

1 1 4

488 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

proportions are so entirely governed by convention, that in some
cases the minority decides.* The laws in many countries require
more than a mere majority to condemn ; less than an equal
number to acquit. In our judicial trials we require unanimity
either to condemn or absolve. In some corporations, one man
speaks for the whole ; in others, a few. Till the other day, in
the constitution of Poland unanimity was required to give va-
lidity to any act of their great national Council or Diet. This
approaches much more nearly to rude nature than the institu-
tions of any other country. Such, indeed, every commonwealth
must be, without a positive law to recognise in a certain number
the will of the entire body.

" As in the abstract, it is perfectly clear that, out of a state
of civil society, majority and minority are relations which can
have no existence ; and that, in civil society, its own specific
conventions in each corporation determine what it is that con-
stitutes the people, so as to make their act the signification of
the general will ; — to come to particulars, it is equally clear that
neither in France (1790) nor in England has the original or any
subsequent compact of the state, expressed or implied, consti-
tuted a majority of men, told by the head, to be the acting people
of their several communities. And I see as little of policy or
utility, as there is of right, in laying down the principle that
such majority are to be considered as The People, and that their
will is to be law."

It is indeed abundantly certain that the will of the
numerical majority was not originally, and has never
been in England, the ruling and deciding authority.
It cannot, therefore, now be made so except by the
voluntary agreement of the whole, or by the dissolution
and unanimous reconstruction of the social structure on
this basis, or by the forcible coercion of the smaller
number.

The conventionalism which lies at the root of all these

* As in the case of the French Chambers (July, 1851), on the
debate on the revision of the constitution, when 278 votes carried
their will against 446. In many clubs two black balls are sufficient
to exclude a candidate whom two hundred vote for.

THE EXPECTED KEFORM BILL. 489

social and political arrangements is strongly brought
out by another fallacious and self-refuting conclusion,
which has not obtained the attention it deserves, and
which flows from the assumption that every man has
an equal natural right — antecedent to and irrespec-
tive of convention — to participate in framing the laws
by which he is to be governed, whether these laws
relate to the imposition of taxes, or the enforcement of
duties or restraints. Of course this right must include
another (of which it is, in fact, only a varying expres-
sion)— that of refusing obedience to any law which he
had no share in framing. If this position were a sound
one (as it would be were there no tacit convention in
the case), it would follow, first, that no constituency
can be justly held bound to obey any law against which
their representative voted; since with no decency or
propriety of language can they be said to have had
any share in the framing of a law against the framing
of which, they, through their constitutional organ,
struggled and protested. It would follow, secondly,
that no elector whose candidate was rejected could be
bound to obey any law passed by a parliament to which
his candidate was not sent, even where the member for
his borough or county voted in favour of such law;
since it is obviously an impudent fiction to speak of
such an elector as represented by the very man against
whom he voted, and who, therefore, by that act, he de-
clared, did not, and should not, represent him. It
would follow, finally, that in no case could the defeated
minority be bound to obey laws imposed on the com-
munity against their will, by the triumphant majority ;
since it is a mockery and an abuse of words to represent
them as having contributed to sanction laws which
they repudiate and condemn, and which they did all in
their power to prevent from becoming law. If the
Chartists are right in their first principle, viz. that by

490 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

an inalienable natural right every freeman's consent is
necessary to a law which is to bind him, it is certain
that he may righteously disobey any law to which,
either personally, or through the delegate of his choice,
he did not give, or actually refused his consent. If this
conclusion is rejected, as obviously inadmissible*, no-
thing remains but to acknowledge the unsoundness of
the premises from which it is logically deduced.

Other parties, arguing from a basis somewhat less
broad, defend " complete" suffrage on the plea that
"representation should be coextensive with taxation ;"
that every man who pays any portion of the state taxes,
has a right to a voice in the election of those who are to
levy and vote away those taxes. "Whatever be the
force of this claim, we are sure it is an unsafe ground
on which to base any amendment of the representation.
A man who pays money to the state has an unquestion-
able right to the article which he has paid his money
for — viz., protection and justice: the other assumed
right is by no means so easy to be made good in argu-
ment, nor to be carried out in practice. For, if the
fact of being taxed is the thing which entitles a man to
a vote, two conclusions surely follow : first, that a man
who is not taxed ought not to have a vote ; and,
secondly, that every man should have a number of
votes in some degree proportioned to the taxes which
he pays. If the principle relied upon by the claimants
be sound, then any poor man who shall escape taxation
by denying himself the enjoyment of any taxed luxuries
(as under our present fiscal system he may easily do),
loses thereby his title to the suffrage ; and if the re-
venue should be raised, as many of our parliamentary
reformers now propose, wholly by direct taxes levied

* So clearly does this appear, that Mr. Spencer, in his able and
logical work on Social Statics, admits, as one of the most unquestion-
able of privileges, the right of every man " to ignore the state."

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 491

upon realised property, then the great mass of the
people — three-fourths or more of the community —
would be justly and legitimately disfranchised, and
would have no right to complain of their exclusion : —
And, again, it would follow, that if the man who is
taxed to the amount of five shillings annually, becomes
thereby entitled to a vote, the man who is taxed to the
amount of 100/., must, by a parity of reason, be entitled
to 400 votes. An electoral system, therefore, fairly
based upon this popular watchword, would throw the
representation almost entirely into the hands of the
rich. If representation is to be coextensive, it must
also be coequal with taxation. By the actual system,
the vote of a man with 100,000/. a year, is of the same
numerical value as the vote of a man having forty shil-
lings a year. Under the full and legitimate working
out of the principle laid down by the democratic party,
the first vote would counterbalance 50,000 of the others.
Are these arguers prepared for this practical deduction
from their premises ? And which system is most truly
just and popular — theirs or the existing one ?

Meanwhile, for the same reason, and arguing from
the very grounds taken by them, the proposal of the
friends of "complete suffrage" would involve the very
acme of injustice; since it would virtually throw the
representation into the hands of the non-taxpaying
classes. It would call on one class of the community
to make up the revenue, and another class to return
the members. It would divide those who pay the
taxes from those who spend them, more effectually
even than the most privileged and partial system of
former days. For, as a simple matter of fact, who now
pay the taxes? the represented or the unrepresented
classes — the electors or the non-electors ? Clearly the
former, as has been well shown, in an overwhelming
and yearly increasing proportion. The ten-pound

492 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

householders, the county freeholders, the larger tenants,
and the classes above these, are the main contributors
both to the state and to the local revenues. Perfect
accuracy in the allotment is of course unattainable, but
from calculations most carefully made*, it appears that,
out of a total annual taxation of sixty-six millions, the
middle and upper classes pay above forty-five millions,
and the working classes not quite twenty-one millions.
Now, it is perfectly obvious, that it would be in the
highest degree both unsafe and unjust to give to a
class, who pay only 31 per cent, of the taxes — and
with whom, moreover (as we have before shown f), it is
perfectly optional whether they will pay even this pro-
portion, or any proportion at all — the entire or main
control over the selection of those who are to regulate
the expenditure of the totality of these taxes. An
economical administration of the public money would
clearly not be secured by any such arrangement ; nor,
probably, an equitable distribution of the public bur-
dens. Indeed, we think it is a matter which well
deserves the serious attention of our statesmen, whether
the course in which we have for many years been pro-
ceeding, and in the following out of which a new ex-
tension of the suffrage would be a great and further
stride, — the course of extending political power to the
lower orders, at the same time that pari passu we ex-
onerate them from taxation, — be not one of question-
able policy and uncertain issue.

We are thus brought back to our original position :
— that the true theory of the English constitution is
not the representation of numbers, nor yet of property,
but of classes ; — and that the suffrage is not so much
a natural claim as a civil function — not an indefeasible
right, but a means to an end. The franchise is a scheme

* Vol. I. art. "Principles of Taxation."
f See " Edinb. Rev." No. cxc.

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 493

for the attainment of an object — that object being a
government which shall fully understand, duly repre-
sent, and sedulously attend to, the interests and views
of the various classes which together make up the
totality of the nation. This principle once made good,
our course is comparatively clear and easy ; for we
have only now to inquire what arrangement and distri-
bution of the suffrage will best attain the aim in view.
This principle indicates as our first rule the extension
and the limitation of the franchise, in the first instance,
to all who are in all points qualified to exercise it for
the benefit of the community ; and afterwards the pro-
gressive and the gradual enlargement of it as the
number of the qualified increase. Now this " quali-
fication " in a voter implies theoretically three things,
— competence to comprehend his own and his country's
interest ; harmony of interests between himself and the
community at large ; and freedom to obey the dictates
of his own conscience. Or to speak more tersely, it
implies capacity to choose a good representative, willing-
ness to choose him, and independence, or ability of cir-
cumstances, to choose him. If any of these three
elements of sufficiency be wanting, the elector is, in the
eye of theory, disqualified from the beneficial exercise
of the franchise ; and it would be a mistake to bestow
it upon him. But here comes in our practical diffi-
culty. We want some criterion of these qualifications.
We cannot examine the case of each individual can-
didate for the franchise, and test, by actual investiga-
tion, his possession of the three requisites. We must
fix upon some general standard which shall, on the
whole, and in the great majority of instances, indicate,
or give a rational presumption of, the presence of the
said qualifications. This standard can rarely give us
more than an approximation to the solution of our

494 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

problem: the criterion must at best be a rude one.
Now this criterion varies in different countries: with
most of our continental neighbours the payment of a
certain amount of direct taxes is the favourite, if not
the sole one. With us it is and has always been the
possession of property — indicated in the county by the
actual ownership or occupancy of a certain amount of
land, and in boroughs by residence in a rate-paying
house of a certain annual value. Now the principle of
this criterion is assailed by many : it is alleged that the
possession of property is about the coarsest, vulgarest,
and most inconclusive test that could be selected ; that
thousands who possess no property and cannot afford
to live in a ten-pound house, are mentally and morally
admirably qualified to exercise the franchise ; and that
thousands who own great wealth and live in costly
residences, are disqualified by ignorance, meanness, and
servility. We may grant them both statements to a
very considerable extent. Still we think, that no better
criterion than a property one can be devised, and that
on the whole it is a practically good one, though the
details of it might be altered with advantage.

Its fellow-candidate for public acceptance at present
is an educational test. It is proposed that every man
who has attained a certain amount of information, or
mastered a given amount of instruction, shall be entitled
to be put on the register. Mr. Symons has put forth a
suggestion — not without a certain plausible ingenuity —
that any one not civilly disqualified by crime or pau-
perism, who presents himself in the Revising Barrister's
Court, and can write from the dictation of the barrister,
accurately and intelligibly, a sufficient number of sen-
tences, shall be held to have given proof of his qualifi-
cation, and shall be endowed with the franchise. Now,
in the first place, we submit that the faculty of reading

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 495

and writing with accuracy and facility is but a very im-
perfect test of real capacity. Many a sagacious artisan,
many a shrewd long-headed farmer, who spells ill, writes
a scandalous scrawl, and reads only when aided by the
index of a dirty finger, is endowed with all the intel-
lectual capacity and moral requirements for a perfect
elector. Nay, we know many well-educated gentlemen,
whom, under such a system, the revising barrister would
reject with infinite disgust, and pronounce disqualified,
on the faith of their illegible autographs. And many
who could pass their examination in the court with
credit and eclat, would be wholly destitute both of the
sagacity to select a good candidate, and the courage to
vote for him in the face of sinister inducements or im-
pediments. But even though education and intellectual
capacity could, by some yet undiscovered machinery,
be gauged and tested, we should still have arrived at
only one of our three requisite elements of qualification ;
harmony of interest and wishes with the public good,
and independence of undue influence, would remain
wholly unascertained. Moreover, while we fully and
unreservedly allow, that a mere property qualification
admits many who had better be excluded, and excludes
some whom it would be most desirable to enfranchise,
yet we are by no means sure that it is not a more
faithful and adequate test even of capacity than a mere
intellectual one could be. We are disposed to believe
that it is actually itself the best educational test that can
be devised. If the property has been inherited, it affords
a rational presumption that education has been conferred
also, since a parent who can bequeath means to his son
will rarely have left him without instruction. If the pro-
perty reach a certain amount, it may be taken as a posi-
tive proof that the education customary in the rank of life
thus indicated has been gone through. If, on the other

496 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

hand, the property has been acquired by industry, enter-
prise, and skill, what better criterion could you desire ?
The very object of the criterion we seek is, to confer the
franchise upon those men who, in any way, have mani-
fested the qualities needed for its judicious and patriotic
exercise. And when the choice lies between the man of
whom all we know is that he has acquired property, and
the man of whom all we know is that he has received an
education, which of the two should we, primd facie,
most surely presume to be fitted for electoral duties, —
the instructed, cultivated, even clever man, who has
acquired no property, and whose actual position therefore
indicates that even his knowledge and talent have not
been able to counteract the sinister and fatal operation
of certain other qualities, — such as want of steadiness,
want of judgment, want of character, — which have kept
him down in the world, which have prevented him from
doing well for himself, and will therefore most probably
prevent him from choosing well for his country; — or
' the man whose station in life clearly points to his pos-
session of mental and moral powers, of industry, of
sense, of foresight, of perseverance; of those endow-
ments, in short, which most precisely designate his
fitness for the exercise of thef franchise ? The possession
of property is, then, in every case a presumption, and in
most cases a proof, of educational fitness ; the want of
property is a presumption, though not always a sound
one, of the reverse.

All tests and criteria are rough and rude ; the posses-
sion of property less so, however, we believe, than any
other that could be practically worked. But our pre-
sent system is defective and unjust in this — that it
selects two kinds or forms of property only as conferring the
franchise. Let us continue to maintain a property quali-
fication ; but let us not insist that the property, so

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 49?

favourably and honourably distinguished, must be in-
vested in one special mode. If a man has accumulated
by diligence and frugality 50?. or 100?., and spends it
either in the purchase of a freehold, or in removing his
residence from an SI. to a 10?. house, his realised pro*
perty confers upon him the distinction of a vote. But
if he invests the same sum, earned by similar qualities,
in the savings' bank, or in railway shares or debentures,
or in the purchase of a deferred annuity — which would
probably be much wiser modes of disposing of it — it
carries with it no such privilege. This seems neither
equitable nor wise. It might easily be rectified, and
such rectification would be at once one of the safest,
simplest, justest, and most desirable extension of the
franchise that could be suggested. Let the production
before the registration courts of a savings' bank book,
showing a credit of 50?. of at least six months' standing,
or of a bond fide certificate of shares to the same value
in a valid railway, or of coupons to the same amount,
be held to entitle a man to be inscribed upon the list of
voters for that year. If next year he has withdrawn
and spent his money or parted with his investments, he
will have lost his franchise. As long as he holds pro-
perty which gives him an interest in the stability and
prosperity of his country's institutions, and intimates
the exercise of sagacity and prudence, he will remain an
elector. When these qualifications are no longer pro-
ducible he will cease to be so. It would be simply
necessary to surround this franchise with the needful
securities against the fraudulent manufacture of votes.
— A measure of this kind would at once include within
the pale of the constitution, many of those among the
working classes whom it is for the interest of the country
to place upon the list of voters, and who well deserve
to be there. It would be a great stimulus to diligence
and saving with all to whom the suffrage is really an

VOL. II. K K

498 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

object of ambition ; and none else ought to have it.
It would remove all valid, and nearly all plausible,
objections to the exclusiveness of the present system,
since it would bring the franchise within the reach of all,
or nearly all, who are qualified to exercise it indepen-
dently and judiciously ; for we cannot think that the
power of voting for members of parliament would be,
whether we consider themselves only or the community,
a desirable possession for those who are either too poor,
too dependent, or too unenergetic and self-indulgent,
to be able, in the course of a few years, to lay by 50£. as
a provision for age, misfortune, or advancement. It is
possible that this suggestion might with advantage be
extended to other modes of investment, or to all : but
those are details for the practical statesman, which we
do not wish to enter upon here. The great principle
which it is important to bear in mind is, that the fran-
chise should not be given to the working classes, but
should be attainable by them ; that it should not be con-
ferred as a boon, but should be made capable of being
achieved by the same qualities which are needed to
exercise it well.

The project of enlarging the constituency by a reduc-
tion of the amount of assessable value which confers the
franchise in towns, is open to two serious objections. In
the first place, it would in no degree remove the present
theoretical defect of that branch of qualification, viz., its
inequality in different towns. At present, a ten pound
house in Ludlow or in Warwick, is inhabited by the
same class of men who in London or in Manchester
would inhabit one of fifteen or twenty pound rent.
Hence, the franchise, though nominally the same, is in
reality far lower in the latter cases than in the former.
This inequality is inherent in the nature of the qualifi-
cation ; if we were to endeavour to rectify it by ascer-
taining the equivalent of a ten pound house in each dif-

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 499

ferent borough, and fixing the franchise accordingly, we
should find ourselves involved in endless difficulties and
embarrassments. In the second place, if you reduce the
franchise from ten pounds to eight, you admit but few
additional voters, and still exclude nearly the whole of
the operative classes. If you reduce it to six pounds,
you admit nearly the whole of the working classes in the
metropolis and the great manufacturing towns (most of
whom live in houses paying a yearly rent of six to
seven pounds) ; but you continue to exclude those same
classes in most other districts. In other words, you
admit not the higher class of operatives throughout the
kingdom (which is your object), but all the operatives
in certain districts (which is not your object). The
operatives whom you admit will belong, probably it is
true, to the most intelligent and thriving, but also to
the most excitable section of that portion of the com-
munity. The reduction of the qualification from ten
pounds to eight will, indeed, have this counterbalancing
advantage; it would enable most of the artisans in
Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, and Shef-
field, who were really anxious for the franchise, to ob-
tain it, by creating a demand (which would speedily be
supplied) for a class of dwellings somewhat superior to
those they now inhabit. But on the whole it would
neither meet the objects of the Conservative reformers,
nor satisfy the demands of the Kadicals. It would
simply extend a test of electoral fitness which is admitted
to be theoretically objectionable and practically unequal.
The operation of Mr. Locke King's proposal, to extend
the county franchise from a fifty pound to a ten pound
tenancy, would be very questionable. In some cases, in
the larger villages and the smaller towns, it might per-
haps introduce a valuable class of voters ; but in small
hamlets, and in purely rural districts, a more dependent
class than the ten or twenty pound tenants are nowhere

K K 2

500 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

to be found. The objection to the " fifty pound tenant-
at-will clause," was that it conferred the franchise upon
a number of men who were almost certain to vote under
the direction of their landlords. A ten pound tenant-
at-will clause would enormously augment this number,
and incalculably increase this certainty. Such a result
can be desired by no party but the Tory gentry. A far
preferable mode of enlarging the constituency might be
found in the plan of uniting a number of small towns
in the election of a member ; a precedent for which may
be found in two or three cases in Scotland.

We purposely avoid entering into any lengthened dis-
cussion of these and other definite proposals ; our object
being to steer clear of details, while bringing out as
strongly as possible the principles which should guide
us, and the aims we should keep in view, in our exten-
sion of the franchise. The end to be sought for once
distinctly seen, the means by which it is to be sought
become comparatively easy of discovery. We pass over,
therefore, all consideration of the ballot, of the abolition
of property qualification for members, of the adoption
of the municipal or household suffrage, and several other
propositions which have at various times been candidates
for popular favour. But before we conclude, two im-
portant points remain, to which we must direct atten-
tion, and which we will treat as briefly as we can.

One of the favourite points of the democratic panacea
— the point on which, next to universal suffrage, its
advocates have laid the greatest stress — is the division
of the kingdom into equal electoral districts (districts
that is of equal population), which should return one or
two members each. This scheme has a simplicity and
mathematical exactness and completeness about it, which
renders it, at first sight, very attractive. But since we
have shown that neither property nor mere numbers
can form a desirable or equitable basis for representation,

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

501

nor ever did form its original basis in this country, the
whole argument on which this favourite recommenda-
tion is founded, falls to the ground. If votes ought to
be proportioned to property — if property is the thing
to be represented — then parliamentary as well as paro-
chial elections should be carried on under "Sturges
Bourne's Act," according to rateable assessment. If
every man is entitled to a vote — if population is the
thing to be represented — then the most perfect theo-
retical system would be that which should give to every
man a vote for the whole 658 members*, and whatever
practicable system approached nearest to this in action
would be the most defensible. Granting their premises,
the reasoning of the advocates of equal electoral districts
would be unassailable. But we hold their premises to
be unsound ; and we believe that they themselves would
shrink from some of the practical consequences of their
recommendation. In the first place, the number of
members allotted to the three divisions of the United
Kingdom would be greatly changed. As thus: —

Divisions.

Present
Allotment
of Members.

Allotment
according to
Census of 1841.

Allotment
according to
Census of 1851.

England and Wales
Scotland ...
Ireland ...

500
53
105

392

59
207

431
69
158

United Kingdom

658

658

658

A plan of representation which would thus require
readjustment every ten years; nay, which, to be carried
out with scrupulous fairness, would require readjust-
ment every parliament, or possibly every session, would,
to say the least, prove enormously inconvenient. But,
passing over this, what man is there on this side of the

* The French approach nearly to this theoretical perfection in
their system. Thus Paris returns 34 members, and its 250,000

electors vote for all 34.

KK 3

502 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

Channel, whether Radical or Conservative, acquainted
with the records of the Irish parliament before the
Union, or with the proceedings and character of Irish
members of the imperial legislature since that event,
who would not look with dismay upon such an increase
of their proportionate numbers as either the census of
1841 or that of 1851 would have given them, on the
basis of equal electoral districts ? At present, in our
House of Commons, the solid and reflective English
element outnumbers its capricious and volatile Irish
companion in the proportion of jive to one, and even
with that preponderance, has difficulty in reducing it to
order. What would be the result, was it only three to
one, as by the census of 1851, or two to one, as by that
of 1841.

But, in truth, the proposed plan would present ano-
malies to the full as startling and extreme as any that
exist under the present system. Thus the Metropolis
alone would return nearly as many members as the whole
of Scotland. By the last census (that of 1851) Scotland
had a population of 2,870,784, and at the equal rate of
one member to 41,500 inhabitants, would be entitled to
69 members: — the metropolis, by the same census, had
a population of 2,361,000; and therefore, at the same
rate, would return 57 members. That is, one city —
already enormously and disproportionately powerful as
the centre where all the rank, wealth, grandeur, and
genius of the empire are too much concentrated, and
especially influential over the legislature as being the
seat of its deliberations, — would have all these uncon-
stitutional and accidental advantages enhanced by com-
manding as many votes as a whole incorporated kingdom.
Indeed, throughout the country, the operation of the
plan of the electoral districts would be to swamp and
overpower the quiet, slow, rural element of the English
nation, by the pushing, energetic, mobile element which

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 503

characterises towns and cities. This would be the
needless aggravation of an intrinsic and natural unfair-
ness, so to speak. As it is, and inevitably, forty thou-
sand persons in a city — with their faculties brightened,
their energies aroused, their ambition stimulated, and
all the vehement and restless qualities of their nature
excited into preternatural activity, by a life of constant
collision and publicity, — are an immense overmatch
for forty thousand others scattered in the country,
who are slower thinkers, enjoy more placid and sluggish
tempers, and lead a life of comparative dulness and iso-
lation. The greater influence on national feelings and
proceedings which will be exercised by the former body,
is an indefeasible privilege which cannot be taken from
them, but which assuredly needs not to be enhanced by
legislative arrangements. Yet the proposed plan —
though as an equivalent to a certain degree, it would
absorb small boroughs into the surrounding country
constituencies — would enormously increase this dispro-
portionate weight; — would allot seven (or now eight)
members each to Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow,
six to Dublin, jive to Birmingham and Leeds, four to
Sheffield and Bristol; while, as we have seen, the
Metropolis would have no less ih&njifty+seven.

We pass over, purposely, all discussion as to the
effect which such a division of the kingdom into new
electoral districts, would have upon the relative strength
of the Liberal and Tory parties in the House of
Commons. Considerations of that kind would be beside
the mark here. The justice or wisdom of a measure of
organic reform cannot be affected by the results it
would produce on the preponderance of this or that
set of special doctrinal views, and ought not to be
argued on any such grounds. But the operation, which
the proposed change would have in aggravating what
appears to us the chief defect in the existing repre-

K K 4

504 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

sentative system, deserves more detailed consideration.
That defect is the exclusive representation of majorities.
At present, it is only by a happy accident that the mi-
nority is ever represented at all. Under the actual
system, each elector votes for all the members returned
by his constituency; — for both, where there are two;
for all four, where, as in the Metropolis, there are four.
The mischievous operation of this will be perceptible
and more and more serious, exactly in proportion to the
number of members, and the largeness of the district.
For example, in Andover there are 252 electors and
two members: one hundred and twenty-seven electors
may monopolise the whole representation, leaving the
almost equal and very possibly much wiser number of
one hundred and twenty -five, wholly unrepresented. In
Liverpool, again, out of 17,316 electors, 8659 may
utterly paralyse, ignore, blot out of constitutional exist-
ence, the remaining 8657. In London, there are four
members: and we find that practically, at the last
general election, 6722, the lowest number who voted
for the Liberal candidates, had four representatives,
while 6719, the highest number voting for the Tory
candidates, had no representatives at all. In Paris, the
case is still more flagrant. There are 34 members and
250,000 electors — each elector voting for the whole
number. The contest is generally a very close one;
and the result might easily be that the 34 candidates
who obtained 125,001 votes should be elected, and the
candidates who obtained 124,999 votes should be re-
jected:— in which case an obvious, practical, and mighty
wrong would be committed on one half of the con-
stituency.

Now in England, under our present system, we do
not, it is true, obviate this injustice, but we, to a great
extent, neutralise it by the variety of our constituencies.
The minority which loses, by a narrow chance, the

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 605

representation in the large towns, belongs often to the
same party which, by an equally narrow chance, gains
it in the smaller boroughs. The defeated moiety in the
city becomes the triumphant moiety in the county.
Thus an inequitable result in one quarter is practically
corrected by a countervailing inequity in another. If,
however, the reforming and conservative parties, for
example, bore the same numerical proportion to each
other in every separate constituency, as they do in the
country at large, it is obvious that the whole represent-
ation would be monopolised by one party, to the com-
plete exclusion of the other. " To take a recent warning
— suppose parliament had been dissolved on the Papal
Aggression question ; is there a single English constitu-
ency that would have returned Sir James Graham ?
Yet to say nothing of the fact that Sir James Graham's
opinions on this subject were shared by a highly respect-
able minority in every constituency, no rational poli-
tician could see Sir James Graham, excluded from
Parliament without deep regret. Our constitution, in
fact, gives no security for the representation in the
House of Commons of opinions opposed to the mania
of the moment, unless that mania happen to divide
the town and country constituencies into opposite
arrays. In case it array them both on one side, the
majority not only has its will, but the question at issue
cannot be argued within the court of ultimate decision,
because the electoral system does not recognise the
existence of minorities." There is nothing except the
variety of our constituent bodies to prevent the entire
legislature from being composed of the nominees of one
half of the nation (plus one) : the other half (minus
one) might be, for all political purposes, utterly annihi-
lated and forgotten. Such a result would embody so
manifest an injustice, that few would defend it in prin-
ciple, or endure it in practice.

506 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

Various suggestions have been thrown out for miti-
gating or removing this anomaly. Some have proposed
that no elector should vote for more than one member.
This, where there are two members, would remedy the
evil in question, but would involve an unfairness of an
opposite kind ; since, in that case, the majority and
minority might each return one .member, and would,
therefore, be equally represented, unless the majority
should exceed two-thirds of the whole. Others suggest
that each constituency should have three members, each
elector still being restricted to one vote. But this
would involve the disfranchisement or amalgamation of
many boroughs, or the augmentation of the number of
the House of Commons to a most inconvenient extent.
A third proposition has recently been made, of a highly
ingenious kind, — viz. that besides the local members,
there should be a certain number of national members,
and that any electors who pleased should be permitted
to withdraw themselves from the local register, and
inscribe themselves among the voters for these national
representatives.* The objection to this scheme is its
novelty : a discussion of its merits would lead us into
too wide a digression for our limits.

Now, from the possible extreme result of the exclu-
sive representation of a small numerical majority of
the nation, we are protected only by those very anoma-
lies and incongruities which the advocates of equal
electoral districts so mercilessly and inconsiderately
assail. If the whole country were one vast " electoral
district," the perfection of the theory, and the mischief
of the practice, would have reached their climax : the
larger and more homogeneous the districts, the more
nearly are both approached : — the more various the
constituencies, on the other hand, the more effectually

* See a moat able paper in the " Spectator" of October 18. 1851.

THE EXPECTED EEFOKM BILL. 507

are both avoided. .Now, the proposed plan of equal
electoral districts, would render the constituencies fright-
fully homogeneous, and similar one to another. There
would be a certain number of purely city constituencies ;
there would be three or four counties, as Westmoreland,
Argyle, and Sutherland, which would afford purely
rural constituencies ; but all the rest would be mixed
and uniform, composed of a blended aggregate from
small towns and the adjoining country districts. If
the plan, developed by Mr. Mackay in the Pamphlet
which we have placed at the head of this article, were
adopted, to all towns with a population of 41,000, and
upwards, a member would be given for every 41,000
inhabitants. In this category, including the Metropolis
and its different districts, there are (or were in 1841)
40 cities, towns, and boroughs, which now, among them,
return 78 members, representing an aggregate popu-
lation of 5,178,000; — which population, on the pro-
posed basis, would entitle them to 124 members. There
are 12 parliamentary boroughs, and several others, at
present unrepresented with a population of between
30,000 and 40,000. These boroughs, many of them
containing four-fifths of the population required to
constitute a parliamentary district, might be classed
with those just alluded to, inasmuch as the town-people
would be sure to control the elections. But, to be
within the mark, let us take 124 as the number of
purely town representations, what would be the result ?
The House of Commoijs would then be divided into
two classes ; — one class, the 124 representing consti-
tuencies exclusively of one character, and all the rest,
534 in number, representing mixed constituencies of
town and country people, of one uniform tone and
colour, so that the majority in one would probably be
the majority in all. If again, however, the prevalent
plan of giving two members to each constituency were

508 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

adopted, the electoral districts would include a popu-
lation of 83,000, and would, of course, be only half as
numerous. In that case, the number of pure constitu-
encies would be greatly diminished, and the mixed ones
would be increased ; and, becoming necessarily more
and more homogeneous as they became larger in extent,
the evil of the exclusive representation of the majority
would become more and more enhanced.

Finally : any very wide and general extension of the
franchise would have a noxious operation not com-
monly perceived, unless it were accompanied with a
provision never hitherto suggested or desired. In order
to reap from it the public benefits which its really pa-
triotic advocates anticipate from it — in order to render
it even innocuous or safe, it would require to be coupled
with a provision to make voting compulsory, or, at least,
so to facilitate it by arrangements and enforce it by
consequences, as to render the exercise of the franchise
virtually as universal as its possession. The reason will
be apparent on a little consideration. It is obvious that
all which the most complete representation — even if
such actually and successfully followed from " com-
plete" suffrage — could do, would be to confer upon the
mass of the people the power to act as they liked ; — to
act wisely, if wisdom were their salient characteristic ;
to act selfishly and unwisely, if folly, ignorance, or ill-
intention predominated in their ranks. But it remains
to be seen whether universal or quasi-universal suffrage
— "complete suffrage," as Mr. Sturge calls it — would
really throw the representation into the hands of the
people, — whether it would give us the real, deliberate
judgments and feelings of the masses. If it would do
this — if its operation would be to render parliament the
bond fide embodiment of the genuine opinions of the
whole body of the working classes — if it would procure
us their individual, uncanvassed, unbiassed answers to

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 509

the questions, " Which of two men, whose life and cha-
racter you know, will you choose as your legislator ? "
"Which of two sets of political doctrines will you
patronise?'7 "Which side, on such and such a ques-
tion, will you adopt?" — we should dread and depre-
cate its advent still, but much less, assuredly, than we
now do. But we think it as certain as the effect of any
untried or partially tried cause can be, that it would not
do this ; — that universal suffrage, or any near approach
to it, would, practically and in all ordinary times,
throw the representation into the hands of one section . —
and that neither the most numerous nor the most de-
sirable section — of the working classes ; — that it would
rarely give us the natural feelings or unsuggested
opinions of the masses themselves, but only the reflected
ones of those self-constituted and self-regarding leaders
who (as is too often the case in strikes) seek to ex-
ploiter them for the furtherance of their own political
crotchets or personal aims ; — and that whenever it did
give a genuine representation of the mind and heart of
the people, it would only be on those occasions of blind-
ing and perilous excitement when they would be the most
likely to think superficially, to feel passionately, and to
be led easily and fearfully astray. We are not speak-
ing, it must be remembered, of the operation of uni-
versal suffrage in the abstract, or as it might be in an
ideal England — one not, we trust, quite chimerical, but
one, as certainly, not yet realised — in which the labour-
ing poor should be as sober, as instructed, and as well-
to-do, as our middle ranks now are ; we are speaking of

its inevitable tendency in our country as it actually is

among our people, such as history and circumstances
have made them.

The ignorance and indifference of the great mass of
the poor is the rock on which in our actual condition
universal suffrage would be inevitably wrecked. It is

510 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

certain that, to the vast majority of agricultural peasants
the possession of a vote would at present be a dead
letter, an unvalued privilege, a nuisance rather than
otherwise. They understand nothing of politics, they
feel not the slightest interest about them ; their care and
anxiety are naturally enough confined to the material
wants of their own family ; and they have not education
enough to discover, scarcely to understand if it were ex-
plained to them, the bearing of this or that political
measure, of the triumph of this or that candidate, on
their social state. Not knowing how to vote, not un-
derstanding why they should vote, not caring for whom
they voted, apart from occasional personal predilections,
they would in ordinary practice never vote at all, unless
bribed, cajoled, or driven to the polling-booth. Hence
among this class the suffrage would cease to be exer-
cised by all save a turbulent, agitating, and intriguing
few, who would be far from being either fair or favour-
able specimens of their fellows. In towns, indeed,
where the working population is both more intelligent,
and more accustomed to feel an interest in political
discussions, a much larger proportion of the electors
would record their votes ; but even here, generally
speaking, the largest class — the class whose opinions and
wishes we most desire to ascertain — would be the last
and slowest to express them. There are two sections of
workmen : there is the steady, peaceful, industrious
artisan, who desires nothing more than to support his
family in comfort and independence, by honest and un-
remitting industry, and to pass his leisure hours in the
enjoyment of their society ; and there is the soi-disant
enlightened artisan, fonder of talking than of working,
a reader of newspapers rather than of books, a frequenter
of the public-house, the club-room, and the union ; who
prefers the company of fellow-politicians to that of his
wife and children, and whose languid performance of his

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 511

personal duties is a poor guarantee for the conscientious
discharge of his patriotic ones. For the first of these men,
a day lost at elections or in a canvass is a real and unplea-
sant sacrifice ; it is a supper the less or the scantier for
his children, it is an unfinished job, a lost engagement, an
interrupted labour. The excitement and general idleness
prevalent for many days during election times interfere
with his regular duties, and diminish his already inade-
quate earnings. His vote is to him a nuisance and a
loss. For the second, the noise and tumult of hustings
and committee-rooms form a natural and favourite atmo-
sphere ; he is in his element in popular commotions, and
for him the oftener they come the better. The result is,
that the one whose vote we wish to have, whose opinion
we should be glad to know, is silent ; the other, whose
vote is of no value, either intrinsically, or as indicative
of the genuine feelings of the labouring class, never
misses an occasion of recording it. And thus universal
suffrage, when unaccompanied by the provision we have
suggested to neutralise its evils, ends in eliciting, not the
universal sentiment, but the notions, prejudices, and
passions of the least numerous, least competent, and
least important section of the masses.

There are two circumstances in which this objection
would not apply, but where it would give place to
another and a still more decisive one. Two conditions
may be supposed under which the suffrages of nearly all
the working class might possibly be obtained ; but under
one of these conditions those suffrages would not be
genuine and spontaneous, and under the other they
would not be safe or beneficial. When questions were
in agitation, or interests at stake, which interested men
of property, but which were of faint, remote, or hidden
concern to proletaires, every conceivable influence would
be brought to bear by the former upon the latter, in
order to drive or lead them to the poll. Persuasion,

512 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

bribery, intimidation, the legitimate and illegitimate in-
fluence of local position, or family connection, would be
employed, without scruple and without mercy, to induce
the uninterested labourers to record, not their wishes,
but the wishes of their superiors in rank. Or when de-
magogues and agitators by profession had any cry which
they desired to raise, any sinister or personal purpose
which they wished to serve, as in the case of the Repeal
of the Union, they would contrive, by secret agents, by
monster meetings, by inflammatory harangues, by the
circulation of exciting tracts, to arouse the mass of the
people to an extent sufficient to secure a triumph at the
hustings or the polling-booth. But in neither of these
cases should we obtain the genuine expression of the
popular voice. In neither would the honest advocates
of universal suffrage have attained their aim. In both
cases there would have ensued, from the trial of their
plan, a result which they did not wish for, and had not
foreseen. In both cases the people would have been
exploits for the selfish purposes of others. In both cases,
all which universal suffrage had effected, would have
been the multiplication of the political tools in the
hands of the same political artists as at present.

Occasionally, however, crises of vast excitement and
mighty significance arise, when popular interests are too
manifestly and too painfully involved to permit popular
feeling to slumber, when the generally languid and con-
cealed connection between political affairs and the
social welfare of the masses comes suddenly out into
startling and vivid light ; or, when some abnormal exa-
cerbation of their material privations arouses them to
seek in political operations at once an explanation and
a cure. On such occasions Universal Suffrage will be-
come something more than a name, or an instrument for
other men to work with. Under the supposed excite-
ment nearly every man will give his vote without being

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 513

either bribed, or coaxed, or goaded to the hustings. But
these are precisely the occasions when Universal Suffrage
is least likely to return a healthy or serviceable answer
to the appeal made to it. The popular mind is then in
a state of too vehement emotion to promise either care-
ful consideration or a just perception of its true interests,
or even to afford a fair representation of its ordinary
workings. In five cases out of six these moments of
general awakening from the usual monotonous apathy
of daily labour will occur, either in periods of scarcity
or of commercial convulsion ; in periods, that is, when
the greatest coolness and patience are needed to weather
the crisis, without aggravating or prolonging it. If any
thing can add to the danger and augment the sufferings
of such times, it is for popular commotion to be super-
induced upon popular privation. If any thing is calcu-
lated to increase the peril and the wretchedness to in-
curable intensity, it is for the masses to be endowed with
the power of political action at seasons of such peculiar
difficulty, and under the influence of such maddening
excitement. A system of rule under which the sove-
reign power is dormant and inert when ordinarily com-
fortable, and called into action and made omnipotent
only when frantic with misery ; under which it abne-
gates its functions in hours of calm, to resume them in
its moments of passion ; under which it drops the reins
when the driving is easy and the road is smooth, to
snatch them at those difficult and perilous passages
when the cool and dexterous hand of long experience is
especially required — surely carries its own condemnation
on its face.

In order to mitigate the dangers inherent in a widely
popular franchise ; in order to make it what its sincerest
advocates desire it should be — an actual reality, not a
mere deceptive name ; in order to enable universal suf-
frage to express the universal will ; — it would require

VOL. II. L L

514 THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

to be united with some provision for making the exercise
of it universal also — compulsory, or virtually so.
Practically, we believe, there would be no great diffi-
culty in doing this. The non-exercise of the franchise
at one election might incur forfeiture of it at the next ;
or a voting paper, like the census-paper, might be left
at each man's house to be filled up, and be called for by
the proper officer, who should take the declaration of
the signer as to the genuineness of his signature and
vote. The rule once decided on, the arrangements for
carrying it into effect would be merely matters of detail
for official ingenuity. On principle there could be no
objection to such enforced performance of a patriotic
function. The object which the state has in view, is to
obtain the expression of opinion — the vote — of every
enfranchised citizen. The natural and self- suggested
mode of securing this object, is surely not to leave every
citizen at the mercy of his own laziness, indifference, or
forgetfulness, so that he may register his vote or not as
he pleases, but to ask Mm for it, — exactly as it asks him
for other things which it wants from him — his tax-pay-
ing liabilities, for example, or the numbers, ages, and
occupations of his household. Not only can there be no
objection, but there is every inducement, on the score
of principle, to the adoption of such a course. If the
franchise is conferred upon a citizen with a view to the
benefit of the state, and as a means of obtaining the
object of the constitution — viz., good government, and
fair representation of the wants and feelings of the
people, — it is at least as necessary to ensure its exercise,
as to bestow it : to do the one, and omit the other, is to
leave the work half done. If it be given — as it is
sometimes claimed — on the plea of right, — then it is fit
that the citizen should be reminded that every right in-
volves a corresponding duty ; that to claim his share in
the privileges of citizenship, and yet neglect to perform

THE EXPECTED KEFORM BILL. 515

his share in its functions and obligations, is neither per-
missible nor just. In truth, the paramount object of
the suffrage is to secure good legislators and rulers : he
who will not do his part towards securing this national
blessing, clearly neither deserves the franchise, nor can
estimate its meaning and its value. The state does not
leave it optional with a citizen whether he will serve on
a jury, or fill up a census-paper or a tax-paper, or accept
a parochial or municipal office. Why should it leave it
at his option whether or not he will help to elect the
nation's lawgivers and chiefs ? If, indeed, those whom
he chooses were to legislate for him alone, there might
be some show of justice in allowing him a discretion as
to whether he should trouble himself about the matter.
But when he has had the function assigned to him —
whether imposed upon him as a social obligation, or
conferred upon him in consequence of his own claim —
of choosing those who are to govern all his fellow-
citizens, — then to neglect that choice, or to be careless
over it, — to choose bad men, or to abstain from choosing
any, — or to abstain from preventing bad men from being
chosen, is an obvious dereliction of duty, to which the
state should never make itself a party.*

How far the English public is as yet from having
risen to the "height of this great argument," will appear
from a comparison of the number of electors who voted
at the last contest with the numbers on the register.
From the same comparison we may also learn how par-
tially the franchise is valued in ordinary times, even by
those more educated classes who now possess it ; — and
we can scarcely be wrong in applying the argument, a
fortiori, to those less enlightened and less political classes

* A proposal to make voting compulsory was recently negatived
in the late French Chamber ; but in this case it was proposed to
make the neglect punishable. By the actual law, unless a certain
proportion of the electors vote, the election is void.

LI. 2

516

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL.

to whom it is proposed to extend it. The following
table is made out from the best and most recent mate-
rials extant. We have been obliged to confine it to
single elections — those where only one member was
habitually or on that occasion returnable, — as there is
no published account of the number who actually polled ;
and where there are two or more candidates, therefore,
the uncertain number of plumpers and split votes render
it impossible to ascertain this otherwise than by an ex-
amination of each separate poll-book. The figures are
taken from " Dodd's Parliamentary Companion for
1851," and " Ridgway's Parliamentary Manual" for the
same year.

Places.

Regis-
tered
Electors.

Number
who
Polled.

Places.

Regis-
tered
Electors.

Number
who
Polled.

Aberdeen -

4,158

1,340

Lincoln

1,372

1,102

Abingdon -

314

304

Liskeard

324

287

Athlone

330

196

London

20,250

8,831

Aylesbury (1848)

1,405

959

Lyme Regis (D.)

317

293

Aylesbury (1850)

1,405

646

Lymington -

287

224

Banbury

551

390

Mallow -'"* '•&

213

130

Bewdley -

375

327

Mayo -

1,014

234

Bolton

1,497

1,187

Montrose

1,345

1,108

Boston

1,003

743

Newcastle (S.) -

1,028

913

Cardigan

650

590

New Ross -

187

124

Carlow

449

265

Orkney

627

392

Cheltenham

2,278

1,821

Peebleshire -

563

403

Cheshire (N.)

7,495

5,493

Poole -

498

354

Chester

2,529

1,631

Shaftsbury -

514

389

Cirencester -

467

392

Sligo - > : .-

603

279

Colchester -

1,250

1,009

S. Shields -

903

538

Cork -

3,244

1,377

St. Alban's -

504

423

Drogheda -

579

307

St. Ives

585

403

Dumbartonshire -

1,215

830

Stockport -

1,224

1,126

Dundalk

400

245

Sunderland -

1,728

1,281

Dungarvan -

407

286

Surrey

3,610

2,132

Falkirk

1,710

1,013

Truro - ' -

553

468

Fifeshire - ' -

2,659

1,602

Wakefield -

731

652

Greenock -

1,186

771

Wallingford

419

320

Haddingtonshire -

662

407

Walsall

911

695

Hampshire (N.) -

3,580

2,067

Warrington

697

625

Horsham

346

297

Westbury -

334

319

Huddersfield

1,019

1,029

Wicklow -

1,077

723

Hythe

758

400

Wight (Isle of) -

1,665

849

Kidderminster

470

417

Yorkshire (W. R.)

36,750

26,538

Kinsale

281

191

York -

4,289

2,422

Lancaster -

1,372

1,256

Youghall -

408

276

THE EXPECTED REFORM BILL. 517

We feel averse to tables in which a considerable con-
jectural element must necessarily enter. Otherwise, if
we could have ventured to give the estimate we had
framed from the recorded votes of the number of electors
who actually polled in the larger boroughs and counties,
we should have brought out still more strongly the two
conclusions deducible from this table ; viz. first, the in-
adequate number of the registered electors who take the
trouble to vote — sometimes not half, often not above
two-thirds ; arid secondly, the much larger proportion of
electors who record their votes in small boroughs, and
those under local influence, than in the larger constitu-
encies ; showing that, where left to themselves, they are
languid in the matter, and vote in full numbers only
when driven to the poll. We believe we are near the
mark in stating that, taking together London, Birming-
ham, Bristol, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Hull, Lam-
beth, Leeds, Marylebone, Newcastle, and Nottingham,
out of 131,169 electors, only 72,187, or 55 per cent., re-
corded their votes ; while in Bridgenorth, Cirencester,
Devonport, Dover, Horsham, Lymington, Westbury,
Aylesbury, Hastings, Pontefract, and Taunton, out of
10,638 electors, 9850 voted, or 92 per cent.

L L 3

518

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.*

IT seems scarcely incumbent on any Ministers in these
days to cut out for themselves gratuitous employment.
We should have fancied that the urgent and inevitable
duties of the hour would have left little either of strength
or inclination for hors-d'oeuvres. The natural impression
of a spectator who contemplates our complicated and
imperfect political organisation — the instruments that
have become rusty — the arrangements that have become
obsolete, and yet are still extant — the institutions which
have become inadequate, perverted, or corrupt — the
thousand abuses, at once universally admitted and prac-
tically grievous, which clamour for attention, — would
be that, in .the amendment and rectification of these
things, — in bringing up antiquated institutions to the
requirements of the day — in meeting the actual social
wants of the community — in keeping the machine of
public life in decent and "tenantable" repair, — our
statesmen might find ample scope for all their energy,
ample occupation for all their time, ample field for ail
their benevolence, patriotism, and zeal, without opening
the vexed question of the franchise, or undertaking to
remodel the vital organ of the state.

Yet, fully admitting and strongly feeling all this, a
closer observation of the matter will show us many
reasons which make it impossible either entirely to

* From the " Edinburgh Review." Oct. 1852.

1. Political Elements, or the Progress of Modern Legislation.
By JOSEPH MOSELEY, Esq. London : 1852.

2. The true Theory of Representation in a State. By GEORGE
HARRIS, Esq. London : 1852.

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 519

shelve or long to postpone the question of Parliamentary
Keform. The consideration of it has been recommended
in a speech from the throne ; the official Whigs, as a
party, are pledged to entertain it, and when in power
must bring forward some measure on the subject ; if the
Tories are in, the Opposition look to it as a natural and
certain battering-ram for ousting them from office ; and
if a neutral or "fusion" administration should be formed,
the public will expect them to be prepared both with a
creed and a policy upon this matter. Moreover, there
is an active and influential section of politicians in par-
liament who look to a larger infusion of the democratic
element as the only means through which they can hope
to carry out the schemes and systems of policy which
they have at heart : one man is bent on " cheap govern-
ment ;" another is resolute for University Reform ; a
third is devoted to stamping the principle of isolation
on our foreign policy ; — and all believe, rightly or
wrongly, that it is only by greatly increasing the Radical
strength in the House of Commons that they can hope
to attain their ends. Out of parliament, again, there
are many energetic demagogues who have their own
peculiar aims, and who are willing to move heaven and
earth to procure an extension of the suffrage, in the
confident belief that they will be able to command and
direct the votes of the newly admitted electors. Finally,
a considerable portion of those who already possess the
franchise are desirous of its extension to those below
them, in the hope that, in those whose claims to a par-
ticipation in their privileges they thus advocate with
such apparent generosity, they will find ready and cer-
tain allies.

While these various motives combine to create a strong
and numerous party in favour of a new Reform Bill
among the more advanced or extreme politicians, other
considerations induce many of the more cautious, con-

I.L 4

520 KEPKESENTAT1VE KEFORM.

servative, and philosophic of our public men, to look
upon such a measure as not wholly undesirable. Though
loth to run the risk of evil even for the sake of admitted
good, and though they feel that our representative
system may be said to do its work well, in a coarse
rough way, and on the whole to produce in practice a
tolerably decent and serviceable aggregate result, yet
they are, on the other hand, conscious that it contains,
as at present constituted, much that is imperfect, some
things that are indefensible, and not a few that are
absolutely noxious; that it presents many vulnerable
points, many handles for ill-disposed assailants, which it
were well for the sake of public peace and safety to
remove ; that in its periodical action it gives occasion to
much suffering and to much sin which, for the national
honour and well-being, ought, if possible, to be abated ;
that the elective franchise is now possessed by many
unworthy men, used for many unworthy purposes acted
upon by many unworthy influences; that it is often
indefensibly withheld, and often unequally, sometimes
unwisely, allotted ; — and, on the whole, that many
most beneficial amendments might be introduced not
only without danger to the stability of our constitution,
but to its manifest strengthening and consolidation.
Altogether, then, we may regard it as a settled point
that the subject must be faced, not shunned ; the
problem must be solved, not evaded. And if so, there
can be no doubt that it much concerns the national
welfare that it should be considered in a thorough, not
a perfunctory manner, and should be treated not con-
ventionally but philosophically, and with a constant
reference both to the fundamental principles of our
social organisation, and to the ultimate purpose which it
is the desire of all parties to attain,

In a previous paper we endeavoured to trace the
changes in the constitution and action of the House

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 521

of Commons consequent on the Reform Act of 1832,
and to demonstrate, in opposition to the common
democratic theory, that the elective franchise was not
a right inherent in every man by virtue of his residence
in a free country, but an instrument for the attain-
ment of a national end. We touched briefly on a few
of the objects to be kept in view in any new plan of
Representative Reform, and on some of the dangers to
be feared from seeking that reform in what appeared
to us a radically wrong direction. In recurring to the
subject now, after so short an interval, we wish to
develop rather more at length some of the considerations
then cursorily noticed, and to offer a few suggestions
which it appears to us ought to be familiar to, and be
well considered by, the public mind, before we can with
safety or with profit adventure on the field of a second
Parliamentary Reform. We do not expect for the more
novel of these an immediately favourable reception, or a
prompt and early acceptance; we know that in this
country whatever is new and without the range of ordi-
nary precedent is, at first sight, startling and repellent ;

" But, bolder grown, familiar with its face,
We first endure, then ' study,' then embrace."

It is not till a proposition has been long before the
nation, has by time and juxta-position worked for itself
a place in the popular thought, has ceased to be a
sudden and discomposing visitor, and has become a
well known and accustomed guest, that it has any
chance of obtaining a fair consideration and a patient
hearing. In the public mind of England seeds require
to lie long before they germinate ; but if a competent
period be allowed them, and if they are really recom-
mended by any inherent truth and value, their day of
growth and favour is certain to arrive, and their victory
is all the surer and firmer for its long delay. The

522 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

propounder of a strange idea, or the proposer of a novel
expedient, is at first looked upon as wild ; if he persist,
he is voted a bore ; but if his idea or plan be really
good, and if he is endowed with the requisite degree of
pertinacity, his turn comes and his triumph is achieved.
It is one of the most marked characteristics of the
national mind — and one which operates strongly to
blind us both to the position in which we stand, and
the direction in which we are drifting — that we con-
tinue to live in the ideas and to repeat the formulas of
our ancestors, long after the circumstances which gave
to those ideas and formulas their sense and meaning,
have entirely changed. We still retain the habit,
naturally and inevitably generated by our historical
antecedents, and to a great extent still just, of con-
necting the reform of abuses and the redress of griev-
ances with the progress and preponderance of the
popular element in our constitution ; and we forget
that " the progress of the popular element " signifies a
very different thing now from what it meant in 1832.
This is the first point which we wish to impress upon
our readers. Before the first Reform Bill, the vast
proportion of the middle classes were excluded from
any share in the representation. The House of Com-
mons was returned in an overwhelming proportion, first,
by the counties, where the electors were mainly either
landed gentlemen, or small forty-shilling freeholders, a
considerable proportion of whom were dependent upon, or
influenced by them ; secondly, by close or rotten boroughs
which elected the candidate named to them by the
aristocratic patron or proprietor of the place ; thirdly,
by boroughs which were entirely in the hands of the
government for the time being ; and fourthly, by
large towns whose electors were sometimes pot-wal-
loppers, but oftener freemen or burgesses, a privileged
and limited class, whose votes were, for the most

KEPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 523

part, either always on sale or under the undeniable
influence of the municipal authorities. It is obvious,
that under such a system the selection of the House
of Commons would be almost exclusively in the hands
of the aristocracy and gentry, and those of the town
classes whom they could influence or control ; and
it is notorious that it was so ; the aim and operation of
the Reform Act of 1832 was to take it, to a great
extent, out of the hands of these parties and place it in
that of the middle classes. This was effected, partly
by the complete or partial disfranchisement of those
boroughs which were the admitted private property of
the great and noble, and whose members they appointed
as directly as a patron presents a clergyman to his
incumbency; partly by the abolition of scot and lot
voting ; and partly by the extension of the franchise to
Wl. householders in the representative towns. It was
proposed still further to promote the same object by the
enfranchisement of those town voters (the old freemen),
who were notoriously under the influence of the higher
ranks, as it had already been promoted, in anticipa-
tion, by Sir Robert Peel's clauses for disfranchising the
lowest and most dependent class (the forty-shilling
freeholders) in Ireland. The purpose and intent of
the act of 1832, therefore, was simply to give the fran-
chise to the middle class — to place the command of the
representation in the hands of the entire aggregate of the
educated portion of the community — from the intelligent
tradesman and thriving farmer up to the princely land-
owner and the wealthy merchant. As far as it touched
the lower or operative classes at all, its operation was
to disfranchise, not to enfranchise, them. Thousands
were disfranchised (through Schedule A.) by the bill
as it actually became law : thousands more were in-
tended to be disfranchised by the measure in the far
preferable form in which it was originally propounded,

524 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

on the ground of their notorious corruptibility or de-
pendence. Thus, to state it broadly, the operation of
that celebrated plan was to curtail the representative
power of both the higher and lower orders in favour of
the middle ranks. The "popular element" in our
constitution, which it so unquestionably increased and
made preponderant, was not that of the masses or the
working men, but of the intelligent, cultivated, and pro-
pertied people below the ranks of the aristocracy and
gentry, but above that of the labouring poor. The
transfer of power was not from those who had property
and education, to those who had neither ; but from the
men of large property and opportunities for refined
culture (aided by their serf-like and dependent vassals)
to the men of competent means, moderate education,
and acute and shrewd, but by no means, on the whole,
of enlarged or comprehensive intelligence.

Now, a new Keform Bill, it is plain, may be so framed
as to be either a continuance and carrying out, or a
reversal, of this policy. A further disfranchisement
of certain small and corrupt boroughs would be the
former. So would a measure to enfranchise lodgers of
the class of shopkeepers and those above them. So
would a measure to confer the franchise on all who pay
direct taxes — supposing taxation to remain apportioned
as at present. So would a measure (if one could be
framed, — of which we are very sanguine) extending
the suffrage to the elite of the working men — to those
among them who have given proof or presumption of
the possession of that property, education, or intelli-
gence which entitle them to take rank with the middle
classes. So, possibly, as farmers become more inde-
pendent and leases more general, might be a measure
lowering the franchise in counties from a rental of SQL
to one of 25£. But any material reduction of the
present borough qualification — any reduction large

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 525

enough to produce any marked change or have any
very decided operation in regard to numbers as num-
bers— would (it is not difficult to perceive) be a reversal
of, a reaction from, a direct antagonist to, the policy of
the first Reform Bill. It would take the command of
the representation out of the hands of the classes in
whom that law had vested it. The measure of 1832
was at once conservative and popular: the measure we
are speaking of may be just, wise, and necessary (as to
which we here offer no opinion), but would assuredly
be at once democratic and retrogressive.

Now, there can be no doubt that the education of the
people has advanced since 1832 : school instruction has
been more generally diffused, and its character mate-
rially raised ; books have become much cheaper and
are more widely spread; savings have multiplied, and
property has been acquired by many formerly who had
little or nothing*; while political action and discussion
have considerably sharpened and serviceably trained
the faculties of the mass of the population. Their con-
duct on several trying occasions during late years, has
shown this change in a strong and favourable light.
All classes have participated in this improvement : the
lowest class, perhaps, as much as any. To assume,
however, that a 71. or a 5/. householder now is, therefore,
on a par as to intelligence or property with a 101.
householder then, and is in consequence an equally
desirable recipient of the franchise, involves a fallacy,
which a little reflection and observation will enable us
to clear up. And to act upon this assumption in any new
movement toward representative reform, would involve
results, as we shall proceed to show, which it may
possibly be right to encounter, but which it is to the
last degree important should not come upon us as a

* The deposits in Savings' Banks, which were under 14,000,000/.
in 1831, had reached 28,000,000/. in 1851.

526 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

surprise, but should be encountered, if we resolve to
encounter them, with our eyes open.

In the first place, the 101. franchise drew a broad,
arbitrary, and decisive line of demarcation between the
two great divisions of the urban population — those
who did and those who ,did not possess accumulated
property — those who did and those who did not live
by their daily labour. It is true that this line may not
have been drawn precisely at the right place, and that
in many towns it might have been more fitly placed 21.
or even 3/. lower; but still the rough effect and pro-
bably the general intention of it was such as we have
described. On the one side of the line lay all the
upper and middle classes, the gentry, the professional
men, the shopkeepers, the publicans, the small trades-
men ; all who might fairly be assumed to have some
political opinions and some competent education; all
who were not dependent on the will of a master — all
who lived upon the income arising from accumulated
property, or upon the proceeds of industry and the
profits of trade as distinguished from the daily or
weekly wages of labour (a rough distinction unques-
tionably, but still an intelligible one) : on these the fran-
chise was conferred. On the other side lay those whom,
for want of a better designation, we must speak of as
the working classes, (acknowledging at the same time
how incorrect the epithet is when used as a distinctive
one) — the operative, the artisan, the mechanic, the
agricultural labourer, who worked for individual or
associated employers, and who, as a rule, possessed no
accumulated property: from these the franchise was
withheld. The only individuals properly belonging to
the lower orders, who under the Reform Act of IS 32
exercise the suffrage, are those few mechanics or artisans
who have raised themselves so far as to live in a more
expensive house than is customary among their class, —

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 527

the freemen of old boroughs, and the really forty-
shilling freeholders of counties.

Now, as we have said, in many towns the arbitrary
line then drawn might be fixed somewhat lower, so as
not only to maintain the same demarcation between the
classes, but even to effect this demarcation still more
accurately than at present. For example, a 51. rating is
generally equal to, or indicative of, a 71. or 11. 10s.
rental ; and a 61. rating, of an SI. house, and so on ; and
these dwellings (in the smaller towns at least) are
commonly inhabited by those who can scarcely, accord-
ing to our definition, be said to belong to the labouring
classes. The few facts, however, which we have been
able to collect, and which we chiefly owe to Mr. E.
Baines, seem to show, that in the manufacturing districts
at least, a franchise based upon a 51. rating, or a 11.
rent, would at once open the door to a new, and a very
numerous class. It appears that such a franchise would
raise the number of registered electors in

Leeds - from 5,200 to 10,000

Bradford - - 2,694 „ 6,776

Halifax - - 1,084 „ 1,434

Huddersfield - 1,020 „ 2,000

Sheffield - - 4,000 „ 7,500

Liverpool - 15,820 „ 30,000

Glasgow - - 12,500 „ 30,000

Manchester - 12,000 „ 25,000

All this, however, is beside the mark, and in no
degree invalidates the essential proposition, the broad
fact, which we desire to elucidate and impress — viz. that,
although national education has been greatly improved,
and intelligence spread among all ranks since 1832, yet
a 101. householder, and a 51. householder, now, as then,
represent wholly distinct classes ; and that to lower the
qualification from the one figure to the other, would not
be, as is often assumed, simply to admit to the franchise

528 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

large numbers now, of the same sort, position, and cha-
racter as were admitted then, but to admit precisely
people of the sort, position, and character who were
excluded then ; — a step not to be taken, it is obvious,
without a clear comprehension of its bearing, and a full
consideration of its consequences.

Nor does it in the least signify, as affects either the
principle or the ultimate results of the measure, what is
the precise figure at which we now fix the franchise-
giving rental. If the qualification be lowered on the
ground that it ought to be lowered as education spreads
downwards, and as the lower orders become better in-
structed and more intelligent, then, since this process is
always going on, it is obvious that the whole principle
of universal, or at least of household, suffrage is con-
ceded ; and the rest is merely a matter of time and
preparation. The argument goes the whole length of
the assertion, that as soon as the labouring classes shall
have reached the average degree of intelligence and
education fitting for, and attainable by, their class — as
soon as they are, as we all hope in time to see them,
intellectually what labouring men should be — they will
be entitled to, and must be endowed with, the elective
franchise. If the 8/. householder now is on an intellec-
tual level with the 10£. householder twenty years ago
(which we by no means intend to dispute), it is equally
certain that, if we do our duty as a nation and as
citizens, the 5£. householder twenty years hence, will be
on a par with the SI. householder now ; and, therefore,
whether or not the application of our principle admits
the mass of the working classes to the franchise now,
there can be no question that it will admit them then.

Their admission, therefore, if the principle be sound, is
a political fact to be faced either now, or in a few years
hence. Moreover, it will be allowed on all hands, that
this admission, when conceded, must be honest and

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 529

bond fide. What is granted in name and theory, must
be granted in reality and in practice. To endeavour to
deprive the people, by a side wind, of a privilege, power,
or function, which we have formally conferred upon
them, or to attempt to hamper and control them in its
exercise, would be neither safe, feasible, nor decent.
They must, therefore, be admitted to the franchise
under arrangements which will secure them against any
undue influence in the exercise of it, which will make
them genuine and bond fide possessors of it on their own
account, not the mere proxies, puppets, and representa-
tives of others.

Now (as we showed fully in a former Paper, and need
not therefore enlarge upon now), since the working
classes are, and under the existing arrangements of
society will always be, more numerous than any other
class in the community, and probably than all the other
classes put together, it follows that such an admission
of them to the franchise, as is involved in the principle
we are considering, whether we call it universal suffrage,
household suffrage, or " complete suffrage," would not
merely admit them to a share, and a large share, in the
representation, but would throw the entire, or the pre-
ponderating, control over that representation, — in other
words, the supreme power of the state — into their
hands. Have, then, those reformers who laid down the
principle contemplated this legitimate deduction from
it ? and are they prepared to accept it ?

There is, no doubt, one description of reformers who
have perhaps never fairly faced this result, but whose
doctrines, nevertheless, will not allow them to shrink
from it when plainly placed before them. Those who
base their arguments upon abstract right and naked
arithmetic ; to whom the will of the numerical majority
is sacred ; and in whose estimation one man is as good
and as competent as another, and his claim to an equal

VOL. II. M M

530 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

share in the government inherent and indefeasible, —
will of course maintain, that the mere circumstance of
the working classes being the most numerous, entitles
them, in that exact proportion, to the lion's share in the
representation. Consequences with them are nothing :
principle is everything. It is idle to talk of dangers,
however vast, imminent, or certain, to men who take
their stand on what they consider the inexpugnable en-
trenchments of justice. With these reasoners we have
at present no controversy ; we consider that we stormed
and demolished their positions in our former Paper.

There is another class of reformers equally prepared
to defend the principle which we have shown to involve
" complete suffrage," even if the practical result should
be, the handing over the election of the House of
Commons to the lower and more ignorant classes of the
community. Not that in their hearts they believe these
classes to be really the fittest for that solemn function ;
not that they conceive that, good or evil, it is their in-
alienable birthright ; but they suppose that they would
be at least as honest and unselfish as the present pos-
sessors of the franchise, and they assume further, that
the undeniable ignorance and incompetency, relative or
absolute, of the great mass of the lower classes, would
be corrected and compensated by the leaders they would
choose. In other words, this section of the advocates
for an extension of the suffrage confidently believe, that
they would be able to guide, dictate, and control the
votes of the new electors ; that the enfranchised masses
would be in their hands like the passive potter's clay ;
that they would be to them obedient pupils, docile in-
struments, whose blank ignorance they might inscribe
with their own doctrines, whose principles they would
be permitted to form and fashion in their own mould,
and whose short-sighted impetuosity and shallow follies
they would at all times be able to compress and curb.

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 531

Men who entertain expectations like these, must have
read the history of the past to little purpose, and the
living history that is before their eyes, to still less.
They would, perhaps, guide the masses only as long as
their objects were identical, and their plans marched
side by side. They would lead them only as long as
they were going the same way. The moment they
wished to pause or turn aside, or retrace a false step, or
avoid a dangerous advance, — the moment that, by the
attainment of their own purposes, they were changed
from innovators into conservatives, — the moment they
began to think and urge that " enough had been done,"
— that instant they would be cashiered by the followers
whom they flattered themselves they would have been
able to control, whose more vehement tendencies they
had hoped to keep in check, and whose ulterior designs
they had imagined themselves acute enough to detect,
and strong enough to thwart. Other leaders more " up
to the times," less resistent to the " pressure from
without," would be installed in their places ; and they,
like their predecessors, would be left stranded on the
shore, discarded and forlorn, to show how far the tide
of democratic action had swept past them. When was
it ever otherwise ? When was a democratic party ever
led by the moderate among its ranks for more than the
first few steps of its career ?

But our present remarks are not intended for either
of these sections of the great army of representative re-
formers, but for those who, believing, like ourselves,
that an extension of the suffrage is both just, desirable,
and necessary, are yet anxious that that extension
should be so arranged as to be defensible, beneficial,
and safe ; who, believing that our electoral system is to
be valued only as an instrument for the attainment of
good government and the maintenance of our ancestral
liberties, would deem no change an improvement which

MM 2

532

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

endangered those cherished ends. And it is to these,
our fellow-labourers in the liberal cause, that we address
the question : Are they prepared to concede a principle
which involves, either now or at a future day, and by
progressive and inevitable steps, the transfer of the re-
presentation into the hands of the poorest, the most
numerous, the least instructed, the most excitable, and
the most misleadable, class of the community ?

Now, we will suppose the labouring classes to be as
adequately educated as we are all of us endeavouring
to make them, as well trained in their social and moral
duties, as they would be if Church and State had always
done their duty by them, as familiar with political dis-
cussions as a habit of reading the newspapers in their
spare hours can render them ; — though the first is still
a distant and problematical perspective, and the latter
may not be altogether the most desirable occupation of
their scanty leisure. We will assume, moreover, that
the social aspect of Great Britain has been so far im-
proved, that the mass of the population is no longer
necessitous, envious, or discontented ; that their living
has ceased to be either precarious or inadequate ; that
hopeless poverty no longer renders them eager listeners
to any project, eager advocates for any experiment, eager
promoters of any innovation ; — all which we some day
hope to see. Still, when this " blessed change " shall
have passed over the troubled waters of society, and
educed light and order out of gloom and chaos, the main
fact will remain unaltered and unalterable ; the working
classes will still be only one of the many orders which
constitute a well-organised community; their real in-
terests, as seen with the eyes and from the position of a
Superior Intelligence, will not, it is true, be different
from the real interests of the other classes, but their
views of those interests will be different; moderately
worked and amply instructed as they may be, compared

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 533

with their present case, they will still and always be the
least leisurely and the least instructed, compared with the
other sections of society ; the highest culture will not be
theirs ; the deepest and knottiest problems of national
life must remain insoluble by them ; the most profound
and comprehensive ideas of policy demand for any due
appreciation and conception a knowledge and a medi-
tation which circumstances must place permanently
beyond their reach ; and therefore, to sum up the whole,
it never can have been the purpose of Providence, nor
can it conduce to the welfare of man, that the basement
class of the social edifice should override and overrule
all the others — that "those who toil should govern
those who think," — that those who labour with the
hands should have the supremacy over those who labour
with the brain.

Besides this injustice and reversal of the natural order
of things, Universal Suffrage, or any extension of the
suffrage which should deserve the name of " complete,"
exposes the state to two dangers, which at first appear
to be opposed to each other, but which in reality are
identical in their origin, and not very different in their
ultimate results. Both are equally fatal to liberty and
to high civilisation. One leads to tyranny directly, the
other leads to tyranny through re-action. The first
danger is, that the populace of electors will be used and
led by demagogues ; the second is, that they will be used
and led by despots. The first risk is proclaimed by
every page of history, and is now again faintly shadowed
forth in Switzerland and America. The present position
of France is perhaps the best modern exemplification of
the second. Both act precisely in the same way — by
swamping the propertied and educated classes. On the
first it would now be superfluous to dwell : we will make
only two or three observations, and pass on. Those
who point with triumph or who look with hope to the

M M 3

534 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

success of the great popular experiment in America —
who appeal to it as showing how safely and how bene-
ficially the concerns of a great country may be carried
on under a government chosen by universal suffrage —
cannot, we think, be men whose observation is very close
or patient, or whose standard of requirement is very
high. We yield to none in a full and generous ap-
preciation of the many excellences and the wonderful
energies of our Transatlantic brethren. The United
States may well be proud of their Past, and sanguine as
to their Future. But with them, it must be remembered
that the experiment has been tried under a combination
of circumstances almost inconceivably auspicious. They
were of Anglo-Saxon race ; they were always free ; for
generations they had been inured and trained to self-
government ; they were descendants of the religious and
self- controlled and self-denying Puritans ; and they were
pressed upon by none of those social or material diffi-
culties which beset older and more populous countries.
With them every one was well off, or might easily become
so. Yet even there, is it not too unhappily notorious
that the tone of public morality has been gradually
lowering since the days of Washington ? that the
standard of national policy is far less wise and worthy
than it was ? that the ablest, purest, and noblest of her
sons habitually retire from public life, or are snubbed or
neglected if they enter it ? and that their greatest
statesmen are now never chosen for the highest offices
or honours of the state ? Since the departure from the
stage of the old race of revolutionary worthies, America
has had three statesmen of high capacity and European
reputation, — Clay, Calhoun, and Webster : and all have
aspired to the Presidency in vain. — The politics of
Switzerland have been so little noticed amid the exciting
movements of the greater states surrounding her, that
few are aware of the recent triumphs of pure democracy

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 535

in many of her cantons, nor how deplorably both her
character and her prospects have been compromised in
consequence. In Geneva every politician known under
the old regime has disappeared, and every man of official
talent or experience has been dismissed. In Berne it is
not much better. In the Pays de Vaud, as in Geneva,
the government has fallen into the hands of the extreme
radicals, and the more moderate and better educated
classes have been entirely superseded by the populace
and its leaders. The consequences will take some time
to develop themselves. Meantime the tendency and the
operation are obvious enough.

As far as England is concerned, we have a very high
opinion of the strong sense and general good feeling of
a great proportion of our working classes, but nothing
we have seen will warrant the belief that they would
escape from being led and exploite by most unworthy
demagogues. They are ignorant, and they feel them-
selves to be so ; they are lazy, and habitually leave it to
others to think for them ; they are mistrustful of their
superiors in rank, and are apt to listen eagerly to those
who would foster and take advantage of that mistrust ;
and they belong to a people whom we do believe to be,
with all their practical talent, the most gullible in
creation. Moreover, few among them have either moral
courage or independence enough to stand alone or run
counter to the presumed opinion of their fellows. The pro-
ceedings in the late strike of the Amalgamated Engineers
were not encouraging for those who hoped much from
the progress of education among the people. The
parties to it were, as a body, the most intelligent, skilful,
and well-conducted of our artisans, in good circumstances,
in receipt of high pay, many of them well educated for
their station, and accustomed to read and to discuss.
They knew well the almost invariable history of such
attempts ; the certain misery and evil such attempts

MM 4

536 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

always entail; the defeat in which they nearly always
end. Their demands were, in some points, obviously
oppressive and unjust to their fellow-workmen ; a great
proportion of them (we believe the majority) were averse
to the contest, and were conscious both of the folly and the
wrong. Yet they suffered one or two self-elected leaders
(who are always forthcoming as soon as money has been
accumulated by these bodies) to make use of them as
completely as they themselves make use of the tools of
their handicraft ; to put forth in their name demands
which they knew could not be complied with ; and to
absorb and waste in this foolish strife the funds which
their self-denial had laid by for times of natural pressure
and distress. They permitted all this with their eyes
open — or half open, and chiefly because they wanted
the resolution to say " No/' when the more bustling and
noisy of their fellows were saying " Yes." And yet
these men were unquestionably, as far as wealth and
intelligence are concerned, the elite of our operative
classes, and precisely those whom the next step down-
ward in a rental qualification would endow with the
franchise : and their franchise would, we may assume,
be used by Mr. W. Newton exactly as he has used their
funds.

Let us turn to the other operation of universal suf-
frage, as exhibited by France. The contemporary his-
tory of that country is, indeed, a perfect mine of poli-
tical wisdom ; but, like those of Old Mexico and Peru,
little worked by the natives. To foreign students and
standers-by, however, the lessons it affords are as in-
valuable as they are various. While reading her annals
for the last sixty years, we feel as if we were admitted
into some vast dissecting room, such as that over which
Majendie once presided, where physiological experiments
are carried on on a gigantic scale, and where operations
of every conceivable degree of cruel ingenuity are per-

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 537

formed on the unhappy victims, for the benefit of a
watchful and excited audience. Of all the curious
lessons which France is now reading to the European
world, none is more curious and important than that
regarding the effect of universal suffrage. She shows
that this which, in the popular creed, has always been
represented and valued as the great instrument and
security of freedom, is, on the contrary, one of the
surest means and sanctions of tyranny. She holds it
forth to the world as the MODERN BASIS OF DESPOTISM
— firmer, broader, craftier than the old one. She
proves that it is not only no guarantee against oppres-
sion : it may be made its heaviest and sharpest weapon.
Far from bringing hope to an injured and trampled
nation, it may put the blackest seal on its despair. In
place of securing equal justice and general prosperity,
it may simply pass the flattening iron over society, and
present the most flagrant specimen of class-legislation
which the world has seen. Universal suffrage is likely
to bring about anywhere, and promises to bring about
in France, an alliance between an ambitious chief, and
the ignorant, improvident, excitable masses of the
population, to the oppression, discomfiture, virtual dis-
franchisement, and possible spoliation of all other
sections of the community.

For, as we have already pointed out, the working
classes — daily labourers for daily bread — form every-
where, more especially in energetic, industrious, pro-
gressive nations, the vast numerical majority of the
population. They comprise nine-tenths of the numbers,
but only a fraction and segment of the nation. For
every nobleman, there are a thousand peasants ; for
every squire, a thousand labourers ; for every master
manufacturer, a thousand artisans ; for every student,
statesman, philosopher, journalist, or poet, a thousand
incompetent and uncultivated units ; for every wise and

538 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

just man, a thousand ignorant, a thousand selfish, a
thousand rash. A ruler, therefore, who allies himself
to the many, and ignores the few — who appeals to the
judgment, flatters the feelings, falls in with the preju-
dices, fosters the superficial interests of the nine-tenths,
and neglects the wishes, despises the opinions, and
sacrifices the welfare of the one-tenth — may be strong
in the strength of overwhelming numbers, and conse-
crated by the choice of disproportionate millions, and
may yet be, not the Elected, but the 'Reprobated, of the
NATION — may be supreme Chief in defiance of the
solemn and earnest disapproval of whatever is good,
whatever is great, whatever is wise, whatever is truly
noble and just, throughout the length and breadth of
the land. He may have been chosen in an open contest ;
the ballot may have been genuine ; the election may
have been fair ; the majority in his favour may have
been enormous ; his rule may thus have every conceiv-
able sanction which the vox populi can throw around it :
— and yet he may be the relentless enemy, the merci-
less suppressor, of all that is noble and chivalrous in
the brave and long-descended ; of all the finer fancy,
and the loftier intellect, which have enriched the litera-
ture and extended the influence of the nation ; of all the
spirituality which would purify her faith, all the high
science which would beautify and regenerate her life, all
the unfettered enterprise which would augment her
wealth, all the true grandeur which would illustrate and
dignify her history ; of all that freedom of the mind,
without which national existence is mere stagnation,
dishonour, and decay. He may array against his
broad-based throne every man who is honoured for his
virtues, every man who is celebrated for his genius,
every man who is valued for his services, every man
who in any department has shed light and lustre on the
age ; he may sacrifice the loftiest moral to the lowest

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 539

material considerations ; — but so long as he panders to
the passions, so long as he enlists the cupidity, so long
as he aggravates the foolish fears and delusive hopes, so
long as he studies the momentary physical interests, of
the masses, — so long will universal suffrage throw its
halo of impure and fallacious sanctity around him ; so
long may he call himself the chosen representative of
the nation, though execrated and disowned by every-
thing that gives to the nation life, reality, and reputa-
tion. When Louis Napoleon seized his power, he had
on his side, we cannot doubt, not only the vast majority
of the lower orders, but many of the middle ranks, some
among the higher, and nearly all the commercial class.
Many of these he has already alienated and alarmed ;
and it is more than probable, that the ulterior measures
which he contemplates, or may be driven to contemplate,
may alienate still more. But when all these have fallen
away, six millions out of seven millions of voters will
still remain. Louis Napoleon will still be the " Elect
of France " — so far as numbers can make him so. Will,
then, the liberal Press, which universal suffrage has en-
abled him to gag ; will the genuine Republicans, whom
it has enabled him to put down ; will the theorists and
politicians, whom it has empowered him to imprison
and to banish, sing its praises or proclaim its sacred in-
violability again ?

France is not the only country where this inherent
vice of universal suffrage has been shown ; nor is Louis
Napoleon the only ruler who has formed an alliance
with the lower orders of society, to enable him to control
the more respectable of the working classes, and the
middle and higher ranks. In many countries, and at
many periods, the proletaires have been found the ready
tools and the natural support of despots. Seeking only
for material comfort and personal well-being, content as
long as they feel no pressure, and are threatened with

540 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

no deterioration in their social state, untroubled by
aspirations, and indifferent alike to political ameliora-
tions and to mental freedom, — they have generally
shown little disapprobation of the tyrant who never
oppressed or spoliated them, and little sympathy with
sufferers under an iron rule which, towards them, was
sedulously softened. The Lazzaroni at Naples, have
stood steadily by Ferdinand in all his worst atrocities.
His crimes and cruelties never pressed on them ; as long
as they could obtain a mouthful of maccaroni or of
water-melon, what was it to them that nobles, because
they had thirsted after the forbidden cup of liberty,
were thrust into loathsome dungeons ? What did the
censorship of the Press, or the prohibition of foreign
books, signify to people who could neither read nor
write — whose only necessity was food — whose only
intellectual luxury was listening to a story-teller ? — In
Austria, too, and in Lombardy, the labouring people
were generally well-off, and the government took care
to keep them so. They cultivated their fields in peace,
the taxes were not burdensome to them, they sat under
their vine and fig-tree when the labours of the day were
done, the police-spy and the insolent gendarme seldom
interfered with them, or if he did, they were too much
inured to submission to resent the interference. The
leaden despotism which crushed or maddened their
superiors— which condemned men of high capacities
and lofty aspirations to fritter away life in the cafe, the
casino, or the ball-room ; which sent men of fiery genius
to antiquarian research, as the only safe channel for
their energies ; which punished intellect with civil in-
capacity, and earnest speech with exile or the dungeon ;
which trod out every spark of that vitality which alone
makes nations great, and human history a progress —
was a matter wholly out of their range of interest or
concern. Naturally enough, they had no sympathy

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 541

with wants which they had never felt, no tolerance for
discontent which they could not comprehend. So,
where national antipathies did not step in, they for the
most part stood by while the battle was fought out over
their heads, or joined zealously in defence of a tyranny
under which they had never suffered, and the very
nature and pressure of which was to them a mystery.

These reflections might easily be pushed further.
But our present purpose was merely to show the defect
and fallacy inherent in the common estimate of universal
suffrage ; and how easily the most ruinous and pestilen-
tial tyranny may be built upon a basis which at first
sight seems the freest and fairest of all.

But further, the question of lowering the franchise
requires to be considered with reference to another and
very important class of facts. Our meaning admits of
being very concisely stated. For a long time past, we
have, unconsciously, been burning the candle of the
constitution at both ends : our electors have been usurping
the functions of the House of Commons, while the House
of Commons has been monopolising thoseof the parliament.

Originally the Supreme Parliament of the realm con-
sisted of three co-ordinate powers, King, Lords, and
Commons — of which the House of Kepresentatives was
by no means the predominating authority. The free
and full consent of each of these powers was necessary
to the decision of all legislative questions, while adminis-
trative matters lay unreservedly with the CrowD. The
Sovereign was paramount, the Nobles were uncoerceable
— the Peerage was the real Upper House: the House
of Commons had a vote and a veto, but no more. Now,
that House has, for a long course of years, been gra-
dually drawing to itself the whole power of the state :
disguise it under constitutional fictions as we may for
the sake of decency or self-deception, it has become not

542 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

only preponderating but virtually supreme, in legislative
matters, and it exercises a direct, undeniable, and most
powerful influence even in affairs of administration.

Originally, too, the function, theoretical and actual,
of the electors was that of choosing men qualified, by
knowledge of their interests and participation in their
point of view (identity of stand-punct, as the Germans
would express it), to represent them in the great council
of the tiers-etat, and qualified, by capacity, experience, and
character, to take part in the government of the realm.
Their choice actually fell, as it was intended by the
constitution that it should fall, upon the most extensive
landed proprietors, the most successful and liberal mer-
chants, the most renowned lawyers, the sturdiest patriots,
the most experienced politicians. — Now, electors, gene-
rally and increasingly, are guided in the selection of
the men they send, by the known or professed opinions
of the candidates ; they avowedly, and on system choose,
not the ablest nor the most high-minded, but those
whose views on that particular question or set of ques-
tions which at the moment happens to be uppermost in
the public thought, most nearly harmonise with their
own ; and an elector who votes for an honest and able
opponent in preference to a shallow and scampish par-
tisan, is vulgarly held to have deserted his colours and
tarnished his character. The constituencies no longer
give their attention to the selection of a member quali-
fied to consider and decide any questions that may be
brought before the House in which he is to sit : they
themselves consider and decide these questions, and then
look out for a man to support and faire valoir their
decisions in parliament.

Thus, not only has the balance of our triune constitu-
tion been materially disturbed, but the original rationale
of representation bids fair to be entirely lost. In place of
selecting men, constituencies pronounce upon measures ;

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 543

in place of choosing representatives to discuss questions
and decide on proposals in one of three co-ordinate and
coequal bodies, the aggregate of which decree what shall
be enacted or done — electors consider and decree what
shall be done themselves. It is a reaction towards the
old Athenian plan of direct government by the people,
practised before the principle of representation was dis-
covered.

Now, it is clear at a glance that both these changes
point in the same direction, and suggest a similar
quarter in which to look for counteraction. To examine,
comprehend, and form a sound judgment on a political
measure or a legislative proposal, obviously requires a
more thoughtful, intelligent, and instructed class — in a
word, a more highly- qualified class — of electors, than
would be needed to decide upon the relative fitness
of two given and known men to be representatives.
Hundreds would be able to pronounce with tolerable
shrewdness whether Mr. A. or Mr. B. was the cleverest
or the worthiest man, whose opinion as to the augmen-
tation of our standing army, or the retention of our
Colonial Empire, or the re-adjustment of our system of
taxation, would not be worth a straw. The more our
electoral functions resolve themselves into deciding on
measures instead of selecting men, the higher are the
qualifications needed for the exercise of the electoral
franchise. Yet the cry is for a lowering of the qualifi-
cation.

Again, if the House of Commons held only the same
position and wielded only the same limited and co-ordi-
nate power as in old times, we might admit into it a
larger infusion of the democratic element not only without
alarm, but possibly with welcome. But since it has be-
come predominant, if not omnipotent — its decisions sub-
ject to no appeal, its decrees liable to no reversal, at most
only to a cautious and short postponement — it is obvious
that higher wisdom, greater sobriety, purer virtue, and

544 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

wider vision, than before, are imperatively requisite in
those who are to frame it. In precise proportion as the
powers of the state become more and more concentrated
into the hands of one supreme and uncontrollable as-
sembly, in that proportion does it become a matter of
vital concern to the greatness and the safety of the state
that the choice of that assembly should be in the hands
of the most competent, the most independent, and the
soundest portion of the people. Yet it is just when
this great and continuous revolution has been consum-
mated that we are asked to throw the choice of this con-
densed and inappellable authority into the hands of a
more uneducated, dependent, deceivable, and excitable
class than have ever yet possessed it.

Of these three processes — the aggregation of the
supreme power in the House of Commons, the usurpa-
tion of the deliberative and pronouncing functions of
that assembly by the constituencies who elect it, and the
lowering of the social and intellectual qualifications
required from electors — any one singly might go for-
ward without peril and possibly with great advantage :
the combination of all three — the concentration, that
is, of the supreme authority in the hands of the lower
classes of the population, wholly or in preponderating
measure — presents a perspective of danger from which
simple reflection and the experience of other countries
should teach us to recoil in time. It is to emulate the
mistake, and to invite the fate of France.

Having so far cleared our way, by an ascertainment
of the quarter in which the improvement of our repre-
sentative system should not be sought, we are in a posi-
tion to approach the practical problem of Parliamen-
tary Reform, and to suggest the character and direction
at least, if not the specific details, of measures for the
extension, purification, and amended distribution of the
franchise, — measures which, while attended by no

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 545

danger and assimilating readily with what exists, shall
be felt by nearly every one to be wide, substantial, and
salutary improvements in the constitution of the House
of Commons — founded in justice and consonant to the
most far-sighted policy.

The problem to be solved is, first to widen the basis of
our representation by admitting to the franchise all who
ought to be admitted — all, that is, who are qualified to
exercise it for their country's good ; — secondly, to purify
it, by excluding all who, from incompetency of whatever
kind, ought to be excluded; — and thirdly, so to dis-
tribute it as to render it as fair and complete an organ
as practicable of the various interests and elements
which compose the nation.

I. The first and most obvious arrangement which
suggests itself, is to confer the suffrage on all whom the
existing constitution pronounces entitled to it, and
competent to exercise it. In other countries enjoying
a representative government, every man who possesses
the qualification is, ipso facto, placed in a position to
exercise it. In Belgium, for example, every man who
pays a certain amount of direct taxes has a vote ; and
he gives that vote wherever he happens to reside at the
time. Now, we have decided that occupation of a 101.
house shall be held a good and sufficient qualification
for the franchise. Yet how inadequate a proportion of
the 10£. householders throughout the country really
possess the franchise ! They are all deemed competent to
hold it ; but unless they chance to live in one of the 185
Parliamentary Boroughs, they have no opportunity of
exercising it. Those who live in the 268 unrepresented
towns with more than 2000 inhabitants, or in the many
more towns and villages below this limit, are virtually
disfranchised. They have not the privilege which,
nevertheless, the law declares that they ought to have.

There are two modes of rectifying this anomaly. The

VOL. II. N N

546 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

one commonly suggested, and the favourite one with
the radical school, — that of dividing the country into
electoral districts of equal population, — was so fully
discussed in the preceding paper, that we need not re-
state the objections to it here. The other plan is to
extend the 101. qualification to counties, by which means
every householder (to the requisite value) throughout
the land would possess a vote ; if he resided in a
city or borough he would be upon the urban list, — if
he resided in a small town, or a village, or an isolated
dwelling, he would be upon the county register. The
only objection we can hear of to this plan is, that in
the country districts and in hamlets a 101. occupancy
generally includes some land, and would not therefore
indicate the same social station as the living in a 101.
house in town, and that it might lead to the creation,
for the sake of augmenting landlord influence, of a
numerous and dependent class of tenant voters. But,
in the first place, the occupier of a 101 . house in villages
and small towns, belongs to a decidedly higher social
grade than the occupier of a 101. house in cities; and,
in the second place, it would not be difficult to meet the
objection, by requiring that the qualifying occupancy
shall be, in the county register, a house, and not a
house and land, or by fixing a sum which shall, as
nearly as can be ascertained, be generally an equivalent
to the WL occupancy contemplated by the present law.
This, Lord John Russell's 201. county franchise was, we
imagine, intended to effect.

There is a third way, not, indeed, of reaching, but of
approximating to the desired result, which, also, was
contemplated in Lord John's measure, viz. by combining
a number of the unrepresented towns in the returns of
a member. This measure we shall have to recur to
presently ; for the moment we will only observe, that it
would very imperfectly attain the end we are now con-

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 547

sidering, since numberless villages and hamlets would
see their inhabitants still excluded from the franchise.

A second mode of extending the basis of the repre-
sentation, in a manner strictly conformable to the
principles of our existing arrangements has been sug-
gested, and is, we think, open to no objection. It is, of
course, desirable, and is admitted to be so by every
party, that all educated men shall be voters ; the diffi-
culty is to name any ostensible qualifications which shall
include them, and them alone. But though we cannot
frame a criterion which shall include all, there is no
reason why we should not accept one which will include
a considerable number of whose fitness to possess the
franchise there can be no question. We should propose,
therefore, that the suffrage be granted to all graduates
of universities, to all members of the three learned profes-
sions, to the officers of the army and navy, and to masters
of schools under government inspection. This provision
would give a most desirable addition to the constituency
out of a class of men now very generally excluded as
living in lodgings.

A third proposal, suggested, we believe, chiefly with
the view of including middle class lodgers, namely, that
of conferring the franchise on all who pay a specified
sum in direct taxes, is, we are disposed to think, one of
questionable advisability. In those countries, as in
Belgium, where this forms the sole or the main qualifi-
cation, the chief part of the revenue is levied in the
shape of direct taxation. Every man above actual
want pays direct taxes, and all persons of a certain
class pay above a certain sum. It therefore forms
about as fair a criterion of social position as can well be
devised. But in England the case is different. Direct
taxation yields only a small portion of our revenue, and
reaches only a small class. Before the imposition of
the income tax — which, in its present form, at least,

N N 2

548 KEPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

we cannot bring ourselves to regard as permanent, —
this portion was very insignificant, and was, in nearly
all cases, (with the rare exception of persons living in
lodgings, and yet keeping horses, or using armorial
bearings,) paid by parties already on the electoral
register in virtue of other qualifications. To adopt the
proposed plan of enfranchisement in England would
therefore be not, as in other countries, to give votes to
those who paid a certain sum towards the national
revenue, but only to those who contributed that sum in
a certain peculiar form. It would enfranchise not the
amount, but the mode of taxation. Nor would it — if
our subsequent suggestions be carried out — be needed
in order to enfranchise any.

A more vital objection is, that it would make a man's
possession of the suffrage dependent upon the financial
arrangements of the session or the parliament. A
whole class might be disfranchised in a single night by
a vote of the House of Commons, which had not the
most remote intentional reference to the question of
electoral qualification. Already one direct tax has
been swept away — the window duty. The income tax
may go any session. If, as fiscal science becomes more
studied and better comprehended, it should appear that
any extension of direct taxation beyond its amount in
1841 is undesirable, and it should be limited accordingly,
numbers whose vote depended on the payment of
income tax would lose their constitutional privilege by
a side-blow not aimed at them. And if, as is possible
enough, the house tax — variable in amount — and the
duties of horses and carriages, be the only direct taxes
ultimately retained, a taxation-franchise would reach
only those who would be on the register already in
virtue of their dwellings. And it seems scarcely wise
to make a man's electoral qualification depend upon a

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 549

fluctuating and annually questioned or modified cri-
terion.

But the knottiest and most important part of the
problem still remains to be approached, — how to give
to the working classes their fair and desirable share
in the choice of members of parliament, and at the
same time no more than his share; — how to admit
such an infusion of the democratic element into our
representation as shall be just, beneficial, and unattended
with danger, but at the same time real and not illusory.
Some, starting from the premises that representation of
classes is the idea that lies at the foundation of our
system, — that the peers, the clergy, the gentry, the
yeomen, the burghers, and the men of learning are all
specially represented (theoretically at least), — and that
the labouring classes alone have no representatives,
because at the time when the constitution was con-
solidated into its present form they were serfs and
villains, not freemen, and therefore not recognised as an
integral order in the state, — have suggested that the
omission should now be supplied by assigning to the
labouring classes a certain number of special repre-
sentatives, to be chosen by them exclusively ; and that
the vacancy created by the disfranchisement of those
boroughs which might be found too corrupt, or too in-
significant, to retain the privilege of returning members,
should be thus filled up. The proposal is not devoid of
a certain prima facie appearance of fairness and work-
ability. But it is open to one objection, which lies
upon the surface, and is in our judgment a fatal one.
Members thus specifically returned by the labouring
classes would often be working men themselves, and,
whether they were so or not, would naturally regard
themselves as entrusted with, and appointed to guard
over, the interests of these classes, alone, or by pre-
ference. On general questions it is possible enough

N N 3

550 KEPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

that they might be divided in opinion among themselves,
and some take part with one section of politicians?
some with another. But on all subjects and measures
directly bearing, or supposed to bear, upon the welfare
and condition of the poor ; on the amount and distribu-
tion of taxation ; on the remuneration of the higher
offices of state ; on the reduction or increase of the
army, and generally on all matters connected with
economical expenditure ; on matters of imperial policy,
so far as they directly involved questions of expense ;
and on proposals closely touching industrial and social
considerations ; it is probable, nay, nearly certain, that
these special representatives would vote together, and
form a compact and influential party in the legislature.
And as on most of these questions they would almost
inevitably take the most superficial and short-sighted
view, — as they would have a strong tendency to oppose
present outlay for a future and distant, though certain
advantage, and so to adjust taxation as to make it fall
as far as possible away from their constituents, — cases
would not unfrequently arise in which all the members
for the working classes would be arrayed on one side,
and nearly the whole residue of the House of Commons
on the other, — an unseemly and perilous antagonism,
the full weight and significance of which the minority
defeated in parliament would not be slow to blazon
to the world. Even now the member for the West
Biding is not slow to remind the member for Tavistock :
— "I represent 30,000 electors, you are the nominee of
only 300." But how much worse would the case be
where 50 men could say to 500, " You, the represen-
tatives of thousands, are opposed to us who are the
representatives of millions; — you, the delegates of the
privileged classes, can overpower us who are the chosen
of the people of England; — you, the nominees of
certain small sections of the community, herd together

REPRESENT ATI VE REFORM. 551

in defence of your constitutional ideas and your selfish
interests ; we, who speak unanimously the sentiments
of the vast majority of that community, of the aggre-
gate of the nation itself, stand forth to protest against
the monstrous inequality." Such an arrangement,
followed as it would be by such language on every
occasion which provoked it, would loudly proclaim, and
most perniciously aggravate, that disseverance and
hostility of classes, that separation of society into hori-
zontal layers (as a recent writer has well expressed it*),
which, of all the features and tendencies of the condition
of England, is, perhaps, the most uncomfortable and
menacing.

Others have suggested a scheme for admitting the
labouring classes to the franchise, and conferring upon
them a due share of political power, which at first sight
appears much more plausible and safe. It has, they
say, long been felt, and has over and over again been
shown, that the only way in which universal suffrage,
or any near approach to it, can ever be admissible,
would be through an adoption of the filtering process of
double election. The various advantages of such a plan
are obvious. It is based upon the indubitable truth,
that hundreds of thousands who are wholly incompetent
to decide upon the merits of a political measure, or the
qualifications of a member of parliament (whom they
know only through his speeches and addresses), are
yet perfectly competent to fix upon some one of their
neighbours or friends fitted to exercise the decision for
them. Hundreds of thousands who would choose very
bad representatives might choose very good electors. It
is true there are no English precedents for the plan,
but it has more than once been put into practice in
France; it was the soul of the celebrated constitution

* See a Paper in the " Westminster Review," for July, 1852, on
the Tendencies of England.

N N 4

552 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

proposed by the Abbe Sieyes in 1799, and partially
adopted by Napoleon; it is the mode in which the
President is elected in the United States, and in which
the Storthing or House of Deputies is chosen in Norway.
If desirable, the mere absence of precedent should not
stand in the way of its adoption here. There are now
in round numbers, and allowing for duplicates, about a
million of electors on the register. To this number it
is proposed to add 100,000 electors to be nominated by
the working classes , and, on mere proof of such nomina-
tion before the revising barristers, to be placed upon
the registers of their respective districts, The voters
for these electors, to include all (paupers, convicts,
minors, or women excepted) who are not upon the
general register. By this plan, it is argued, you would
at once place one tenth of the representation in the
hands of the now unenfranchised operatives exclusively,
which could not be despised as a mere trivial and
worthless concession; the system of double election
would be tested both as to its practical feasibility and
its results ; and the country would have an opportunity
of seeing what sort of selection was made by the labour-
ing classes, and of thus gaining some valuable hints for
future guidance ; since much canvassing, bribing, or in-
timidation would scarcely be worth while merely in
order to obtain a place upon the register, attainable by
the frugal and intelligent in so many easier ways. So
that the electors chosen might fairly be assumed to be
the bond fide unbiassed choice of the masses — the men
they most trusted, appreciated, and admired.

Nor, it is contended by the advocates of this plan,
need any danger be apprehended from the class of men
likely to be chosen. It is probable enough that the
demagogues of the populace, and the most forward,
noisy, and active of the artisans, would be among the
first of those selected for the trust ; but these could

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 553

only form a comparatively small proportion of the
100,000, and they would find their elected colleagues
less willing to submit to their dictation, and more quick
to detect their egotism, than the great body of the
working men. If the majority of them turned out, as
we believe they would, to be the more intelligent, sober,
and respectable of the labouring poor, a great point
would have been gained ; the most numerous body of
the community would be fairly associated with the
upper ranks in the work of legislation, and the ground
would be laid for a better mutual understanding ; and
an act of justice would have met with its appropriate
reward. If, on the other hand, as some predict, these
" select men " should turn out worthless and corrupt,
and disgrace themselves either by cupidity or folly,
their influence with the lower, and therefore their for-
midableness to the higher classes, would be irretrievably
lost. It is only in Ireland that demagogues can retain
their hold on popular obedience and regard in spite of
repeated falsehood and proved delinquency.

We concede the soundness and weight of nearly the
whole of the above considerations. Yet there is an
objection to the plan which is a most formidable, though
we are loth to pronounce it a fatal, one. The immediate
operation of the arrangement, would be to bring the
representation within one step of universal suffrage, and
that step an easy and an obvious one. It concedes the
franchise to those very masses from whom it is your
fixed purpose to withhold it. — but calls them to exer-
cise it under restrictions which place them at a serious
disadvantage, as compared with other possessors of the
privilege. It forges a weapon, and prepares a mecha-
nism which, by the simplest modification, may, at any
crisis of popular excitement, be turned against its
framers, and used in direct contravention of its original
intention. The whole body of the labouring classes

554 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

will have beerf authorised and accustomed to vote ; and
from voting for one set of representatives to voting for
another, — from voting for electors to voting for members,
the transition would naturally suggest itself, and might
be instantaneously made. You would have enacted a
wise and salutary law, which the omission of a single
clause would convert into its opposite.

The third plan for enfranchising the better portion of
the working classes in towns, which first occurs to every
mind — viz. a simple lowering of the present rental or
assessment qualification — loses all its apparent advan-
tages when closely examined, as we explained on a
previous occasion. In the manufacturing districts,
seven-eighths of the operatives live in houses paying
from 2s. 3d. to 3s. weekly rent, or from 6£. to 71. a year.
If you lower your qualification so as to include these,
you enfranchise the mass ; if you go so high as to ex-
clude these, you reach scarcely any of the working men
properly so called ; and by no means always those you
wish to reach. Again, the same limit which would en-
franchise many in Manchester, Leeds, or Birmingham,
would enfranchise all probably in Marylebone and the
Tower Hamlets, and none in Taunton, Leominster, or
Hereford. It would make enfranchisement depend, not
upon belonging to a certain station, but on the accident
of residing in a certain place, which is one of the great
practical defects of the present system. We must,
therefore, look out for some other plan, which we think
is not far to seek, nor difficult of application.

No one doubts the fitness of many operatives, and
even peasants, for the exercise of the suffrage, as far as
honesty, intelligence, and good dispositions are qualifi-
cations. Few, who know them well, will be disposed to
deny, that a selection from among them would give us
a purer and more independent constituency than the
lower class of ten pound householders and small county

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM, 555

freeholders, — a constituency at least as shrewd, and far
more sturdy, in their views, far more individual in their
modes of thought, and more open, also, to unselfish
considerations and generous sentiments. To this we
can bear strong testimony ; and we bear it not only
willingly, but earnestly. The difficulty is to get at these
"select men" — to enfranchise the elite, without en-
franchising the mass.

Now, those among the working classes who have
accumulated property, have, in doing so, given proof of
qualities which will, in the great majority of cases (and
with such only can we deal in legislative measures),
make them fit and safe depositaries of the franchise.
We need not enlarge upon this. The principle is
already admitted in our present system, and indeed lies
at its foundation ; but it is partially applied, and im-
perfectly carried out. If an operative lays by 50/., and
invests it in the purchase of a 405. freehold, the consti-
tution pronounces him fit and qualified to vote. If,
again, he expends the 50£. in moving from an 8/. to a
10/. borough residence, the constitution pronounces him
fit and qualified to vote. But if he expends his 50/. in
the wiser mode of purchasing an annuity for his old age,
or a life policy for his widow or his children, or in the
more lucrative investment of guaranteed railway shares
or debentures, the constitution excludes him as dis-
qualified. That is, our present franchise law judges of a
frugal operative's fitness for the suffrage, not by the cir-
cumstance of his having saved, but by the mode in which
he invests his savings, — manifestly an indefensible cri-
terion. Nay, it does more ; it is scarcely too much to
say that it makes his qualification depend on his having
selected a comparatively unwise channel of investment.
This clearly calls for rectification. We propose, there-
fore, that every man who can prove, to the satisfaction
of the revising barrister, that he has, and has had for

556 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

twelve months, the sum of at least 50£. of his own, in-
vested either in government securities, or in the savings'
bank, or in the purchase of an annuity, present or de-
ferred, or in the purchase of a reversionary policy for
his family, — shall be entitled to be put upon the register
for that year. We do not anticipate any objection to
this provision, nor any material difficulty in working it
out, nor any loophole for fraud which does not exist in
most other cases, and which a revising barrister may
not detect and baffle. It may be urged, that it is partial
and unjust to confine the franchise-giving quality to
these four modes of investment ; especially as these are
not the most generally in favour with the operatives,
who commonly prefer placing their money in clubs of
their own. This is perfectly true ; but the answer is,
that these four are probably the only modes of invest-
ment of which the state has any cognisance, the only
quite safe and certain ones, and the only ones in the
proof of which it would be easy to discover and prevent
fraud and collusion. If others can be pointed out
equally enjoying those advantages, by all means let
them be added to the list.

Now this provision would, in the first place, at once
enfranchise large numbers of the worthiest operatives ;
it would point out the mode by which any who desired
the franchise might attain it ; it would stimulate to
patient economy and to cautious investment ; and it
would connect indissolubly in the popular mind the
possession of the franchise, with the possession of some,
at least, of the qualities which give an earnest of fitness
for its exercise. It would stand upon the statute-book
as a provision to which we might quietly point the
attention of any who complained of their exclusion from
a share in the representation, — "Prove your compe-
tency, and there is a self-acting proviso for admitting
you."

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 557

But there is still another class of operatives whose
superiority and consequent fitness for the franchise is
still more incontestibly proved, and whom the last-
named qualification would not always reach, — those,
namely, who are placed in authority over others. Such
are overlookers in factories and mines ; foremen and
heads of departments in iron foundries and machine-
making establishments, head-gardeners, who have la-
bourers under them, and others in similar positions.
All who are thus appointed to situations of command,
have been selected in virtue of superior capacity, steadi-
ness, integrity, or education ; and must, in order to
have attained such situations, have given proof of
mental or moral qualifications, above those of the mass
of their fellow- workmen. They are precisely the class
whom we desire to distinguish from the rest ; who, as
leaders, are likely to influence others ; and whose opi-
nions on public questions and public men, it would be
really valuable to know. We can conceive no objection
to conferring the franchise on this class, except the
practical difficulty of defining its members, and deciding
on their individual claims. But these are matters for
the management of the revising barrister : the same
searching investigation which determines the validity of
other claims, would amply suffice to settle any disputes
or embarrassments as to these new ones.*

By these two provisions, we should place upon the

* It is important to observe that in the absence of specifically-
sought information, we are greatly in the dark as to the operation of
most new legislative enactments. It is impossible to do more than
form a plausible conjecture as to the numbers and sort of men whom
these two provisions would admit, or as to the working of any other
suggested clauses. Perhaps, before legislating at all upon the subject,
it would be advisable to issue a commission of inquiry, to investigate
the probable bearing and modus operandi of different franchises, both
actual and proposed. A mass of reliable knowledge might thus be
obtained which would do much towards guiding and enlightening our
future action.

558 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

register precisely that portion of the working classes
whose views it is desirable to know, and whose claim to
a participation in the electoral task, it is impossible to
gainsay; we should secure to the side of constitutional
liberty the real chiefs and heads of the labouring masses,
— not their nominal, self-appointed, agitating leaders :
and we shall manifest a bond fide desire and intention
of admitting to the franchise all whose claims to it, on
the score of fitness, we are able to ascertain. It is true
that, though we should thus disarm many of the argu-
ments of Radicals and Chartists, and separate from them
many of their parliamentary supporters, and place con-
servative reformers in a broad, strong, and defensible
position, — yet, we should scarcely have silenced, nor
perhaps altogether met, the demands of the masses for
admission to political power, — if indeed any such
native, indigenous, genuine demand ever took its rise
among them. They might still say, and with some show
of reason, — " You have selected for the exercise of the
franchise — for participation in your privileges — pre-
cisely those members of our body who are most like
you and least like us ; who are most peculiarly under
the influence of the higher classes ; and whose sym-
pathies and connection with our body are shown to be
impaired, or in the way to be impaired, by their en-
deavours to rise out of our body. We ask for represen-
tation for the masses, and you offer representation to
those who already differ from the masses in some essen-
tial points. We ask the franchise for the employed, and
you assign it those who are stepping into the ranks and
are infected with the sentiments of the employers"

Our reply to this, if it is to be satisfactory, must be
not evasive, but direct. That reply is, briefly, an appeal
to the fundamental idea lying at the basis of our consti-
tution, and at the very core of the national character,
which is not that of democratic equality, but of distinct

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 559

and privileged, but open orders. We ground our polity
upon, and owe our safety to, two great principles,' —
retaining the powers of the state in the hands of the less
numerous, but more select, more cultivated, and more com-
petent classes ; and, making ingress into these classes acces-
sible to all. The union of these two principles is safety :
their disjunction would be injustice and ruin. The old
regime in France fell by denying the second : the new
regime has never been able to maintain itself, from
having negatived the first. Let it be our fixed resolu-
tion to avoid with equal care either error.

II. The purification of our representative action is
practically a more difficult achievement than enlarging
its basis. Everybody avows and feels that the franchise
is now possessed by many who, on every ground, ought
to be debarred from such a function ; some because they
are dependent, some because they are corrupt, some
because they are incompetent through ignorance, some
because they are wholly indifferent to all political con-
siderations, and are therefore guided solely by personal
ones. But it is no easy matter to take away a privilege
from any one to whom it has once been granted, except
on actual proof of delinquency, and such proof it is not
easy to obtain. On the part of many liberals, there is a
most unphilosophic desire to extend the franchise as
widely as possible, with a regard solely to numbers, and
not at all to quality. It was this feeling which led to
the interpolation of the Chandos clause, and the reten-
tion of the old freemen, in the first reform bill. On the
part of many of a different way of thinking, there is a
strong disposition to keep upon the register all the most
unfit classes, viz. the indifferent, the corruptible, and
the intimidable ; precisely on account of their un fitness.
Those who dread democratic influence and popular de-
lusion, see an element of safety in the existence of a

560 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

class of voters, whom wealth can always buy, and whom
power can always bully ; and they are not the less ob-
stinate in their resistance to all attempts to purge away
this body, that they can neither avow the grounds of
their proceeding, nor discern the fallacious nature of the
security they would retain. And on the part of the
possessors of the franchise themselves, it is natural that
those who regard their votes as a saleable property, not
as a solemn trust, should cling to them with all the
tenacity of avarice ; and they are sure to tie down their
representatives to the maintenance of their lucrative
and abused privilege. But as the arguments of the two
last of these parties cannot be ostensibly brought for-
ward ; and as the ground taken by the first is cut away
by the considerable and bond fide extension of the
suifrage, which would form the basis of the reform we
are contemplating, we may hope that a proposal to
purify the constituencies, by removing the anomaly of
the old freemen, might meet with more success than it
hitherto has done. Those among them who are really
desirable possessors of the franchise, will be entitled to
it through other qualifications.

Again, we need most especially some simple, effectual,
inexpensive, continuously-acting, and, as far as may be,
self-acting, machinery for disfranchising any voters and
any boroughs which can be proved to be corrupt. Had
this been provided at the time of the Keform Bill, as an
indispensable condition of its successful and beneficent
operation, and been steadily and conscientiously worked
and watched over by the legislature since ; and had the
conventional morality of Parliament, on the subject of dis-
franchising-bills, been altered and corrected as it was on
the subject of election committees, it is hard to say to what
a pitch of comparative dignity and purity our consti-
tuencies might not, by this time, have arrived. It is
not now too late to rectify this, though unquestionably

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 561

many valuable years have been lost, and many boroughs
have fallen from their pristine innocence. Two things
are required in order to attain the object. It must be
enacted, that any borough which is proved before the
appointed tribunal to be as a whole, or in the large
majority, corrupt, or to be so completely under the in-
fluence of one or more proprietors, that no doubt can
exist as to the non-independence of the great body of
the electors, shall ipso facto, and systematically, be dis-
franchised ; and if the appointed tribunal be a parlia-
mentary one, it must be understood, as it is now in the
case of election committees, that members must act
judicially, that is, must obey their consciences, and
respect their oaths. If this were arranged, no great
difficulty would be found, and no great expense need be
incurred, in ascertaining the real rights of each case ;
evidence to satisfy would be easily attainable ; and
those who are cognisant of parliamentary feeling know
well, that the only reason why gentlemen there some-
times act with the strange moral lubricity which so
astonishes us laymen outside is, that it is understood
that they may do so. Before 1835, no member hesi-
tated to disregard his oath, and vote black white, if he
chanced to be balloted on an election committee, any
more than an Irish juryman or an Oxford " Head "
"hesitates on similar moral tours-de-force : since that
date, a senator would lose both his reputation and his
self-respect, were he to act according to the past, rather
than the present, code of honour. The perjury which
was sanctioned by a common understanding then, is re-
pudiated by the same common understanding now.

The next point is to disfranchise the individual voter
who has betrayed his trust. At present, the severity
of the penalty against the convicted recipient of a bribe,
makes convictions almost unattainable. Except in
moments of the utmost exasperation, men scruple to

VOL. II. 0 0

562 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

enforce a fine of 500/. (which in most cases would be
absolute ruin or indefinite imprisonment) for an offence
which public morality has not yet learned to regard as
a very heinous one. In this, as in so many other cases,
the enormity of the infliction denounced secures the
impunity of the offender. We see no objection to
retaining this punishment against the briber; but, as
against the bribee, we would substitute simple disfran-
chisement for the future, on sufficient proof being
adduced in the registration courts to satisfy the revising
barrister. You would thus purify the register, improve
the constituency, disarm the ill-doer, and visit the
offence with an appropriate and proportionate, instead
of a vindictive and excessive, penalty. We are aware
of the difficulty which always attends the production of
satisfactory evidence of bribery : we are aware, too, that
intimidation is often the worse, the most extensive, and
the most demoralising evil of the two, and that proof of
this in individual cases, clear enough to justify disfran-
chisement, would be almost unattainable ; but the
measure we suggest would go some way towards the
purifying purpose we have in view ; and we must not
reject any means on the plea that they are not omni-
potent or sufficing in their simple and unaided opera-
tion. We must be content to achieve our object by
the cumulative and corroborating aid of a variety of
agencies.

We know the reply that will be made to us by our
radical friends : — " Why beat about the bush for indi-
rect modes of securing the free exercise of the suffrage,
when one single and obvious mode lies in your path ?
Why eschew the ballot?" We will not enter on this
vexed question here. We could add nothing new to the
arguments which have been adduced on either side ;
nor could we urge those arguments in clearer or
stronger language than our predecessors. Without,

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 563

therefore, attempting to answer the cogent claims which
have been brought forward on behalf of secret voting,
— without urging^the unconquerable feelings of aversion
to it, which are the arguments of minds more instinctive
than logical, but often far safer guides than that of the
logician, from their delicate tact, and the unerring cor-
rectness of their moral appreciations, — we take our
stand on the position in which all practical men — all
except the most incurable doctrinaires — will agree ; viz.
that if the object can be attained with tolerable com-
pleteness by any other contrivances, a disagreeable
dilemma and a hopeless controversy will have been
avoided.

With this view we strongly urge the adoption of a
mode of taking the votes at parliamentary elections, for
which we have the warrant of a recent and most suc-
cessful precedent, which would greatly diminish bribery,
which would perceptibly alleviate intimidation, and
which would entirely put an end to the riot and outrage
which so frequently disgrace the contests in our large
electoral bodies; which would enormously lessen the
expense of elections ; while at the same time it would
virtually and greatly increase the numbers, as well as
elevate and improve the character of our popular con-
stituencies. The plan is that now practised at the
election of boards of guardians, and other parochial
contests in England, and, with some small modifications
and improvements, in Scotland. It consists simply in
taking the polling booth to every elector, instead of, as
now, carrying each elector to the polling booth. A
couple of days before the one appointed for the election,
a voting paper with the names of all the candidates, and
simple directions as to the mode of filling up the paper,
is left at the house of every ratepayer; and after the
lapse of one clear day, the paper is called for by the ap-
pointed parish-officer. In Scotland, the collector is

o o 2

564 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

provided with a box, with a slit in the lid, into which
the paper is dropped (by which any tampering with the
return is avoided) ; and the commissioners require that
every paper shall be returned, whether filled up or not,
with the view of compelling the attention at least of the
ratepayer to the appeal made to him, however he may
choose to treat it. These arrangements would be just
as applicable to parliamentary, as to parochial, arrange-
ments, with a very slight modification. We propose,
therefore, that immediately after the nomination (the
publicity of which will secure all the popular excitement
constitutionally desirable), a paper containing the names
of the candidates (and accompanied with the addresses
they have put forth) be left at the house of every elector
by a sworn and appointed officer, who shall call again
for the same the next day, or the day but one after, as
may be determined on. He shall receive the papers
into a sealed box or bag, and shall deliver them to the
returning officer. On this plan each elector, when he
returns home at night, finds the important document
awaiting him ; he considers the merits of the candidates,
he reads their addresses, perhaps he consults his wife
and family, or his neighbours ; and then he places his
name opposite to that of the man or men of his choice,
and folds up the paper ready for delivery to the
collector.

Now, the manifold advantages of this plan have been
clearly shown and fully set forth by the Poor Law
Commissioners in their first and fifth Reports.* The

* " By the voting paper on which the elector is to record his vote
in his own handwriting being left during one or two clear days at his
residence, he is enabled to give his vote in the most free and delibe-
rate manner, undisturbed by the importunities of canvassers, or the
tumult and clamour of the polling booth ; by the voting paper being
called for at the residence of the elector by a responsible officer,, and
by him being taken to the returning officer, the elector is saved from

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 565

effects which would flow from its adoption in Parlia-
mentary elections are as follows : —

First. It would entirely avoid the riotous proceedings
now so generally and disgracefully attendant on our
popular contests. The election day might be as quiet
as a Sunday. Disorderly and ill-disposed people might,

the necessity of losing his time and neglecting his business in attend-
ing the polling booth ; it being deemed the best economy that one
officer should attend as a collector at the residences of several hun-
dred voters, rather than that several hundred voters should leave
their homes and occupations to attend at the station of one officer —
a poll clerk. By this mode the necessity of extraneous expense and
excitement, in order to induce bodies of electors to incur inconve-
nience, insults, or annoyances of various sorts, are saved to both par-
ties. Hitherto this mode of election, which differs from all others in
use in this country, has given general satisfaction. Moreover, it has
continued to be marked by the greater number of votes being given
than have been obtained for the like objects under any other form of
election. In the greater number of instances of contested elections
the number of votes polled have been more than trebled, which we
consider equivalent to the relieving of all the additional votes from
the loss and inconvenience previously attendant on the exercise of the
franchise. The expense in the larger parishes was greatly below
that of the ordinary elections by poll. Nevertheless, we have found
that the expense of the first election arrangements might be advan-
tageously reduced, and several inconveniences sustained in the larger
parishes obviated.

" The expense, however, cannot be estimated fairly, except in re-
ference to the savings effected by the new mode of taking the votes.
In one parish, where the election was severely contested, there were
10,000 persons whose votes were taken. One with another, not less,
perhaps, than half a day would be consumed by a voter in quitting
his occupation to go to the polling booth, give his vote, and return,
which was necessary before the passing of the Poor Law Amendment
Act ; one with another, the value of the time consumed by each voter
would, perhaps, be under estimated at half-a-crown. The aggregate
value of the time required from the voters would not therefore be less
than 1,2501. In registering new claims, and in the formation of a
new machinery, much expense was incurred ; but the permanent ex-
pense of printing the voting papers, and other incidental charges for
completing the election, would probably not exceed 100J.

o o 3

566 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

if they pleased, still get up a row on the nomination day,
though it is not generally on these that disturbances
occur ; but as far as the polling goes, the great occasion
for violence and tumult would be entirely taken away.
No more rough scenes which quiet men shrink from ;
no more hootings and peltings which now terrify so
many timid men from the poll ; no more broken heads ;
no more interference of the military ; no more Six-mile
Bridge affairs : every man would be able to record his
vote in peace, and we should no longer have to blush
before foreigners for the disorder attendant on our
freedom.

Secondly. The intimidation practised on voters by the
dread of actual violence or most unpleasant scenes on
their way to the polling booth — no inconsiderable part
of the whole — would be entirely defeated and evaded.
Intimidation by landlords, by employers and by cus-
tomers would, it is true., be left much where it is now.
But bribery would be enormously diminished. Bribery
is now chiefly confined to close contests. When the
majority is pretty decidedly against a candidate, it is
not worth his while to bribe: when the majority is
decidedly in his favour it would be superfluous. It is
where the result is doubtful, and where a certain number
of purchasable votes will turn the scale, that corruption
is resorted to. Now, in many cases, this is not ascer-
tainable still far on in the day, when the course that
matters rare taking is known by the publication of the
hourly lists. Accordingly, the great proportion of the
bribery is actually perpetrated in the last two or three
hours, when the number of votes which remain to be
polled can be pretty accurately known. But by the
proposed mode of taking the votes, all this would be
avoided. No one would have the least idea how the
election was going till the returning officer opened his
papers and cast up his columns at the close of the poll.

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 567

If, therefore, a candidate was disposed to bribe he must
bribe a couple of days beforehand, when he would be
very much in the dark as to whether he was not throw-
ing away both his money and his conscience gratuitously
or ineffectually.

Thirdly. The cost of elections would be enormously
curtailed. Even the legitimate and inevitable expenses
— those of the polling booths, poll clerks, and check clerks
— would be considerably reduced. Instead of the staff
now required, no one would be needed except the one
returning officer and the representatives of the several
candidates who might wish to be present as a check
upon him, and the distributors and collectors of the
voting papers. From six to twenty men, according to
the size of the borough, might do the whole work. But
the great expense of election is the carrying the electors
up to the poll, and keeping open public-houses and
committee-rooms for collecting them previously. They
are generally taken up in carriages, and, according to
the testimony of experienced electioneering agents, 80
out of every 100 voters are taken up at the expense of
the Candidate for whom they vote. The time is past
when 50,000?. or 60,0.00?. used to be spent at once at
this pastime ; but even now the evil is often most enor-
mous. In one of the metropolitan boroughs the cost of
the last election was about 12,000?., though only 8000
voters were polled, — being an expense of thirty shillings
a head. By the plan proposed nearly the whole of this
wasteful outlay would be avoided.

But this is not all. We must add to the cost of
elections the loss of time, and of the earnings of time, by
all the industrious voters of whatever rank, whose day
is broken in upon, and generally wholly lost, by going
up to the poll. Considering their numbers, and the
class to which they belong, we cannot estimate the

o o 4

568 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

average loss to the electors, from the interruption of
their regular avocations, at less than five shillings fo r
the day or half day wasted. Strike off from the 500,000
voters belonging to the contested places, the idle whose
time is of no value ; and to the million of money which
a general election is calculated to cost the Candidates,
you must add about 125,000^. sterling more which it
costs to the Constituents.

Fourthly. You would add almost incalculably to the
number of voters, i. e. of those who recorded their votes.

We showed, on a former occasion, that there was
great reason for believing that of those possessed of the
suffrage not more than from 50 to 60 per cent, took the
trouble to exercise it, at least in the larger constituencies ;
and we have since had sent to us a statement of the
number who voted in the contests on the last election,
which fully confirms our estimate ; though, as it is in a
great measure conjectural, we do not insert it. Now, were
the plan of voting papers adopted, and were these papers,
as in Scotland, returnable whether filled up or not, every
one would vote except those who had some distinct and
positive motive for abstaining. Those who now do not
vote because it takes them away from their business, or
because it would lose them a day's work or a chance
customer, or because they are lazy, or because they do
not like to encounter a hot crowd, or a noisy and
possibly hostile mob, would then be left without any
excuse for such unpatriotic abnegation of their functions.
But we are not left to conjecture as to the effect which
the change would produce on the numbers who exercise
the franchise. In parochial contests the number has
often trebled since the introduction of the new plan. In
one union, of which the return is now before us, the
numbers polled on the old system in 1847, on an occasion
of great parish interest, when very considerable efforts
were made on both sides, were 531 against 497, or a

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 569

total of 1028. In 1852, under the new plan, the
corresponding numbers were 742 against 596, or 1338.
But, fifthly, a still more important point would be
gained. The new votes — those which are now lost,
but would then be given — would belong to precisely
the members of the constituency whose votes we most
desire to get, — viz. the industrious, the quiet, the re-
tiring and the moderate. A great proportion of the
votes now seldom recorded are those of men of business,
merchants, manufacturers, bankers and tradesmen, —
who will not or cannot leave their work, but who
would vote as they went home, if the polling booth
lay in their way, and was kept open after business
hours. In London, Liverpool, and Glasgow, the number
of votes thus lost is immense. We heard of one case at
the last election where 800 electors of this description,
who had delayed till the eleventh hour, came too late,
and were shut out. In London this is one constant
cause of the small proportion of the registered electors
which decides the contests. Now, it is very well to say
that men who are thus languid and lukewarm in the
discharge of their electoral functions do not deserve to
possess them ; this is true enough ; but these are just
the men whom it is desirable, for the good of the country,
should possess them, and exercise them too, — and there-
fore it is incumbent on us, and a matter of common
sense, to make the exercise of them as easy as possible.
The idle, the exciteable, the passionate, the bribable,
will vote fast enough : we must smooth the path to the
poll for those whose counteracting influence the welfare
of the state requires. And this brings us to the final
and most pregnant observation, that the more we can
secure the actual action of these men, the less important
and preponderating in an election do the lower class of
voters, the bribable and the corruptible, become, and the

570 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

more effective and fatal is the blow you have struck at
both bribery and intimidation.

Lastly. The plan would effect the very desirable
aim of equalising electoral action in times of excitement
and in times of indifference and stagnation. Under the
existing system, in periods of quiet and prosperity,
when mens' reason and good sense may be expected to
be paramount because their passions are comparatively
dormant, and when, therefore, the opinions of our
people would be unusually valuable because unusually
deliberate and sober, it is next to impossible to persuade
any considerable number of them to be at the trouble
of recording their votes. But on all more turbulent
and angry occasions, when some popular cry has been
sent forth, or some epidemic prejudice aroused, when
men are blinded by panic or warped by delusion, or
rendered furious by suffering — far larger numbers flock
to the poll, and those who go there are, many of them,
precisely the men who, as far as the object of a calm
decision is concerned, it is specially important should
stay away. By the new mode of voting, on the con-
trary, the exercise of the electoral function would be
made so easy, that the minimum of motive and of
conscience would suffice to secure it; and we might
count on a nearly equal number of votes — i. e. an equally
general expression of public sentiment — whatever were
the peculiar circumstances under which the election
took place.

We have then here a plan which is no new or rash
experiment ; which has been in operation for many
years with signal benefit in a case with which the
analogy is nearly perfect ; which will increase the
number of actual electors nearly as much as most
liberals can hope for; which will raise the class, and
improve the character of the voters almost as much as
we could desire; which will give us the judgment of

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 571

the constituencies in their cooler as well as in their
wilder moods; which will greatly diminish both the
motives to bribery and the relative numbers of the
bribable; which will put an end to election riots and
disturbances; which will materially mitigate one sort
of intimidation and wholly preclude another ; and which
will so reduce the expense of elections as to render
parliament no longer accessible exclusively to the
wealthy and to the wasteful. Nay more. It would
not only, to a great extent, supersede the motives for
having recourse to the ballot ; but it is an arrangement
on which secrecy might, if found necessary, and where
found necessary, be easily engrafted. In any case
where intimidation was known to be habitually prac-
tised to such an extent as to vitiate the genuineness of
the election, an order emanating from the designated
authority (say, the Speaker or the Privy Council) could
swear the returning officer and his two assessors to
secrecy, and the object is attained at once, pro hac vice,
and in hoc loco.* The only parties from whom we
anticipate any opposition to the plan proposed, are, first,
the routiniers, to whom anything novel is startling and

* Practical difficulties in working the plan may no doubt be sug-
gested ; but for all these experience would soon suggest remedies also.
Domiciliary intimidation in the filling up of the papers might, by
simply reducing the time between the delivery and the collection of
them, be made to require such a staff of bullies as would render it
practically impossible. Attested marks must be allowed at first, and
might give rise to some abuse ; but the number of those who could
not write their names would yearly diminish ; and ere long the refusal
to accept marks in lieu of signatures might form a simple, self-acting,
and justifiable educational condition. But the mode of meeting all
these minutiae, and of perfecting the mechanical arrangements, is one
of the points to which such a commission of inquiry as we have
already suggested would naturally direct its attention. When the
principle of the thing has once been cordially adopted, there will
always be found men of practical experience to devise the requisite
machinery,

572 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

shocking, — but their hostility, time and reflection will
wear away; — secondly, the corrupters and corruptible
of every class — electioneering agents, freemen, publicans,
and other sinners — those who sell votes and those who
buy them, and those who profit indirectly by the
nefarious accompaniments of an election; but the op-
position of these men has this inherent impotence
about it, that it cannot be arrayed in a decorous or
presentable shape; — thirdly, those who are of opinion
that elections ought to be costly by way of giving ap-
propriate influence to wealth and rank ; but this argu-
ment, again, cannot be paraded in the face of day ; and,
lastly, those radical politicians who believe (and probably
with reason) that the additional votes obtained by the
alteration will not be recorded in their favour. Whether
the hostility of these classes can or ought to weigh one
atom in the scale when set against such an array of
beneficial consequences as we have developed — which
would make this single measure almost, if not altogether
a greater Reform Bill than the first, — it will be for the
nation, when appealed to, to decide.

III. The third point which would demand attention
in a reform of our representative system would un-
doubtedly be the re- distribution of members, with a
view to their better assignment among different in-
terests and different divisions of the country. The
great complaint among the more advanced of the liberal
party, on this branch of the subject, respects the dis-
proportionate representation of small towns, the reten-
tion, as parliamentary boroughs, of places entirely or
predominantly under the influence of individual pro-
prietors, and the non-observance of any fixed relation
between population, or property, and representation.
Now, on a careful review of the subject, we are bound
to say that the current notions on these subjects appear

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 573

to us to have been hastily taken up, and, while containing
an undoubted element both of sound doctrine and of
true fact, to contain much exaggeration also. For-
tunately a recent return made to parliament (No. 441.)
enables us to lay before our readers a few considerations
which may, perhaps, modify the opinions some of them
have hitherto entertained.

In the first place, it may be conceded at once that
if population, i. e. mere numbers, ought, or was ever
intended, to form the basis of representation, it is
strangely set at nought in our existing arrangements.
But let us see what would be the result of a distribution
of members according to population, and then reflect if
we are prepared to approve such a result as equitable,
or desire it as beneficial. At present in England we
have 186 cities and boroughs scattered over the country,
returning 321 members. If population were our guide
in the assignment of these members, one half of these, or
163, would be returned by only 20 towns ; of which 20
towns 3 would be in Lancashire, 4 in Yorkshire, and 8
would be Metropolitan i. e. either in Middlesex or close
to it (as Southwark and Greenwich). Or, 129 borough
members, or 40 per cent of the whole, would be returned
by 3 counties. Again: 69 county divisions now return
144 knights of the shire. If population be taken as
our basis (throwing out the represented towns), 9 of
these divisions would return 43 members, or nearly
one-third of the whole. Of these 9, 3, viz. Middlesex,
Lancashire, and Yorkshire (West Riding), would return
28 knights, or 20 per cent, of the whole number sent
by all England: that is, of the total 465 members
(knights and burgesses) returned by England, three
counties would elect 157, or more than one-third of the
whole. A result which surely is scarcely defensible in
theory, nor could be endured in practice.

Secondly. At present we may be said to have three

574 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

distinct sorts of constituencies, — counties, small boroughs,
and cities or large towns. Each of these classes has a
distinctive character of its own. Now, reckoning as
small boroughs those under 10,000 inhabitants, we
have, —

69 counties (or divisions)

with a population* of 9,770,000 ; returning 144 members.
114 large towns - 6,660,000 „ 206 „
72 small towns 480,000 „ 115 „

From this comparison it would appear that the large
towns have their full share of the representation ; since,
if we add the small boroughs to the counties, on the
supposition of their returning a somewhat similar class
of members and containing a somewhat similar consti-
tuency, the comparison would stand thus : —

Population. Members.

Counties and small boroughs - 10,250,000 259
Large towns and cities - - 6,660,000 206

whereas the proper arithmetical proportion for the cities
would be 169 instead of 206.

Nor, thirdly, if we remark how large a proportion of
our population reside in small towns, does the number
of 115 members seem so undue an assignment to this
class of the community, who are in some respects a
characteristic class, differing alike from the purely
rural, and the stirring and energetic city population.
It is customary with the more extreme reformers to
declaim thus : " What a scandal that Honiton, with
only 3500 inhabitants, should return as many members
as Liverpool with 376,000; and Arundel, with 2750,
as many as Salford, with 85,000 !" But the apparent
scandal is wonderfully mitigated, if not altogether re-
moved, when we observe that every Liverpool and
every Salford is represented, but only three out of 60

* Exclusive of represented towns.

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 575

Honitons, and only one out of 90 Arundels. Every town
with more than 25,000 inhabitants is represented, but
the eighty-six towns containing between 2000 and 3000
inhabitants, with an aggregate population of 227,000,
have only one member among them ; of the fifty -eight
towns, with from 3000 to 4000 inhabitants, and an
aggregate population of 212,000, only three are re-
presented ; of the forty-four towns, with from 4000 to
5000 inhabitants, and an aggregate population of
199,000, only nine are represented; and so on. The
member for Honiton and the member for Arundel — if
regarded, as they ought to be, as representing all the
unrepresented towns of that size and sort, — have a
constituency as numerous as that of Birmingham and
Southwark.

Fourthly. Nor, if we can once shake ourselves free
from the foreign idea that mere numbers ought to be
taken as the basis of our representative arrangements,
does the distribution of members among the manu-
facturing and agricultural districts appear nearly as
unfavourable to the former as we are in the habit of
assuming it to be, and of condemning it for being.
For instance, we find that the four pre-eminently agri-
cultural counties of Bedford, Hereford, Lincoln, and
Essex, return only 33 members, while the four pre-
eminently manufacturing counties of Lancashire, Che-
shire, Warwickshire, and the West Riding, have 64
members assigned to them as their share. Cases exist,
no doubt, which must be promptly rectified, of in-
defensible inequality; such as Devonshire, which has
22 representatives, and Wiltshire, which has 18. But
passing over these two instances, and comparing the
electoral strength of the more industrial, concentrated,
and energetic populations (among which the reforming
demand is supposed to be most loudly heard), with
that of the rural and quiet districts (which it is pro-

576

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

posed still further to weaken), we find that ten of the
largest counties of the former class return 1 43 members,
and ten of the latter only 104. Thus : —

Lancashire -
West Biding
Sussex -
Staffordshire -
Middlesex
Northumberland
Cheshire
Durham
Nottingham -
Warwickshire

. 26

• 18

Hampshire -
Somerset

• 18

Lincoln

• 17

Dorset -

• 14

Oxford

• 11
• 10

Northampton
Herefordshire

- 10

Hertford

9
• 10

Huntingdon -
Essex -

143

- 16

- 15

- 13

- 14

- 9

- 8

- 7

- 7

- 5

- 10

104

Although, therefore, we are fully alive to the neces-
sity of dealing vigorously with the case of small
boroughs, our opinion is not grounded on the alleged
unfairness of allowing them their due share in the
representation. If their constituencies were in general
pure and independent, or any secure plan of making
them so could be devised, we should regard them as an
important and valuable element in our constitutional
system. But the great majority of them are notoriously
undeserving of the franchise, and those who know them
best are least disposed to undertake their defence.
The plan of combining a number of them into one
constituency would be futile or beneficial according to
the details of each individual case. If a close or a
rotten borough were amalgamated with an open or a
manufacturing town, much advantage might possibly
result; if two or three corrupt or manageable con-
stituencies merely united their iniquities, the evil of
the existing state of things would only be spread
further and rooted faster. We should propose, there-

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 577

fore, at once to reduce the 61 boroughs with fewer
than 500 electors, and now returning 91 members, to
one representative each. This would leave thirty seats
to be disposed of.

In case of gross and general bribery, or clear de-
pendence, being proved against any of these consti-
tuencies before the tribunal already hinted at it should
be disfranchised, and its elective right transferred to
such other towns as parliament might appoint. By
this enactment a strong motive would be given to pure
and decorous elections, while, at the same time, a
standing provision will have been made for the pur-
gation of the anomalies and impurities of our system,
and for the gradual enfranchisement of rising cities.
Thirty seats, however, would be at once at the disposal
of the reforming legislature. Two of these we propose
to allot to the London University, one to Glasgow, and
one to Edinburgh, as an act of just liberality and
popular concession, but also as a means of opening an
access to parliament for that class of men who are by
opinions or habits unstated to popular constituencies,
but who, nevertheless, would make most valuable sena-
tors, and from whom their former resource, close
boroughs, has been cut away. The remaining twenty-
six seats we would deal with in a somewhat novel
manner.

There are individuals who under our present system
either do not find seats in parliament, or find them
with much difficulty, or obtain them only at the cost
of some injurious fetters, or some suppression or modi-
fication of their real views, some damage, therefore,
both to the purity of their conscience and to their
power of usefulness, — whom nevertheless it is most
important for the interests of the empire to have in
public life. Either their manners are unpopular, or
they have given offence to some local prejudice, or they

VOL, n. p p

578 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

are too unbending to suit large and miscellaneous con-
stituencies ; or their views are too profound and com-
prehensive to be appreciated by such ; or the subjects
with which they are specially conversant, though of
vital moment to the empire, are not of a nature to
excite the interest of local bodies; yet in every con-
stituency there are some electors who can appreciate
their value. To take one illustration of our meaning :
Sir James Graham is, by universal consent, about our
ablest administrative statesman, — the statesman of all
others whom sensible men of every party would most
grieve to see excluded from parliament ; yet he has
never been popular with any constituency, has always
found a difficulty in obtaining a seat, and has never
(it is said) sat twice for the same place. Further,
if parliament had been dissolved on the Papal Aggres-
sion question, though a minority in every constituency
shared his notions, he would have been elected by a
majority in none ; and would either have lost his seat
altogether, or have been obliged to stoop to the igno-
miny of an Irish Roman clientele.

Again, the most valuable men, almost, whom we can
have in public life, are the philosophic and eclectic
politicians — a large sprinkling of them at least ; men
who can repeat the shibboleth and echo the watchword
of no party; who are too conscientious and reflective
to "go the whole hog" with any; who belong to one
side by three points of their creed, but to the opposite
side by the fourth ; who, it may be, are zealous free
traders when the Negro question does not come in
to complicate the discussion ; or who are Conservatives
quoad the state, but reformers quoad the church; or
who hold with the Radicals on practical and adminis-
trative, but dissent from them as to organic changes ;
who, in a word, think for themselves, and think in detail
and not in the lump. Now, there are scarcely any con-

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 579

stituencies with whom such men can find favour ; they
are condemned as crotchetty, subtle, and inconsistent ;
they are in the position of the "Ugly Duck" of Hans
Andersen's tale, whom no one discovered to be an
incipient swan ; the conservative electors eschew them
as reformers ; the liberal electors snub them as " un-
sound" and not "thorough;" being "guilty in one
point," they are sentenced as violators of "the whole
law ;" — of whom the world — that is the constituencies
of England — is not worthy.

Again, questions connected with our Indian and our
Colonial Empire will ere long become the most pressing
and important with which parliament has to deal.
Yet such is the state of feeling and knowledge, or
rather the want of feeling and knowledge, prevalent on
these topics in England, that mastery over them and
sound views regarding them will be no effective re-
commendation to any local constituency ; and the most
complete ignoramus on these matters will be preferred
to the ablest and justest thinker, if the first be "right,"
and the second " wrong," on a question of local, or
passing, or party politics. We want, and shall want
increasingly, representatives specially conversant with,
and free to devote themselves exclusively to, imperial
interests^ hampered by no fears or pledges, and com-
pelled to consult the narrow prejudices of no limited
constituency.

Before the Eeform Bill, close or nomination boroughs
furnished men of this class with an avenue to par-
liament ; since that date a few of the smaller and more
manageable constituencies have answered the same pur-
pose. But as any further representative changes will
close this channel likewise, it is important to devise
some adequate and honourable substitute. The pro-
posed increase of members for learned bodies will do
something, though not much, in this direction. Our

p r 2

580 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

suggestion is this ; it would at once and fully meet the
purpose aimed at; and, to the best of our belief, is
open to no objection, except its novelty. Let the
twenty-six seats which remain to be disposed of be
assigned to NATIONAL REPRESENTATIVES, to be chosen as
follows: — Let any elector who pleases require the
revising barrister to remove his name from the local,
and place it on the national register, which shall be
separately published. When an election takes place,
let the candidates for the national representation issue
their addresses, and let the national electors decide
upon their merits. The voting in this case might take
place by written papers, signed and sent to the central
office ; each elector voting either for one candidate, or
for three, or for all, as might on further consideration
seem advisable.

By this arrangement, you would at once create a
higher class both of electors and of representatives.
Those who placed themselves on the national register,
would be for the most part men of more thoughtful
habits, more extensive information, and wider views
than the mass of the enfranchised body. Those too,
who, from being at issue with the overpowering majority
of their fellow- townsmen or fellow-freeholders, found
their votes utterly ineffective and thrown away in their
several localities, would thus be enabled to transfer
them to an arena where they would have a bond fide
value. At present a Conservative elector in a borough
where five-sixths of the voters are Liberals, or the con-
verse, finds himself virtually disfranchised : his voice is
that of one crying in the wilderness. You would secure
a certain number of pure elections, degraded by no
canvass, biassed by no mean personal motives, purchased
by no unworthy compliances, attended with no undig-
nified or indecorous concomitants, realising, in fact,
something like the ideal of representation, and furnishing

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 581

a valuable nucleus of high example. And you would
secure the presence in parliament of a class of men free
to consider nothing but the public good, because undis-
turbed by fear concerning their future re-election, and
confident in the capacity of their constituents to appre-
ciate both their motives and their conduct.*

Fully impressed with the growing extent and increas-
ing population of our colonies, and the importance of
attaching them to the mother country by every tie of
interest and affection ; feeling too both the justice and
the wisdom of treating them as far as possible like
integral portions of our empire ; we have considered
with some care the question of allowing them to send
representatives to parliament, but are not on the whole
inclined to think favourably of the scheme. A member
to each colony or group, or perhaps two to the more
important ones, would be the largest allotment we could
afford. These men would come to the House of Com-
mons naturally impressed with an undue and dispro-
portionate idea of the importance of their respective
constituencies in the balance of imperial concerns, and
would demand more than their fair share of attention
and deference; if pertinacious would be voted bores;
if comparatively yielding would feel a sense of ill-usage
and neglect, which they would not fail to communicate
to the colony they represented ; and in any case, with
whatever respect they were listened to, would find them-
selves lost, swamped, and overlaid amid the vast majo-
rity of British members, and the more urgent presence
of British interests. Their votes would be few, and their
influence, save on special questions, little felt. Their
fitting and far more effectual place would be in the
executive, not in the legislative department of the state.

* The suggestion here put forth was first made by a gentleman to
whom the country is indebted for one of the greatest administrative
improvements of our times.

p p 3

582 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

The whole system of our colonial administration im-
peratively clamours for revision ; and a governing board
in which representatives from our colonies shall find an
influential and recognised position, will probably be the
solution of the problem.

No new Reform Bill will, we trust, be introduced to
the consideration of parliament, without a clause con-
ferring on the sovereign the right of nominating to
ex-officio seats (without votes) in the House of Commons
those ministers, being commoners, whom the public
service requires should belong to that House. We have
never heard any objection to this proposal of the slightest
weight. No evil can be suggested as likely to arise
from it ; whereas the evil arising from the absence of
such a provision is serious and constant. It not only
limits the Queen's choice of her ministers, but it almost
habitually prevents her from choosing the best men.
It enables, moreover, any cross-grained or corrupt con-
stituency to negative Her Majesty's appointments. This
is an evil which has grown out of the Reform Act;
before that measure it did not sensibly exist, for govern-
ment and nomination boroughs afforded an irregular
way out of the difficulty. Let us see the operation
of the defect in a single set of cases — the appointment
of the Crown lawyers. The attorney and solicitor-
generals ought unquestionably to be selected as being
the ablest and soundest lawyers at the bar, holding
the opinions of the ministry of the day. There should
be no other consideration in their appointment. But
as the law now stands, the Queen's choice is limited
first, to those barristers who can securely count upon
a seat in parliament by election or re-election, as the
case may be. She is often obliged to pass over the
best man, or two or three of the best men, and select
her legal agents from among the second or third-rate
lawyers in her realm. This is very objectionable in

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 583

itself; but the evil does not stop here. The attorney -
and solicitor-generals have, by immemorial and ad-
mitted custom, the claim to the highest judicial offices
which fall vacant during their tenure of office : thus
the incompetent or undesirable barrister is raised to
the highest judicial dignity, not in consequence of his
qualification for the Bench, but simply because he hap-
pened some time before to have had a firm hold on
some parliamentary constituency. The Judge is ap-
pointed, not because he is the light and ornament of the
bar, — the profoundest lawyer and the most impartial
and dignified mind in his profession, — but because he
was a successful candidate at the hustings. It would
be indelicate to mention names ; but very recent times
and nearly every ministry since 1832, could furnish in-
stances of the practical pressure of the evil we are
anxious to remove. Nor is the mischief confined to
the legal profession. Many a man would make an
admirable Under Secretary of State, whose fortune or
circumstances do not enable him to enter on a regular
parliamentary career, or to encounter a popular con-
stituency, and who is, therefore, to his own discomfiture
and to his country's detriment, shut out from office.
The most desirable man cannot be appointed Colonial
Minister, because his seat, if vacated, might be irre-
coverable. Administrations cannot strengthen them-
selves by the alliance of colleagues who possess the
confidence of the general public, because the place for
which they sit has been offended by some unpopular
vote or speech. We need add no more on this head:
the peculiarity of the case is that we have no adverse
arguments to meet. Vis inertia?, and hatred of novelty,
are our only antagonists.

After all, however, these various suggestions, what-
ever be their value, regard only the material, and as it
were the corporeal, portion of representative reform.

584 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

Something more and something deeper is needed if that
reform is to be searching and effective. The wisest
arrangements, the most obvious improvements, in the
mere machinery of the system, will go little way to-
wards the attainment of the end we seek, without some
renovation and elevation of our moral notions in all
that regards elections. Unless we can succeed in in-
fusing into the rninds of both electors and candidates a
due sense of the dignity and solemnity of the function
which is exercised by the first, and of the sacredness of
the trust which is aspired to by the second, the wisest
Reform Bill may be but a lifeless letter. We have just
seen a great nation, — boasting itself, not without reason,
the most advanced and enlightened upon earth, rich in
material wealth, rich in boundless territory, rich in
long-descended liberties, rich in all memories which
should bind it to live worthily, to think nobly, to act
decorously, — proceed to discharge the most solemn and
momentous function of its national existence. It had
to select, out of all the thousands of capable men whom
it contains, those who were to govern it and legislate
for it for the next six or seven years ; to whose care
were to be entrusted its mighty and varied interests ;
to whose integrity and wisdom were to be committed
the concerns, moral and material (as far as government
and legislation can affect them), of many millions of
citizens, and many scores of millions of dependent tribes ;
on whose honour and judgment were to depend the
character, the comfort, the existence even, of themselves
and their children — the progress of many great ques-
tions which they have much at heart — the possibilities
of a grand future, the continuance of an honourable
past ! Surely, this was a function to be approached
with the utmost gravity, to be discharged with the
greatest decorum, to be fulfilled under an absorbing
sense of the wide responsibility attaching to it. To

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 585

choose those who were to govern, not ourselves only,
but myriads of others also, was surely a matter demand-
ing the most careful deliberation, and the most con-
scientious caution : no selfish motive, no petty passion,
no private predilection, could be allowed to interfere
where considerations so immense and so various were
at stake : every man must bring to the task his most
enlightened judgment, his sternest honesty, his highest
powers. This is the theory : what was the fact ? This
is what we might have expected to see : what is it that
we have seen ?

We have witnessed a scene in which all the better
part of our national nature seemed to be abnegated and
put off like a garment — which in many of its details
should make Englishmen blush for themselves and for
their country. We have seen a sort of saturnalia — a
licensed holiday for airing all the mean and bad passions
of humanity ; we have seen thousands drunk with
foolish frenzy, hundreds of thousands drunk with igno-
minious beer ; we have seen writers and orators busy in
arousing envy, hatred, and malignity, by every stimu-
lant within their reach ; in awakening every furious
feeling which ought to slumber for ever, and in torpify-
ing every controlling principle which should never for
an hour be laid to sleep ; we have seen calumny and
falsehood indulging themselves to an extent which, in
ordinary times, they would not venture to approach ;
we have seen independent electors selling themselves,
some for gold, some for flattery, some for ambition or
revenge ; we have seen respectable and noble candidates
fawning, cringing, and truckling, in order to obtain a
distinction which is honourable only when honourably
gained ; we have seen men who would not steal from a
shop, yet complacently pocketing a bribe, and men who,
at other times, would counsel no doubtful or disreput-
able deed, yet now asking a voter to sell his conscience

586 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

and his country. In a word, we have witnessed scenes
of low, dirty, shameless iniquity, which fill us with a
double wonder : wonder that from so strange and guilty
a process such a result as even a decent House of
Commons can ever be obtained ; wonder that so many
men fitted to be legislators — high-minded, patriotic,
honourable men, who desire a seat in parliament from
no sordid or unworthy motives — should be content to
wade to that eminence through such a sea of clinging
and soiling mire.

Not for the wealth of worlds, not for the empire of
the old Caesars, would we consent to lay upon our
conscience the sins and sufferings comprised in, and
consequent upon, a general election as now conducted
— the covetous desires aroused, the malignant passions
excited and let loose, the debauchery stimulated and
assisted ; the wounded self-respect, the tarnished honour,
the compromised independence of many candidates ; the
social ruin of the honest voter who stands sturdily by
his principles ; the moral ruin of the bribed or bullied
voter who deserts them ; the conceptions of a whole
people incalculably bewildered and relaxed. For it is a
mistake to suppose that the evil passes with the hour —
that the old sense of right, and justice, and truth revives
in its pristine clearness as soon as the temporary storm
which obscured it has swept past. " Some leaves fall
off every time the tree is shaken." Let us look for a
moment at the varieties of moral mischief produced by
the late election, so as to form some estimate of the real
cost of a new parliament, as* now chosen, to the better
elements of a nation's life. How many candidates, of
gentlemanly birth and education — desiring a seat in
parliament for the gratification of honest ambition, or
for the real object of serving their country and for-
warding great public objects — have yet purchased that
seat by mean compliances, which ought to leave ever

EEPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 587

after a weight upon their consciences, and must almost
incapacitate them from turning to good a power which
has been so unworthily obtained ! How many have
" filed their mind," as Shakspeare calls it, to meet the
angry passions or foolish prejudices of the ignorant
constituents whose votes they were soliciting — have, in
clerical fashion, swallowed in the lump all the articles
of a political creed, only a few of which they cordially
believed — and have stretched, clipped, and warped their
opinions to fit those of their committee or their borough !
How many have perverted an occasion which, properly
used, should be the most serviceable of all for the poli-
tical education of the people — for instructing them in
facts, for enlightening them as to principles, for eradi-
cating false impressions, and preparing them for the
proper discharge of their electoral duties — into an
opportunity of confirming their prejudices, of endorsing
their errors, of sealing and sanctioning their ignorance !
How many — how nearly all — by going to their consti-
tuents, cap in hand, and soliciting their suffrages humbly,
beseechingly, and as a personal favour — have utterly
confounded and perverted in the minds of these men
the true nature and reciprocal obligations of the relation
between the representative and the electors, and have
thus made themselves so many missionaries of miscon-
ception and demoralisation among the people ! How
few, who have gone through the ordeal of a hot contest
and a hustings' cross-examination, can bear witness to
themselves that they have, in all things, held fast their
integrity ; that they have evaded no unpopular, 'but
much needed, declaration ; that they have glossed over
or pushed into the background no unpalatable, but salu-
tary, truth ; that they have never apologised and ex-
cused, " with bated breath and whispering humbleness,"
where they ought to have boasted loudly and defended
boldly ; that they have never been ashamed of that

588 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

which really was their glory, and gloried in that which
was their shame !

Of drunken debauchery there is always a deplorable
amount on these occasions. They are the rich harvest
times of the publicans. There are few boroughs, except
the very largest, in which beer, gratis and ad libitum, is
not provided for all electors, and for hundreds who are
not electors, but mere hangers-on, whose support, vocal
or manual, it is thought may be serviceable. By this
means, the election week is the period whence numbers
date their ruin. To the reclaimed drunkard, it is often
the return of " the sow that was washed to its wallow-
ing in the mire ;" to the young man, it is the first fall
from which he may never be able to recover ; to the
wife and children of many a previously sober and indus-
trious labourer, it is the commencement of a long course
of domestic wretchedness — of poverty, desertion, and
ultimate shame and crime. There are few persons con-
versant with elections who could not tell individual tales
of this sort.

Let us look at another item of the account. It is re-
ported, that bribery has been more extensively resorted
to at this election than for many previous years. But
be this as it may, there is no doubt that it has prevailed,
and always does prevail, to an infamous degree. Now,
what is bribery when stripped naked, and undraperied
by any of the softening phrases in which some faint
remains of shame generally endeavour to disguise it ?
On the part of the corrupter, it is giving a man money
to violate his conscience — to say that which he knows
to be false — to do that which he knows to be wrong.
It is offering him a mess of pottage, not to sell his
birthright, but to betray his trust. It is hiring and
tempting him to sin. It is, therefore, in the most pre-
cise sense, doing the devil's work. On the part of the
corrupted, it is taking gold to send to parliament, as

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 589

arbiter of the destinies of his fellow-citizens, the man
whom he knows that he ought not to send. It is to
accept blood-money. It is to lay upon his conscience
all the evil which may result from the votes and influ-
ence of the man he thus nefariously sends. It is,
simply and undisguisedly, selling himself to the tempter.
It is to barter his virtue for a bank-note. It is to do
that as a man, which in a woman is held the lowest
abyss of infamy. The nation — gentlemen and poor men
— have yet to be taught to view it in this light, before
any new Reform Bill can produce its proper fruits.

Of the amount of intimidation and undue influence of
every sort which was practised at the late election it is
probably impossible to form an exaggerated estimate.
Landlords, customers, and employers have held worldly
suffering over the heads of the unhappy electors, while
priests have brandished spiritual terrors in their face.
For voting according to their own judgment, i. e. for
doing their clear and imperative duty — they have been
threatened by the first with poverty, and by the last
with damnation. They have been told that if they acted
like honest men, their farms would be taken from them,
or the sacraments would be refused them. They have
thus been compelled either to flinch from their duty, or
to do it under peril of earthly destitution or of eternal
punishment. This is the mode in which our citizens
have been educated in their civic duties. Nor does the
guilt of this enormous wickedness lie altogether at the
door of those who practise it : it must be divided in a
far more equal measure than is commonly allowed,
between the actual perpetrators and the nation, which
year after year, in spite of warning, remonstrance, and
entreaty, has yet persisted in leaving its perpetration
possible. Let us look a little more closely at the mode
in which intimidation operates. The voter is a humble
tenant-farmer, an honest shopkeeper, or an industrious

590 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

artisan. He has a wife and children whom he has
brought up well. After years of patient toil he has
begun to prosper in the world ; to enjoy in the present
and see in the future the natural recompense of his
frugality and diligence. He is about to vote for a
candidate whose principles he approves, and on whose
character he places a just reliance. But his landlord,
his chief customers, or his employers, favour the rival
candidate, and scruple at no means of coercion to obtain
the victory. They respect no man's conscience, and care
for no man's ruin. They exercise their power without
delicacy and without mercy. They insist upon the
elector voting not as he thinks, but as they think. If
he yields to the tyrannical pressure, and consents to
purchase safety and worldly comfort by the sacrifice of
his integrity, it is not for us, who have first conferred
the franchise upon him, and then neglected to secure to
him its unfettered exercise, — to judge him severely or
to blame him harshly. But his peace of mind is ruined ;
his self-respect is gone ; he feels himself a degraded and
dishonoured man ; and either his life is one of ceaseless
self-reproach, or as is (more probable) his first sin paves
the way for future ones, and the declivity becomes
easier and sharper with every temptation and with
every failure.

But suppose that he stands to his colours, holds fast
his integrity, discharges his duty, and performs his
promise. He is turned out of doors, and his family
perhaps reduced to want. The fruit of long years of
persevering and honest industry is lost — he is flung
back to the bottom of the hill up which he has been
climbing so manfully, with slow and painful steps, ever
since his youth ; he must leave his garden or his farm ;
he must sell his shop ; he must seek out another home
and a new employer ; — and all this because he has
conscientiously done what his country called upon him

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 591

to do, and was bound to protect him in doing. We
declare that we scarcely know which most excite our
amazement and our reprobation : the robbers and
oppressors who inflict these sufferings ; the candidates
who can bear, year after year, to call on their supporters
for such sacrifices; or the statesmen who have been
cognisant of these enormities for half a lifetime, yet have
made no gigantic or decisive effort to suppress them.
We do not understand how, parliament after parliament,
they CAN ask poor and struggling electors to go through
this fiery furnace of affliction and persecution in order
to carry them into power or to sustain them there ;
or how they can enjoy power so purchased and so
cemented !

Of the many other iniquities practised at a general
election — all needing only a juster view of civic duty
and of civic rights, and a purer and more natural
standard of public morality, to sweep them away like
chaff — we have left ourselves no room to speak. But
when we sum up the whole — the brutal drunkenness ;
the low intrigues ; the wholesale corruption ; the bar-
barous intimidation ; the integrity of candidates warped
and stained; the honest electors who are ruined; the
feeble ones who are suborned and dishonoured ; the lies,
the stratagems, the slanders, which stalk abroad in the
daylight, naked and not ashamed ; the desecration of
holy words ; the soiling of noble names — we stand
aghast at the holocaust of victims — of destroyed bodies
and lost souls, on whose funeral pile every new parlia-
ment is reared. And if we believed, which we do not,
that these things are inherent and irremovable in our
representative system, we should think it high time to
sit down gravely and to count its cost.

In conclusion : while feeling how impossible it is, and
how unjust and how unwise it would be, to take our final

592 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

stand on so imperfect and so improvable a measure as the
Reform Act of 1832 ; while satisfied that it would be
no very arduous task to devise a scheme of amended
representation which every one might hail, and which
110 one need to dread ; and while strongly impressed
with the conviction that a period of prosperity and
quiet is peculiarly the fitting moment for laying broad
and deep the foundations of that harmony among all
classes which alone can carry us safely through the
perils of turbulent and troublous times, we are yet
urgent above all things in preaching the wisdom of a
cautionary and self- collecting pause, till we have realised
our actual position, and deliberately resolved upon our
future course. It is not action that we fear, but rash
action. Till now, the only points of representative re-
form that have been really ventilated and at all ade-
quately discussed, regard the lowering of the electoral
qualification and the introduction of the ballot — two
points which, salient as they are, are yet, if the views
we have developed in this paper be correct, only single
items of a great account — partial glimpses of a vast
question. The subject must now be embraced and
treated as a whole ; and on that whole, few statesmen,
in or out of parliament, who have comprehended its
magnitude, have made up their minds, or profess to see
their way. It is not the simple, small, and isolated
question which superficial and dilettanti politicians on
both sides consider it. Before we can be ripe for action,
we shall need information which has yet scarcely been
asked for, and time for the mature weighing of reflec-
tions which have only just begun to suggest themselves.
Our next step should be a final one, for we cannot
afford to have a perpetual series of Reform Bills. Our
next step, even if it be not a final, will, at all events, be
a conclusive one, for it will decide in what direction,
and probably at what rate, all future steps shall be

REPRESENTATIVE REFORM. 593

made. A false step in advance of what is wise cannot
be retraced ; a defeat, consequent on attempting to
defend an entrenchment in the rear of what is just,
cannot be repaired. Our position must be chosen now

the principle by which we are determined to abide —

the ground on which we mean to take our stand. It is,
therefore, of vital moment that that position should
be selected with the most deliberate judgment and
should be one that will be defensible not for a time only,
but for ever. If as, judging by their language, many
seem to think, an overpowering, if not a pure democracy,
were our inevitable goal; if universal suffrage, which
all deprecate, were sooner or later the destined con-
summation of our polity; and all that wisdom and
patriotism could do were to make the process as slow as
might be, to die hard, to concede inch by inch, and
postpone to the utmost the decreed evil — we confess
we should have little heart to prolong the hopeless con-
test, and defer the inevitable fate. But we feel no such
faithless despondency. We do not believe that, in
England, unless the matter be deplorably mismanaged,
we need ever concede anything which wisdom and
justice command us to withhold. We are so satisfied
that a really just position is not only always an a vow-
able and a defensible one, but the most defensible one,
(and weak and expugnable only when not avowed, but
masked by a timid faithlessness in the power of truth,)
that we are disposed to consider only what we ought to
do, and to give little heed to representations of what
we must do. We would seek safety, conciliation, and
social harmony not by compromise, but by justice; not
by giving to all classes the half of what they ask, but
the whole of what they ought to have.

Time, however, for that adequate deliberation before
action which can alone render action safe or salutary —
time for the nation and its rulers fully to comprehend

VOL. II. Q Q

594 REPRESENTATIVE REFORM.

all the bearings, immediate and remote, of representa-
tive changes — can only be secured by such a course of
conduct on the part of parliament and the executive as
shall cut away all just ground from under those who
clamour for prompt and decisive alterations — as shall
leave it no longer in the power of the democratic
party, or of the masses, to say, with reason, " We
should be more justly governed — our interests would
have fairer and fuller consideration — had we a larger
share of electoral influence." To call for delay on the
plea of deliberation, and then to employ that delay in
maintaining those injustices which are the great argu-
ments against delay, would be a futile and most dan-
gerous course.

THE END.

LONDON :

SPOTTISWOODES and SHAW,
New-street-Square.

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