When the Reform Bill was once secure, men no more carried a black flag, with the inscription, 'Put not your trust in princes;' nor a crown stuffed with straw, with the inscription, 'Ichabod;' but neither did they rend the clouds again with cheers for their 'King William, the father of his country.' There was no longer anything to fear from him; but men saw that neither was there anything to hope from him; and he was thenceforth treated with a mere decorum, which had in it full as much of compassion as of respect.

As for his ministers, they were idols, aloft in a shrine.

CHAPTER VI.

HILE the Reform Bill was in progress and in jeopardy, little else was thought of; except, indeed, the new plague which had come to overcloud all hearts, and to attract to itself some of the terror which would otherwise have been given entire to the apprehension of coming revolution. There were many in those days who would have been intensely grateful to know, first, that the cholera would have departed by a certain day, leaving them and their families in safety; and next, that revolution-by which they

understood the overthrow of the whole social fabric-would not happen in their lifetime. If they could have been assured of these two immunities, they would have been quite happy, would have believed their way was clear for life, and that affairs would remain in their existing state as long as their own generation had any concern with them. Very different from this view was that taken by braver spirits, with that truer vision given by courage and enlightenment. The truth is,' wrote Dr Arnold in April 1831, 'that we are arrived at one of those periods in the progress of society when the constitution naturally undergoes a change, just as it did two centuries ago. It was impossible then for the king to keep down the higher part of the middle classes; it is impossible now to keep down the middle and lower parts of them. One

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would think that people who talk against change were literally as well as metaphorically blind, and really did not see that everything in themselves and around them is changing every hour by the necessary laws of its being.' There is nothing so revolutionary, because there is nothing so unnatural and so convulsive to society, as the strain to keep things fixed, when all the world is by the very law of its creation in eternal progress; and the cause of all the evils of the world may be traced to that natural but most deadly error of human indolence and corruption that our business is to preserve and not to improve.'

Such was the view taken, and maintained at first with some consistency, by the ministry which came into power in November 1830. They saw that a new period had arrived, from which great changes must take their date. They saw what opposition would be raised by those who feared change; and what difficulties by a host of sufferers from existing evils, or unreasonable expectants of impossible good. They could laugh when Sydney Smith said, in a speech on the Reform Bill: All young ladies will imagine, as soon as this bill is carried, that they will be instantly married. School-boys believe that gerunds and supines will be abolished, and that currant-tarts must ultimately come down in price; the corporal and sergeant are sure of double pay; bad poets will expect a demand for their epics; fools will be disappointed, as they always are.' Ministers might laugh at the expectations of the fools and school-children; but they were aware that a multitude of evils which must be redressed now and obviated for the future, must be dealt with in another manner than the sufferers themselves had any idea of, or were at all likely to approve. Not only had they to carry through some arduous work in which they were supported by the demand and the sympathy of a majority of the nation; they had also much to do which was not less imperatively demanded, but in doing which they must adopt methods which their supporters had to be taught to understand. To appreciate their position, irrespective of the Reform Bill, let us briefly survey the state and prospects of the country when Lord Grey and his friends came into power.

The much-dreaded cholera proved the smallest of

the prominent evils of the time. Its first assault was the most violent; and then it attacked few but the vicious, the diseased, and the feeble; and it carried off, in the whole, fewer victims than many an epidemic, before and since, which has run its course very quietly. Before its disappearance from the United Kingdom, in fifteen months, the average of deaths was one in 3 of those attacked; and the total number of deaths in and near London was declared to be 5275. No return was obtained of the number in the kingdom. When it is remembered how many deaths happened in the noisome places of our towns, and in damp nooks of wretched country villages, and in the pauper haunts of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and among the hungering Irish, it is clear that the disease could hardly work any appreciable effect in the open places, and among the comfortable classes of the kingdom. If a person of rank or substance, or in healthy middle age, was attacked here and there, it was spoken of as a remarkable circumstance; and the cholera soon came to be regarded as a visitation on the vicious and the poor. Happily the preparations which depended on the apprehensions or the benevolence of the rich were made before that change in the aspect of the new plague-the cleansing and whitewashing-the gifts of clothing and food; and the impression was made on all thoughtful minds that improved knowledge and care on the subject of health were the cause of our comparative impunity under the visitation of this plague, and that a still improved knowledge and care were the requisites to a complete impunity hereafter. Though our progress from that day to this has been slower than it ought to have been, the awakening of society in England to the duty of care of the public health must date from the visitation of the cholera in 1831-2.

The state of the rural districts was fearful at the time of the accession of the Grey administration. Everybody knew about the rick-burning and machine-breaking; and the thoughtless and narrowminded called for soldiery and police, stringent laws and severe punishments. More thoughtful persons, however, looked also at the condition of the agricultural interest generally-the complaints of distress, renewed from year to year, the increase of pauperism and poor-rates, and the growth of crime, as well as of misery; and they saw that the evil was one which stringent laws and severe punishments could not cure, nor even reach. They saw that the real mischief lay in the antiquated and corrupted poorlaw, which they knew to be what it was declared to be by a French commission sent over to inquire into its operation-'the great political gangrene of England, which it was equally dangerous to meddle with and to let alone.' Under this system, in its union with the corn-laws, the condition and prospects of the country were truly such as to make sagacious statesmen tremble. No previous administration had understood the mischief in all its extent and its bearings; but the facts were, that while rents were nominally very high, no landowner was sure of his income; that the farmers were subject to fluctuations in their receipts, which discouraged all

CHAP. VI.]

prudence and self-education for their business; that land was badly tilled, or actually going out of cultivation; that the quality of labour was deteriorating incessantly, from the practice of paying wages more and more out of the rates; that the labourers were becoming more and more reckless and demoralised, as they came to form a huge pauper class; that the honest and independent of their order were drawn down faster and faster into pauperism; that the class of small shopkeepers were becoming, in increasing numbers, unable to pay rates, and compelled, instead, to apply for relief; that country parishes were exhibiting themselves, with less and less shame, as scenes of unprincipled jobbing and scandalous vice, where every one who could, thrust his hand into the public purse, where the honest and independent became the victims of the knavish and reckless, where the unchaste might prosper while the chaste must starve, where the capitalists of the parish must sink under the coalition between the magistracy and the paupers, and where ruin impended over all. The amount of money expended for the relief of the poor in England and Wales had risen in half a century from under two millions to above seven millions per annum; and this vast expenditure went to increase instead of to relieve the pauperism of the country. Here was this enormous tax, becoming ruinous by annual increase, less production from the land, less industry among the labourers, more vice, more misery, a great race of illegitimate children growing up, riots by day, fires by night, the stout heart of England sinking, and likely to be soon broken; and all from the existence of a poor-law system for whose repeal or alteration there was no popular demand, while it was certain that every item of it would be clutched fast to the last moment by parties and persons the most difficult to deal with, from their lack of either enlightenment or public principle. Next to the reform question, the gravest which presented itself to the handling of the new ministry was undoubtedly that of the poor-law.

If it was proposed to lighten the pressure upon the poor-rate by the resource of emigration, the question was, how was it to be done?-where were the people to go? The true principles of colonisation were on the eve of being announced, but they were not yet understood; and there was the story of the Swan River settlement, new and disheartening, within every man's knowledge. The Swan River settlement dates from 1829 as a British colony. The accounts given of the district, on the western coast of New Holland, by Captain Stirling, who became its first governor, caused the grandest expectations. And the fault of the failure did not lie in any deception about the natural advantages of the place. The fault was in ignorance of the first principles of colonisation. Vast tracts of land were sold or granted to individuals. The colony was to be exempted, as a favour, from any importation of convicts. The settlers were to be allowed 200 acres of land for every labouring man, woman, or child above ten years of age, that they should import into the colony; and forty acres of land were given,

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up to the end of 1830, for every amount of £3 imported into the settlement in any shape. Thus land superabounded in proportion to capital; and the capital brought in, though so scanty in proportion to the land, abounded in proportion to the labour. The richest of the colonists could obtain no labourers; and they sat down upon their lands, surrounded by their rotting goods, their useless tools, and the frames of houses which there were no hands to erect; without shelter, and certain soon to be without food, if more labour could not be obtained. Instead of more, there was daily less, as the few labourers who were on the spot made use of their first exorbitant earnings to possess themselves of enough of the cheap land to make them their own masters. Now it appeared that the secret of the success of other settlements, pitied for their liability to convict immigration, was in their convict labour; and the Swan River colonists petitioned the government at home to send them convicts to save them from destruction. Some of the settlers wandered away, as they could find opportunity, to other colonies, stript of everything, or carrying the mere wrecks of their expensive outfit, and declaring of the famous Swan River district, 'It is a country to break one's heart;' and people at home heard such tales of perplexity and disaster as shook the popular confidence in emigration as a resource, and might well make the government hesitate in regarding it as a remedy, in any degree, for the intolerable pressure upon the poor-rate.

Those

And what was the state of older colonies? The moral sense of the nation must be met in regard to the abolition of slavery. From the time of the issue of the famous circular in Canning's day-from the time that the cause of the negro had been taken up by the powers at home-it was certain that a radical change must take place in the relation between the proprietors of men and their legal human property; and none who saw what a vast universe of morals lies above and beyond the range of the law, could for a moment doubt what that change would be. But there were enough of men, as there are in every community, who see nothing above and beyond the existing law, to make the process of change appear in anticipation very difficult and hazardous. interested in human proprietorship would perhaps no longer try to push Clarkson into the dock at Liverpool, or even dare to murder missionaries at such a distance as Demerara; but they had to be reminded that laws could be altered or abolished, and taught that eternal principles exist which compel the destruction of bad laws: and unwilling pupils like these are very slow at learning their lesson. This mighty work, of the abolition of slavery, lay clear before the eyes of the ministers, needing to be done, and soon. Another colony in the west-Canadawas in an unsatisfactory state; but the call for reform there appeared to be less pressing than it really was, and no adequate attention was given to it for yet a few years. As for our great Indian dependencies, there was no option about attending to them and their needs, for the Company's charter was about to expire; but it was a question of mighty importance

to future ages, as well as of vital consequence to many millions of living men, what the terms of the great East India proprietorship or administration should be from this time forward: whether the new doctrine of commercial freedom should spread to the nations of the east, by our practice of it there; or whether any of the time-hallowed monopolies of the most majestic of merchant companies should be contended for against the rising popular will.

Nearer home, there was that difficulty, without limit as to depth and extent-the state of Ireland. The form in which the spirit of outrage now shewed itself was opposition to the Church. It had become impossible to collect tithe in Ireland; and men saw that to collect tithe in Ireland would never be possible again. Here was the insulted Church to be vindicated-for there was as yet no debate whether to maintain it—and, at all events, the starving Irish clergy to be succoured; many of whom had pawned or sold their furniture and clothes, and were working like labourers to raise potatoes to feed their children, or were thankful for the gift of a meal of porridge for their families from a neighbour. In England, too, in places where the clergymen were strict about their dues, an imitation of Irish methods of dealing with tithe-collectors began to be heard of; and the affair was becoming urgent. Chancery reform, and many improvements in our judicial system besides, were needed and demanded. The severity of our criminal law had been for many years condemned; and one relaxation after another had been procured; but much more remained to be done than had yet been effected. The infliction of punishment was still perniciously uncertain, from the law ordaining severer penalties than the tribunals chose to inflict; and a complete revision of the criminal law, in order to bring it into harmony with the spirit of a new age, was a great work pressing to be done. There was another noble task-new, beneficent, but not on that account the less urgently necessary-for which the nation looked confidently to the new administration, and especially to the Henry Brougham who was so deeply pledged to the cause: the work of preparing a national system of education lay before the new rulers. The struggle and success of the people in the reform question was a plea for it; the growing evils of the poor-law system were a plea for it; the hope of the operative classes, and the despair of the rick-burners and the machine-breakers, were pleas for it. But these pleas, and all others, were in vain. It was not that Henry Brougham, during his four years of power, made efforts which were defeated, as efforts on behalf of education have been since, by sectarian or other differences: it was not here that the disappointment lay; but in Henry Brougham never approaching the subject at all, during his four years of power. This affair lay before the new administration, when they came into office, with the others just enumerated; and it was the greatest of them all. It alone was left untouched, and must be omitted in the narrative of what was done between 1830 and 1834.

There was, besides, the currency question, sure to turn up, under all administrations, with every vicissitude of the national fortunes; and now more sure

than usual, from the approaching expiration of the bank charter. There was the usual eagerness everywhere for the reduction of taxation; and more than the usual expectation, from the confidence felt that a reforming ministry would deal freely with sinecure offices and pensions which a Tory government could not be expected to touch.

The opportunity must be taken, while the spirit of reform pervaded the nation, and the enlightened will of the middle classes was in its completest union and vigour, to reform the municipal institutions of the country. A liberal cabinet, anxious to raise the national mind and character by an extension of selfgovernment, could not but know that it was as desirable to purify and enlarge municipal administration and powers as to amend the parliamentary representation. And this work, which would have been necessary if they had had nothing else to do than to carry parliamentary and corporation reform, was made yet more indispensable in their eyes by the necessity which they foresaw of introducing a principle and practice of centralisation, new to administration in England, and requiring, not only a careful watch over itself, but a set-off of enlarged local powers in some other direction. They foresaw that the perplexing and overwhelming task of poorlaw reform could be accomplished no otherwise than by taking out of the hands of local administrators the powers which had been so long and so grossly abused, that the wisest and best individuals could not be the reformers of the system in their own neighbourhoods, but only its victims. These powers must now be confided to some central body, and by them locally administered. Whether this necessity was a good or an evil one, might be and was debated by the two orders of politicians by whom the great question of centralisation and local administration is for ever debated; but, while some insisted that business was much better done when done for the people by well-trained officials, sending out their functionaries from a central office, and others contended that no such advantages could compensate for the loss to the people of the habit and the privilege of managing their local affairs for themselves, the new government felt that a municipal reform, which should enlarge the local powers and public interests of the people, would be the best safeguard they could give against the possible evils of such centralisation as they must establish in the prosecution of some other indispensable reforms.

Such was the series of works which lay before the new ministry, when they should have accomplished their distinguishing achievement of parliamentary reform. The mere list is an indication that we have arrived at a new period of history, and that our method of narration must change accordingly. Hitherto, while governments went on from year to year, legislating for the time-adding, amending, abrogating, from session to session, as natural occasion arose-our history could not but take something of the form of the chronicle, as it will again before its close. But at the incoming of a new period, so marked by a great act of regeneration or revolution—whichever it may be called-the