Another effect of the growth of manufactures was to influence very considerably the prevailing opinions about the legitimate sphere of Government interference. ‘It is one of the finest problems of legislation,’ Burke truly wrote, ‘what the State ought to take upon itself and to direct by the public wisdom, and what it ought to leave with as little interference as possible to individual discretion.’ 1 It may be added that there are few questions upon which more various and conflicting answers have been given in different ages and countries. In classical antiquity the sphere of government and the sphere of morals were regarded as almost co-extensive. The State undertook to discharge authoritatively moral functions which in modern societies are left chiefly to religions. It set before itself a distinct moral ideal, and it was held to be its supreme end to make wise, virtuous, and capable citizens. It is the task of governors, according to Plato, to ‘draw from what Homer calls the divine form and likeness subsisting among men; effacing one thing and putting in another, till they have, as far as possible, made human morals pleasing to the gods.’ 2 In that great mediæval and feudal system of law which grew up under the influence of Catholicism, and which after the Reformation still survived in its most essential parts in the laws of the Tudors, the sphere of government was equally extended. Religious belief and religious worship were rigidly prescribed by law and enforced by the severest penalties. Sumptuary laws regulated in minute detail private manners and expenses. Wages and prices were both determined, not by free competition, but by law. Industry in all its departments moved under the restraints and supports of the guilds. Landed property was held, subject to many rigid conditions, and special laws determined how much land must be ploughed, and how much might be left in pasture; how much land must surround a labourer's cottage; how many sheep should be supported on a farm. It was, in a word, within the accepted duty of the Government to regulate the social condition of the nation in all its details, with a view to promote the physical and moral well-being of all classes and the strength of the nation as a whole.

This theory of government gradually wore itself away, although the brief period of Puritan ascendency in England, and in the American colonies, exhibited authoritative interference with private manners carried almost to the highest point. Several causes, however, into which it is not now necessary to enter, had produced in England from a very early period a spirit of independence and self-assertion much greater than on the Continent, and the empire of Government over the individual was never so absolute. After the Restoration a new and purely secular theory of government began to dominate, though many fragments of the old feudal laws remained, blending, often very successfully, with more modern legislation. After the Revolution the restriction of the sphere of Government interference proceeded more rapidly. There was a disputed succession, and a Government which did not really represent the sentiments of the majority of the nation, and the Revolution settlement was only kept in existence by a studied moderation, by holding the reins very loosely, by avoiding as much as possible all occasions of friction or collision. At the same time, the most powerful intellectual movements tended to withdraw great departments of human affairs from Government coercion and control. Complete religious toleration and perfect liberty in the expression of political opinion were both substantially achieved. Attempts to regulate manners by sumptuary laws came to an end, though Blackstone notices that when he wrote there was still in the Statute-book an obsolete law of Edward III. ordaining that no one should be served at dinner and supper with more than two courses, except on some great holidays, when he might have three. 1 The regulation of morals, except as far as the well-being of society was directly affected, though not formally abandoned, was no longer seriously undertaken. A law of 1746 punishing profane swearing by fines proportioned to the rank of the culprit, 1 and a few laws against gambling, were the most conspicuous exceptions, though, as we have already seen, the Evangelical movement produced some tendency among private persons to attempt prosecutions under obsolete laws enforcing the strict observance of Sunday, or punishing different kinds of immorality.

In general, however, legislation was now confined to the protection of life and property and the regulation of industry, and the opinion that in the latter sphere most Government interference was mischievous was steadily gaining ground. During the whole of the eighteenth century the famous law of Elizabeth determining the conditions of industry was in force. 2 It provided that no one could lawfully exercise any art, mystery, or manual occupation without having served in it at least seven years as an apprentice; that no one should be bound as an apprentice who was not under twenty-one years, and whose parents did not possess a certain fortune; that every master who had three apprentices must keep one journeyman, and for every other apprentice above three, one other journeyman; that no one should be engaged as a servant or journeyman for less than a year; that the hours of work should be twelve in summer, and from dawn to night in winter, and finally that wages should be assessed for the year by the justices of the peace or town magistrates, who were also directed to settle all disputes between masters and apprentices. Another law which was passed under James I. 3 extended the power of the justices and town magistrates to fix the wages of all kinds of labourers and workmen.

These Acts, however, soon fell into desuetude, and it is remarkable that it was especially the workmen who appear to have clung to them. The Act of Elizabeth was confined to market towns, and to forms of industry which had existed before it was passed. In country villages a person might exercise trades without having served a seven years' apprenticeship, and in recent trades the whole system of regulation was abandoned. 4 The great woollen manufacture, in addition to the Act of Elizabeth, was minutely regulated by earlier statutes, but towards the middle of the eighteenth century there were bitter complaints among the workmen that the justices refused to fix the rate of wages as the law required, and after some strikes and riots an Act was passed in 1756 again ordering the justices to settle yearly the rate of wages in this manufacture. 1 There were other trades which were carried on in corporations under byelaws very imperfectly observed, and there were complaints that some masters had overstocked their trades with multitudes of parish apprentices; that wages were not fixed by law and by the year, but fluctuated and sank with competition. Many petitions were presented by workmen imploring Parliament to regulate them, and several laws for this purpose were passed during the eighteenth century.

As far as can now be judged, the restrictive system, regulating the number of apprentices and settling for long periods the rate of wages, appears to have been popular with the workmen; but the masters in general opposed or evaded the restrictions, and the great developments, changes, and fluctuations of industry towards the close of the century produced new conditions to which the old regulations were inapplicable. There was a period of great industrial anarchy. The custom of assessing wages by the justices of the peace or by the Lord Mayor appears to have become very generally obsolete. In the silk manufacture, however, in consequence of great prevailing distress, three laws called ‘The Spitalfields Acts’ were passed, providing minutely for the regulation of wages by the Lord Mayor or justices of the peace. Employers giving more or less than the assessed wages to their workmen or evading the Acts, as well as journeymen entering into combinations to raise wages, were condemned to fines, which were to be applied to the relief of needy weavers and their families. 2 In the last years of the century new and very stringent laws were made forbidding combinations of workmen to raise wages. 3 Laws of this kind had already frequently appeared in the Statute-book, and as long as all the conditions of trade were legally regulated they were natural and justifiable. When, however, the law ceased to regulate wages, and the masters were at full liberty to concert to depress them, the combination laws against workmen became a glaring injustice. It is probable that they may be partially explained by the extreme dread of popular associations that might assume a political and Jacobinical form which the French Revolution had produced. 1

The number of restrictions falling upon industry, and the number of taxes, partly indeed for the purpose of revenue, but partly also for the purpose of regulation, that rested upon its products, were very great. Even before the many taxes that grew out of the war of the American Revolution a foreign observer noticed that an Englishman was taxed when he got up, for his soap; at nine o'clock, for his coffee, tea, and sugar; at noon, for the starch with which he powdered his hair; at dinner, for his salt; in the evening, for his porter; all day long, for his light; and at night, for his candles. 2 A glance over the Statute-book, or at the police reports of the eighteenth century, illustrates curiously the great difference between its industrial system and our own. Thus a law of George I., passed in the interest of the silk manufacturers, prohibited anyone from wearing buttons and button-holes made of cloth or other stuff, and as late as 1796 a law was passed at the request of the makers of metal buttons prescribing the proportion of gilt, double gilt, and triple gilt buttons, and prohibiting the mixture of buttons of different qualities. 3 I have already cited the law which long made it penal for any woman to wear a dress made of Indian calico. In 1766 a lady was fined 200l. at the Guild Hall because it was proved that her handkerchief was of French cambric. 4 In the same year an attorney named Brecknock, who had been sent to prison by the House of Lords for publishing a book called the ‘Droit du Roi,’ avenged himself upon Lord Camden by laying an information before Judge Fielding, that the Chief Justice and three other judges wore cambric bands in court, contrary to the Act of Parliament. 5 The laws against usury were frequently enforced, and they forbade the exaction of any interest higher than five per cent. All contracts for taking higher interest were not only void, but were punished by the lender forfeiting treble the amount borrowed. 1 The offence of ‘owling,’ or transporting English wool or sheep to foreign countries, was treated with especial severity, as it was supposed to assist the rival woollen manufactures of the Continent, and the penalties against this offence rose to seven years' transportation. Penalties but little less severe were enacted against those who exported machines employed in the chief English industries, or who induced artificers to emigrate; and any skilled workman who carried his industry to a foreign market, if he did not return within six months, after being warned by the English ambassador, was declared an alien, forfeited all his goods, and became incapable of receiving any legacy or gift. General warrants, without specifying names, were especially employed as a means of detaining such workmen when they were preparing to emigrate, and there were complaints that the condemnation of these warrants during the Wilkes case, by facilitating the emigration, had a prejudicial influence on English industry. 2 At home the law of settlement effectually prevented the labourer from carrying his labour to the most profitable market. The poor law secured him an ultimate support in the parish in which he was settled, but it also gave the parochial authorities an almost unlimited power of preventing a new labourer from establishing himself in the parish and of forcibly removing poor men if they seemed likely to become chargeable on the rates.

This last power, as we have seen, was modified towards the close of the century, and the system of regulation, though still in our eyes extravagantly excessive, had greatly diminished. Though particular Acts still regulated wages in particular trades or places, the old system of determining all wages either by general laws or by particular orders of the justices of the peace in each county, had fallen into complete desuetude. The regulation of profits, by fixing the price of provisions and other goods, was now only retained in the case of bread, the assize of which continued till 1815, when it was abolished in London and appears to have become obsolete in other parts of the kingdom. 1 Among the ancient restrictions on free trade in provisions, were a crowd of laws which were still sometimes put in force against ‘Badgers,’ ‘Engrossers,’ ‘Forestallers,’ and ‘Regrators,’ terms which denoted different classes of speculators, who, foreseeing a coming dearness, and desiring to regulate prices or monopolise the market, bought up large quantities of provisions before they came to market, or at an early period of the market, in order to sell them again at an enhanced price. Most of these laws were repealed in 1772, 2 and Burke appears to have taken the leading part in their abolition. 3 The provisions of the statute of Elizabeth relating to apprentices and journeymen were suffered to fall into general neglect; special Acts were passed in 1777 relieving particular trades from similar restrictions, 4 and under the commercial treaties, which were so frequent during the eighteenth century, some steps were taken in the direction of free trade. The transition of industry from small establishments to vast factories, the wholly new conditions on which its success depended, and the magnitude and power which the different industrial classes assumed, made the regulations of Elizabeth and of the Stuarts altogether impracticable, and they at last led to the great measures of 1814 and 1824, which repealed the Apprentice Act and a number of other old laws, preventing workmen from combining or from emigrating, regulating the rate of wages, the hours of work, and the manner of conducting any business or manufacture. Nearly at the same time the most important of the great exclusive commercial companies were abolished or thrown open. 5

It is worthy of notice that this vast and rapid emancipation of industry from the restrictions which mediæval and Tudor legislation had imposed upon it was effected by a Tory Government, and at a time when Toryism was completely in the ascendant in Parliament. It was partly due to the force of the new circumstances which industrial inventions had produced, and partly also to the general intellectual influences of the time. The first form that political economy assumed was a conviction that all Government interference with industry was an evil. ‘Laisser faire, laisser passer,’ was the favourite maxim of Quesnay and his school, and, as we have seen, they combined the most unflinching advocacy of commercial freedom with a strong political leaning towards despotism. Fénelon in his ‘Telemachus’ had already advocated complete liberty of commerce; 1 but what with him was a passing intuition of genius, with the economists was an essential part of a great and well-reasoned system. The English economists adopted the same view, and it was adopted also for other reasons by the more advanced Democrats. The restriction of government within the narrowest limits was in their eyes the condition and indeed the very definition of liberty, and in this respect they were totally opposed to the authoritative democracy of Rousseau and of his later followers. ‘All government,’ wrote Price, ‘even within a State, becomes tyrannical as far as it is a needless and wanton exercise of power, or is carried further than is absolutely necessary to preserve the peace or to secure the safety of the State. This is what an excellent writer calls “governing too much.”’ 2 ‘Government,’ wrote Godwin, ‘can have no more than two legitimate purposes, the suppression of injustice against individuals within the community, and defence against external invasion.’ 3

Among those who did not belong to the Radical school a great distrust of Government interference with industry was also shown. It appears in the writings of Hume and Tucker, both of whom were decided Tories. ‘Our policy,’ wrote Arthur Young, ‘is weak beyond all doubt, because it consists of prohibiting the natural course of things. All restrictive, forcible measures in domestic policy are bad.’ 4 Burke, as we have seen, by no means sympathised with the prevailing Whig doctrine that Government should exercise little or no coercive influence in the sphere of religion, but in industrial matters his leaning was consistently on the side of liberty. In that great speech on American taxation which he made in the earlier phase of his career he complained that ‘Mr. Grenville thought better of the wisdom and power of human legislation than in truth it deserves. He conceived, and many conceived along with him, that the flourishing trade of this country was greatly owing to law and institution, and not quite so much to liberty,’ and, in one of the last tracts he ever wrote, Burke pointed out that the leading vice of the French monarchy had been a ‘restless desire of governing too much. The hand of authority was seen in everything and in every place.’ ‘My opinion,’ he concluded, ‘is against an overdoing of any sort of administration, and more especially against this most momentous of all meddling on the part of authority, the meddling with the subsistence of the people.’ 1

But by far the most powerful intellectual influence in this direction was that of Adam Smith, whose views on commercial matters soon acquired a paramount authority over the best English minds. It is one of the signal proofs of his genius that, though some of his doctrines have not stood the test of time, his great work in its method and its spirit is more akin to nineteenth century thought than the most eminent of its successors. Unlike Ricardo, and unlike the great school of economists that followed Ricardo, Adam Smith did not treat political economy as a chain of absolute and almost mathematical reasoning, to be evolved à priori, and with little or no relation to the fluctuating and diversified conditions of societies. His work is perhaps the best example in literature of the union of history with philosophy, and he showed the true judgment of a statesman in recognising exceptions and limitations to his most cherished principles. Thus, while no previous writer had written so powerfully in favour of the restriction of the sphere of government, he at the same time contended that the education of the people was a task which it was the duty of Government to undertake; that a school should be established in every parish, where children may be taught at so moderate a cost that even a common labourer may afford it; that it should be partly but not wholly paid by the public, and that the Government may in this way encourage and even impose upon almost the whole body of the people the necessity of acquiring the most essential parts of education. In spite of his strong sense of the value of machinery in industry, he has pointed out with the greatest fullness, and even with some exaggeration, the tendency of the excessive division of labour it produces, to narrow both the intellect and the character. In the same way his central doctrine of free trade is largely qualified. He warmly eulogised the navigation laws on the ground of political expediency, and he justified protective laws in favour of native industry as measures of retaliation against foreign nations which impose restrictions on our imports; as measures of self-preservation, securing to a nation a constant supply of everything that is necessary for the national defence, and as measures of equalisation when the products of foreigners are burdened with lower taxes than our own.

But in spite of these exceptions, his book is essentially one long indictment against Government interference with industry either in the form of restriction or in the form of encouragement. As Dugald Stewart has truly said, it was its main object ‘to demonstrate that the most effectual plan for advancing a people to greatness is to maintain that order of things which Nature has pointed out; by allowing every man, as long as he observes the rules of justice, to pursue his own interest in his own way, and to bring both his industry and his capital into the freest competition with those of his fellow-citizens.’ Restrictive duties, prohibitions and bounties, by which Legislatures have endeavoured to force industries into particular channels, are alike condemned, as well as all attempts to regulate private expenses by sumptuary laws. The natural effort of each man to improve his own position, when exerted with freedom and security, is represented as the mainspring of national progress. Every nation and individual, in the judgment of Adam Smith, is directly interested in the prosperity of others; their jealousies spring mainly from ignorance; and whatever lowers the cost of the products which a nation requires is equivalent to an increase in the national wealth. The corollary from these propositions is that the largest possible latitude should be given to industry and competition. The legitimate functions of Government, Smith maintains, may all be summed up under three heads: (1) to protect the society from the attacks of other nations, (2) to secure each member of the society from the injustice or ill-will of other members, (3) to erect and maintain certain establishments of public utility which are of such a nature that it would never be the particular interest of an individual, or the interest of a small number of persons, to construct them.

Such was the order of ideas which for more than a generation presided over and mainly formed the character of English Liberalism. It was a robust, healthy, and self-reliant type, extremely jealous of all extensions of Government interference, extremely tenacious of individual liberty, and habitually preferring spontaneous activity, even when wasteful and ill-regulated, to the disciplined action of a controlling power. Many circumstances, however, have contributed gradually to change it, and it is certain that the problem of the legitimate sphere of Government action is a much more complex and difficult one than it appeared to the writers of the eighteenth century. All political rules are dependent on the special circumstances, conditions, and character of the people for whom they are intended. The political art is essentially an art of adaptation; it admits of very few general terms, and the course which is suited for one stage of society is wholly unsuited for another. There are societies of scattered farmers like the Boers in South Africa for whom scarcely any government is needed. In crowded and highly organised societies the work that must be accomplished by the community is far larger, but there is an enormous difference in different nations in the amount of spontaneous energy which they produce. Let anyone compare from this point of view the great communities of North America with those of South America; or European with Asiatic nations; or Great Britain with Ireland and with most of the nations of the Continent; and he can hardly fail to be struck with the absurdity of supposing that the sphere of Government initiative and control can be defined for all of them by the same rules. Much of this difference has its root in the deep and obscure field of national character, and much also is due to particular circumstances and especially to the distribution of wealth. When there is a large, intelligent, and energetic middle class; when the spirit of specnlation is strongly developed; when there is a high standard of public spirit; and when wealth is so agglomerated that there are many persons who possess either habitually or occasionally incomes much larger than their wants, a crowd of enterprises will be undertaken which are of the highest value to the community, but which only offer to the investor the prospect of doubtful, small, or postponed returns. In countries where these conditions do not exist such works will never be undertaken without the initiative and support of the Government.

In England the great development of manufactures broke the trammels of the mediæval system of industry, and led the way to the triumph of free trade, but it also prepared the way for a new reaction in the direction of Government interference. Adam Smith judged correctly in connecting the question of national education with that of manufactures. The experience of the nineteenth century has abundantly shown that no nation can hold its own in the great competition of the world without a high standard of education, and that such a standard cannot possibly be attained without a large measure of Government direction and assistance. Hence this vast field of activity, which was formerly left to individual initiative or to ecclesiastical organisations, has become one of the chief preoccupations of statesmen, and over the greater part of Europe immense sums are compulsorily raised in order to establish efficient education under the direct control and superintendence of the State. The Factory Laws marked a second great step in the extension of Government influence—important in itself, but still more important as a precedent. It was found that simple competition occasioned the employment of women and children in a manner that ruined their health; that the overcrowded factory might become a seedplot of immorality; that a permanent lowering of the physical as well as moral standard of a vast section of the population was to be feared, and that great political dangers might grow out of moral evils. Hence sprang a long series of legislative interferences with industry, wholly repugnant to the laisser faire philosophy. The progress of medicine, again, showed that some deadly and contagious diseases could be successfully combated by the universal imposition of certain practices or rules. Hence compulsory vaccination, and the growing sense of the extreme importance of extensive Government measures of sanitary inspection and reform, and experience has conclusively established the enormous saving of human life which can by these means be effected. In a smaller circle the invention of railways had a similar effect, for it was found absolutely necessary to regulate this form of locomotion to a much greater extent than the older forms.

In this manner department after department of human affairs has been gradually drawn to an increased extent into the sphere of Government superintendence and control. But many other and very various influences have been tending in the same direction. The greatly increased sensitiveness of philanthropy which characterises our century, and the immense extension of the newspaper press, have together brought into clear and vivid relief vast numbers of miseries, wants, and possibilities of improvement, which in former years had been unknown or unrealised, and it becomes the natural impulse of multitudes to seek an immediate remedy in Government interference. The impulse is especially natural, and also especially dangerous, because, in the balance of advantages and disadvantages resulting from such a course, the former appeal very powerfully, and the latter most inadequately, to the imagination. Men realise vividly the magnitude of the evil to be combated. They realise vividly the improvement when that evil seems to have suddenly ceased; but they do not realise the impossibility of effecting permanent improvements without changing the characters and desires of men; the danger of weakening by successive acts of interference the spirit of responsibility and self-reliance; the danger of premature and ill-considered reforms producing other evils more grave than those which are remedied; the pressure of the increased taxation, which increased Government superintendence imposes over a wide area of struggling and productive industry; the fatal tendency of every act of interference to become a precedent, and to reproduce itself in further encroachments on individual action. With the great transfer of power to uninstructed democracies the impulse towards Government interference has naturally increased. Plausible and superficial advantages, which are susceptible of a popular treatment, weigh much more on the minds of such men than remote, indirect, and possibly obscure dangers, and, as Aristotle long since pointed out, the demagogue finds his easiest path to power in incitements to class warfare, and promises of class benefits through the compulsory action of Government. It must be added, too, that when once the empire of habit and tradition is broken, and that of popular discussion is extended, the reproductive character of a precedent or a principle is greatly increased. In earlier periods of English history measures of a socialistic tendency, like the English Poor Law, might exist for generations as isolated and perhaps beneficial anomalies. In active democracies the desire to unify and assimilate the type of legislation is much stronger; principles are quickly pushed to their extreme consequences, and one measure of State interference is tolerably sure to become a point of departure, and the basis of many others.

In all these ways the tendency to enlarge the sphere of Government acquires an accelerated force. On the Continent that great augmentation of standing armies which has been so conspicuous a feature of the present century has strengthened the bias in favour of strongly organised and disciplined government; and the laws of equal succession, which have been so generally adopted, are not only themselves a signal instance of legislative interference with the social type, but also, by their tendency to level fortunes, make Government initiative more necessary. In England the notion has greatly extended of regarding Government as a machine for securing co-operative effort, for unifying, organising, and concentrating the action of the community for many different purposes, and the large number of public men who have been formed and influenced by the experience of Indian life has had a similar effect.

Under all these influences, the tendency which prevailed in the latter half of the eighteenth century has been not only checked but reversed. The old jealousy of Government interference, and of encroachments on individual liberty, and the old disposition to rely on individual action rather than Government assistance, have both manifestly diminished, and the pendulum of opinion sways once more in the direction of authority. Compulsory regulations have, within the last twenty or thirty years, multiplied to a startling degree in the Statute-book. The immense increase of the burden of taxation is largely due to the many additional functions which Government has assumed. The modern system of placing the credit of the State, in the form of large loans at low interest, at the service of particular classes, seems likely to have a very wide extension, and much of the Irish legislation of the last few years has been as irreconcilable with the principles of Adam Smith, with modern notions of private property, and with the respect for contracts, as any part of the legislation of the Tudors.

I do not here undertake to judge these measures. What I have written is intended merely to point out the change of tendency, since the closing years of the eighteenth century. There was then much less desire for Government interference and compulsion. There was also much less sensitiveness to the great evils of the time. Of this latter fact the almost unchanged condition of the penal code is a sufficient proof.

I have devoted several pages, in a former volume, to the penal system of the eighteenth century, and the barbarities and absurdities which were there described were not seriously diminished before its close. The fact will appear supremely shameful when we remember that the reform of penal codes had on the Continent been one of the special themes of writers upon politics, and one of the capital achievements of the great generation of reforming monarchs and statesmen that preceded the French Revolution. The atrocity and almost grotesque absurdity of the English penal code grew out of certain inveterate traditions of English legislation. Penal laws, enacted often in a remote antiquity and under circumstances that have wholly vanished, have been constantly allowed to remain unrepealed, though they have become obsolete and nearly forgotten, and later generations, without revoking them, have made new laws against the same crimes. Nothing is more common than to find, in consequence, that the same crimes may be prosecuted under totally different penalties. At last a generation arises who consider acts that had once been deemed heinously criminal either innocent or venial, and a law is passed repealing a great mass of ancient legislation that condemned them. The historian will naturally assume that they had become legal; but he will constantly find, on more careful examination, that an act which had been formally freed from a crowd of penalties, still remains an offence by common law, or by some ancient statute which had not been included in the list of those which were repealed; and occasionally, and at long intervals, penal laws which had been regarded as wholly obsolete were put in force. This utter want of method and symmetry in English legislation, this extravagant multiplication of statutes bearing upon the same act, this difference between the theory and the practice of the law, constitutes one of the chief difficulties of an English historian, and we have had many examples of it in the present work. Another class of laws had acquired a great additional severity by the lapse of time. Legislators had endeavoured to protect property by punishing with death those who stole a sum of money which in their time was considerable, and the penalty was retained when the change in the value of money had made that sum insignificant. In this way, as an old lawyer forcibly complained, ‘While everything else had risen in its nominal value and become dearer, the life of man had continually grown cheaper.’ It was also the constant practice of Parliament in the eighteenth century, when new offences arose or when old offences assumed a new prominence, to pass special Acts making them capital. Hence an enormous and undigested multiplication of capital offences, which soon made the criminal code a mere sanguinary chaos. Previous to the Revolution the number in the Statute-book is said not to have exceeded fifty. During the reign of George II. sixty-three new ones were added. In 1770 the number was estimated in Parliament at one hundred and fifty-four, 1 but by Blackstone at one hundred and sixty; and Romilly, in a pamphlet which he wrote in 1786, observed that in the sixteen years since the appearance of Blackstone's Commentaries it had considerably increased.

A few illustrations will sufficiently show the extravagant absurdity of the code. Thus, to steal a sheep or a horse; to snatch a man's property out of his hands and run away with it; to steal to the amount of forty shillings in a dwelling-house, or to the amount of five shillings ‘privately’ in a shop; to pick a man's pocket of any greater sum than twelve pence; to steal linen from a bleaching ground, and woollen cloth from a tenter ground; to cut down trees in a garden or in an orchard; to break the border of a fishpond so that the fish may escape, were all crimes punishable with death. On the other hand, it was not a capital offence for a man to attempt the life of his father; to commit premeditated perjury, even when the result was the execution of an innocent man; to stab a man, however severely, provided the victim did not die from the wound; to burn a house in which the incendiary had a lease, even though it was so situated as to endanger the lives of hundreds. It was a capital offence to steal goods to the amount of forty shillings from a vessel on a navigable river, but not from a vessel on a canal. To steal fruit ready gathered was a felony. To gather it and steal it was only a trespass. To break a pane of glass at five in the afternoon for the purpose of stealing something that lay in the window was a capital offence. To break open a house with every circumstance of violence in summer, at four o'clock in the morning, was only a misdemeanour. To steal goods from a shop, if the thief happened to be seen to take them, was punishable by transportation. To steal the same goods ‘privately,’ that is to say when the criminal was not seen, was punishable with death. In one case a servant was put on his trial who had attempted to murder his master, and had given him fifteen wounds with a hatchet. He was executed, not as an attempted murderer, but as a burglar, because he had been obliged to lift up the latch of his master's door in order to enter his chamber. In another case a man of notoriously bad character, after going through a course of burglary and larceny with impunity, was at last convicted and executed for cutting down young trees. 1 The only difference in punishment by which the law of England distinguished the most atrocious murder from the theft of five shillings, was that in the first case, under a law of George II., the execution of the criminal was to take place within forty-eight hours of his conviction, and his body was to be anatomised.

A natural result of such laws was the constant perjury of juries. Unwilling to convict culprits for small offences which were made punishable by death, they frequently acquitted in the face of the clearest evidence; and, as witnesses in these cases were also very reluctant to appear, criminals—among whom the gambling spirit is strongly developed—generally preferred to be tried for a capital offence rather than for misdemeanour. Often, too, juries, when unwilling to acquit, reduced the offence by the most barefaced perjury to the rank of a misdemeanour. Thus, several cases are recorded, in which prisoners, indieted for stealing from dwelling-houses, were convicted only of larceny, by the jury finding that the value of what they had stolen was less than forty shillings, even when several guineas in gold, or bank notes to a considerable amount, were among the booty that was taken. 1 The proportion of arrested men who were either discharged on account of prosecutors and witnesses failing to appear against them, or acquitted on account of the reluctance of juries to condemn, or of the legal rule that the smallest technical flaw invalidated an indictment, was enormously great. Thus, in the four years before 1795 no less than 5,592 persons who had been committed for trial were discharged by proclamation and gaol deliveries, and 2,962 others were acquitted. 2 In one year from April 1793 to March 1794, 1,060 persons were tried at the Old Bailey, and of these only 493 were punished. 3

The executions, though scandalously numerous, bore but a small proportion to the convictions, but the statistics that are preserved on the subject are too fragmentary for a complete statement. Sir Stephen Janssen, who was Chamberlain for London, preserved a full list of the capital convictions at the Old Bailey during the twenty-three years from 1749 to 1772. The number of persons condemned to death in those years was 1,121. The number of executions was 678. In the Norfolk and Midland circuits between 1750 and 1772, 952 persons were sentenced to death, but the proportion of executions was much smaller than in London, for only 233 persons were executed. Four hundred and sixty-seven persons were executed in London and Middlesex alone in the twelve years from December 1771 to December 1783. 1 In 1785 not less than 96 persons were hanged at the Old Bailey. 2 In Scotland capital punishments seem to have been much more sparingly administered. Between January 1768 and May 1782, only 76 persons were condemned and 54 executed. 3 In the Dutch Republic, where the standard of order and good government was at least as high as in any part of Europe, Howard found an instructive contrast to the English system. In all the seven provinces together there were seldom more executions in a year than from four to six. In the great city of Amsterdam, which was about a third of the size of London, and contained 250,000 inhabitants, he found that in the eight years before his arrival only five persons had been executed. 4

There is nothing more scandalous in the history of England in the eighteenth century than the neglect by legislators and statesmen of these abuses. Burke was indeed in this, as in many other respects, an exception to the spirit of his time. He strongly urged the necessity of revising the penal code. He described it, certainly without exaggeration, as ‘radically defective’ and ‘abominable,’ and he seems to have made it his practice to oppose steadily the multiplication of capital offences. 5 But in general English statesmen paid no attention to such matters, and when the great task of softening the penal code was undertaken in the early years of the nineteenth century, the leading lawyers bitterly opposed it. In Parliament the enactment of new capital offences appears to have been left almost exclusively to a few lawyers. There were no debates which excited less interest, which were less attended or worse reported. Burke used to relate that being stopped one night when leaving the House of Commons, and requested by the Clerk at the table to stay to make a house, he asked what was the business in question, and was answered, ‘Oh, sir, it is only a new capital felony!’ 1 Outside Parliament, Paley, in a well-known passage of his ‘Moral Philosophy,’ justified the English system on the ground that it swept into the net every crime which under any possible circumstances could deserve death, leaving it to the executive to single out for condign punishment such cases as presented particular features of danger or aggravation.

But although in the latter years of the century only a very small proportion of capital sentences for the lighter offences were carried into effect, the English penal code in its actual enforcement was probably the most sanguinary in Europe, while it was totally wanting in that element of certainty, which, as Beccaria truly said, is the most essential in a penal code. The profuse distribution of the penalty of death not only multiplied enormously chances of acquittal, but also deprived secondary punishments for capital offences of most of their deterrent power, for the imaginations of men were naturally much more impressed by the escape of a criminal from the gallows than by the fate which subsequently awaited him. In London and Middlesex, criminals after sentence were all remitted to the gaol, where they remained in suspense about their fate till the Recorder had made his report to the King in Council, when, perhaps, a third part were removed for execution. In the other parts of England the judges directly, and of their own authority, reprieved the criminals, and their sentences were then invariably commuted. 2 Different judges, as might be expected, differed considerably in their severity, and much depended on the general character of the criminal, and even on his demeanour in the dock. One writer, near the close of the century, mentions that he was present when a girl of twenty-two was hanged for receiving a piece of check from an accomplice who had stolen it. Such crimes were at this time scarcely ever capitally punished, but the poor girl had unfortunately drunk too freely before the trial, and was insolent in the dock. The prosecutor, a simple, honest man, who had no idea that such a punishment would be inflicted, was driven almost distracted by remorse, and did not long survive the shock.

The improvements in the penal system during the last half of the century were few and slight. I have already mentioned the repeal of the laws condemning prisoners who refused to plead to be pressed to death, and all gipsies to be hanged, and the substitution in 1790 of the gallows for the stake, in the capital punishment of women. I have noticed also the disgusting scene of ribaldry and profanity which habitually took place when the criminal was carried, for more than two miles, through the most crowded thoroughfares in London, from Newgate to Tyburn. So brutal and brutalising a spectacle could be seen in no other capital in Europe, nor could any be conceived more fitted to harden a dying criminal, to make him, if reckless and unrepentant, the hero of the mob, and to deprive his execution of every element of solemnity. It is a curious illustration of the caprice of national sentiment, that English opinion in the eighteenth century allowed the execution of criminals to be treated as a popular amusement, but at the same time revolted against the Continental custom of compelling chained prisoners to work in public, as utterly inconsistent with English liberty. The scandal of English executions was not wholly removed till our own day, but it was one of the few good measures of the Coalition Ministry of 1783 that it abolished the procession to Tyburn, and criminals were from that date executed in front of the gaol. 1 A serious improvement was at the same time made in the manner of execution by the introduction of the drop. Previous to this time the punishment by hanging was a very unequal one, and the death in some cases very lingering. The French traveller Misson mentions the horrible fact that the relations and friends of a criminal often themselves laid hold on his legs when he was hanging, in order to put him out of his agony. The drop is said to have been first used at the execution of Lord Ferrers in 1760, but it does not appear to have come into general use till 1783, when the London executions were removed from Tyburn to Newgate. 1

The senseless and savage rule which deprived prisoners accused of any capital offence, except treason, of the assistance of counsel, unless some question of law arose which it was necessary to discuss, had been slightly relaxed. Even Black-stone, who regarded the criminal law of his country with the characteristic complacency of an English lawyer, acknowledged that there was no plausible reason why the same assistance should not be granted to a poor, ignorant, and terror-stricken prisoner, in cases affecting his life, as in cases of petty trespass; and he ventured timidly to hint that this ‘seems to be not all of a piece with the rest of the humane treatment of prisoners by the English law.’ 2 By the permission of the judges, however, in trials for felony a counsel now usually stood beside the prisoner, instructed him what questions to ask, and even himself cross-examined the witnesses, though he might not address the judge or jury unless a legal question had arisen. 3

It appears still to have been the rule that criminal trials should be compressed into a single day. Whether this haste was due to a consideration for the juries, or to the professional interest of the lawyers, may be a matter of dispute. In the more lucrative branches of the profession no such hurry was shown. Civil suits, and especially suits in Chancery, were often protracted for years, and sometimes even for generations, by merciless legal subtleties, and in this way countless fortunes were engulfed, and countless hearts were broken. But in those less lucrative cases in which only a human life was pending, evidence was often hurried through with indecent haste, or sittings were so prolonged that neither judges nor jurymen can have been fit to discharge their duty. The impartiality and the dignity of English judges have been rarely questioned since the Revolution, but an English criminal trial was probably far from being as decorous a thing in the eighteenth century as in our own day. A writer in 1785, whose leanings were all on the side of severity towards criminals, has left us the following picture: ‘A cause of much evil,’ he says, ‘is the trying prisoners after dinner, when from the morning's adjournment all parties have retired to a hearty meal, which at assize time is commonly attended, among the middling and lower ranks of people at least, with a good deal of drink. … Drunkenness is too frequently apparent where it ought of all things to be avoided. I mean in jurymen and witnesses. The heat of the court, joined to the fumes of the liquor, has laid many an honest juryman into a calm and profound sleep, and sometimes it has been no small trouble for his fellows to jog him into the verdict, even where a wretch's life has depended on the event. This I myself have seen—as also witnesses by no means in a proper situation to give their evidence.’ 1

The American War put an end to the old system of disposing of criminals by selling them for the term of their sentence to American planters. This system began in 1718, continued for fifty-six years, and appears to have been remarkably successful. Healthy agricultural labour, pursued during many years under rigid discipline and amid totally new associations, proved a great school of reformation, and many convicts, after their term had expired, became farmers and planters on their own account, and rose to respectability, and sometimes to wealth. Skilful thieves, who formed a large proportion of them, had generally good natural abilities, and their labour proved so useful in Maryland, where they were chiefly sent, that, for some years before the beginning of the American War, contracts were made to convey them without any expense to Government, which had formerly allowed 5l. a head. For some time after the outbreak of the war, there was great difficulty in disposing of convicts. The gaols were soon overcrowded. A project was formed for transporting convicts to an island in the Gambia, but it was soon abandoned, and in 1776 an Act was passed for establishing convict galleys. In the space of nineteen years, about eight thousand convicts were divided between an old ship named the ‘Justicia,’ which was moored at Woolwich, and two others in Langston and Portsmouth Harbours. 1 Howard says that out of 632 prisoners on board the ‘Justicia,’ 116 died within nineteen months. 2 The discoveries of Captain Cook, and the glowing description which his companion Sir Joseph Banks gave of New South Wales, made the English Ministers, after a time, resolve to revive the system of transportation, and to make New South Wales the receptacle of their criminals. An Act was passed in 1784 authorising transportation, in the old method, assigning the convicts as servants to the contractor who undertook it. In 1786 and 1787, however, a new system was adopted, and a great penal settlement was established at Botany Bay, under the governorship of Captain Phillip. At a much later period, the Australian colonies naturally and properly resented the introduction into their population of English criminals. But at the time when the settlement was founded, Australia was almost a desert country. Its splendid future was as yet unrealised; convict labour was of no small use in opening its resources; and there is no reason to believe that either in Australia or America the criminal element in the early population has left behind it any permanent moral trace. 3

There were great abuses in the early convict system in Australia, and especially in the treatment of the female convicts; but on the whole, transportation to this distant and unknown country was probably a more deterrent punishment than imprisonment at home, and the fate of transported convicts was in most respects superior. The English gaols, in spite of the strong light which had been thrown on their condition by the Parliamentary inquiry of 1729, continued in a state which shows forcibly the extreme corruption that might still exist in departments of English administration, to which public opinion was not turned. The latter half of the century, however, witnessed the labours of John Howard, the greatest of prison reformers, and his untiring efforts, seconded by the Legislature and supported by that great wave of philanthropic enthusiasm which proceeded from the Evangelical movement, gradually effected a complete renovation.

The attention of Howard was first called to the condition of prisoners, in 1756, when on a voyage to Lisbon he was captured by a French privateer and imprisoned at Brest and at Morlaix; but his active mission dates from 1773, when he was appointed High Sheriff of Bedfordshire, and was in that capacity charged with the superintendence of the county gaols. From this time till his death at Cherson in January 1790, his whole life was devoted to a single object, and the researches he made into the condition of prisons in every part of the United Kingdom as well as in all the principal countries on the Continent, revealed to the world a mass of maladministration and atrocious cruelty which made a deep and lasting impression.

The abuses he discovered were of many kinds. The food in nearly all English prisons was utterly insufficient. The pennyworth or at most two pennyworths of bread, daily allowed each prisoner had been originally fixed at a time when corn was nearly twice as cheap as when Howard wrote, and being very frequently farmed out by the gaolers the amount was constantly diminished. In nearly half the county gaols the debtors, and in several bridewells all prisoners, were left without any regular allowance of food and subsisted on charity. There were often no sewers, no infirmaries, no means of warming the prisons during the winter. In one gaol Howard found but three pints of water a day allowed to each prisoner for both drinking and washing. Prisoners were crowded to excess, for fourteen or fifteen hours of the day, in dark, damp, subterranean dungeons reeking with pestilential effluvia. In many gaols and most bridewells there was no allowance for bedding, or for straw for prisoners to sleep on, and if by any means they procured any, it was not changed for months. Almost all ventilation was stopped in order to escape the window tax. The 1

In this respect the history of the sacramental test has a very melancholy interest. Nor is it less remarkable when we consider its origin. The Corporation Act, indeed, was directed against Protestant Dissenters, but the Test Act, as is well known, was aimed exclusively against Catholics. It was enacted in 1673, at a time when the dread of Popery had almost reached its height. The King was gravely suspected. The heir to the throne had recently proclaimed himself a Catholic. The heir to the throne had recently proclaimed himself a Cathlic. The Government had combined with Lewis XIV. in war with Holland, the chief Protestant Power of the Continent. Charles II., by a bold and unconstitutional exercise of authority, had issued a declaration of indulgence suspending all penal laws against Nonconformists and against recusants, and it was clearly understood that the declaration was intended not only to enlarge the sphere of the royal prerogative, but also, and even more signally, to protect the Catholics. This disposition of the sovereign and of the heir to the throne, combined with the aggressive attitude of Catholicism on the Continent, and with several attempts that had been made to tamper with or overawe the constitutional guardians at home, had excited the keenest alarm, and the Test Act was introduced, in order to maintain the exclusion of Catho-lics from office by imposing a test which they would never take. That this was the object appears not only form the debate, but also from the very title of the Bill, which was described as ‘an Act for preventing Dangers which may happen from Popish Recusants.’ The Dissenters who sat in Parliament exhibited on this occasion a rare and magnanimous disinterestedness. It was observed that the Act would operate against them as well as against the Catholics; but Alderman Love, who was one of their leading representatives, begged the House not to hesitate, through any considerations of this kind, to pass a measure which he believed to be essential to the maintenance of English liberty; and, trusting that special legislation would speedily relieve them from their disabilities, all the Dissenters in the House of Commons voted for the Bill. 1 The patriotism of the course which they pursued was then fully recognised, and some attempts were made at the time to relieve them from a part of the burdens to which they were liable, but they were frustrated by the lateness of the session and by certain difficulties which had arisen in the House of Lords.

Such were the circumstances under which the Test Act was carried. That such a law, carried in such a manner, should have continued when the Revolution was firmly established, that it should have survived a period of forty-five years of unbroken Whig ascendancy, that it should have outlived the elder and have been defended by the younger Pitt, and that it should have been reserved for Lord John Russell to procure its repeal, is surely one of the most striking instances of national ingratitude in history. William, in whose reign, as Swift bitterly complained, the maxim had come into fashion ‘that no man ought to be denied the liberty of serving his country upon account of a different belief in matters of speculative opinion,’ had done everything in his power to procure the abolition of the test, but great majorities in Parliament defeated his intention. Stanhope had entertained the same desire, and such a measure actually formed part of a Bill which was carried through its second reading in 1718, but the opposition was so strong that the clauses referring to the Test and Corporation Acts were struck out in Committee; and the premature death of Stanhope prevented their speedy revival. The Dissenters were now organising rapidly with a view to obtaining relief; and Hoadly, Kennett, and several others of the more liberal Anglicans, seconded them; but Walpole, though he was personally favourable to the measure, and though the Dissenters had steadily supported him, shrank to the last from provoking a new ebullition of Church fanaticism. They at last lost patience, and had a measure for the repeal brought forward in 1736; but Walpole, in a very moderate and conciliatory speech, while expressing much sympathy for the Dissenters, pronounced the motion ill-timed, and, through the opposition of the Whig Government, it was thrown out by 251 to 123. The measure was again brought forward in 1739, at a time which seemed peculiarly favourable, for the Tory party had lately seceded from Parliament, leaving the conduct of affairs wholly in the hands of the Whigs. But the Government was still inflexible, and the institutions, and administrative measures by which different nations have endeavoured to solve the same problems, to cure or to diminish the same evils. Of this comparative method the writings of Howard form one of the earliest and best examples. They illustrate vividly one side of the moral history of Europe, and they at the same time furnish painful proofs of the fragmentary and unequal character of European civilisation. There were no doubt prisons in Germany and Italy, in the bishopric of Liége and in Russia, which were even more horrible than any in England. Though torture had been in general abolished or disused throughout Europe, Howard still found it regularly employed at Osnabrück, Hanover, Munich, Hamburg and Liége, and in Austrian Flanders, and he found recent traces of it in some other quarters. Death by breaking on the wheel was not unusual. An executioner in Russia acknowledged to him that slow death by the knout was often in that country deliberately inflicted. But on the whole, England, which stood so high among the nations of the world in political, industrial, and intellectual eminence, ranked in most matters relating to the treatment of criminals shamefully below the average of the Continent. Nowhere else were the executions so numerous. Nowhere else were they conducted with such revolting indecency, and in scarcely any other country were the abuses in prisons so gross, so general, and so demoralising.

Prison reform had already attracted some attention on the Continent. It had formed part of the great series of reforms which had been carried out by Leopold in Tuscany. In Austrian Flanders, Houses of Correction had lately been erected which filled Howard with admiration, and Count Vilain XIV. had done much to anticipate his work. Imprisonment for debt had been abolished in Portugal in 1774, and in many other countries it was carefully limited and regulated. In the Dutch Republic, institutions, both for the correction and reformation of prisoners, had been brought to almost the highest perfection; nearly every important prison reform of the nineteenth century appears to have been anticipated, and Howard found in the Dutch prisons and Rasphouses not only a model of all he desired, but also a conclusive proof of the efficacy of such methods in diminishing crime. In Switzerland a physician, much concerned in prison management, assured him that the gaol fever which was so inveterate in English gaols was absolutely unknown, and he added that he believed it to exist no where but in England. Howard acknowledged that he found no trace of it on the Continent, not even in Russia and Italy, where there were some of the worst prisons in Europe. There had been, it is true, a terrible outbreak of scurvy in the Paris prisons, but improved regulations had completely checked it, and although prisons in the French provinces were very bad, those in Paris were now admirably managed.

The special evils of English prisons were evils of administration, largely due to the position of the gaolers. There was an old law of Charles II. ordering the separation of debtors from felons. 1 An Act of George II. had forbidden under stringent penalties the introduction of spirituous liquor into workhouses or gaols, and another Act, which was called the ‘Lords' Act’ because it originated in the House of Lords, and which became the basis of much subsequent legislation, among many other provisions obliged the creditors of imprisoned debtors to provide four pence a day for their support. 2 These Acts, however, were systematically violated. In 1773, the year in which Howard began his mission, a member of Parliament named Popham brought forward the abuses relating to gaolers' fees, and tried unsuccessfully to carry a Bill throwing them on the county rates, and in the same year a beneficent Act was passed appointing for the first time regular chaplains for the county gaols of England. 3 In the following year Howard gave evidence, before a parliamentary committee, about the condition of some fifty prisons which he had visited, and received the thanks of the House, and in that year two very important Acts were passed. One of them provided in much detail for the cleanliness and ventilation of prisons, and the other condemned the frequent practice of detaining in prison, on account of fees due to sheriffs, gaolers, and keepers of prisons, men against whom no indictment had been brought, or who had been acquitted, and enacted that in such cases fees should no longer be demanded, but that an equivalent sum should be paid out of the county rates. 4 Howard at his own expense sent printed copies of these Acts to every keeper of a county prison in England. Some other measures of slight importance were afterwards taken regulating fees and improving the condition of insolvent debtors; and Grey supported by Burke made an effort in 1794 to abolish imprisonment for debt.

The treatment of debtors in England was indeed one of the most astonishing instances of the astonishing corruption of English law. ‘If a debt exceeds 40s.,’ wrote a most competent authority in 1795, ‘the action may be brought in a superior court, where if contested or defended the expense at the lowest computation must be upwards of 50l. … at present the rule is to allow the same costs for 40s. as for 10,000l. It depends only on the length of the pleading, and not on the value of the action.’ ‘In the county of Middlesex alone,’ says the same writer, ‘in the year 1793, the number of bailable writs and executions for debts from 10l. to 20l. amounted to no less than 5,719, and the aggregate amount of the debts sued for was 81,791l. It will scarcely be credited, although it is most unquestionably true, that the mere costs of these actions although made up, and not defended at all, would amount to 68,728l.—and if defended, the aggregate expense to recover 81,791l. must be (strange and incredible as it may appear) no less than 285,950l., being considerably more than three times the amount of the debts sued for.’ More than one million of money, in debts of 100l. and upwards, was recovered at considerably less than half the expense of 81,791l. in debts of from 10l. to 20l. It is a horrible fact that between six thousand and seven thousand persons were arrested every year on mesne process in Middlesex alone, one-half of whom were for debts under 20l. In the kingdom at large the number annually arrested for trifling debts was estimated at not less than forty thousand. 1 It was such men who were exposed during long periods of imprisonment to the intolerable evils of English gaols, and their long imprisonment was usually due much less to their original debts than to the legal expenses that had been heaped upon them. Can it be deemed surprising that many foreigners who valued good administration, public order, and cheap justice more than representative institutions and political liberty, should have preferred their own system of that of England?

Howard, though he was deeply imbued with the very emotional Evangelical piety which was then rising to prominence, was far from being a sentimental reformer. He dwelt strongly on the evils of public executions, and desired capital punishments to be restricted to three or four offences, but he was no advocate for a complete abolition of the punishment of death, and while pointing out the enormous abuses in English gaols, he did not forget—as his successors have sometimes done—that the diet and treatment of prisoners should always be such as to make imprisonment a deterrent punishment to the most needy, and that hard labour is an essential element in every sound prison system. The task which he and his generation of reformers set before them was chiefly to remedy great positive abuses, but the success with which the reformation of criminals was pursued in Holland gave rise to an Act for the erection of penitentiaries in England, 1 which was carried in 1779, chiefly by the influence of Blackstone. There was, however, much delay in carrying it out, although Pitt clearly saw and stated the importance of discriminating between the different kinds and degrees of criminal character, and averting the contagion of vice produced by the existing prison system. 2 It was not until some years after the death of Howard, that English philanthropy made the reclamation of criminals one of its great objects. In the last years of the eighteenth century, if this end was ever attained, it was probably in most cases through the army and navy. Every year of war many convicts were pardoned on condition of enlisting, and the press gang and the recruiting sergeant brought great numbers of discharged criminals under the stringent and healthy regimen of naval or military discipline.

All attempts to estimate the amount and the fluctuation of crime in the eighteenth century must be extremely vague and unsatisfactory. Accurate statistics on these matters date only from the nineteenth century, and the scandalous imperfection of the police system, and the extravagant severity of the criminal code, secured the escape of a great proportion of criminals. In the first half of the present century, concerning which we have full information, the proportion of convictions to acquittals largely augmented, and the increase in the number of committals was far greater than can be accounted for by the increase of population. 1 Much, however, of this apparent deterioration may no doubt be ascribed to the greater efficiency of the police force, and to a somewhat mitigated and simplified criminal code. On the whole it appears probable that, in the eighteenth century, crimes against the person, and especially murder, diminished, but that large classes of crimes against property increased. I have already collected evidence showing the terrible and long-continued outbreak of crime in London from 1767 to 1771; 2 and the distress which was then very widely prevalent, spread similar disorders over the country. 3 Prosecutions under the Game Laws are said to have much multiplied with the growth of enclosures. By the law of England, no one at this time, with a few strictly specified exceptions, was permitted to shoot or fish even on his own grounds, unless he possessed a freehold estate of at least 100l. a year, or a leasehold of at least 150l.; the sale of game was absolutely prohibited, and although the penalties of poaching were not so severe as they became under George IV., it was still possible for young men to be publicly whipped for having killed a hare. 4

Many other forms of crime were naturally increased in the closing years of the century by the great rise in the price of food, and by the great changes and fluctuations of industry. The full and detailed account which Colquhoun has given of the state of crime in London about 1795 shows that large classes of offences against property had attained a terribl magnitude. This able and experienced magistrate speaks of it as an incontestable fact that there was much more crime in proportion to population, and especially much more crime against property, in England than in France, Flanders, Holland, and some other Northern countries, 1 and he ascribes it very largely to the immense proportion of criminals who were either not arrested, or were acquitted though guilty, or were returned to the population, after a short period of imprisonment, totally corrupted and with an almost absolute impossibility of finding any honest means of livelihood. In seven years before a reform in the police establishment, which took place in 1792, no less than 4,262 prisoners, who had been put on their trial at the Old Bailey by the grand juries, were acquitted. Between April 1793 and March 1794 inclusive, 1,060 persons were committed for trial at the Old Bailey, and of these 567 were acquitted and discharged. ‘The acquittals,’ adds Colquhoun, ‘will generally be found to attach mostly to small offences which are punishable with death. Where juries do not consider the crime deserving so severe a punishment, the delinquent receives no punishment at all.’ 2

Colquhoun gives at the same time a very vivid picture of the extreme inefficiency of the watchmen and of the whole police administration. The crimes which he describes as having of late years especially increased were coining, petty forgery, robberies from ships on the Thames, and other offences against property. He states that there were believed to be more than three thousand receivers of stolen goods in London, and an equal proportion all over the country. 3 Public-houses were, next to the prisons, the great schools of crime, and there were no less than 5,204 licensed within the bills of mortality. The complaints of excessive drunkenness do not appear to have been as great as in the earlier half of the century, but Colquhoun has made one remark about public-houses which appears to me of much significance. ‘The period,’ he says, ‘is not too remote to be recollected, when it was thought a disgrace for a woman (excepting on holiday occasions) to be seen in the taproom of a public-house; but of late years the obloquy has lost its effect, and the public taprooms of many alehouses are filled with men, women, and children, on all occasions.’ 4

Probably the most important measure for the suppression of crime during the period we are considering, was an Act which was passed in 1773 making it possible for felons and other malefactors who escaped from England to Scotland or from Scotland to England to be arrested in either country and sent back to the place where their offences were committed. 1 This measure, which had been so long and so strangely delayed, completed the union between the two countries, diminished greatly the chances of the escape of criminals, and was especially useful in improving the condition of the border, which had been for generations a great centre of violent crime.

The roads were still scandalously insecure, and the English highwayman was a striking and conspicuous figure through the whole of the eighteenth century. William IV. was accustomed to relate how his great-grandfather George II., when walking alone in Kensington Gardens, was robbed by a single highwayman who climbed over the wall, and pleading his great distress, and with a manner of much deference, deprived the King of his purse, his watch, and his buckles. 2 Even in the most central parts of London, highway robberies were not unfrequent. Thus, George IV., when Prince of Wales, and the Duke of York were robbed on Hay Hill near Berkeley Square. Two daughters of Admiral Holborn were driving across St. James's Square on their return from the opera, when a single footpad stopped their carriage and carried off their watches and jewels. The Neapolitan Ambassador, though two footmen stood behind his carriage, was stopped in Grosvenor Square and robbed of his watch and money, and Walpole describes a similar robbery in Piccadilly within fifty yards of his own house. On the mail coaches arms were constantly carried for protection, and there are numerous accounts of men who were shot when attacking them. The roads in the immediate neighbourhood of London were infested with highwaymen, and solitary and unarmed travellers rarely ventured after nightfall to traverse Hounslow Heath, or Blackheath, or Clapham or Finchley Common. At Kensington, as late as the beginning of the present century, it was customary on Sunday evenings to ring a bell at intervals, in order that the pleasure seekers from London might assemble in sufficient numbers to return in safety. The Angel Inn at Islington was a favourite resting place of timid travellers to London who arrived towards the evening, while the braver assembled near the end of John Street, where, when a sufficient number had collected, an armed patrol was appointed to escort them across the dangerous space that separated them from the great City. Men of business settled at Norwood and at Dulwich, when they returned from London after business hours, used to appoint a place of rendezvous from which they proceeded in a body for mutual protection, and it was found necessary to protect the roads leading to the public gardens by patrols of horse. 1

The English highwaymen were an altogether different class, from the savage and half-famished brigands who found a refuge in the forests of Germany and among the mountains of Italy and Spain. They were in general singularly free from ferocity, and a considerable proportion of them were not habitual criminals. Broken tradesmen and even young men of position, who had ruined themselves by dissipation, not unfrequently went upon the road, and if they escaped detection returned again to respectable life. On one occasion a London print cutter, on the road to Enfield, was stopped by a single highwayman whom he recognised as a tradesman in the City. He addressed him by his name, and the detected robber at once blew out his own brains. Favourite actors and other popular heroes, when stopped by highwaymen, were sometimes allowed to pass unmolested as soon as they were recognised; and if the robbed person asked for sufficient money to continue his journey, the request was generally granted. Few things in English life appeared more strange and more scandalous to foreigners than the extraordinary insecurity of the roads around the English capital, although there were neither mountains nor great woods to give shelter to robbers. They ascribed it to the want of that mounted police called the ‘Maréchaussée’ which protected the French roads; to the forms of English freedom which made it difficult or impossible to arrest men on suspicion and to demand their papers, and especially to the extreme severity of the penal code which discouraged informers and induced juries to avail themselves of any pretext to acquit criminals. 1

Another prevalent form of violence, which in the eyes of the law was a crime of the deepest turpitude, was duelling. Few facts in the moral history of Europe are more curious than the stringency with which the practice was enforced by public opinion, in Catholic countries and in ages when faith was almost unchallenged and when all heterodoxy was suppressed by law, although the Church had pronounced it to be a sin of that ‘mortal’ kind which excludes from heaven. In England, if the Church did not profess to speak in as authoritative language as Catholicism, the law at least recognised no distinction between the killing of a man in a duel and premeditated murder, and the seconds as well as the principals were involved in the guilt. The Star Chamber had made special efforts to suppress duelling, and Bacon was conspicuously opposed to it, but in general judges and juries seem to have combined to shield the culprits, and there was as yet little or no sign of a turn of opinion. In France, it is true, both Voltaire and Rousseau wrote strongly against duelling, and the downfall of feudalism at the Revolution probably accelerated its fall. In England, Paley, and also the Evangelical leaders, strongly condemned it, but the practice, in some cases, was so stringently enforced by opinion that the most serious moralists hesitated. Dr. Johnson maintained that in the existing state of opinion a man who fought a duel to avoid a stigma on his honour, was only exercising his legitimate right of self defence. 2 Bentham used very similar language, though he pointed out with great force the evils and absurdities of duels, and ascribed their prevalence to the deficiency of legislation, which had provided no adequate means for the protection of honour. 3 Wilberforce himself, was on one occasion challenged by a West Indian captain, and he mentions that Stephen, who was one of the ablest men in the early Evangelical party, confessed to him that his ‘strongest temptations were to duelling.’ 4 On the occasion of Pitt's duel with Tierney in 1798, Wilberforce desired to bring the subject before the House of Commons in the form of a resolution, but he found that he could not count upon more than five or six members to support him, and accordingly relinquished his intention. 1 The immense number of conspicuous men, and especially of conspicuous statesmen, who fought duels during the eighteenth century is very striking. We have already had occasion to notice as considerable political events the duels of Lord Mohun with the Duke of Hamilton; of Wilkes with Martin; of the Duke of York with Colonel Lennox, and of Whateley with Governor Temple. Among the Prime Ministers of George III., Shelburne fought with Colonel Fullerton, Pitt with Tierney, and Fox with Adam; and at a later period, Canning fought with Castlereagh, the Duke of Wellington fought with Lord Winchilsea, and Peel twice challenged political opponents. These are but a few out of many examples that might be given. No revolution of public sentiment has been more remarkable than that which in the space of little more than a generation has banished from England, and in a great measure from Europe, this evil custom which had so long defied the condemnation both of the Church and of the Law.

It is impossible, I think, to trace the history of crime, of the treatment of criminals, of the treatment of debtors, and of the maintenance of order, without acknowledging the enormous improvement which has in these fields, at least, been effected in England, as in most other countries, since the eighteenth century. The tone of life and manners has become indisputably gentler and more humane, and men recoil with a new energy of repulsion from brutality, violence, and wrong. It is difficult to measure the change that must have passed over the public mind since the days when the lunatics in Bedlam were constantly spoken of as one of the sights of London; when the maintenance of the African slave trade was a foremost object of English commercial policy; when men and even women were publicly whipped through the streets; when skulls lined the top of Temple Bar, and rotting corpses hung on gibbets along the Edgware Road; when prisoners exposed in the pillory not unfrequently died through the ill usage of the mob, and when the procession every six weeks of condemned criminals to Tyburn was one of the great festivals of London. A similar change is shown in the abolition of the old modes of recruiting for the army and navy; in the character of public amusements; in the treatment of boys at school; in the attention that is paid in the houses of the rich to the comfort and health of their servants. Improved roads, improved police and improved legislation have altogether extirpated some forms of crime and greatly diminished others. The wholesale cattle stealing of the Highlands, highway robbery, piracy and kidnapping, are now things of the past. Smuggling, which once educated hundreds, if not thousands, into systematic lawlessness, has sunk into insignificant dimensions. Riots have become comparatively rare and inconsiderable. If theological fanaticism burns in some quarters more fiercely than in the eighteenth century, intolerance at least finds no longer any sanction in English law, and the circle of permissible discussion recognised by public opinion has been immensely enlarged. In the upper classes duelling has disappeared; drunkenness has become very rare; gambling, though it has probably greatly increased in the form of reckless and dishonest speculation, has in other respects declined, and the canons of good society have diminished coarseness, and banished profane swearing from conversation.

All these signs of improvement are incontestable, but in nearly all these respects the latter part of the century was greatly superior to the beginning. In other forms of morals the comparison is more dubious. Towards the close of the century especially, there were loud complaints of growing vice in high quarters. The many conspicuous scandals in the royal family; the public relations of the Duke of Grafton, when Prime Minister, with Nancy Parsons; the passion at one period for masquerades and at another period for ballet dancing, and above all the growing number of divorces, were cited as illustrations. Bills for preventing the intermarriage of the offending parties were carried through the House of Lords in 1771 and in 1779, but on both occasions rejected by the Commons. 1 A Bishop of Durham in 1798 gravely assured the House of Lords that the French, despairing of overthrowing England by arms, had formed a deliberate and subtle design to corrupt her morals, and had for that purpose sent over a number of ballet dancers. 1 Lord Auckland noticed in 1800, that in the space of 130 years there had been 132 divorces by Act of Parliament. Of these only eight had taken place in the first forty-five years, fifty in the next sixty years, and seventy-four in the last twenty-five years. In the four years immediately preceding the Session in which he spoke, twenty-five divorce bills had been carried and five others rejected. 2

Evidence, however, of this kind appears to me to be of very little value. Each generation has its censors who pronounce it to be altogether extraordinary in its depravity, and these denunciations are sometimes even a sign of progress, for they merely show that men are more conscious of the evils around them; have raised their standard of excellence, and have learned to lay an increased stress upon moral improvement. This was very eminently the case at the close of the last century when the Methodist and Evangelical movements were at their height. In the ‘Practical Piety’ of Wilberforce; in two short treatises of Hannah More, and in some of the essays of Vicesimus Knox we have the views of leading Evangelicals on the morals of the upper classes; and while they sufficiently show that those classes were far from conforming to the Evangelical standard, they do not furnish any real proof of deterioration. The mere coincidence of a few great scandals is often purely fortuitous, and the number of divorces is certainly no sure index of the morals of society. It is a notorious fact that the lowest standard of domestic morality in Europe may often be found in countries, and in periods, in which divorce was absolutely forbidden, or in classes in which it never takes place; nor is there, I believe, any real reason to think that the standard of domestic morals in England has been lowered by the great multiplication of divorces which has followed the Divorce Law of 1857. In this case the multiplication has been the obvious consequence of a law which made a process, which before was extremely difficult and extremely expensive, both easy and cheap. But where no change in the law has been effected, it would be very rash to infer that a public opinion which acquiesces placidly in conjugal infidelity, or which condemns the victims of unhappy marriages to lifelong misery and sin, is of a higher order than a public opinion which in such cases permits and encourages divorce. In the eighteenth century the practice in England relating to it was incredibly absurd. All matrimonial cases were placed under the Ecclesiastical Courts, and the law of England, following the doctrine of Catholicism and the canon law, pronounced that while separation ‘a mensâ et thoro’ might in some cases be permitted, an absolute dissolution of a valid and duly accomplished marriage, was in all cases a sin against God. And from this position the singular inference was drawn, that it should only be permitted by special Act of Parliament, and at the cost of several thousand pounds. The fact that the small class of persons who were able and willing to resort to this remedy had increased is surely no considerable index of growing depravity, and it may be much more than balanced by the immense improvement in the marriage relation which was effected by the Act of Lord Hardwicke, suppressing or diminishing the enormous abuses of clandestine marriages.

At the same time, it is certain, that in this field of morals there has been no improvement at all commensurate with that which has taken place in the field of philanthropy, and it is probable that the tendency has been in the opposite direction. This class of vices naturally increases with the increased luxury of a wealthy society, with the larger place which town life holds in the existence of the wealthy, and especially with the increasingly cosmopolitan character which European society has assumed. It is possible also, that it may have been more largely affected than other departments of morals, by that decline of theological beliefs which was so manifest in the closing years of the eighteenth century, and which is certainly not less apparent in our own day.

The distinctive virtues of the eighteenth century were not those which spring from passionate or definite religious convictions. For these we must look rather to the two centuries that preceded it. In its closing years, it is true, the Methodist and Evangelical movements, and the strong conflicting passions aroused by the French Revolution, somewhat altered its character; but in general it was an unimpassioned and unheroic age, singularly devoid of both religious and political enthusiasm, and much more remarkable for intellectual than for high moral achievements. It was pre-eminently a century of good sense; of sobriety of thought and action; of growing toleration and humanity; of declining superstition; of rapidly extending knowledge; of great hopefulness about the future. In England, we must add to these characteristics a steady national progress; a free and temperate government; a constantly increasing respect for law; a remarkable absence of class warfare, and of great political and religious convulsions.

The reforming spirit was, however, much weaker than at present, and that extreme activity of the philanthropic spirit, which is so characteristic of modern English life, had but just begun. This spirit has been largely stimulated by the Evangelical revival; by the great development of the press, which has brought into vivid relief innumerable forms of long unnoticed suffering, and also, perhaps, by the democratic movement which has forced the wants of the humbler classes into attention. In comparing, however, from this point of view, the England of the last century with that of our own day, it is necessary to remember that during the greater part of the eighteenth century, society was so organised that the demand for charitable and philanthropic exertions was considerably less than it now is. Before the existing industrial system had grown up, and before the vast agglomerations of population in the great towns, industry in all its branches was much less fluctuating than at present, and the permanent relation between classes was closer and more stable. The country gentleman lived nearly the whole year among his people. A great proportion of the agricultural labourers lived in the houses of the farmers. The common land and the plot of ground, which, in the early years of the century, still surrounded the married labourer's cottage, preserved him from the extremes of want. The poor law system was lavishly administered, and the obstacles which the law of settlement put in the way of the migration of the agricultural poor, stereotyped the features of English country life. The price of corn till near the close of the century was low and steady. Extreme want was rare, and the standard of comfort was low. Manufacturing industry was, to a large extent, a mere adjunct of agriculture, carried on in cottages scattered through the agricultural districts. In the towns, the apprentice system; the long contracts between the master and his journeymen; the habit of apprentices, and often journeymen, living under the roof of their master, and the settlement of wages by law, which was not yet extinct, mitigated the fluctuations of industry. The population was also comparatively small, and English industry was much less closely connected than at present with the vast and complex vicissitudes of foreign markets.

Legislation concerned itself much less than in our day with social abuses. The prevention of crime, and the regulation of commercial interests, were sedulously, if not always wisely, attended to; but there were few attempts during the Hanoverian period to deal with special evils and forms of suffering among the poor, and in spite of occasional laws relating to gaming, lotteries, disorderly houses, and the observance of Sunday, there was in general little disposition to regulate habits, and restrain private vices, by law. The greater portion of the legislation directly bearing on the condition of the poor consisted of extensions, restrictions, and modifications of the poor law. Numerous measures were passed during this period, defining the nature and conditions of relief; the circumstances by which a parish settlement might be lost or gained; the power of churchwardens and overseers to hire out, with the assent of two justices of the peace, pauper children, till they were twenty-one, as ‘parish apprentices.’ 1 A disclosure of the appalling mortality among young children in the London workhouses was met by a merciful Act, which appears to have been principally due to Hanway, establishing separate nurseries in the country for these children. 2 Some great evils, which had been discovered in private madhouses, and some striking instances of persons improperly confined, produced much scandal, a parliamentary inquiry, and some careful legislation, 1 and another law endeavoured to put an end to horrible abuses which had grown up in the treatment of children who were employed to sweep chimneys. 2 I have spoken already of the laws for regulating wages and hours of work; for improving the condition of prisons, and for alleviating the state of debtors; and there are a few instances of new forms of charity being assisted by moderate and temporary parliamentary grants.

But on the whole this class of subjects occupies a very small place in the legislation of the eighteenth century, though a great amount of private benevolence was devoted to it. The London charities were large and excellent, and an intelligent French traveller, who carefully investigated them in the early years of the present century, was especially struck with their complete independence of the Government, and with the very large proportion of them which had grown up during the latter half of the eighteenth century. 3 A detailed examination would, I believe, show that London already ranked very high, in its charitable institutions, among the cities of the world. 4 Two important, though by no means uncontested, forms of charity, which had already existed on the Continent, appear to have arisen in England for the first time in the eighteenth century. The first foundling hospital in England was established through the exertions of Captain Coram in 1739, and the first Magdalen Asylum in 1769. In addition to the foundling hospitals and orphanages which already existed, some attempts were made in the latter half of the century to purify the sources of crime by asylums for deserted girls, young delinquents, and children of criminal parents, and by a society, founded by Hanway, for collecting destitute boys from the street in order to educate them as sailors. A society for the relief of persons confined for small debts was founded in 1772, and in the work of improving the condition of prisoners, its treasurer, James Neild, deserves to rank only second to Howard. 1 There were numerous instances of large subscriptions raised for special purposes of benevolence, such as providing comforts for prisoners of war, or for soldiers and their families, and these subscriptions had sometimes a very cosmopolitan character. Large sums were raised from private sources in England to assist the Corsicans in their struggle with the French, and the Poles in their struggle with the Russians. 2 There was a subscription for the destitute Portuguese after the earthquake at Lisbon, and in the beginning of the French Revolution more than seventy thousand pounds were subscribed for the assistance of French refugees.

Charities of this description do not appear to me to have been to any considerable extent due to the religious revival at the close of the century. There had always been much unobtrusive charity in England, and causes in a great degree independent of religion had contributed to stimulate it. There are fashions of feeling as well as fashions of thought, and with the softening manners of the closing years of the century, benevolence and philanthropy had undoubtedly acquired a higher place in the category of virtues. It was the complaint of a hostile critic, that Fielding had set the fashion of reducing all virtue to good affections in contradiction to moral obligation and a sense of duty, and of representing goodness of heart as a sufficient substitute for moral virtues. 3 The ideal of excellence which was taught by Shaftesbury in England, and by Voltaire in France, and the strain of sentiment which was at once sustained and reflected by the writings of Rousseau, was very apparent in English life; and Evangelical writers, so far from denying the strong spirit of benevolence outside their sect, were inclined to reproach their contemporaries with the exclusive and excessive stress they laid upon that virtue. 1 There was, however, a large class of institutions which were distinctly traceable to the religious revival. The Evangelical party, though it as yet only included a minority of the clergy, had already drawn to itself the strongest religious enthusiasm in the nation, and had become the pre-eminent source of religious activity. In the older religious societies it had little weight, but nearly all the popular religious literature of the time, nearly every fresh departure, nearly every new organisation which grew up in the English religious world, was mainly due to it. The largest of them were of a purely religious character, with which we have no concern here. Thus the London Missionary Society, which was established in 1795; the Church Missionary Society, which was established in 1799; the Religious Tract Society, which was established in the same year, and which followed in the steps of a tract society that had been founded by Wesley seventeen years before; the British and Foreign Bible Society, which was established in 1802, and all, or nearly all, the Nonconformist religious societies which arose about this period, were distinctly Evangelical. The Society for the Reformation of Manners, imitated from the society of the same name which had existed at the close of the seventeenth century, was not indeed an Evangelical society, but it owed its origin to Wilberforce; and the Association for Securing a Better Observance of Sunday consisted chiefly of Evangelical members. But in almost all forms of purely secular charity, a new impulse was also given; and a characteristic feature of English life in the closing years of the century, was the increasing number of persons—especially unmarried women—who were making works of charity the main business of their lives. ‘There is no class of persons,’ Wilberforce once said, ‘whose condition has been more improved within my recollection than that of unmarried women. Formerly there seemed to be nothing useful in which they could be naturally busy, but now they may always find an object in attending to the poor.’ 1

The services of the rising party to religious education were also very considerable. It is a remarkable fact that during the whole of the eighteenth century the task of educating the English poor, as far as it was undertaken at all, was left to the different religious denominations, and to the benevolence of individuals and voluntary associations without the smallest assistance from the Government. The old law which forbade the opening of any school without the licence of a bishop, though still in force, had become obsolete; but if the Government did not impede, it at least did nothing whatever to support education. There were still many endowed schools dating from an earlier period, which gave free education to many children, and there had been, as we have seen, a great and beneficent movement for the erection of parochial charity schools under Anne. It was warmly patronised by the Queen, but it was the work of private charity, entirely unassisted by Parliament; and for more than sixty years after the death of Anne, the history of education in England is almost a blank. Scotland, indeed, and the New England colonies had long enjoyed excellent systems of popular education, and even in Ireland there were the Charter Schools endowed by the Irish Parliament; but in England it was the prevailing doctrine that the education of the people was entirely foreign to the duties of Government, and it was a very common belief that education would only unfit the poor for the life that was allotted to them. New charity schools were no doubt occasionally erected. Private enterprise multiplied cheap schools; landlords occasionally founded schools on their estates, and the apprentice system in some small measure discharged the functions of a system of education; but unless we except the circulating schools in Wales, 1 there is, I believe, during this long period, no evidence of any considerable attempt to instruct the poor.

The fact is especially remarkable when we remember how eminently the eighteenth century was a century of extending knowledge, and how large a place education held in the thoughts of legislators on the Continent. As early as 1717, Frederick William I. had issued an edict making education compulsory in Prussia, and not less than seventeen hundred schools for the poor are said to have been established in Prussia during his reign. Frederick the Great energetically pursued the same policy, and some years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, there were laws in almost every little German State, obliging parents to send their children to schools which had been established under the direction of ecclesiastics. Even the Catholic States of Germany, though in general considerably behind the Protestant ones, had thrown themselves ardently into the same career. Maria Theresa through her whole reign made the education of her people one of the great objects of her policy, and Joseph II. though with feebler steps followed her example. The writings of Rousseau, and in the last years of the century, the example and system of Pestalozzi had given an immense impulse to the cause of education throughout the Continent. But in England this movement appears for a long time to have been entirely unfelt, and the first traces of a revived interest in education seem to be due to the religious movement. A sermon preached at Cambridge by Bishop Porteus in 1768, on the subject of religious education at the Universities, induced a Norfolk gentleman named Norris to found at Cambridge a professorship for giving lectures on the doctrines of revealed religion; 2 while among the poor an important step was taken by the establishment of Sunday schools. Raikes of Gloucester, whose first schools were set up in 1781, is generally spoken of as their originator, but it is certain that there were a few isolated Sunday schools at an earlier date. To Raikes, however, far more than to any other man, the Sunday-school system owes its real importance. Some of the clergy, and among others Bishop Horsley, looked on it with suspicion and dislike, but it spread rapidly, and was especially favorued by the Evangelical party. The Sunday School Society was established in 1785, and two years later, not less than two hundred thousand children are said to have been receiving instruction in Sunday schools. 1 Wesley strongly advocated them; Hannah More greatly assisted the movement both by her influence and by her pen, and Rowland Hill is said to have been the first to introduce Sunday schools into London. 2

The establishment of any real system of secular national education in England belongs altogether to the nineteenth century, for although the systems of Bell and Lancaster were brought before the English public in 1797 and 1798, nothing was yet done to put them into action. About the same time, Malthus, following in the steps of Adam Smith, urged in impressive language the extreme national importance of a general system of popular instruction; the scandal and the danger of leaving the education of the lower classes to a few Sunday schools, directed and supported by private individuals. 3 For a long time, however, these warnings were little attended to. The deep and honourable distrust of all encroachments of Government, which was characteristic of Englishmen in the eighteenth century, has produced many advantages, but often at a heavy price. Part of that price has been that England until very lately had no system of national education at all comparable with that of many continental nations, or at all worthy of her own place among civilised Powers.

In England, as in the chief nations on the Continent, the closing years of the century were marked by a great widening of the national sympathies, which were no longer confined by the lines of country, race, or creed. The increased sense of wrongs done to savage and pagan races was very evident. The ill-treatment, by the English, of the Caribbees in the island of St. Vincent, was the subject of a parliamentary inquiry and of much discussion in 1773; 4 and the impeachment of Warren Hastings has a great significance in English moral history, as representing the awakening of the national conscience to its responsibility towards subject races. But the most conspicuous illustration of this kind is to be found in that great movement for the abolition of the slave trade, which became, in the last years of the century, one of the chief forms of English philanthropy.

The more important facts in the early history of slavery and of the British slave trade have been already related, 1 and they are in themselves sufficient to show the vast revolution which has been effected in English public sentiment. A few voices had indeed been heard from a very early period protesting against the trade. Even in the seventeenth century, George Fox, the founder of Quakerism; Richard Baxter; Morgan Godwyn, a clergyman of the established Church; and one or two other writers had denounced it; and Aphra Behn, who had herself witnessed slavery in the West Indies, had brought the wrongs of the negroes before the public in a novel called ‘Oronooko,’ which was afterwards turned into a play by Southern. In the following century, many English writers had dwelt on the barbarity of the slave trade before any serious effort had been made to restrain it. Defoe condemned it in some powerful lines in his poem on ‘The Reformation of Manners,’ which appeared in 1702, and he afterwards urged a more humane treatment of negroes in his ‘Life of Colonel Jacque.’ Thomson, Savage, and Shenstone among poets; Heylin, War burton, and Paley among divines; Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Beattie among philosophers, may all be cited as early enemies of the slave trade, and a few books of travels had already described its horrors. But in the sphere of politics no such reprobation was shown, and the generation that applauded the conquests of Chatham, as well as the generation that made the Peace of Utrecht, considered the extension of the slave trade a capital object of English commercial policy. The Assiento Treaty, as we have seen, had given England the monopoly of the slave trade to the Spanish colonies, and it was a boast of Chatham, that his conquests in Africa had placed almost the whole slave trade in English hands. 2

An Act of 1750 had already elaborately regulated the trade. Its preamble described it as very advantageous to Great Britain, and as necessary to her colonies, but it is a remarkable fact that it contained a clause expressly providing for the security of the natives. ‘No master of a ship,’ it said, ‘shall, by fraud, force, or violence, or by any other indirect practice whatsoever, take on board or carry away from the coast of Africa any negro or native of that country, or commit, or suffer to be committed, any violence on the natives to the prejudice of the said trade; and every person so offending shall, for every such offence, forfeit 100 l. 1 As might have been expected, and as subsequent inquiries abundantly proved, these words proved a mockery and a dead letter, but they show that although the slave trade was uniformly conducted with the most barefaced violence and fraud, the existence of some duty to the natives was at least recognised by the legislators. In 1768, a few years after the war of Chatham, it was estimated that not less than 97,000 negroes were taken from Africa in a single year. 2

The signs, however, of a growing awakening to the evils of the trade were rapidly multiplied, and in a few years before the outbreak of the American War some important facts had occurred. A controversy which had long been pending, relating to the legality of the state of servitude in England, was at this time finally decided. Numerous slaves had been, in the course of the century, brought to England, held in servitude in England, stopped by force when they left their masters, and even publicly advertised for sale. York and Talbot, the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General in 1729, had given it as their opinion that a slave, by being brought from the West Indies into Great Britain, was not emancipated, but might be legally compelled to return to the plantations. This doctrine, however, had been frequently disputed, and especially by Granville Sharp, one of the earliest and most illustrious of that long line of philanthropists who have devoted their lives to the defence of the negroes. At last, in 1772, the case of an African slave named Somerset, who had been brought to England, had left his master, and had afterwards been forcibly seized for the purpose of being carried out of the kingdom and sold in Jamaica, was brought before Lord Mansfield, and that great judge, after long deliberation, decided that Somerset must be discharged, and that every slave, as soon as he touched English ground, acquired his freedom.

Two other facts of great moment speedily followed. John Wesley, who had come in personal contact with American slaves as early as 1736, 1 published, in 1774, his ‘Thoughts on Slavery,’ strongly denouncing the system; and two years later David Hartley, the son of the metaphysician, for the first time brought the question before Parliament, by moving a resolution ‘that the slave trade was contrary to the laws of God and the rights of man.’ The motion was seconded by Sir George Savile, but it was easily defeated, and appears to have excited but little attention.

Up to this time the steadiest and most persistent opponents of the slave trade had been the Quakers. They had passed resolutions condemning it in 1727 and in 1758. In 1761 they excluded from membership, any Quaker who was concerned in the trade, and in 1763 they branded as criminal all who in any way encouraged or abetted it. In America, however, the Quakers were less inflexible in their opposition, and they appear to have in general kept slaves like their fellow-colonists, though they were remarkable for the humanity with which they treated them and the frequency with which they emancipated them. They in general distinguished between the possession and the importation of slaves, but there were always some among them who considered the whole system of slavery criminal, and a strong movement in favour of abolition sprang up a few years before the revolutionary contest with England, chiefly in the Quaker province of Pennsylvania. 2 In 1754, in 1755, in 1774 and in 1776, the subject was brought forward at their yearly meetings, and in general the American Quakers seem to have made it their rule to abstain from importing or purchasing slaves, though they did not absolutely condemn the keeping of slaves. 3 About 1770 a few Quakers began to form associations in the middle provinces of North America to discourage the introduction of slaves into their neighbourhood and to encourage manumission, and it was noticed that several persons of different creeds began to liberate their slaves, and to co-operate for the purpose of ameliorating their lot. 1 Benjamin Franklin, among others, warmly supported the movement.

As I have already observed, conditions of climate, and therefore of cultivation, ultimately determined the course of negro slavery in America, and while in the Northern States and in Pennsylvanis slaves were few, manumission frequent, and the laws relating to negroes comparatively mild, the slave codes of Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas were of extreme ferocity, 2 and instances of glaring and extraordinary inhumanity to negroes were very numerous in the Southern colonies, and the English West Indies. 3 The grotesque absurdity of slave owners signing a ‘Declaration of Independence’ which asserted the inalienable right of every man to liberty and equality was not unfelt, but the original draft of the Declaration of Independence as drawn up by Jefferson contained a passage strongly censuring the slave trade, and blaming the King of England for having forced it upon America. By the desire of some of the Southern representatives, this passage was expunged.

Dean Tucker, in a pamphlet published in 1785, has devoted some remarkable pages to the English slave trade. No man living, he says, could sincerely approve of the slave trade as it is actually conducted, and he declares that ‘the murders committed in the course of it, reckoning from the beginning of it to the present hour, almost exceed the power of numbers to ascertain. Yet,’ he continues, ‘reason and humanity recoil in vain. For the trade in human blood is still carried on not only with impunity but also with the consent, approbation, and even assistance of the British Legislature,’ and it is never likely to be suppressed, till it is proved that slavery is economically wasteful, and that sugar can be produced more cheaply by free labour. Referring to the state of the slaves, he asserts that it is a notorious and incontrovertible fact ‘that the English planters in general (doubtless there are exceptions) treat their slaves, or suffer them to be treated, with a greater degree of inhumanity than the planters of any other European nation.’ He ascribes this ‘excess of barbarity’ partly to the fact that the English planters have more slaves than those of any other nation, and therefore think it necessary to protect themselves by a greater severity from combinations or revolts, but partly also to the large amount of self-government the English colonies enjoy. ‘The English planters are more their own masters, their own lawgivers in their assemblies; also the interpreters, the judges (as jurymen) and the executioners of their laws, than those of any other nation. The very form of the English constitution, originally calculated for the preservation of liberty, tends in this instance to destroy it. Consequently the English planters can indulge themselves in a greater degree of passion and revenge than would be permitted under the absolute governments of France, Spain, Portugal, or Denmark.’ In proof of this assertion Tucker refers to the Code Noir of France, and he adds: ‘The regulations of the Spanish Government respecting negro slaves are still more humane, laying a foundation for the sober and industrious among them, by allowing them the profits of two days’ labour in each week, to purchase their own liberty in the course of a few years. And it may be observed in general, that though absolute governments are tyrannical in themselves, yet they are a great check on the tyranny of their intermediate subjects, being ready to protect the helpless from being oppressed by any but themselves. This is remarkably verified in the case of those slaves who live under the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian Governments, compared with the hard fate of others who still groan under the bondage of the nobles of Poland.’ In addition to these reasons, he observes that an unusual proportion of English planters lived habitually in England and consigned the care of their property to bailiffs and overseers, who had a manifest interest in stifling all complaints, and keeping their principals as much as possible in the dark about the management of their estates. 1

I have already mentioned the attempts that had been made by some American provincial Legislatures, during the colonial period, to discourage the excessive importation of slaves. They appear to have been due mainly or solely to commercial and political reasons, and, as we have seen, were overruled by the British Government. In 1776, however, the Continental Congress passed a memorable resolution, ‘that no slaves be imported into any of the thirteen United Colonies.’ During the war, the British cruisers very effectually prevented such importation, but, on the attainment of independence, the question was decided independently by the different Legislatures. In the great majority of the States the slave trade was forbidden; but, in spite of the State laws, it was carried on to a considerable extent by New England vessels, and in some of the Southern States it was fully legal. When the Constitution of 1787 was established, there was a long dispute on the subject, and it was finally decided that Georgia and the Carolinas should retain their right of carrying on the slave trade for twenty more years. At this date slavery, as distinguished from the slave trade, had not been actually abolished in any State except Massachusetts; but a measure for its gradual abolition had been adopted in Pennsylvania, and imitated by many Northern States, and there were already active organisations for hastening its abolition, and for alleviating the condition of the slaves. 2

The British slave trade had been greatly crippled by the war of the American Revolution, and the independence of America cut off permanently one of its great markets. It also very seriously, though indirectly, affected the lot of the negroes in the British West India Islands. The active and profitable commerce which had long subsisted between those islands and the American colonies had been necessarily interrupted by the war, but it was hoped that it might revive on the establishment of peace. The Shelburne Ministry was especially distinguished for its enlightened commercial views, and in March 1783 Pitt, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, brought before Parliament a singularly liberal Bill repealing all the measures prohibiting American ships from trading with the British dominions, and establishing provisionally, and for a limited time, perfect free trade between the United States and the British Empire. The change of Ministry that immediately followed, prevented this measure from being carried; and the Coalition Government which succeeded, contented itself with repealing the prohibitory laws which had existed during the war, and passing a measure, vesting in the Crown for a limited period authority to regulate the commerce with America. 1

It soon appeared that while the West Indian planters were extremely anxious to reopen free trade with America, a strong opposition to such a policy had grown up. It was desired to confine the trade to these islands to British ships and to the British dominions, and it was contended that by such restrictions the prosperity of Canada, Nova Scotia, and the island of St. John, might be greatly stimulated. Pitt, on returning to power, yielded to the clamour, abandoned the liberal policy of the provisional Bill, consented to refer the whole matter to the Committee of the Privy Council for the Board of Trade, and at last, on the recommendation of that body, and in spite of the protests and warnings of the planters, he agreed to confine the intercourse between the British West India Islands and America to British ships. The result was a destitution, lasting for many years, and falling especially on the negro population. One or two bad seasons and one or two devastating hurricanes aggravated the calamity, and its magnitude is shown in a ghastly report drawn up by a committee of the Assembly of Jamaica. They express their firm conviction that in seven years, and in consequence of the prohibition of foreign supplies, not less than fifteen thousand negroes had perished. ‘This number,’ they say, ‘we firmly believe to have perished of famine, or of diseases contracted by scanty and unwholesome diet, between the latter end of 1780 and the beginning of 1787.’ 1

The slave trade revived rapidly after the Peace of 1783, and Liverpool became its special source. It has been computed that between 1783 and 1793 not less than 74,000 negroes were annually transported from Africa to the West Indies. Of these it was estimated that Great Britain imported 38,000, Holland 4,000, Portugal 10,000, Denmark 2,000, and France 20,000. It has also been estimated that of the immense number of 814,000 negroes who were carried from Africa to the West Indies in eleven years, not less than 407,000 were carried in Liverpool ships, and that the town derived from this unholy trade an annual profit of about 298,462 l. 2

There were, however, increasing signs that the conscience of England was beginning to awaken to the enormity of the trade. Granville Sharp with an admirable perseverance continued his efforts, and a peculiarly horrible case that occurred in 1783 contributed largely to arrest the attention of the public. The master of a slave ship, called the ‘Zong,’ finding sickness raging among his negroes, deliberately ordered 132 of them to be flung into the sea. The pretext alleged was that the supply of water had become insufficient, but this pretext was completely disproved. The real motive was a desire to save the owners, who would bear the cost if the negroes died of sickness, while, if they were thrown overboard for the preservation of the ship, it would fall upon the underwriters. There were two trials with conflicting verdicts, but it was clearly laid down in them that the only question at issue was a question of property or cost; that there was nothing in the transaction of the nature of a murderous act, and that the case was legally of exactly the same kind as if it had been homes and not human beings that had been thrown into the sea. 3

About this time a small Quaker society was formed for the purpose of influencing public opinion in favour of the abolition of the trade, which it did by disseminating tracts, and through the medium of the provincial press; and in 1783, when a Bill for introducing some regulations into the trade was before Parliament, a Quaker petition for its abolition was presented by Sir Cecil Wray. Lord North in a few words expressed his warm admiration for the Quaker body and his sympathy with the object of their petition, but declared that the trade had become ‘in some measure necessary to almost every nation in Europe,’ and that ‘it would be next to an impossibility to induce them to give it up and renounce it for ever.’ A similar petition was presented to Parliament from the town of Bridge-water in 1785, and nearly at the same time some of the most powerful champions of abolition appeared in the field. A clergyman named Ramsay, who had lived for many years in the West India Islands, published in 1784 a work on the treatment of the enslaved negroes which attracted much attention and gave rise to a long and acrimonious controversy. In 1786 Thomas Clarkson began his lifelong labours in behalf of the negroes by the publication of his essay on negro slavery. In 1787 Wilberforce agreed to bring the subject before Parliament, and in the same year the ‘Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ was formed in London under the presidency of Granville Sharp.

This society consisted in its origin of only twelve members, most of them being London merchants and the great majority Quakers. Its first business was to define its scope, and the members wisely decided that they would not attempt a crusade against slavery, but would aim only at the abolition of the slave trade and the mitigation of the condition of the negroes.

By adopting this course they greatly diminished the amount of opposition. They avoided the delicate constitutional questions that might be raised if the English Parliament were asked to interfere with the institutions of colonies which had their own Legislatures, and they at the same time took a course which was excellently fitted to mitigate the abuses of slavery. The slave trade was in itself a more horrible thing than the simple maintenance of slavery; and by furnishing the plantations with an unlimited supply of cheap and fresh negro labour, it gave slavery its worst features of atrocity. It took away the one serious restraint of self-interest which prevented the extreme ill-treatment of slaves, and it inevitably produced an enormous disproportion between the sexes, a total destruction of family life, extreme and general dissoluteness.

It was the opinion of Pitt and of a large number of the opponents of the slave trade, that if this trade were abolished colonial slavery would lose its worst characteristics and that it might at the same time become self-supporting. In North America and also in the Bermudas this had been already achieved, and the result of some measures regulating the condition of negroes in Jamaica appeared to show that if slaves were only compelled to work in moderation, and if family life were duly maintained, the simple increase of population would make the slave trade wholly unnecessary. 1

The first great work of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, was to collect evidence. Clarkson devoted himself to this task, and the facts collected by him in long and laborious inquiries at Bristol and Liverpool, and after-wards brought before Parliament, revealed a series of horrors which made a deep and lasting impression on the mind and conscience of England. The pretence that the negroes exported from Africa were simply or mainly criminals, was easily dispelled; and the horrible system of kidnapping, and of desolating native wars by which the trade was sustained, was abundautly shown.

Not less appalling were the horrors of the Middle Passage, and the terrible mortality that attended it. Though the negroes taken from Africa were chiefly strong men, Wilberforce was able to state before Parliament, that of every hundred carried from Africa, seventeen on an average died in about nine weeks, and not more than fifty lived to become effective labourers in our islands. 2 Many in despair tried to starve themselves to death, and an instrument employed by surgeons in cases of lockjaw was in habitual use to defeat their attempts. Others, in spite of all precautions, succeeded in plunging into the sea, and they had been seen flinging up their arms in exultation, and shouting with the triumph of recovered liberty, as they sank beneath the waves. Nor were the abuses of the slave trade confined to the treatment of negroes. The trade had fallen chiefly into the worst hands; and while it was alleged by its defenders that it was the nursery of British seamen, it was proved beyond all doubt that in no other department of the British Navy was the mortality so great.

While the Committee were engaged in collecting such evidence, the management of the cause of abolition in Parliament was taken up by William Wilberforce, who conducted it to its final triumph, and whose fame has somewhat eclipsed the memory of the minor agents in the movement. A considerable social position, very eminent social gifts, a large fortune, the weight attaching to the representation of the first county in England, and the still greater weight derived from a most intimate friendship with Pitt, at once made the adhesion of Wilberforce to the cause a matter of great moment. He could not be compared in intellectual power with Pitt, Fox, Burke, or Sheridan, but he stood high in the second line of parliamentary debaters. He was quite capable of mastering in its details a vast and complicated subject, and though he seemed the frailest and feeblest of mortals, he could sway great multitudes of excited men by a clear and popular eloquence, and by the exquisite beauty of his voice and his elocution. He had passed completely under the influence of the Evangelical revival, and he showed something of its weakness and narrowness, as well as of its earnestness and strength. The enormity of drilling militiamen on Sunday afternoons in a time of great public danger, or meeting on that day for recreation or secular instruction, appears to have been in his eyes hardly less than the enormities of the slave trade; and the journals in which he recorded his daily emotions, seem to me to show much of that morbid, exaggerated, and somewhat effeminate self-consciousness, which is the frequent, and indeed the natural, accompaniment, of a constant habit of religious introspection and self-analysis. It would be difficult to speak too highly of the purity and beauty of his career, but something too much has been said of its self-sacrifice. A public man who leads and represents the great religious party of his time, and identifies himself with a small number of conspicuous philanthropic causes, must no doubt sacrifice some of the great prizes of political ambition, but even from a worldly point of view his career is by no means without charm. Of politicians of the same intellectual calibre, very few exercised so wide an influence as Wilberforce. Few, if any, enjoyed so large an amount of contemporary admiration, and not one has been so canonised by posterity. He encountered, it is true, in his career, some measure of obloquy and disappointment, but probably much less than he would have encountered had he taken an equally prominent part in party warfare. His character, however, if it was not exactly of the heroic type, was at least singularly pure, attractive, and unselfish. It was, perhaps, as free from all taint of sordid and unworthy motives, from all envy, jealousy, and bitterness, as any in modern history, and though a very devoted follower of Pitt, he showed on a few occasions in his political conduct a considerable independence of judgment.

The prospects of the cause in 1788 were exceedingly encouraging. Public opinion was strongly and widely moved, and no less than a hundred and three petitions praying for the abolition of the trade were presented to Parliament. The number may not appear great according to the measure of our time, but it appears to have been at least double of the number that had ever before, even in periods of greatest popular excitement, been presented to Parliament. Among them were petitions from the Corporation of London, and from most of the other leading Corporations in England and Scotland. Bristol, though only second to Liverpool as a centre of the slave trade, sent up a petition for its abolition; and there was a petition from the Chamber of Commerce in Dublin, expressing their satisfaction that Ireland had been unpolluted by the traffic, and promising that if it were abolished in England, they would do the utmost in their power to prevent it from finding any asylum in the ports of Ireland. 1

Very important measures were in this year taken to diminish or ameliorate the trade. In February, an Order of Council was issued, directing a Committee of the Privy Council to make a thorough inquiry into its condition and abuses; and as Wilberforce was incapacitated by illness, Pitt himself in May introduced and carried a resolution, pledging the House early in the next session of Parliament to take into consideration the petitions that had been presented. Whether the trade should be abolished, or simply regulated, Pitt said, was a question on which he could give no opinion, pending the inquiry which was going on before the Privy Council. Although there was some objection to the tribunal by which the inquiry was to be conducted, and some doubt about the necessity of postponing legislation, there was very little difference of opinion about the great evils of the existing trade. Fox at once, and in the most explicit terms, declared that his opinion on the subject was fully determined: that he was convinced that the slave trade ought not to be regulated, but absolutely destroyed. Burke was little less emphatic. His attention had been already for some time directed to the trade, and in 1780 he had even drawn up a code for its mitigation and ultimate abolition, but had abandoned it through a conviction that it would be impossible to carry it. 1 He now spoke strongly to the effect that the trade was one which ought to be totally abolished, but if this was not now possible, it ought to be regulated at once. All delay in such a matter was criminal. 2

There was no serious opposition. The resolution pledging the House was unanimously passed, and a few weeks later Sir William Dolben introduced a temporary measure to mitigate the horrors of the middle passage, of which abundant evidence had been already disclosed. Its chief object was to limit the number of negroes who might be carried in slave ships, by establishing a fixed proportion between the cargo and the tonnage, and a few additional regulations were afterwards introduced into the Bill before it became law. The measure was warmly supported by Pitt, who urged, among other arguments, that there was reason to fear that the prospect of a speedy abolition of the trade might for a time aggravate it, by inducing the slave traders to carry as many slaves as possible to the West Indies before Parliament came to a definite decision on the subject. The Bill was violently and persistently opposed in the Commons by the members for Liverpool, and in the Lords by the Chancellor, Lord Thurlow, but it ultimately became law, and it was the first step taken towards the mitigation of the trade.

A cause which was supported by one of the most powerful prime ministers ever known in England, which was equally favoured by the leaders of the Opposition, and which had already excited a strong outburst of popular enthusiasm, seemed not far from its triumph, but 1789 and 1790 passed without any further measure in Parliament than a renewal of Dolben's Act. The report of the Privy Council had indeed now been drawn up, and Wilberforce introduced the subject in a long, eloquent, and comprehensive speech, and moved that the House should go into committee upon it; but although Pitt, Fox, and Burke strongly supported him, the signs of opposition were more considerable. The enormous amount of capital directly invested in the trade, or closely connected with it, told powerfully on Parliament. Much use was made of some regulating enactments which had lately been carried through the colonial Legislatures. Fears were expressed lest the sudden abolition of the trade would ruin the West Indian Isles, produce dangerous insurrectionary movements among the negroes, perhaps throw a great and lucrative branch of English commerce wholly into the hands of France. There was a demand for further inquiry, and the question was twice adjourned. In the country, however, the popular agitation on the subject showed little or no signs of abatement. A print of the plan and section of a slave ship, which was at this time very widely diffused, had a great influence on the popular imagination. 1 The rising Methodist and Evangelical party had taken up the question very warmly, and most of its prominent leaders were identified with the struggle.

The movement was at the same time strongly supported on the Continent, though by very different men. In France, Montesquieu, and Raynal, and also Necker, who was now at the head of French affairs, had written strongly on the iniquity of the trade, and the cause of abolition was vehemently advocated, on the grounds of the rights of men, by a large proportion of the rising revolutionary party. Lafayette, Mirabeau, Brissot, Claviere, and Condorcet had fully adopted it, and it was soon brought before the National Assembly. In France, however, as in England, there were fears that if one nation abolished the trade, its rival would rapidly monopolise it, and the growing distrust and alienation between the two countries was very unfavourable to the cause. Mirabeau told Clarkson that out of the twelve hundred members of the National Assembly, about three hundred would probably vote unconditionally for the suppression of the trade, but that about five hundred more would vote for it, if they had an unequivocal proof that it was the intention of England to abolish it. 1 At present all that could be promised was the suppression of the bounties by which the trade was encouraged. 2

The fear of the French Revolution and its principles now exercised a great influence on English public opinion. The abolition of the slave trade, being supported by Jacobins, began to wear, in the eyes of many, a Jacobinical aspect, and the horrors of the negro insurrection at St. Domingo, followed by serious negro disturbances in the British colony of Dominica, greatly strengthened the reaction. It was noticed as an incontestable fact, that the opinion of the House of Commons in 1791 had turned decidedly against the abolitionists. In April Wilberforce moved for leave to bring in a Bill to prevent the further importation of slaves into the British West Indies, but after a long and interesting debate, and in spite of the support of Pitt, Fox, and Burke, the motion was defeated by 163 to 88. It was remarked, however, that nearly all the eminent men in the House of Commons were in the minority. 3

It was about this time that the Sierra Leone colony obtained its charter of incorporation. This colony had been established a few years before, largely through the efforts of Granville Sharp. It was intended to be an asylum for freed negroes, and at the same time a great trading centre for the civilisation of Africa and the development of its resources; and it was especially specified in the charter of incorporation, that the company was on no account to deal in slaves or keep any persons in slavery. It became the refuge of many negroes who had obtained their freedom during the war of the American Revolution, and for some years it excited the sanguine hopes of philanthropists. These hopes were, however, not fulfilled. Mismanagement and various misfortunes retarded the development of the colony, and it suffered very seriously from French devastations during the great French war.

In 1792 the struggle passed through some new phases. The earnestness of the popular movement against the slave trade was shown by the multitude who, in all parts of England, agreed to leave off the use of sugar, as being a product of slave labour; by associations established in numerous provincial towns, corresponding with the central Abolition Society in London; by numerous public meetings to protest against the trade, and by the remarkable fact that in this year no less than 519 petitions were presented to Parliament for the abolition of the trade, while there were only four against the abolition, and one in favour of regulation. 1 On the other hand, both the opposition of interest and the opposition of panic had manifestly increased. The horrors of the St. Domingo revolt had sunk deeply in the minds of men. The King and Royal Family were extremely hostile. The public meetings and petitions, which seemed now becoming for the first time an important normal instrument in political struggles, were looked upon by leading politicians with much aversion, as tending to overthrow the independence of political judgment in Parliament and convert the representatives into mere delegates, and the dislike to such proceedings was much intensified by what was happening in France. Pitt himself appears for a time to have been shaken and dubious, 2 but when Wilberforce in April introduced a motion for immediate abolition, he cast off his hesitation and electrified the House by a speech which Fox, Windham, and Grey concurred in pronouncing to be one of the most extraordinary displays of eloquence they had ever heard. The debate had extended till past six in the morning, when in a superb peroration, which Wilberforee said seemed literally inspired, Pitt predicted how, the slave trade being abolished, the tardy justice of Europe would at last atone for the long agonies of Africa by bringing to that benighted continent the light of civilisation and knowledge; and as he spoke the rays of the rising sun streamed suddenly through the windows of the House, and the orator by a happy quotation at once applied the incident as an image and an omen of the future. 1 He concluded by declaring with grest emphasis that he would oppose any proposition which tended to postpone even for an hour the abolition of the slave trade.

The House, however, thought otherwise. The policy of gradual abolition was now proposed by Dundas, and it was carried by 193 votes to 125. It was a policy which was also adopted in Denmark, where the King had lately issued an ordinance that after the year 1803 the trade should be no longer tolerated in any of his colonies. Such a policy was evidently acceptable to the majority in the House of Commons, and at last, after much dispute, they agreed on the year 1796 as that in which the trade should cease. When, however, the Bill was sent up to the Lords, a demand for more evidence was raised and carried, and the question was again adjourned.

Next year the French War broke out, and reforms of all kinds became unpopular. It was in vain that Wilberforce proposed a committee to consider the slave trade; a Bill for regulating and limiting the importation of negroes into our own colonies; a Bill for prohibiting the supply of slaves by British merchants to foreign colonies. In the country and in both Houses the cause was now associated with Jacobinism, and the association was strengthened when the French Convention in 1794 proclaimed the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, and when Danton openly declared that a great object of the measure was to produce a revolt among the negroes in the English and Spanish colonies. The conditions of the question were indeed profoundly altered, and Dundas urged the extreme danger of taking any step which might be offensive to colonial Legislatures at a time when the war was raging. Wilberforce, however, succeeded in 1794 in carrying his Bill for the abolition of the slave trade with foreigners, through the Commons; but in the Lords, Grenville, who had hitherto been one of his most faithful supporters, refused to defend it. The Duke of Clarence, Lord Abingdon, and Lord Thurlow led the opposition, and the Bill was easily defeated. In the two following years his motions were defeated in the Commons, and in 1796 the interest on the subject was so languid that Dolben's annual Bill was dropped, for want of a sufficient attendance of members.

It was revived, however, in the following year, and though Wilberforce was again beaten on a motion asking leave to bring in a Bill to discontinue the trade within a limited time, measures were introduced, principally by his opponents, for regulating the conditions both of the slave trade and of slavery, with a view to depriving them of some of their worst characteristies. A parliamentary address was carried to the governors of the colonies, calling on them to take means to promote the welfare of the negroes, so that the trade should ultimately become unnecessary, and some measures in this direction were, shortly after, taken by the Legislatures of the Leeward Isles. An Act of George II. which authorised the sale of slaves at the suit of their master's creditors was repealed, and an Act was passed securing a greater height between the decks of slave ships. The strong feeling of the hour, however, was that the darkest period of a colossal war was no time for abolishing a lucrative trade, at the cost of irritating the colonial Legislatures and immediately after the acquisition of many new slave colonies. The majorities against Wilberforce were not large, but the abstentions were very numerous, and in 1798 and 1799 his motion was again defeated. Thornton at this time introduced a measure prohibiting the purchase of negroes on the northern coast of Africa, on the ground that it frustrated the good that was expected from the Sierra Leone Colony. It was postponed in 1798. In 1799 it passed the Commons, but was defeated in the Lords.

The century thus terminated with the temporary defeat of a cause which twelve years before seemed on the eve of triumph. I have noticed in a former chapter the sequel of the struggle, 1 and it is not necessary to recur to it. I will here only observe how different a complexion the eighteenth century would have presented to the historian if, in addition to the great Methodist and Evangelical revival of religion, it had been distinguished, as once appeared so probable, by the supreme philanthropic achievement of the abolition of the slave trade. While admitting that the eighteenth century in England was not rich in conspicuous social and political reforms, it should not be forgotten how many great causes had been almost conquered in opinion in the early years of the Ministry of Pitt, and would in all human probability have been speedily carried into effect, if the fatal influence of the French Revolution and of the war which it produced had not checked, blighted, and distorted the natural progress. But for this influence, the closing years of the century would probably have seen the abolition of the English slave trade; a reform of Parliament; the removal of the Test and Corporation Acts from the Statute-book, and an immense reduction both of debt and of taxation. The great industrial transition which has been described might have been accomplished with comparatively little suffering, if it had not occurred when the French War had raised corn to a famine price and absorbed all the attention of the legislators; and it was the introduction from France of the revolutionary spirit into Ireland that for the first time made the Irish problem almost insoluble.

But in spite of the sudden and most disastrous blight which thus fell on so many promising causes, the eighteenth century deserves, I think, a more honourable place than has usually been assigned to it in the history of England. A century was certainly not without the elements of greatness, which witnessed the victories of Marlborough; the statesmanship of Chatham and his son; the political philosophy of Burke and Adam Smith; the religious movement of Wesley and Whitefield; the conquest of India; the discovery of Australia; the confirmation of the naval, and the establishment of the manufacturing, supremacy of England. In this century religious persecution practically ceased, and the form of the Constitution was thoroughly established. Whatever may be said against the English statesmen which it produced, it is at least certain that they carried England safely through the long period of a disputed succession; maintained free institutions when they were extinguished in almost every country in Europe; transformed Scotland from a scene of utter anarchy into a highly civilised country; kept the name of England for many successive generations very high among the nations of the world, and preserved her in the closing years of the century from the most dangerous revolutionary epidemic of modern times. The period from the Restoration to the accession of the House of Hanover was a period of great selfishness and corruption in the higher spheres of Government, but from the accession of George II. the standard appears to have almost steadily risen. Factious, reckless, and corrupt statesmen often appeared conspicuously on the scene; but it is remarkable how very rarely such men have succeeded, for any considerable time, in acquiring a really controlling and dominant influence in English politics. No one, I think, who follows with care the confidential correspondence of English statesmen and diplomatists during the latter half of the century, can fail to be struck with the essential honesty with which English policy appears to have been conducted, and with the fidelity with which, in the broad lines of their policy, successive Governments represented and followed the opinion of the country.

The standard of duty, however, in the professions was undoubtedly lower than at present. The spirit of reform was less active. Many abuses, which would not now be tolerated for a day, were almot unquestioned. There was much more hardness and indifference to human suffering, and in the sphere of politics there were grave and scandalous evils. The King himself, during the administration of Lord North, was accustomed to devote many thousands of pounds to the purchase of borough seats. 1 Corruption at elections was constant and flagrant, and numerous sinecures and a lavish patronage were maintained and employed for political purposes.

Yet even in these respects the picture has been often overcharged. Some of the small borough seats were either purchased by public men who wished to secure their independence, or were disposed of in a manner that was very conducive to the interests of the country, and eminently honourable to their patrons. Some, at least, of the sinecures were usefully employed in rewarding merit, or served the purpose of retiring pensions to offices to which such pensions are now attached. If the public revenue was not administered quite as scrupulously as at present, it is at least true that there was little absolute malversation, and the taxation was in general moderate and equitable, and singularly free from those unjust exemptions and privileges which were so general on the Continent.

The question, indeed, whether the standard of patriotism, of public duty, and of public honour has risen in England since the eighteenth century, is one which it appears to me far from easy to answer. It by no means follows that, because a nation has advanced in intelligence and even in morality, there must be necessarily a corresponding improvement in its governing and political class, for the improvement in the nation may be more than counterbalanced by the degradation of the suffrage. In one respect, the superiority of the English Parliaments of the eighteenth century will scarcely be disputed. With the doubtful exception of the small and short-lived Jacobite party, those Parliaments contained no party which was not in harmony with the general interests of the Empire, and did not sincerely desire its greatness and its prosperity. Corruption was very widely spread and very undisguised, but political corruption takes many forms, and each age has its characteristic vices. A democratic age, in which power is chiefly won by appeals to the great masses of the population, is likely to be an age of high moral profession, and it will be free from many of the prevalent evils of an aristocratic Government. The avowed cynicism; the disregard in foreign politics for the rights of nations; the open subordination of political interests to personal and family pretensions; the many forms of petty corruption which so often meet us in the eighteenth century, have wholly disappeared or greatly diminished; but another and a not less dangerous family of vices has much tendency to increase. Cant and hypocrisy; the combination of mean action and supersaintly profession; the habitual use of language that does not represent the real sentiments and motives of the speaker; the habit of disguising party and personal motives under lofty and high-sounding professions; the sacrifice of the most enduring interests of the nation, for the purpose of raising a popular cry or winning immediate applause; the systematic subordination of genuine conviction to popular favour—these are some of the characteristic vices of a democratic age. In such an age the demagogue takes the place of the old sycophan. Bribery is applied not to individuals, but to classes. Dexterous appeals to ignorance, passion, and prejudice become supreme forms of party management. Questions of vast and dangerous import are unscrupulously raised for the purpose of uniting a party or displacing a Government; and a desire to trim the bark to every gust of popular favour produces apostasies, transformations, and alliances compared with which the coalition of Fox and North will appear very venial. No modern statesman would attemtp to bribe individuals, or purchase boroughs like Walpole, or like North; but we have ourselves seen a minister going to the country on the promise that, if he was returned to office he would abolish the principal direct tax paid by the class which was then predominant in the constituencies. Irish politics have long since ceased to be conducted by ennobling borough owners and pensioning members of Parliament, but the very impulse and essence of their most powerful popular movement has been an undisguised appeal to the cupidity and the dishonesty of the chief body in the electorate. Lofty maxims and sacred names are invoked in Parliament much more frequently than of old; but he who will observe how questions of the most vital importance to the Constitution of England and the well-being of the Empire have in our generation been bandied to and fro in the party game; how cynically the principles of one year have sometimes been abandoned in the next; how recklessly prominent politicians have sought to gain their ends by setting the poor against the rich, and planting in the nation deadly seeds of class animosities and cupidities, may well learn to look with tolerance and with modesty upon the England of the past.

CHAPTER XXIV.: ireland, 1782–1789.

The victory which had been achieved by the Irish popular party in 1782 was a great one, but many elements of disquietude were abroad. An agitation so violent, so prolonged, and so successful, could hardly be expected suddenly to subside, and it is a law of human nature, that a great transport of triumph and of gratitude must be followed by some measure of reaction. Disappointed ambitions, chimerical hopes, turbulent agitators thrust into an unhealthy prominence, the dangerous precedent of an armed body controlling or overawing the deliberations of Parliament, the appetite for political excitement to which Irishmen have always been so prone, and which ever grows by indulgence, the very novelty and strangeness of the situation, all contributed to impart a certain feverish restlessness to the public mind. Unfortunately, too, one of the foremost of Irish politicians was profoundly discontented. Flood, who had been the earliest, and, for a long period, by far the most conspicuous advocate of the independence of the Irish Parliament, found himself completely eclipsed by a younger rival. He had lost his seat in the Privy Council, his dignity of Vice-Treasurer, and his salary of 3,500 l. a year, but he had not regained his parliamentary ascendency. All the more important constitutional questions were occupied by other, and usually by younger, men. He was disliked By the Government and distrusted by the Parliament. Even his eloquence had lost something of its old power, and by too frequent speaking in opposition to the sense of the House, he had often alienated or irritated his hearers.

Yelverton was made Attorney-General, and Burgh Prime Sergeant, but the Govenment had no wish to restore Flood to his office, though they were willing to replace him in the Privy Council. Their intentions, however, in this respect were frustrated by a curious blunder. One of the most remarkable facts in this period of Irish history is the number of false steps which were due, not to any miscalculations of leading statesmen, but simply to the carelessness of subordinate officials. We have already seen that the insertion of Ireland in four or five very insignificant British Acts, at a most critical moment and in defiance of the warnings of the viceroy, had been one of the chief circumstances in creating the violent demand for independence, and that, in the opinion of Lord Carlisle, this insertion was due to pure inadvertence, official draughtsmen having probably copied the forms of previous Acts. 1 In 1782 the Government at last consented, after a long struggle, to accept the Bill making the judges removable only by the address of the two Houses of Parliament in Ireland, and to relinquish the disputed clause making the concurrence of the Irish Privy Council indispensable; but the Bill had scarcely been returned from England, when Shelburne wrote in much alarm to Portland that he had discovered that, ‘by a mere mistake of the Council Office,’ the very clause which was the subject-matter of dispute had been inserted, though ‘it was not intended to have been adopted by the Committee of Privy Council,’ and he begged the Lord Lieutenant to take such measures that no bad consequences should follow from the error. 2 In the dealings with Flood a much more serious mistake was made. The Lord Lieutenant thought it very desirable to enter into negotiation with him, and he wished to be authorised in the course of this negotiation, if he thought it expedient, to offer Flood a seat in the Privy Council; but a clerk by some strange mistake sent the nomination which was meant to be conditional, and at the option of the Lord Lieutenant, meant to be conditional, and it was from this source that Flood first learnt the intentions of the Ministers. He refused to accept the position, and the Lord Lieutenant spoke with very justifiable irritation of the great injury that was done to the public service by the premature disclosure. 3 Portland regarded Flood with much dislike. ‘His ambition,’ he said, ‘is so immeasurable that no dependence can be placed upon any engagement he may be induced to form.’ 1

The question of the sufficiency of the measures that had been taken for securing the constitutional independence of the Irish Parliament, had been raised in a discussion on the clause of the Address, which stated that ‘there will no longer exist any constitutional question between the two nations that can disturb their mutual tranquillity.’ Flood described this clause as superfluous and possibly dangerous, but he refused to divide against it, and the only two members who voted for its omission were Sir Samuel Bradstreet the Recorder of Dublin, and an able lawyer named Walshe, who first raised in Ireland the question of the adequacy of what was termed ‘simple repeal.’ The nature of this question may be stated in a few words. The Irish Parliament in 1782 had asserted its own independence of the British Legislature, and the British Parliament had responded by repealing the Declaratory Act of George I., which asserted the legislative and judicial power of Great Britain over Ireland. It was contended by the two lawyers I have mentioned, that as a matter of law this measure was insufficient So annul the assumed right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland. The Declaratory Act had not made the right, and therefore its repeal could not destroy it. Long before that Act had passed, the right of the English Parliament to legislate for Ireland had been asserted by Coke and other great authorities—had been frequently exercised and had been frequently acquiesced in. If it existed then, it existed still, and although as a matter of expediency the English Parliament had withdrawn its assertion, it was open to it at any time to renew it. No lawyer, it was said, would assert that the assumed right of Great Britain to legislate for Ireland could be taken away by implication. ‘The repeal of a declaratory statute is not in construction of law a repeal or renunciation of the principle upon which that statute was founded.’ It leaves the legal right exactly as it was before the Declaratory Act had passed. Nothing but an Act of the British Parliament expressly relinquishing or disclaiming the right to legislate for Ireland could be legally sufficient. Ireland must not rest content with ‘a constructive freedom.’ She must obtain such an explicit renunciation from Great Britain as would put an end to all further controversy and cavil, and become a perpetual charter of her freedom. The language of Fox in moving the repeal of the Act of George I. seemed to draw some distinction between external and internal legislation, and to foreshadow an attempt to retain some part of the former.

These arguments were at first treated in the Irish Parliament with much contempt, and were regarded merely as the quibbles of lawyers, and, although Flood soon after adopted them and brought them forward on several occasions, he found the great majority against him. Grattan, especially, contended that nothing could be more impolitic, nothing more ungrateful, nothing more dangerous, than to reopen a question which Parliament had solemnly pronounced to be closed. The dealings of nations, he said, must rest upon broad principles of equity and not upon mere legal special pleading, and it was plain that England in repealing the Declaratory Act had taken a step which was morally equivalent to a renunciation. She had in the first place formally asserted her right to legislate for Ireland. She had then, in consequence of an address of the Irish House of Commons denying that right, and with the avowed object of meeting the wishes of the Irish people, as formally retracted and expunged her assertion, and she had thus in effect disavowed or resigned the right. No reasonable man could doubt that this was the plain meaning of the transaction, nor could England revive her claim without the grossest perfidy. But if the supposition of perfidy were admitted, an Act of renunciation would be as useless as simple repeal. Nations cannot be bound like individuals by bonds or warrants. Parliament might renounce its own renunciation, and what one Parliament had enacted, another might repeal. Good faith alone could maintain the connection, and the good faith of England was already pledged to Irish independence. Ireland, it was said, might justly demand the withdrawal of a claim which was an act of usurpation, but with what consistency could she call upon England to renounce rights which she denied that England had ever possessed, or, while assuming to be an independent nation, seek the charter for her freedom in a foreign Statute-book? The Irish Parliament had stated its grievances, had received redress, had acknowledged itself satisfied. A new demand could only be regarded as an unworthy attempt to humiliate England. Its only effect would be to shake the confidence of the people in their Constitution; to prolong a period of very dangerous agitation; to foster animosity and distrust between the two countries at a time when it was vitally important to Ireland and to the Empire that all such feelings should be speedily allayed.

These views predominated in the Irish Parliament, and they would no doubt have predominated in the country had not a series of very unfortunate incidents, originating in England, inflamed the jealousy of the nation. Lord Beauchamp, the son of Lord Hertford, strenuously maintained both in the British Parliament and in a pamphlet which was widely read, that simple repeal was entirely insufficient, unless it was accompanied by a formal renunciation. 1 Lord Abingdon—a not very conspicuous member of the English House of Lords—moved for leave to bring in a Bill declaring the right of the Parliament of Great Britain to regulate and control the whole external commerce and foreign trade of Ireland, and repealing any legislation that withdrew any portion of the commerce of Ireland from its control. The Bill was never, it is true, formally introduced, but its mere announcement was quite sufficient to excite consternation in Ireland. 2 Then came the news that two trade laws had passed in England which were drawn up—it is said through the inadvertence of clerks—in such a way as to include Ireland, 3 and about the same time Lord Mansfield decided an Irish law case, which had come up on appeal to the Court of King's Bench before the late Act had passed. All these things occurred within a few months of the establishment of the Constitution of Ireland, and at the very time when a great reaction of feeling was most to be apprehended. It was known that the Constitution of 1782 had been reluctantly conceded, that it had been conceded mainly in consequence of the desperate condition of public affairs, that it was detested by the Tory party on grounds of prerogative and by a large section of the Whig party as putting an end to the system of commercial monopoly. Lord Rockingham, whose character was universally respected, had just died. The dispute for his succession had thrown English politics into great confusion and uncertainty, and brought other men to the helm, and Portland was now replaced by Lord Temple as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. It was widely believed that there was a disposition on the part of men in authority to undo in time of peace what had been granted in time of war, and a revulsion of feeling speedily set in. The judges, indeed, in Ireland, and several of the leading lawyers, asserted the sufficiency of what had been done, but the lawyers corps of volunteers, which comprised a very large part of the legal profession, drew up a declaration that in their opinion no real security had been obtained, until the British Legislature had in express terms acknowledged its incapacity to legislate for Ireland. The popularity of Grattan suddenly sank, and that of Flood rose with a corresponding rapidity. It was said that the nation was deceived, that nothing had been really gained, that England was already showing a manifest disposition to withdraw what she had granted.

These suspicions were not unnatural, but they were certainly essentially unfounded. The conduct of Lord Mansfield, though much contested, was thought by the best lawyers to be in accordance with law, as the case which he decided had been entered in his court before the jurisdiction of that court was removed. Lord Beauchamp spoke solely in the interests of Ireland; Lord Abingdon had no connection with the Government, and the two English Bills in which Ireland was involved appear to have been only another instance of the gross carelessness of the official draughtsmen. It is, however, perfectly true that the English Ministers had from the first disliked the new Irish Constitution, and aimed at an ideal which was wholly different. To any statesman, indeed, who looked on the question with real prescience and without illusion, it must have been evident that the complete independence of the Irish Parliament as it was established in 1782, if it remained unqualified by any further arrangement, must weaken and might endanger the Empire. It was true, indeed, that at this time the one essential condition of co-operation subsisted. There could be no reasonable doubt that the Irish Parliament, and the classes it represented, were unfeignedly and heartily loyal to the British connection. But was it quite certain that this state of things would always continue? Strange as it may now appear, the danger of a rebellious Catholic interest appears at this time to have been little felt. The general conservatism of Catholicism throughout the Continent; the total abstinence of the priesthood from Irish politics; the sincere and undoubted loyalty of the Catholic gentry; the passive attitude of the Catholic population during all the political troubles of the eighteenth century; the authority which the landlords exercised over their tenants; the complete concentration in Protestant hands of the elements of political power, and the enormous superiority of the Protestants in energy and intelligence, made danger from this quarter appear very remote. But among the Presbyterians of the North, and in the ranks of the volunteers, there were some disquieting signs of a republican and anti-English spirit, and if, by any change in its Constitution, these elements became ascendant, or even powerful, in the Irish Parliament, there was everything to be feared. A separate Irish Parliament consisting of men who were disloyal to the English Government could only lead either to complete separation or to civil war. It would be the most powerful and the most certain agent that the wit of man could devise for organising the resources of Ireland against England.

This contingency might appear a distant one, but even without any serious or reasoned disloyalty, there were in the Constitution of 1782 grave possibilities of conflict, and they were fully present to the minds of the English statesmen who originally consented to it. Fox declared, in the most emphatic language, that ‘the intentions of those Ministers who had sent the repeal of the declaratory law [to Ireland] were thereby to make a complete, absolute, and perpetual surrender of the British legislative and judicial supremacy over Ireland,’ 1 but he afterwards acknowledged that it was only with extreme re luctance, and in consequence of what he regarded as irresistible necessity, that he consented to the surrender of the right of external or commercial legislation, which left the Empire without one general superintending authority to embrace and comprehend the whole system of its navigation. 1 The surrender had been made, but he desired that the two nations should enter into a treaty arrangement, which would draw them more closely together, and one of the resolutions of the English Parliament, which has been already quoted, pointed to such a treaty. 2 ‘As there can no longer exist any grounds of contest or jealousy on matters of right between the two countries,’ wrote Rockingham to Portland, ‘the only object of both will be how finally to arrange, settle, and adjust all matters whereby the union of power and strength and mutual and reciprocal advantage may be best permanently fixed.’ 3

Portland, however, was aiming at something more than this; and his secret correspondence shows that he was extremely anxious to regain for England a very large part of the legislative supremacy which had been surrendered. I have already referred to the letter in the beginning of May, in which he expressed his sanguine hope that the Irish Parliament would be prepared to enter into a treaty, either with Commissioners from the English Parliament, or through the medium of the Lord Lieutenant, ‘to settle the precise limits of that independence which is required, the consideration that should be given for the protection expected, and the share it would be proper for them to contribute towards the general support of the Empire.’ ‘The regulation of their trade,’ he added, ‘is a subject which, I think, would very properly make a part of the treaty,’ and he concluded that without such an adjustment the country would not be worth possessing, and that it might even be advisable to abandon it altogether. 4 It soon, however, appeared evident that the Irish leaders, though they were quite ready to vote additional sailors and soldiers for Imperial purposes, were not prepared at this time to enter into any treaty which would restrict their future liberty of action. In June, Fitzpatrick, the Chief Secretary, was authorised, in the Irish Parliament, publicly to disavow any intention of bringing forward further measures grounded on the second resolution of the British Parliament. 1 But within three days of this disavowal, certain hopes which had been held out by an obscure Irish member named Ogilvie, had drawn Portland into a new negotiation. Without the knowledge of his Chief Secretary, and with the most urgent injunctions of secrecy, he wrote to Shelburne, expressing his hope that the Irish Parliament might be induced to pass an Act ‘by which the superintending power and supremacy of Great Britain in all matters of State, and general commerce, will be virtually and effectually acknowledged, that a share of the expense in carrying on a defensive or offensive war, either in support of our dominions or those of our allies, shall be borne by Ireland in proportion to the actual state of her abilities, and that she will adopt every such regulation as may be judged necessary by Great Britain for the better ordering and securing her trade and commerce with foreign nations, or her own colonies or dependencies.’ 2 Shelburne received the intimation with delight. ‘Let the two kingdoms,’ he wrote, ‘be one; which can only be by Ireland now acknowledging the superintending power and supremacy to be where Nature has placed it, in precise and unambiguous terms.’ 3 In a few days, Portland wrote with great mortification, that he had discovered that it was at this time perfectly hopeless attempting to induce Parliament to adopt any such scheme, but it is probable that the rumour of his negotiations spread abroad, and contributed something under the new viceroyalty to the prevailing uneasiness.

Lord Temple had arrived in Dublin on September 15, and his first impression was, that the task he had undertaken was almost desperate. In some very confidential letters to Shelburne, he depicted the state of the country in the blackest colours. ‘No Government,’ he says, ‘exists.’ ‘Those to whom the people look up with confidence are not the Parliament, but a body of armed men composed chiefly of the middling and lower orders, influenced by no one, but leading those who affect to guide them.’ ‘There is hardly a magistrate who will enforce, or a man who will obey any law to which he objects.’ Every day, he said, confirmed his opinion of the necessity of maintaining the strongest opposition to Flood, and to the majority of the volunteers. For this purpose he had made immediate overtures to Charlemont, but he wrote to Shelburne ‘in the strictest confidence,’ and with a desire that it should be communicated to no one but the King, that he had no real wish to add weight to Lord Charlemont's party. His object was to prevent that party from flying off in support of Mr. Flood's doctrines which were daily growing more popular, and also ‘to foment that spirit of disunion among the volunteers, upon which alone,’ he said, ‘I found my hopes of forming a Government.’ The middle and lower classes of volunteers were fast ranging themselves under the banner of Flood, but Flood was universally disliked by the nobility and persons of property, and he must be resisted or possibly bought. ‘It is my unalterable opinion,’ wrote the Lord Lieutenant, ‘that the concession is but the beginning of a scene which will close for ever the account between the two kingdoms.’ ‘Much time is necessary to recover to the Crown that energy which alone can check a ferment that confines itself to no settled objects, but pervades every part of Ireland.’ The one chance of securing the authority of the Government, lay in the Irish Parliament. ‘The country is too wild to act from reflection, and till you can oppose Parliament effectually to the volunteers, nothing can be done.’ Grattan was decided to stand his ground, and confident of success if the Government would support him. ‘Nothing but a Parliament,’ repeated Temple, ‘can recover the Government, and be opposed to the volunteers,’ and he urged the Government to hasten the elections and summon speedily a new Parliament. 1

The picture must be judged with some allowance for the colouring of a mind which was always peculiarly prone to exaggerate difficulty and opposition. In one respect Temple speedily changed his policy. ‘No terms of reprobation,’ he wrote in October, could be too strong to apply to the ‘execrable and iniquitous publication of Lord Beauchamp,’ but when in the following month the decision of Lord Mansfield was aunounced, it appeared to him that both in policy and honour a new course was required. 1

‘The claim,’ he then wrote, ‘so solemnly made, was as solemnly yielded by England, and the repeal of the 6 George I. was understood by England and accepted by the Parliament of Ireland in their addresses to his Majesty, as a full and final renunciation of all claims of jurisdiction and of legislation internal and external. And to this compact the Duke of Portland was enabled to pledge his personal faith, and as far as my testimony could add to it, I conceived myself, on my arrival here, authorised to pledge the faith of the King's servants of England, and my own, that these concessions should be maintained inviolate. It is now certain, that notwithstanding this compact … Lord Mansfield has conceived himself authorised to entertain and decide a cause which had been removed into his court prior to the passing of the Act.’ Such a measure might be legal, but it was a distinct breach of the compact by which the right to bind and to judge Ireland only by her own laws and by her own courts was clearly yielded. 2

There were those in Ireland who maintained with Flood that an Act of renunciation was imperatively necessary to the security of the Constitution. There were those who, with Grattan, considered that such an Act was wrong in principle, and should not be conceded, and there were those who with Charlemont and Chief Baron Burgh considered that, though legally and constitutionally superfluous, it had become politically necessary, as the only means of allaying discontent. To this opinion Temple had now come. It would have been better in his opinion, ‘in the interest of the whole Empire, that external legislation (that is, the right of directing the commerce of Ireland) had been reserved by England.’ But it had not been reserved, and it remained only to fulfil religiously, the terms of the compact. He had been authorised to pledge the faith of Government, and his own, ‘that no attempt should be made to tread back one iota of concessions already made, or to break the good faith so solemnly pledged;’ and when ‘the question of the sufficiency of simple repeal was agitated from one end of the island to the other,’ he had declared in the strongest terms, and with the full approbation of the Government in England, that ‘simple repeal comprised complete renunciation.’ But the judgment of Lord Mansfield had baffled his policy. ‘I owe it to the King's service,’ he said, ‘to be understood clearly that there is not a man in Ireland (even of those who most firmly supported Lord Carlisle), who will maintain opinions favourable to this measure or even palliating it, and that the only reason for the appearance of a calm is that all Ireland is persuaded that England will explain this breach of compact. … If the rights specifically acknowledged by England should now be controverted (and I must contend from the clear and unequivocal words of the Irish address, that the right to bind and to judge Ireland only by her own laws and by her own courts was clearly yielded), I cannot hesitate to say that the public faith of the nation, and the private honour of individuals, are committed. Conceiving that this cannot be the intention of the Cabinet, I am only alarmed at the delay.’ Two Irish causes are now before the English House of Lords. If it should decide them, ‘I will not answer for the effect of such a judgment twenty-four hours after it is known.’ Ministers should consider ‘the danger to which the public tranquillity of Ireland is exposed, for want of a clear and satisfactory avowal of those principles upon which the Parliament of England proceeded in the month of June last, when they admitted the Irish addresses as the basis of their proceedings.’ ‘This crisis,’ he added, ‘will be decisive upon the practicability of governing Ireland by English connection and influence, for, as to an attempt by force (even if a foreign peace would permit it), I trust that the consideration is too wild to have occurred to any man.’ 1

The Government and Parliament of England acted frankly upon this advice, and, for the second time, they consented fully to meet the wishes of the Irish people. In the beginning of 1783, a renunciation Bill was carried without difficulty through the British Parliament, 1 which completely set at rest every reasonable or plausible demand of the party of Flood. It declared that the ‘right claimed by the people of Ireland, to be bound only by laws enacted by his Majesty and the Parliament of that kingdom in all cases whatever, and to have all actions, and suits at law or in equity, which may be instituted in the kingdom, decided by his Majesty's courts, therein finally, and without appeal from thence, shall be, and it is hereby declared to be established, and ascertained for ever, and shall at no time hereafter be questioned or questionable,’ and that no writ of error or appeal from Ireland shall under any circumstances be again decided in England. No surrender or disclaimer could be more explicit or more honourable, and it must be remembered that it was not made by England at a time of great national danger, but at the very moment when the re-establishment of peace had restored her power. When Temple communicated the news to the King's servants in Ireland, the impression it made was very deep. ‘I found in everyone,’ he wrote, ‘the strongest impressions of the national good faith with which Great Britain has acted, at a moment when her external situation might possibly have given another turn to her councils.’ 2

The Renunciation Act forms the coping-stone of the Constitution of 1782, and before we proceed with our narrative it may be advisable to pause for a moment in order to form a clear conception of the nature of that Constitution—its merits, its defects, and its dangers. Much had indeed been gained—the independence of the judges, the control of the army, the appellate jurisdiction of the Irish House of Lords, the extinction of the power of the Privy Council to originate, suppress, or alter Irish legislation, the renunciation of the power of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland, the full and repeated acknowledgment of the doctrine that the King, Lords and Commons of Ireland had alone the right to make her laws. An Irish Act of Henry VIII, and the Irish Act of recognition of William and Mary, had established that the crowns of England and Ireland were inseparable, so that whoever was King of England was ipso facto King of Ireland; but the two Legislatures were now regarded as independent, co-ordinate, and in their respective spheres co-equal.

It is sufficiently plain, however, that this was not, and could not be, the case. English Ministers were necessarily dependent on the support of the British Parliament and of that Parliament alone, and even apart from corrupt agencies, English Ministers exercised an enormous influence on Irish legislation. The King's veto was obsolete in England, but it was not likely to be obsolete in Ireland, and it could only be exercised on the advice of his Ministers in England. The British Parliament claimed and enjoyed a right of watching over and controlling the conduct of the Executive Government, even in the exercise of what are justly considered undoubted prerogatives of the Crown, and this right, or at least this power, was wholly, or almost wholly, wanting in Ireland. Even the English Privy Council, though it had lost all recognised and formal control over Irish legislation, still retained a not inconsiderable influence. When Bills were sent over from Ireland to receive the royal sanction, it was the custom to submit them in the first place to a committee of the Privy Council, who were instructed to examine them and report on them to the King's law officers in England. This wheel of the machine of administration, indeed, was not public, and it appears to have escaped the notice of historians, but there is reason to believe that it was not inoperative. Occasionally mistakes were detected by the Committee of the Privy Council in Bills which came over from Ireland, and the Secretary of State then directed the Lord Lieutenant to introduce into the Irish Parliament supplemental Bills for the purpose of correcting them, and sometimes, where this was not possible, Irish Bills were not returned. 1