A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume IV Part 9

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CHAPTER LXXIV.

THE EMANc.i.p.aTION OF LABOR.

[Sidenote: 1832--The slave trade]

The statesmen who had carried the Reform Bill soon found that they had taken upon themselves a vast responsibility. They had accomplished so great a triumph that most men a.s.sumed them to be capable of any triumph. It has to be remembered that they had succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng one principle which, up to that time, had never been recognized, the principle that a const.i.tutional sovereign in these countries cannot any longer set up his own authority and his own will in opposition to the advice of his ministers. Up to the days of William the Fourth, the ministers always had to give way to the sovereign at the last moment, if the sovereign insisted on maintaining his dictatorial authority. We have seen how one of the greatest of English statesmen, the younger Pitt, had bowed his judgment and even coerced into silence the remonstrances of his own heart and his own conscience, rather than dispute the authority of an obstinate and a stupid King. Lord Grey and his colleagues had compelled their King to listen to reason, and probably not even they knew at the time the full importance of the const.i.tutional principle which they had thus established. In our own days, and under the rule of the first really const.i.tutional sovereign who ever reigned in these countries, we seem to have almost forgotten that there ever was a time when the occupant of the throne was understood to have a right to govern the people according to royalty's own inclination or royalty's own notion of statesmans.h.i.+p. When the pa.s.sing of the Reform Bill was yet the latest event in history, the people of these countries commonly, and very justly, regarded this a.s.sertion of the right of a representative Ministry to exact support from {189} the sovereign as one of the greatest triumphs accomplished by Lord Grey's Administration. The natural feeling therefore was to a.s.sume that the men who had done these great things could do greater things still, and from all parts of the realm eyes were turned upon them, full of confidence in their desire and their capacity to accomplish new reforms in every department of our const.i.tutional and our social system.

The time was one especially favorable for such hopes and for such achievements. A new era had opened on the civilized world. New ideas were coming up regarding the value and the validity of many of our const.i.tutional and social arrangements which had formerly been considered as inspired and sanctified forever by that mysterious influence, the wisdom of our ancestors. If education had not yet made much way among the ma.s.ses of the people, at least the belief in popular education was becoming a quickening force in the minds of all intelligent men. Then, as ever since, the agitation for each great new reform began outside the walls of Parliament, and had to take an organized shape before it became a question for the House of Commons.

The first great work to which the reformed Parliament applied itself, after the conditions of Lord Grey's Act had been allowed to take effect in remoulding the const.i.tuencies, was the abolition of negro slavery in the colonies of Great Britain. Domestic slavery and the slave trade had already been abolished, but in the minds of a great number of well-meaning, well-informed, and by no means hard-hearted men slavery in our colonies was a very different sort of inst.i.tution from slavery in our own islands, or from the actual trade in slaves. The ordinary Englishman, when he troubled himself to consider such questions at all, had settled it in his own mind that slavery in England, or in any part of the British Isles, was incompatible with the free const.i.tution of the realm, and that the forcible abduction of men and women from African sea-sh.o.r.es in order to sell them into slavery was an offence against civilization and Christianity. But this average Englishman did not see that there was anything like the same {190} reason for interfering with the system of slave labor as we had found it established, for instance, in our West Indian colonies. "We did not introduce the system there," it was argued; "we found it established there; we inherited it; and its continuance is declared, by all those who know, to be absolutely essential to the production of the sugar which is the source of profit and the means of living to the islands themselves, and an indispensable comfort, a harmless and healthful luxury, to millions of civilized beings who never stood under a tropical sky." The mind of the average Englishman, however, had been, for some time, much disturbed by the arguments, the pleadings, and the agitation of a small number of enlightened Reformers, at first much in advance of their time, who were making a pertinacious crusade against the whole system of colonial slavery. Some of these men have won names which will always be honored in our history. Zachary Macaulay was one of these. He was the father of the Macaulay whom we have just heard of as seated side by side with Charles Greville at Lord Holland's dinner-table. Zachary Macaulay had been the manager of a great West Indian estate, but he had given up the position because his conscience would not allow him to have anything to do with the system of slavery, and he had come home to devote his time, his abilities, and his earnestness to the generous task of rousing up his countrymen to a full sense of the horrors which were inseparable from the system. He was able to supply men like Brougham, like Fowell Buxton, and like Whitbread with practical facts beyond dispute to establish the realities of slavery in the West Indian colonies. Among the more obvious, although not perhaps even the most odious, accompaniments of the system were the frightful cruelties practised on the slaves, the flogging, the mutilation, and the branding of men, women, and children which formed part of the ordinary conditions of a plantation worked by slave labor. Over and over again it had been denied by men who professed to know all about the subject and to be authorities upon it that any such cruelties were practised on a well-regulated plantation belonging to a {191} civilized owner. It was constantly argued, with self-complacency, that the planter's own interests would not allow him thus to mar the efficiency of the human animals who had to do his work, and that even if the planter had no pity for them, he was sure to have a wholesome and restraining consideration for the physical value of his own living property.

[Sidenote: 1832--The horrors of the slave trade]

Zachary Macaulay and the Buxtons, the Wilberforces and the Whitbreads, were able to give innumerable and overwhelming proofs that the system every day was working such evils as any system might be expected to work which left one set of human beings absolutely at the mercy of another set of human beings. Many years after this great controversy had won its complete success for the English colonies, a chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States laid it down as law that a slave had no rights which his owner was bound to respect. Up to the time of which we are now writing, it was certainly a.s.sumed, in our West Indian colonies, as a self-evident doctrine, utterly beyond dispute or question, that a slave had no rights which his owner was bound to respect. The band of resolute philanthropists who had taken up the subject in England were able to show that frequent flogging of men and women was a regular part of the day's incidents of every plantation, and that branding was constantly used, not merely as a means of punishment, but also as a means of identification. It was a common practice when a female slave attempted to escape for her owner to have her branded on the breast with red-hot iron as an easy means of proving her ident.i.ty if she were to succeed for a time in getting out of his reach. Numbers of advertis.e.m.e.nts were produced in which the owners, seeking through the newspapers for the recovery of some of their women slaves, proclaimed the important fact that the fugitive women were branded on both b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and that thus there could be no difficulty about their identification. We need not go further into the details of the subject, but it may be as well to mention that we have not touched at all upon the most revolting evidences of the horrors which seemed to {192} be the inevitable accompaniment of the slave system. Brougham was one of the first among leading Englishmen who threw his heart and soul into the agitation against colonial slavery. Long before that agitation approached to anything like success he had brought forward a motion in the House of Commons, directing attention to the evils and the horrors of the system, and calling for its abolition. For a time, successive Governments did not see their way to go any further than to endeavor to bring about or to enforce better regulations for the use of slave labor on the colonial plantations. Even these modest measures of reform had many difficulties to encounter. Some of the colonies were under the direct dominion of the Crown, were governed, in fact, as Crown colonies, but others had legislative chambers of their own, and refused to submit to the dictation of the authorities at home. These legislative chambers in most cases resented the interference of the home Government when it attempted to introduce new rules for the treatment of negro slaves, and the whole plantation interest rallied in support of the great principle that every owner of slaves had an absolute right to deal with them according to his own will and pleasure.

[Sidenote: 1832--Anti-slavery agitation]

It was loudly a.s.serted by the planters and by the friends of the planters--and of course the planters had friends everywhere in England--that the sugar-growing business could not be carried on with any profit except by means of slave labor, and that the slaves could not be got to work except by the occasional use of flogging or other such needful stimulant. The negroes, it was loudly declared, would rise in rebellion if once it became known to them that the English Parliament was encouraging them to consider themselves as slaves no longer, and their mode of rising in rebellion would simply be a simultaneous ma.s.sacre of all the planters and their wives and children.

"See what you are doing!" many a voice cried out to the anti-slavery agitators; "you are preaching a crusade which will not merely end in the utter bankruptcy of the West Indian Islands, but in the ma.s.sacre of all the planters, their wives, and their children." The agitators, however, were neither {193} dismayed nor disheartened. It would have taken a good deal of sophistry to confuse the conscience of Zachary Macaulay or Wilberforce. It would have taken a good deal of bellowing to frighten Brougham. The agitation went on with increasing force, and Brougham continued to denounce "the wild and guilty phantasy" that man has property in man.

In Jamaica the colonial legislature, pressed hard by the Government at home, pa.s.sed an Act with the avowed purpose of mitigating the severity of the punishments inflicted on slave laborers. The Act, however, was, even on the face of it, absurdly inadequate for any humane purpose.

The home Government had demanded, among other reforms, the entire discontinuance of the flogging of women. The colonial Act allowed the flogging of women to go on just as it had done before. The Jamaica planters were indignant at the course taken by the home authorities, and raved as if they were on the verge of rebellion against the Crown, and the well-meant interference of the Government at home seemed in fact to have done more harm than good. In Demerara, which was the Crown colony, some of the more intelligent among the negro slaves had heard sc.r.a.ps of talk which led them to believe that the King of England and his Government were about to confer freedom upon the colored race, and these reports spread and magnified throughout certain plantations, and the slaves on one estate refused to work. Their refusal was regarded as an insurrection and was treated accordingly. The most savage measures were employed to crush the so-called insurrection, just as in more recent, and what ought to have been more enlightened, days some local disturbances in Jamaica were magnified into a general rising of the blacks against the whites, and the horrors perpetrated in the name of repression startled the whole civilized world. In Demerara an English dissenting missionary, the Rev. John Smith, who had been known as a most kindly friend of the negroes, was formally charged with having encouraged and a.s.sisted the slaves to rise in revolt against their masters. He was flung into prison, was treated with barbarous {194} rigors such as might have seemed in keeping with some story of Siberia; he was put through the hurried process of a sham trial in which the very forms of law were disregarded, and he was sentenced to death. Even at Demerara and at such a time the court-martial which had condemned the missionary as guilty of the offence with which he was charged had accompanied its verdict with a recommendation to mercy on account of the prisoner's previous good character. But before it could be decided whether or not the recommendation was to have any effect, the unfortunate man died of the treatment he had received.

[Sidenote: 1830--Parliamentary action against slavery]

The story of the accusation, the trial, and the death created an immense sensation in England. Brougham, Buxton, Sir James Mackintosh, the historian and scholar, and many others aroused the public indignation by their rightful denunciations of the trial and the verdict. The Government condemned and reversed the proceedings at the trial, and when Brougham brought on a motion in the House of Commons, publicly branding with just severity the whole conduct of the Demerara authorities, his motion was only defeated by a small majority.

Meanwhile, the agitation against the whole system of colonial slavery was receiving new impulse and new strength from the teaching of new events in the colonies, and in May, 1830, a great meeting was held in London to demand, not the mitigation, but the total abolition of slavery in every land over which the flag of England floated. This meeting was presided over by the great abolitionist, William Wilberforce, who had been out of public life for some time owing to severe ill-health, and who believed that he could not more fitly celebrate his return to the active work of philanthropy than by taking the chair at such a demonstration. Mr. Buxton proposed a resolution calling on the country to agitate for the total abolition of slavery in the colonies, and to be content with nothing else, and the resolution was carried by enthusiastic acclamation. Brougham at once became the champion of the great London meeting by a motion which he brought forward in the House of Commons. One of the greatest speeches of his lifetime {195} was made in justifying his appeal to the House for the total abolition of a system which admitted of nothing like partial, or what is called moderate, reform, and must either be swept out of existence altogether or remain a curse to those who enforce it as well as to those against whom it is enforced. Brougham's motion was defeated, of course. We say of course because it was only a motion made by an independent member, as the phrase goes, and was not proposed by the leader of a strong Government, determined to stake its existence on the carrying of its proposition. Every great reform, it may almost literally be said, is heralded in Parliament by the motions of independent members, who are sure to be defeated, but whose determined efforts have success enough to make the leader of the Government, or the leader of the Opposition, feel that the time is near at hand when the cause must be taken up by one or other of the great parties in the State.

Buxton raised the whole question in the following session; and then Lord Althorp, speaking for the Government, went so far as to offer a sort of compromise by suggesting that the colonies which in the future should give evidence of their sincere resolve to make distinct improvement in the condition of their slaves should be rewarded and encouraged by a permission to send their sugar into English ports at a reduced rate of duty. The country, however, had long outgrown the condition of mind in which this feeble and ridiculous proposition could be regarded as worthy of serious consideration. The notion of sacrificing any part of the country's revenues for the purpose of bribing the planters to deal a little less severely with their slaves was not likely to find much favor among the men who had thus far conducted the great agitation against slavery. The object of reformers such as Clarkson, Wilberforce, Buxton, Brougham, and Mackintosh was not merely that the negroes should be flogged less often, or that the negro women should not be flogged at all, but that the whole abominable system which made men, women, and children the absolute property of their owners should be brought to an end forever.

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[Sidenote: 1833--A plan for the abolition of slavery]

At last it became evident to the Whig Ministry that something definite must be done, and that nothing would be considered definite by the country which did not aim at the total abolition of slavery. The hour had come, and the man who could best turn it to account in the House of Commons was already in his place. Lord Stanley, who had joined the Reform Ministry as Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, had since that time been moved to the higher position of Colonial Secretary, and to him was appropriately confided the task of introducing the measures which the Government had determined to take.

The Lord Stanley of those days was in after years the Earl of Derby, whom some of us can still call to mind as one of the most brilliant orators in the House of Lords at a time when Brougham and Lyndhurst maintained the character of that a.s.sembly for parliamentary eloquence.

Those among us who remember the eloquent Lord Derby, the Rupert of debate, remember him as a Tory Prime Minister or the Tory leader of Opposition in the House of Lords. But he began his great Parliamentary career as a Whig and as a Reformer, and he was one of the most zealous of Lord Grey's colleagues in pressing forward the great measure which was carried to success in 1832. Among those who can remember him there is only one opinion about the high order of his Parliamentary eloquence, and that opinion is that he was a worthy rival of Gladstone and of Bright. To him as Colonial Secretary was entrusted the task of bringing forward, in the House of Commons, the measures of the Government for dealing with the question of slavery in the British colonies. Stanley's speech was such a magnificent blending of reason and emotion, so close and so powerful in its arguments, so thrilling in its eloquence, that many of those who heard the speech naturally expected that it was destined to announce a bold and a comprehensive policy. A certain feeling of disappointment came up among the abolitionists when the measures were described which the Government had resolved to submit to the House of Commons. What Stanley had to propose was not a complete measure, but a {197} series of resolutions embodying the purposes of the Government's policy. It is enough to say that the Government proposed a plan which amounted to a scheme of abolition by stages. There was to be a certain period of apprentices.h.i.+p, a term of fifteen years, during which the slaves, men and women, were to continue to work for their masters as before, under conditions gradually relaxing as the slave drew nearer to the time of emanc.i.p.ation, and then when that hour at length arrived the slave was to be free forever. This principle, however, was not to apply to children under six years old at the time of the pa.s.sing of the measure, or to any children born after that time. The idea on which the whole scheme was founded was the notion, very common at that time and since, that the sudden emanc.i.p.ation of any set of human beings could only tend to bewilder them, and to prevent them from making a proper use of the freedom thus abruptly thrust upon them. "The fool in the fable," said Macaulay, when dealing with a somewhat similar question, "declared that no man ought to go into the water until he had learned to swim." Lord Grey's Ministry had apparently much the same idea about the perils of emanc.i.p.ation. Another part of the scheme proposed that fifteen millions should be advanced by the Government as a loan to the West Indian planters in order to help them over the diminution of income which might be expected to follow any interference with the conditions of slave labor.

The resolutions put forward by the Government were regarded as highly unsatisfactory by most of the leading abolitionists. Macaulay indeed argued with all his usual eloquence and skill in favor of the principle of gradual abolition, and it is hardly necessary to say that it was not in that speech he made use of the pithy sentence which we have already quoted. Buxton proposed an amendment to the resolution, an amendment in fact calling for immediate abolition, and the amendment was seconded by Daniel O'Connell. Buxton, however, was prevailed upon not to press his amendment on the ground that the Government were as eager for emanc.i.p.ation as any one could {198} be, and that Lord Grey and his colleagues were only anxious to bring forward such a measure as might at once secure the support of the majority and prevent further delay, while securing, at the same time, the ultimate and not distant settlement of the whole question. O'Connell stood firm, argued strongly against the proposed compromise, refused to accept it, and actually pressed Buxton's amendment to a division. Of course he was defeated by a large majority, but he carried a respectable minority along with him; and few now can doubt that the amendment which he pressed forward, even after its proposer had abandoned it, was right in its principle, and that the Government, if forced to it, could have carried a plan for immediate abolition with little more difficulty than was found in carrying the scheme of compromise. As the discussion went on the Government made some further concessions to the abolitionists, by reducing the time and modifying the terms of the apprentices.h.i.+p system, and the abolitionists in general believed it their wisest policy to accept the modified arrangement and thus avoid any further delay. Another alteration of great importance was made by the Government in favor of the planters, and was finally accepted by the abolitionists and by the country in general. The friends of the planters made strong representations to the effect that the proffered loan would be of no use whatever to the owners of slaves whose property was so soon to pa.s.s from their hands into freedom, and that there was not the slightest chance of the planters being able to pay back to the English exchequer the amount that the Government was willing to advance. It was urged, too, with some show of reason, that the planters were not themselves responsible for the existence of slave labor, that generations of planters had grown up under the system and had made a profit by it during the days when civilization had not, anywhere, set its face against slavery, and that it was hard, therefore, to make them suffer in pocket for the recent development in the feelings of humanity. The offer of a loan was abandoned by the Government, and it was proposed instead that a gift of twenty millions sterling should {199} be tendered as compensation for the losses that the planters would be likely to undergo. This proposal, at first, met with some opposition, and by many indeed was looked upon as an extravagant freak of generosity; but some of the leading abolitionists were willing to make allowance for the condition of the planters, and most, or all, of them were prepared to make a large sacrifice for the sake of carrying some measure which promised, even by gradual advances, the final abolition of the slave system. We may condense into a very brief s.p.a.ce the remainder of the story, and merely record the fact that the Government carried their amended measure of emanc.i.p.ation with its liberal grant to the West Indian planters through both Houses of Parliament, and that it obtained the royal a.s.sent.

[Sidenote: 1833--Slavery abolished in British colonies]

It may easily be imagined that poor King William must have had some mental struggles before he found himself quite in a mood to grant that a.s.sent. If the King ever had any clear and enduring opinion in his mind, it probably was the opinion, which he had often expressed already, against the abolition of slavery. He had, of course, a general objection to reform of any kind, but his objection to any reform which threatened the endurance of the slave system must have been an article of faith with him. It was the fate of King William the Fourth to live in a reign of reforms, not one of which would appear to have touched his heart or been in accordance with his personal judgment. The highest praise that history can give him is that he did not at least, as one of his predecessors had done, set his own judgment and his own inclination determinedly and irrevocably against the advice of the statesmen whom he had called in to carry on the work of administration. The King gave his a.s.sent to the amended Bill for the abolition of slavery, including the generous gift to the planters, and the measure became law on August 27, 1833. Some of the colonies had the sense and spirit to discard the apprentices.h.i.+p system altogether, and to date the emanc.i.p.ation of their slaves from the day when the measure became an Act of Parliament. In no colony did the setting free of the negroes bring about any of the troubles and turmoils, the {200} lawless outbreaks of blacks against whites, the ma.s.sacres of the innocents, which had been so long and so often pictured as the inevitable consequences of the legislation demanded by the Clarksons, the Wilberforces, the Buxtons, and the Broughams. It seems to us all now so much a matter of course for a civilized and enlightened State to decree the extinction of slavery within its limits, that we find it hard to appreciate at its true value the difficulty and the splendor of the achievement which was accomplished by the Grey Ministry. It has to be said, however, that the Ministry and the Parliament were, in this instance, only the instruments by which the great charge was wrought.

The movement carried on out-of-doors, the movement set going by the leading abolitionists and supported by the people, deserves the chief honor of the victory. All the countries that make up the kingdom, England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, sent their authorized speakers to sustain the cause of freedom for the slaves. The gift, which on the recommendation of Lord Grey's Ministry was placed at the disposal of the West Indian planters, was indeed a lavish gift; but the public in general made little complaint on the score of its lavishness, and did not calculate too jealously the value of the sacrifice which the State was invited to make for the purchase of negro emanc.i.p.ation. Thirty years and more had to pa.s.s before the great American republic was able to free itself from the curse of slavery, and even then the late deliverance was only accomplished at the cost of a war which threatened for the season a permanent division of the States.

[Sidenote: 1833--Labor legislation]

The same year which saw the pa.s.sing of the measure for the abolition of slavery in the colonies saw also the pa.s.sing of an Act which interfered seriously, for the first time, with something which might almost be called a system of domestic slavery. We are speaking now of the measure which dealt with the conditions of factory labor in these countries. Factory labor, as it was known in the early days of William the Fourth, was the growth of modern civilization. England had found that her main business in life was not the conquest and the subjection of foreign races, {201} or the building or the navigating of s.h.i.+ps, or the cultivation of land, or the growth of corn, but the manufacture of goods for her own domestic use and for export all over the world.

Great manufacturing cities and towns were growing up everywhere, and, while the workers on the land were becoming fewer and fewer, the workers in the city factories were multiplying every day, so that an entirely new laboring population was coming up to claim the attention of the State. Since the old days, when the whole social organization was conducted according to the dictates of some centralized authority, there had been growing up, as one of the inevitable reactions which civilization brings with it at its successive stages, a sort of vaguely expressed doctrine that the State has no right to interfere between capital and labor, between the employer and the employed. This theory naturally grew and grew with the growth of the capital invested in manufactures and the increase in the number of employers, and it was found in later years than those at which we have now arrived, that the course of agitation that Lord Ashley may be said to have begun was opposed mainly in its progress by the capitalists and the employers of labor, many of whom were thoroughly humane men, anxious to do the very best they could for the health and the comfort of those whom they employed, but who sincerely believed that the civil law had no right to interfere with them and those who worked for them, and that the civil law could do only harm and no good by its best-intentioned interference.

The whole controversy has now been long settled, and it is a distinctly understood condition of our social system that the State has a right to interfere between employer and employed when the condition of things is such that the employed is not always able to protect himself. At the time when Lord Ashley started on his long and beneficent career there was practically no law which regulated the hours and the conditions of labor in the great factories. The whole factory system, the modern factory system as we understand it, was then quite a new part of our social organization. The factory, with its little army of workers, {202} men, women, and children, was managed according to the will and judgment of the owner, unless in the rare cases where the demand for labor far exceeded the supply. In most places the supply exceeded the demand, and the master was therefore free to make any conditions he pleased with his workers. If the master were a humane man, a just man, or even a far-seeing man, he took care that those who worked for him should be fairly treated, and should not be compelled to work under conditions dangerous to their health and destructive of their comfort.

But if he were a selfish man, or a careless man, the workers were used merely as instruments of profit by him, or by those immediately under him; and it did not matter how soon they were used up, for there could always be found numbers enough who were eager to take their places, and were willing to undertake any task on any terms, for the sake of securing a bare living. Lord Ashley raised the whole question in the House of Commons, and brought forward a motion which ended in the appointment of a commission to inquire into the condition of the men, women, and children who worked in the factories. The commission was not long in collecting a vast amount of information as to the evils, moral and physical, brought about by the overworking of women and children in the factories. The general concurrence of public opinion, even among those who supported Lord Ashley's movement, did not seem to go beyond the protection of women and children. The adult male, it was considered, might perhaps safely be left to make the best terms he could for himself; but the inquiries of the commission left little doubt among unprejudiced minds that something must be done to secure women and children from the evils of overwork. Lord Ashley succeeded in forcing the whole question on the attention of Parliament, and an Act was pa.s.sed in 1833 which did not indeed go nearly as far as Lord Ashley would have carried his principle, but which at least established the right of legislative interference for the protection of children and young persons of both s.e.xes. The Act limited the work of children to eight hours a day and {203} that of young persons under eighteen to sixty-nine hours a week. This Act may be regarded as the beginning of that legislative interference which has gone on advancing beneficially from that time down to our own, and is likely still to keep on its forward movement.

[Sidenote: Lord Shaftesbury]

Lord Ashley, whom many of us can well remember as Lord Shaftesbury, may be said to have given up the whole of his life to the general purpose with which he began his public career--the object of endeavoring to mitigate the toils and sufferings of those who have to work hard in order to provide for others the comforts and the luxuries of life. His principle was that the State has always a right to interfere for the protection of those who cannot protect themselves. He was not a man of great statesmanlike ability, he was not a man of extensive or varied information, he was not a scholar, he was not an orator, he was not in the ordinary sense of the word a thinker, but he was a man who had, by a kind of philanthropic instinct, got hold of an idea which men of far greater intellect had not, up to his time, shown themselves able to grasp. The story of his life is part of the whole story of the industrial development of modern civilization. Again and again he worked with success in movement after movement, initiated mainly by himself, for the protection and the education of those who toil in our factories and in our mines. Some day no doubt Parliament may have to devise legislation which shall do for the women and children employed in field labor something like that which Lord Ashley did for the women and children employed in factories and in mines. We have seen that already efforts are made in every session of Parliament to extend the principle of the factory legislation into various industrial occupations which are common to city life. For the present, however, we have only to deal with the fact that one of the first labors accomplished by the Reformed Parliament was the establishment of that legislative principle with which Lord Ashley's name will always be a.s.sociated.

Let it be added that, with the establishment of that principle, came also the introduction of two innovations in our {204} factory system which lent inestimable value to the whole measure. One of these was the appointment of a number of factory inspectors, who were authorized to see that the purposes of the Act were properly carried out by the employers, and to report to the Government as to the working of the whole system and the necessity for further improvements. The other was the arrangement by which a portion of the time of all the younger workers in the factories was set apart for educational purposes, so that children should no longer be treated as mere machines for the making of goods and the earning of wages, but should be enabled and compelled to have their faculties developed by the instruction suited to their years. This provision in the Factories Act may be regarded as the first step towards that system of national education which it took so much trouble and so many years to establish in these countries.

Lord Ashley had great work still to accomplish; but even if his n.o.ble career had closed with the pa.s.sing of the Factories Act in 1833, his name would always be remembered as that of a man who, more than any other, helped to turn the first Reformed Parliament to the work of emanc.i.p.ating the English laboring cla.s.ses in cities and towns from a servitude hardly less in conflict with the best interests of humanity than that which up to the same year had prevailed on the plantations of Jamaica and Demerara. The Reformed Parliament had still much difficult work to call out its best energies and to employ its new resources, but it had begun its tasks well, and had already given the country good earnest of its splendid future.

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CHAPTER LXXV.

THE STATE CHURCH IN IRELAND.

[Sidenote: 1832--"Dark Rosaleen"]

A saying which has been ascribed to a well-known living Englishman, who has made a name for himself in letters as well as in politics, may be used as the introduction to this chapter. The saying was that no man should ever be sent as Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland who could not prove that he had thoroughly mastered the meaning of the n.o.ble Irish poem rendered by Clarence Mangan as "Dark Rosaleen."

The author and statesman to whom we refer used to point the moral of his observation, sometimes, by declaring that many or most of the political colleagues for whose benefit he had spoken had never heard either of Clarence Mangan or of "Dark Rosaleen." Now, as it is barely possible that some of the readers of this volume may be in a condition of similar ignorance, it is well to mention that Clarence Mangan was an Irish poet who was dear to the generation which saw the rise of the Young Ireland movement during O'Connell's later years, and that the dark Rosaleen whom Mangan found in the earlier poet's ballad is supposed to typify his native country. The idea of the author and statesman was that no Englishman who had not studied this poem, and got at the heart of its mystery, so far as to be able to realize the deep poetic, pathetic love of the Celtic heart for the soil, the traditions, and the ways of the Celtic island, could attempt with any success to undertake the government of the country. We have now come to a period in this history when the Irish question, as it is called, came up once again, and in a new form, to try the statesmans.h.i.+p of English rulers.

We have told the story of '98, and how the rebellion ended in complete defeat and disaster. Up to the {206} time at which we have now arrived there was no more talk of rebellion in the field, but in the sullen heart of Irish discontent there still lived all the emotions which had animated Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, and Robert Emmet.

[Sidenote: 1832--The t.i.the question in Ireland]

When the rebellion was put down the Government of King George the Third abolished the Irish Parliament, and then all loyal and sensible persons in Westminster a.s.sumed, of course, that there was an end of the matter.

The rebellion had been put down, the princ.i.p.al rebels had been done to death, Grattan's troublesome and tiresome Parliament had been extinguished, Ireland had been merged into complete identification with England, and surely nothing would be heard of the Irish question any more. Yet the Irish question seemed to come up again and again, and to press for answer just as if answer enough had not been given already.

There was a clamor about Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation, and at last the Irish Catholics had to be emanc.i.p.ated from complete political disqualification, and their spokesman O'Connell had been allowed to take his place in the House of Commons. Sir Robert Peel had carried Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation, for, although a Tory in many of his ways of thinking, he was a statesman and a man of genius; and now Lord Grey, the head of the Whig Government, had no sooner pa.s.sed the Reform Bill than he found himself confronted with the Irish question in a new shape. We could hardly wonder that Sir Robert Peel or Lord Grey did not try to inform their minds as to Irish national feeling through a study of "Dark Rosaleen," for the good reason that no such poem had yet been given to the world. But neither Peel nor Grey was a type of the average Englishman of the times, and each had gradually borne in upon him, by a study of realities if not of poetic fancies, that the national sentiment of the Irishman was not to be eradicated by any Act of Parliament for his denationalization. Lord Grey, as the friend and pupil of Fox, who had always been the friend of Ireland, must have acquired, as a part of his early political training, the knowledge that Ireland's grievances were not all {207} sentimental, and that if they were to be dealt with by Acts of Parliament these Acts must take the part of relief and not of repression. It may well be questioned whether any population is disturbed for very long by mere sentimental grievances, and it may be doubted also whether the true instinct of statesmans.h.i.+p does not always regard the existence of what is called a sentimental grievance as the best reason for trying to find out whether there is not some practical evil at the root of the complaint.

Certainly, in Lord Grey's time, the grievances were open and palpable enough to have attracted the attention of any man whose mind was not as well contented with the wisdom of his ancestors as that of King William himself.

Just at this time, as we have seen, a school of Englishmen was springing up: Englishmen whose minds were filled with new ideas, and who thoroughly understood the tendencies of the reforming age to which they belonged. The Irish t.i.the question had come up for settlement.

The Irish t.i.the question was only a part of the Irish State Church question. The Irish State Church was an inst.i.tution bestowed upon Ireland by her conquerors. Five-sixths, at least, of the population of Ireland belonged to the Church of Rome and were devoted to the religion of that Church. The island was nevertheless compelled to maintain the State Church, which did not even represent the religious belief of the one-sixth of the population that was not Roman Catholic. One of the privileges of the State Church was to exact t.i.thes from all the farmers of the country for the maintenance of its clergymen. Ireland was almost altogether an agricultural country, and had but little to do with manufacturing industry, and in three out of the four provinces of Ireland the farmers, almost to a man, held to the religion of their Catholic forefathers and wors.h.i.+pped only at the altars of their faith.

It would be seen, therefore, that the imposition of t.i.thes for the support of the State Church ministers was not merely a sentimental grievance, but a very practical grievance as well. It was practical because it exacted the payment of a tribute which the farmer believed he ought not to be called {208} upon to pay, and it was sentimental because, while it extorted the money from the farmer's pocket, it also insulted his nationality and his faith.

[Sidenote: 1832--Difficulty in collecting the t.i.thes]

The result was that a sort of civil war was perpetually going on in Ireland between those who strove to collect the t.i.thes and those from whom the t.i.thes were to be collected. The resistance was sometimes of the fiercest character; the farmers and their friends resisted the forces sent by the Government to seize the cattle of those who refused to pay, as if they were resisting an army of foreign invaders. Blood was shed freely and lavishly in these struggles, and the shedding of blood became so common that for a while it almost ceased to be a matter of public scandal. Sydney Smith declared that the collection of t.i.thes in Ireland must have cost in all probability about one million of lives. Police, infantry, and dragoons were kept thus in constant occupation, and yet it could not possibly be contended that those who claimed the t.i.thes were very much the better for all the blood that was shed on their behalf. For when a farmer's cattle had been seized by the police after an obstinate fight with the farmers and their friends, and when the cattle had been driven off under the escort of infantry and cavalry soldiers, the clergyman who claimed the t.i.thes was not always any nearer to the getting of that which the law declared to be his own. The familiar proverbial saying about the ease with which a horse may be brought to the water and the difficulty there may be in getting him to drink when he has been brought there was ill.u.s.trated aptly and oddly enough in the difference between seizure of the farmer's cattle and the means of raising any money on them when they had been seized. The captured cattle could not in themselves be of much use to the clergyman who claimed the t.i.thes, and they would naturally have to be sold in order that he might get his due, and the question arose who was to bid for them. All the farmers and the peasantry of the country were on the one side, and on the other were the inc.u.mbent, a few of his friends, and the military and police. It was certain that the soldiers and the policemen would not bid for the cattle, and probably {209} could not pay for them, and the population of the district would have made the place very uncomfortable for any of the clergymen's friends who showed an anxiety to buy up the impounded beasts. In some cases when cattle were sold by public auction no bidder ventured to come forward but the farmer himself who owned the cattle, and they had to be knocked down to him at a purely nominal price because there was no possible compet.i.tor. The farmer drove home his beasts amid the exultation of the whole neighborhood, and the clergymen was as far off his t.i.thes as ever. The pa.s.sive resistance in fact was harder to deal with, as far as practical results went, than even the resistance that was active. Summon together by lawful authority a number of soldiers and police, and it is easy to shoot down a few unarmed peasants, and to dispose for the hour of popular resistance in this prompt and peremptory way. But what is to be done when the resistance takes the form of a resolute organized refusal to pay up the amounts claimed or to offer any price for the cattle seized in default of payment? There were in every district numbers of quiet Catholic paris.h.i.+oners who would much rather have paid their share of the t.i.thes to the Protestant clergymen than become drawn into quarrels and local disturbances and confusion. But such men soon found that if they paid their t.i.thes they put themselves in direct antagonism to the whole ma.s.s of their Catholic neighbors. Intimidation of the most serious kind was sometimes brought to bear upon them, and in any case there was that very powerful kind of intimidation which consists in making the offender feel that he has brought on himself the contempt and the hatred of nearly all his fellow-paris.h.i.+oners and his fellow-religionists. In those days it was not lawful to hold a public political meeting in Ireland, but there were anti-t.i.the demonstrations got up, nevertheless, over three parts of Ireland. These demonstrations took the outward form of what were called hurling matches, great rivalries of combatants, in a peculiar Irish game of ball. Each of these demonstrations was made to be, and was known to be, a practical protest against the collection of the t.i.thes. {210} Whenever it became certain that the recusant farmer's cattle were to be seized, a great hurling match was announced to be held in the immediate vicinity, and the local magistrates, who perhaps had at their disposal only a few handfuls of police or soldiery, were not much inclined to order the seizure in the presence of such a cloud of witnesses. Nor would any Catholic paris.h.i.+oner who had quietly paid up his t.i.thes without resistance have felt very comfortable if he had happened to come near the hurling field that day, and to hear the loudly expressed comments of his neighbors on his line of conduct. To make the troubles still deeper, it often happened that the claimant of the t.i.thes was an absentee--the inc.u.mbent of many a parish in Ireland left his curate to look after his flock and his t.i.thes alike--and the absentee was almost as much hated in Ireland as the t.i.the-collector.

[Sidenote: 1832--The t.i.the question in Parliament]

Now it must not be supposed that there were not many of the Protestant clergy in Ireland who utterly disapproved of the t.i.the system. One Protestant clergyman in England, from whom we have just quoted, the Rev. Sydney Smith, had denounced the system over and over again in language the most indignant and the most scornful that even his scathing humor could command. But there were numbers of Protestant clergymen in Ireland who saw and proclaimed its injustice and its futility. The Archbishop of Dublin declared that no Government could ever accomplish the collection of t.i.thes in Ireland otherwise than at the point of the bayonet. Protestant country clergy often found that the very attempts to collect the t.i.thes only brought increased distress and hards.h.i.+p upon themselves.

Many a poor Protestant clergyman saw the utter injustice of the system, and disliked and detested it almost as much as the Roman Catholics themselves could have done. There were many such men, too, who put up with miserable poverty rather than make any attempt to recover such an income by force. Great English speakers and writers were beginning to denounce the whole system. Macaulay stigmatized it as severely as Sydney Smith had done. George {211} Grote, the historian of Greece, who had then a seat in the House of Commons, had not only condemned it, but had condemned the whole State Church system of which it was only a part. In our own days the ordinary English reader finds it hard to understand how any such system could have been carried on under a civilized European Government. Such a reader will readily admit that Sydney Smith had not gone beyond the limits of sober a.s.sertion when he declared that "there is no abuse like it in all Europe, in all Asia, in all the discovered parts of Africa, and in all we have ever heard of Timbuctoo." The subject had been brought up in Parliament by some of the advanced reformers of the day, and, indeed, it was bringing itself before the notice of Parliament every week through the official reports of the disturbances which were taking place in various parts of Ireland.