for calling the Commons House to account for its neglect of the interests of the working-classes. This National Convention could not effect much, from the want of intellectual discipline, political knowledge, and business habits, among the members; but it was so clear in its reprobation of physical force for the attainment of its objects, so free from rapacity in its aims, and so earnest in its pursuit of rights and privileges which are legitimate and virtuous objects of desire, that it was regarded with kindness by all good-hearted and unprejudiced men, however little hope or fear they might feel from its proceedings. This kindly feeling was very evident on the presentation of the national petition prepared by the convention, and carried into the House of Commons on the 14th of June. It was a wonderful document -'a cylinder of parchment about the diameter of a coach-wheel, literally rolled into the House '-and signed by upwards of 1,200,000 persons. The ordinary rule of permitting no speech on the presentation of a petition was disregarded on this occasion; and when a member desired, in insolent language, to stop the business, he was resisted by the feeling of the House and the indulgent disposition of the speaker. So Mr Attwood was allowed, by a listening House, to advocate the plea of the petitioners for the 'recovery of those ancient privileges' which were 'the original and constitutional rights of the Commons of England.' The temper of the House shewed that the effort was not altogether in vain, though no legislative consequences could be expected to ensue. No persons in England better deserved a respectful hearing than this million of petitioners; and there is reason to believe that no persons in England more sincerely mourned the outbreaks of the physical-force Chartists during this year than the leaders of the National Convention. The petition occasioned a good deal of discussion in the House, when, on the 12th of July, a committee was moved for to consider the five points of the petition-universal suffrage, vote by ballot, annual parliaments, remuneration of members, and abolition of the property qualification -but the committee was refused by a majority of 189, in a House of 281.

The home secretary remained on the watch during the first half of the year-till assured by the attorneygeneral that Chartism was extinct. In February, he called to account a magistrate of the borough of Newport, in Monmouthshire, a Mr Frost, for violent language at a public meeting. Mr Frost's replies were insolent in the extreme; but, as there had been at the outset one of the ordinary Whig mistakes, in supposing him a magistrate of the county instead of the borough, and as Mr Frost disclaimed a part of the charge, he was not at once removed. This was a stretch of forbearance much censured when the event shewed Mr Frost's unworthiness of it; but he soon provoked his removal; and it does not appear that the gentleness used towards him in the first instance had any effect in promoting the subsequent rebellion; while it was valuable as proving the disposition of the government to lenity in a time of popular suffering. In April, there was a Chartist riot at Devizes; or rather, a rising of the people of Devizes, under Tory leadership, against the Chartist

assemblage of labourers who came, a thousand strong, armed with bludgeons, to hold a meeting in the market-place. In July, Birmingham was kept in a state of disturbance for many days by Chartist turbulence. Sixty policemen were sent to Birmingham, on application from the authorities of the town; and a collision ensued between the police and the mob, which was ended only by the appearance of a troop of cavalry, after some stabs and many blows had been given. The interference was resented by some of the better order of Chartist leaders, in published resolutions, for the seditious character of which the authors suffered trial and imprisonment. The riot took place on Thursday, the 4th of July. On the Sunday evening, a mob stopped the service at St Philip's Church. On Monday, the police and military again dispersed a meeting. On Tuesday, the Chartists, having been denied the use of the Town-hall, met in an open space. The Rifles were called to disperse the assemblage, but were so assailed that they were ordered to load and make ready. Before they fired, a troop of dragoons came down upon the mob, who then fled. The inhabitants hoped that the mischief was over; but on the 15th, a far worse outbreak took place. First, windows and street-lamps were smashed; then iron palisades were torn up; houses were forced, warehouses pillaged, and bonfires made of the contents; lights put out in the streets; and, finally, houses burned down. It was by the military that the outbreak was overcome at last; and it was some days before the orderly classes of the town could take any rest. By that time they were very weary and very wrathful; weary with patrolling the streets, and keeping watch against incendiary fires; and angry with that most painful sort of wrath which has in it a mixture of fear. Some of the best workmen in Birmingham were Chartists. Some of the most indispensable men in the town had become insufferably insolent to their employers, without the excuse of hunger, which was admissible in the case of too many of the Lancashire malcontents. Many of the Birmingham Chartists might have been ten-pound householders, and in possession of all the substantial comforts of life, if they had been capable of the prudence and self-denial which had raised some of their employers from a position like their own; and it was exasperating to their employers to be insulted in their own manufactories, and their business put to hazard, by men whom they could not well dismiss, but by whom they were told that all capitalists were tyrants, born with a silver-spoon in their mouths, and so on. The evil here was clearly not political. It was socialthe master-evil of popular ignorance, under which it appeared but too probable that society must be dissolved, sooner or later, if popular enlightenment could not be achieved. Yet Birmingham is one of the best of our towns, in regard to means of popular instruction. Sheffield is another; but in Sheffield, matters were even worse. Besides the usual manœuvres of breaking windows, extinguishing the street lights, and pelting the soldiery, the malcontents planned the murder of some of the best and kindest-hearted gentlemen of the place. At Newcastle-upon-Tyne, at Stockport, at Manchester, as

CHAP. XIV.]

well as in the neighbourhood of London, assemblages were attempted for purposes of intimidation, and dispersed with more or less of difficulty. One of the most painful incidents was the extortion of money or goods from shopkeepers, under intimidation; a practice which called forth a letter from the home secretary to the magistrates of Manchester, encouraging them to use the most vigorous means to put down this method of pillage. Many who leaned towards the Chartists before, in sympathy if not in conviction, gave them up altogether on the appearance of this symptom of the agitation. One of the strange caprices of the malcontents was attending the cathedrals and other churches in overwhelming numbers, and wearing some sort of badge. Five hundred of them went in procession to St Paul's, in August. At first, most of them insisted on wearing their hats; but they yielded the point to the verger, and behaved very quietly. On the next Sunday, Norwich Cathedral was crowded to the last foothold by the Chartists of the city; to whom the bishop in his sermon offered a strong but kind remonstrance. At the Old Church at Manchester, there was a singular scene, if the record of the time be true. The Chartists quitted the church on the giving out of the text of the sermon; and the reason is said to be that, instead of accepting the Scripture verse prescribed beforehand by his Chartist hearers, the preacher chose: 'My house is the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.' For the preacher's sake, we must hope that the choice of his text had no reference to the Chartists. This mode of action-by filling the churches-was soon given up, as it evidently did not aid the Chartist cause, and was wisely passed over in quietness; and it had ceased before the autumn, with those other demonstrations, whose discontinuance had persuaded the attorney-general himself that Chartism was extinct.

It was only a lull; and that Edinburgh declaration was mischievous during the ensuing weeks, as shewing that the ministers were off their guard-to say nothing of its tone of triumph, which was anything but conciliatory. Mr Frost was awake and active, and far from grateful for the leniency which had afforded him an opportunity for remaining in the magistracy at the beginning of the year. On the 3d of November, which was on Sunday, his brother-magistrates at Newport had information that he was marching down large bodies of armed men from the hills upon the town. The attack upon the town was to have been made in the night; but the weather was bad; and the malcontents did not muster in sufficient force till the morning, when, at about ten o'clock, they entered the town. attacked the hotel where the military were stationed, and provoked the destruction of more than twenty of their number. The magistrates acted with eminent discretion and courage; the mayor, especially, so distinguishing himself that he was afterwards knighted at Windsor Castle. Frost's followers amounted to upwards of 7000 when within the town, and there were very many more upon the hills.

They

The conspiracy, frustrated by bad weather, and the good conduct of the Newport authorities, was found to be a truly formidable one, from its orderly

569

arrangements, the number of persons in the district involved in the scheme, and its connection with the Chartists of Birmingham and other places. Two other leaders, Jones and Williams, were arrested and tried with Frost. There could be no doubt of the enormity of their crime in leading this rebellion; and it was not easy to see on what plea their pardon could be asked. It was asked, however-even demanded, from time to time, for some years; but it was enough that their lives were spared. If their punishment of transportation were remitted, it is difficult to see who should be punished. Many who lamented the transportation of the Dorsetshire labourers could see no excuse for Frost, Williams, and Jones.

The state of things was very fearful. The great unsolved question of the rights of labour lay at the bottom of these perplexities and prevalent discontents; and nobody saw it-nobody who could obtain a hearing, or in any way exhibit the facts. Those who saw anything of the truth were precisely those to whom a hearing was denied the more enlightened of the manufacturing and trading class who were turned back from the doors of the legislature when they asked the Commons to listen to proof of the disorganising tendency of the corn-laws. The Chartists understood nothing of the operation of the corn-laws against their interests; and they were so far from comprehending their own existing rights, while demanding others, that they permitted pretended friends to urge the legislature to take from them the command of their only possessiontheir labour. Tory agitators went among them to incite them to demand ten-hour bills, and to alienate them from asking a free supply of food. To obtain a free admission of food was only a part of the satisfaction of the great difficulty-of the rights of labour; but it was a very important part-at the time, the chief and most immediately pressing consideration: but the government did not see it; neither House of the legislature saw it, any more than the Chartists; and they believed that the men who had begun to agitate for it, were disturbing an old system-the radical policy of the empire-for the sake of enlarging the margin of manufacturing profits, and putting more money into their own pockets, without giving the operatives their share. All this was mournful blindness and folly; but the final action against the corn-laws had fairly begun, and those who were engaged in it knew that their end was secure. If the great labour question could remain a matter of controversy till the corn question should be settled, instead of becoming one of revolution, all might yet be well; and to accomplish this, the anti-corn-law agitators set to work with a zeal, a knowledge, a pertinacity, and a spirit of self-sacrifice, probably unequalled in the history of peaceful agitation. When their work was done, and they looked back upon its beginning, they were surprised to find how little they themselves knew when they first devoted themselves to the cause. The deepest of them had scarcely an idea how closely the interests of the agricultural classes were involved in the establishment of a free-trade in food, and how society was injured through all its ramifications by

an artificial restriction in the first article of human necessity; but what they did know was clear; as far as they reasoned, their reasoning was sound; and if one part of their view was more clear and sound than another, it was that of the implication of this question with the larger and deeper one of the rights of labour, which was elsewhere causing only that perilous agitation that must issue either in suppression by force on the one hand, or in revolution on the other. The anti-corn-law agitators were, at this period, the only true Conservatives in the whole range of our society.

On the 18th of September 1838, a public dinner was given to Dr Bowring at Manchester, when the persons present-between fifty and sixty-agreed to form themselves into an association for the promotion of the principles of free-trade. They soon organised their force, settled their scheme of public instruction and political movement, raised subscriptions, were sanctioned by the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, and made known their existence to the large towns of England and Scotland by recommending similar associations in them all. This was the origin of the Anti-Corn-Law League.

At the beginning of 1839, we find assembled in London a large body of delegates from Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow, and the great manufacturing towns, whose business it was to examine and analyse the House of Commons, in regard to the corn-law question; to watch over its action on that question, and see how far professions were supported by knowledge and sincerity on either side; and to challenge the House, collectively and individually, by offering to prove at its bar all the allegations they had made against the operation of the corn-laws. We find the metropolitan boroughs holding meetings to appoint delegates on their own behalf, and passing resolutions of discontent at the omission of the topic of the corn-laws from the queen's speech. On the 7th of February, when Mr Villiers had given notice of a motion that evidence on the operation of the corn-laws should be heard at the bar, Lord J. Russell made a little speech which caused a stronger sensation than some of the longest he had ever delivered. It was copied into the newspapers with a declaration that it made one's blood boil; and the universal impression, among men of all parties, seems to have been, that it proved him so unaware of the existing circumstances and temper of the nation as to injure his immediate reputation and influence, and to weaken him, unaccountably to himself, in every one of the various positions in regard to the corn-law question, in which he afterwards endeavoured to establish himself. He said 'the impression on his mind was that it would be his duty to oppose the motion as to hearing evidence at the bar. He had not as yet found sufficient reasons or precedents to induce him to adopt that course. At the same time he must say, that as there would be a great deal of discussion relating to facts, when a mode was proposed which he thought was conformable to precedent, and not inconvenient to the House, by which these facts could be ascertained, he should be willing, although not ready to propose it himself, to support a motion

so to ascertain the facts.' This might have been taken as a matter of course from Sir R. Peel in those days-this speech about propriety and precedent, and the convenience of the House, in regard to a matter about which 3,000,000 of the best subjects in the empire had sent up representatives to London, and a message to parliament. Such a speech would have suited Sir R. Peel's then position and views with regard to the corn-laws. But Lord J. Russell had declared to his Stroud constituents that the existing corn-laws were indefensible; and he declared on this very night that he believed the time to be come for a change. The delegates who were analysing the House now knew where to place Lord J. Russell on their lists. He disapproved the corn-laws in the abstract—just as the Carolina planters disapprove slavery in the abstract. In both cases, when an opportunity for acting from that disapprobation occurs, the action goes over to the other side. This was proved on the 18th of the same month, when, the cabinet being divided on Mr Villiers's motion, Lord J. Russell voted against it, with Lord Howick, Lord Palmerston, Mr Spring Rice, and some minor officials, while Mr Poulett Thomson, in this his last session in parliament, and Sir J. C. Hobhouse, voted for inquiry. Mr Villiers's speech that night was not lost. It was a statement of singular force and clearness; and the occasion was destined to great celebrity. Of all the many weak and blind acts of the Whig ministers, none was more memorable than this refusal to hear evidence on a subject whose importance they professed to admit; and Mr Villiers's position was conspicuous in proportion to their fall. On that night he assumed his post undisputed as the head authority in the legislature on the subject of the corn-laws; and from that night the Whig ministers who opposed his motion lost all chance of being generally trusted in any popular action on that subject. If they had understood this as others understood it, their exit from power two years afterwards would have been made in another manner than it was. The majority of the Commons against inquiry was 361 to 172. As for the peers, they would not entertain the subject at all. Lord Brougham laid the case before them in a strong and able statement; but they negatived it without a division.

The delegates met, and passed votes of thanks to Lord Brougham and Mr Villiers. Among the hopeful speakers was Richard Cobden. There was no cause for despondency, he said, because the House over the way had refused to hear them. They were the representatives of three millions of people-they were the evidence that the great towns had banded themselves together, and their alliance would be a Hanseatic league against their feudal corn-law plunderers. The castles which crowned the rocks along the Rhine, the Danube, and the Elbe, had once been the stronghold of feudal oppressors; but they had been dismantled by a league; and they now only adorned the landscape as picturesque memorials of the past, while the people below had lost all fear of plunder, and tilled their vineyards in peace. A public dinner

camp-the war was not over, but only the mode of attack about to be changed. There was no secrecy about the new mode of attack. The delegates had offered to instruct the House; the House had refused to be instructed; the House must be instructed; and the way now contemplated was the grandest, and most unexceptionable and effectual-it was to be by instructing the nation. The delegates were to meet again at Manchester in a fortnight, to devise their method of general instruction, which, in its seven years' operation, approached more nearly to a genuine national education than any scheme elsewhere at work. By the Anti-Corn-Law League the people at large were better trained to thought and its communication, to the recognition of principles, the obtaining of facts, and the application of the same faculties and the same interest to their public as to their private affairs, than by any methods of

intellectual development yet tried under the name of education.

The present was a time when minds were feverish, and disposed to undue alarm from any untoward circumstance; and the queen was made to bear her share of the uneasy excitement of the period. It was no wonder that, as all eminent persons are likely to occupy the visions of infirm minds, a young queen should be especially liable to the intrusions of the insane. It was no wonder to any body that one lunatic, having crept up to the garden steps of Buckingham Palace, should threaten her majesty because no Protestant should occupy the throne of England; nor that another, having leaped the enclosures at Windsor, should demand admittance to the castle as King of England; and so forth. But there were worse alarms than these, for two or three years. At first, there really was terror when a pistol was

fired near the royal carriage, in the course of the queen's drives. Her popularity was by no means what it had been. Sometimes silence, and sometimes disagreeable cries, in the streets and the theatres indicated this. The disheartened and suffering people could not understand how the prime-minister could properly conduct the public business while seen daily with the queen, or heard of at her parties; nor how so much money could be properly spent upon the queen's banquets and balls, while so many poor were starving; nor how the queen could enjoy festivities for six days in the week, while there was so much mourning in the land. When one pistolshot after another was directed at the queen's carriage within two or three years, it was clearly proved in each case that there was no conspiracy, and no immediate working of political discontent; yet the general impression was that the odious act might not have been attempted in a season of prosperity and satisfaction. The first case, which occurred on the 10th of June 1840, was a type of the rest, and may serve for a notice of them all. A youth of eighteen or nineteen, named Oxford, who was foolish, if not insane, fired two pistol-shots at the queen in her phaeton on Constitution Hill. He was poor and ignorant; and it was so impossible to find any cause for the act, that he was pronounced insane, and given over to a lunatic asylum for life. On this first occasion, the excitement was so strong -'members of parliament applying for locks of Oxford's hair when it was cut off'-the whole aristocratic crowd in the Parks escorting the queen home with cheers, and the affair appearing in capital letters in the newspapers for weeks, that it is not surprising that an ignorant person here and there, with a morbid longing for notoriety, should try to get it by shooting at the queen. This became so well understood after a time, and it was clear that the risk to the queen was, at the same time, so nearly nothing, that such affairs were treated as they should be-as nuisances which might best be put a stop to by contempt and an ignominious punishment; and, during the next period, an act passed by which such a prank was punished by whipping, accompanying imprisonment or transportation. The most abiding incident connected with this first attack is one which it is now-and was yet more at the time-pleasant to note. At the top of Constitution Hill, the queen spoke to her husband, and the carriage, at his order, turned from the Hyde Park entrance down Grosvenor Place. The queen had thought of her mother, and went to her, that the Duchess of Kent might see that her daughter was safe before any other notice of the attack reached her. Of such attacks, no more mention will be made. The queen has no enemies among her people. Sovereigns who lead innocent lives and have no political power have no enemies among their people; and the pointing of a pistol at the royal carriage-a pistol, now without a bullet, and now without a lock-by some poor creature who courts arrest, is an incident of which this cursory notice is sufficient. The first occurrence of the kind, however, certainly did not tend to relieve the depression of the period.

Some accidents went to increase the gloom. There were several dockyard fires happening so near together, and so mysteriously, as to excite fears of treachery; but one proved to be from spontaneous combustion, and another from an accident. The storms were severe and disastrous; and one in the winter of 1839 was more like a tropical hurricane than a mere winter storm in our own seas. Twenty persons were killed in Liverpool streets, and a hundred drowned on the neighbouring shores. Dublin was like a sacked city-some houses unroofed, and others burning from the flight of sparks and brands. The repeal agitation was advancing in Ireland so formidably, that the lordlieutenant publicly declared at this time, that he should oppose to it the whole power of the government; and that all countenance of the government should be withheld from those who took part in it. There had been a new, though futile rebellion in Canada. As for the east, it required some courage to look that way. What a thoughtful man had been saying for years, that we should be compelled to conquer China, was now coming true. In the next period of our history we shall have to tell of the Chinese war which was now beginning. In India, matters were in a more fearful state still. The blow had not fallen yet-the blow which annihilated an Indian army; but it was felt that something terrible was impending; and in fact some very bad news was on the way. Under such accumulated gloom, destined yet to deepen for some time, it was a thought of comfort to the nation that the queen was safe in the honour and repose of a home; and it was a matter of general rejoicing when the blessings of that home were enriched by the birth of a daughter on the 21st of November 1840.

CHAPTER XV.

OME beneficent legislation took place during this period, three instances of which were of such strong popular interest as to require notice in some detail.

Up to this time, the criminal law of the country had not been accessible to those who lived under that law; and it was no easy matter for professional men to attain any competent knowledge of it. The criminal law of England was contained in an immense and confused mass of documents-statutes, ancient and modern records, reported decisions of the judges, and text-books. If the mind of every individual lawyer was required to deduce the law from all these repositories, it was clear that the vast work would not really be done; and if the profession proceeded on tradition, or in conventional agreement with regard to the most commonly occurring cases, it does not appear that the deposited law was of much practical use. It ill befitted a civilised state and an enlightened age that the criminal law should not be clearly ascertained,