The Years of Endurance Read online

  Liberty outside Parliament was reflected by liberty within. For all the power of the great nominating lords and borough-mongers and the allurements of the Treasury, there were more independent members in the House than is possible under the rigid Party machinery of to-day. In a major issue it was not the Whips but men's consciences that turned the scale in the lobbies. Minorities could make themselves felt. A great speech could still decide a hard-fought debate: members were not the tied advocates of particular interests obeying mandates issued in advance. They gave their constituents not so much rigid obedience as unfettered judgment.

  Nor did the complexion of the House discount the rise of talent. Within its narrow range the old parliamentary system fostered it. Again and again it recruited to the country's service the strongest motive power in the world—the force of genius untrammelled by the rule of mediocrity. A young man of brilliance, who had the good fortune to attract the notice of some great peer, might be set on the high road to the Front Bench at an age when his counterpart to-day is laboriously overloading his brain and memory to satisfy the Civil Service Commissioners. Pitt with £300 a year was Prime Minister at twenty-four. Probably at no other time in British history could Edmund Burke, a man of genius without any of the arts of the demagogue and lacking both birth and independent fortune, have become a lifelong legislator. Like Macaulay and Gladstone after him, he entered Parliament by the back door of a rotten borough and a discerning aristocrat's approval.

  Behind every English exercise of liberty was the underlying conception of law. It was because the law was there, guaranteeing the freedom of every man against every other, that the English were able to allow and take so much licence. The law did not coerce a man from acting as he pleased: it only afforded redress to others if in doing so he outraged their rightful liberty or the peace of the community. Every man could appeal to the law: no man could legally evade it. Not even the King: perhaps it would be truest to say in the eighteenth century, least of all the King. The squire who rebuked George III—a very popular monarch—for trespassing on his land became a national legend.

  In England there was no droit administratif: no sacred principle of state with which to crush the cantankerous subject. The official had to produce the warrant of law to justify his every action. If he exceeded his authority, whatever his motives, he suffered the same penalty as though he had acted as a private citizen. There was no escape from the law: it was like divine retribution and might overtake the transgressor at any moment of his life. Joseph Wall, for all his fine connections, was hanged at Newgate in front of a cheering mob for having twenty years before, while Governor of Goree, sentenced a mutinous sergeant to an unlawful flogging that caused death.

  Trial by law was conducted in public. Judges were appointed for life and were irremovable save for gross misconduct. Issues of fact were decided by a jury of common citizens. Any man arrested could apply to the Courts for an immediate writ of Habeas Corpus calling on his custodian to show legal cause why he should be detained. In all doubtful cases the prisoner was given the benefit of the doubt and acquitted. These were the main pillars of English justice, together with an unpaid magistracy of local worthies, the absence of a paid constabulary and a traditional distrust of the standing army which was always kept by Parliament—alone capable of voting funds for its maintenance—at the lowest strength compatible with national safety, and often a good deal lower. The duties of police were performed by the general body of citizens serving in turn as constables on a compulsory parish rota or paying substitutes to deputise for them during their year of office. In the larger towns this ancient system had long broken down. But the national distrust of despotism long made reform impossible.1

  There was another principle of freedom scrupulously honoured in England. It was the legal sanctity of property. It was individual ownership, it was held, that enabled a man to defy excessive authority. Without a competence of his own to fall back on the subject could be bribed or intimidated: a John Hampden without an estate seemed impracticable to the English mind.2 The guardians of English liberty were the gentlemen of England whose hereditary independence protected them from the threats and guiles of despotism. They were tyrant-proof. That men might be rendered servile through wealth as well as through poverty had not yet dawned on them.

  Any interference with a man's property by the State was regarded as pernicious. Freemen were supposed to be free to do as they liked with their own. Taxation had, therefore, to be kept as low as possible and the extent of a man's contribution to the upkeep of the State left wherever practicable to his own choice. " No taxation without representation " was the oldest battle-cry in the armoury of

  1 In London a small patrol of less than fifty mounted men was maintained to guard its highwayman-infested approaches, while a handful of professional Bow Street Runners—popularly known as " redbreasts " on account of their scarlet waistcoats—occasionally patrolled the more lawless districts. For the rest the public order of the capital was left to the medieval constables of the parishes assisted by a race of venerable watchmen or " Charlies " with traditional staffs, lanterns and rattles.

  2 This was also the belief of the great libertarian pioneers of the United States. To Washington and Jefferson property and democracy were synonymous : their ideal was the small freeholder scorning all tyrants, political and economic, and dispensing almost with government itself.

  English freedom: it dominated the whole constitution. Those assembled in Parliament did not represent numbers but property: the greater landowners in the House of Lords, the lesser in the Commons, side by side with the burgesses who represented the nation's mercantile interest.

  Such an assembly was naturally tender to the taxpayer and unsympathetic to the Executive. In the seventeenth century it had made government virtually impossible, and England had only been saved from a second civil war by vesting the King's executive power in a Cabinet of Ministers who commanded the support of a majority in the House of Commons. But though the expenses of government steadily rose with the growing complexity of civilisation, taxation continued to be kept as low as possible. Direct taxation was regarded as repugnant to English principles both on account of its compulsion and of the odious power of inquisition it involved. The taxpayer was given the option of declining to purchase the taxed article and so of avoiding the tax. For this reason many antiquated tariff barriers which would otherwise have been swept away in the rising tide of free trade were retained for revenue purposes. Anything which infringed what an eighteenth-century correspondent called " the sweet majesty of private life " was discouraged.

  Because of this, administration and justice were supported more cheaply than in any other country of equivalent size and importance in Europe. The cost of administration in Prussia was twice as much, in France many times that of Britain. The chief civil expenses were the sinecures and pensions which the ruling aristocracy, usurping the former perquisites of the Court, lavished on their relations and supporters. The Army was pared to the bone: so in time of peace was the Navy, especially in the matter of seamen's pay. Yet economy on the Navy was at least kept within limits, for two centuries of experience had taught the English that their commercial wealth depended on their fleet.

  For more than a century and a half trade had played an increasing part in the direction of English policy. Commerce was the activity by which younger sons and their progeny sought to raise themselves to the same standard of wealth and independence enjoyed by their elder brothers. The richer the latter under entail and primogeniture, the greater became the desire to emulate them.

  The development of British commerce during the eighteenth century was immense. Population was rising, and the luxuries of one generation became the necessities of the next. In 1720 the value of British imports was just over £6,000,000. By 1760 it was nearly £10,000,000, by 1789 over £37,000,000. During these years tea, coffee and West Indian sugar became part of the staple dietary of the people. Everything conspired to further this process: na
tural health and vigour, free institutions, aptitude for seamanship and colonisation and a unique geographical position.

  It brought the British a great Empire, acquired not by any design of imperial conquest but through the individual's search for trade. The fight to maintain it against their rivals, the French, placed them in the middle years of the century on a pinnacle of unprecedented glory. Under the leadership of the elder Pitt, they gained supremacy in India and a new dominion in Canada.

  Before Clive's victory at Plassey in 1757 the British had only been casual factors trading from isolated coastal ports in the anarchical Indian peninsula by precarious leave of native princes and in armed rivalry with other European trading companies. But in the second half of the century the East India Company of London found itself administering possessions many times the size of England. At first it merely regarded this unlooked-for dominion as a windfall for its factors and shareholders: the imagination of Leadenhall Street could stretch no further.

  It was not only in India that a race of sober farmers and shopkeepers failed to visualise the magnitude of their opportunity. Along the eastern seaboard of North America, now freed from fear of French aggression by the conquest of Canada, lived two million British settlers. These a patronising Court and Parliament treated as if they lacked the stubborn independence of their kinsfolk at home. The result was a quarrel, persisted in with all the ferocious obstinacy and moral rectitude of the race until no alternatives remained but either a systematic conquest of the colonies by British soldiers or the end of the imperial connection.

  The issue was still undecided when Britain's outdistanced competitors in the race for empire seized their opportunity for revenge. France, Spain, and Holland—the three chief maritime powers of the Continent—supported by Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, joined hands with the colonists. With her fleets outnumbered and her finances in ruin, Britain seemed beaten. Then the brilliance of her seamen and the stubborn defence of Gibraltar turned the scale. A disastrous war dwindled away into stalemate. The British faced the facts and in 1783 made peace. Their former colonies became the United States of America.

  But unperceived by the islanders, who thought their imperial heritage lost for ever,1 the process which had made the first empire continued, and at an accelerated pace. What had happened before happened again. In every corner of the world where ships could sail appeared enterprising Britons, begging concessions, planting factories and on occasion hoisting the imperial flag as a protection for their ventures. No sooner, in the poet Cowper's phrase, had the jewel been picked from England's crown, than new jewels blazed in the empty sockets. Within five years of the final loss of the American colonies, Captain Phillip had established the first British settlement on the Continent of Australia. An even vaster new Britain in America took embryonic shape amid the snows of Canada where 140,000 defeated French, 60,000 migrant loyalists from the United States and a few thousand rough Scottish emigrants contrived to live together under King George's writ. Elsewhere a chain of forts, naval bases and sugar and spice islands continued to afford the traders of Britain springboards of opportunity.

  For the moment the chief imperial field for the aspirant to wealth was India, which was beginning to take the place of the West Indies. From this oriental El Dorado flowed an ever-widening stream of spices, indigo, ivory, sugar, tea, ebony, sandalwood, saltpetre, cotton, silks and calicoes, and fabulously rich merchants who bought up English estates and rotten boroughs, married their children into the aristocracy and received from their, less fortunate countrymen the envious name of nabob. It was due to them that Britain first became conscious of its eastern possession and began to assume a direct responsibility for its government. The India Act of 1784, subordinating the political power of the Directors of the East India Company to a Board of Control appointed by the Crown, and the impeachment of Warren Hastings in 1787 were symptoms of this new interest, half-humanitarian and half-imperial.

  1 Parliament in its gloom abolished the third Secretaryship of State (for the Colonies) and the Board of Trade.—C.H.B.E. II, 1.

  The commercial aptitude of the nation perpetually modified its habits. It was not only to be seen in the spread of new luxuries into farm and cottage1 and the splendour of the metropolis, an eighteenth-century imperial Rome whose red brick houses marched in shapely ranks under the dome of St. Paul's, with its dazzling shops—" drapers, stationers, confectioners, printsellers, hosiers, fruiterers, china-sellers, one close to another without intermission, a shop to every house, street after street and mile after mile." The race was setting out on its long trek from country to town. Already London had more than three-quarters of a million inhabitants with a circuit of twenty miles from Millbank in the west to Limehouse and Poplar hamlet in the east and from Islington in the north to Newington in the south.2 Elsewhere population was concentrating itself in urban entities of a kind unknown to the civic culture of the past. By 1790 Manchester had 80,000 inhabitants, Liverpool and Birmingham over 70,000 and Leeds 50,000. The population of Lancashire, hitherto one of the most barren areas of England, had grown to 600,000.

  For here on that humid western slope of England an industry had arisen to rival the cloth trade of Yorkshire. It had grown out of the demand for the bright cotton goods of India. Raw cotton, it was found, could be grown with slave labour on the plantations of the southern American colonies. The traditional skill of English spinners and weavers and the astonishing ingenuity of British inventors did the rest. In 1771 Richard Arkwright, a Bolton barber, improving on the earlier work of the handloom weaver, Hargreaves of Blackburn, set up the first water-propelled spinning frame in Derbyshire: eight years later Samuel Crompton, a Lancashire farmer and weaver, invented his spinning mule. These changed the entire nature of the industry and ultimately of British domestic life. The factory with its myriad turning machines took the place of the cottage spinning wheel. In 1741 Britain exported .£20,000 worth of cotton goods; in 1790 .£1,662,369 worth.

  1 Rochefoucauld (p. 23) noted that the humblest peasant had his tea twice a day just like the rich man.

  2 Gouverneur Morris reported in 1790 that from the western gateway of Hyde Park Corner to Chiswick village there was an almost continuous suburban highway running through the Middlesex meadows and market gardens : " should the peace be preserved for twenty years this overgrown capital would become immense."—Morris I, 556.

  The northern deserts with their water power and coal-seams became transformed. Gaunt buildings with rows of windows rose like giant wraiths on the wild Matlock hills and in the misty Lancashire valleys under the Pennines, and around them rows of cheerless, squalid little houses. Within a few years quiet old. market towns like Rochdale swelled into noisy, straggling cities, filled with unwashed, pagan spinners and weavers: they seemed to a Tory of the old school " insolent, abandoned and drunk half the week." The capital of this area, now given over to the service of Mammon, was the old Jacobite town of Manchester, whose new population huddled together in damp, stinking cellars. Its port, importing corn and raw cotton, was upstart Liverpool, home of the West Indian trade and its scandalous offspring, the slave trade, with windmills and warehouses full of flies, rum and sugar crowding for a mile along the northern bank of the Mersey.

  Farther south in a formerly wild countryside another industrial area was growing up round the coal and iron-fields of Staffordshire and north Warwickshire. This was the Black Country—by 1790 a land of forges, collieries and canals with grimy trees and hedges. The traveller, venturing into this little-trodden, satanic region, saw rows of blackened hovels swarming with ragged children, and instead of church spires tall chimneys belching metallic vapours and at night lit by flames. At its southern extremity was Birmingham—a squalid village afflicted with elephantiasis where " crusty knaves that scud the streets in aprons seemed ever ready to exclaim, ' Be busy and grow rich! ' " and where the head grew dizzy with the hammering of presses, the clatter of engines and the whirling of wheels. Here almost every man in the cobbled stre
ets stank of train oil, and many had red eyes and hair bleached green by the brass foundries.

  A few miles from Birmingham, the "toyshop of Europe," lay the great Soho manufactory of Boulton & Watt. Here over his own works lived the princely capitalist who in the course of thirty virtuous and laborious years turned the creative genius of a Scottish engineer, James Watt, into a dynamic force to refashion the world. Here the first practical cylindrical steam-engines were placed on the market, and manufacturers, statesmen and princes flocked to see the first wonder of Europe and buy the commodity which all the world of Mammon needed—" power."

  Such men as Boulton were pioneers of a new race, serving and exploiting the needs of their fellow-creatures with an energy and disregard for all other objects that make them loom through the mists of time like Titans. John Horrocks, the Quaker spinner, beginning work in a horse quarry, within fifteen years amassed a fortune of three-quarters of a million and entered Parliament as member for his native town. Josiah Wedgwood of Etruria, exploiting the contemporary love for the ceramic art, made £500,000 out of pottery and transformed a wild moorland into a hive of smoking ovens trodden by thousands of horses and donkeys laden with panniers and by men and women with faces whitened with potter's powder. Far below them in the social scale but travelling the same adventurous road were newer and ever newer capitalists: dispossessed yeomen venturing their little all in the fierce industrial hurly-burly, or spinners earning, perhaps, 35/- a week, working what would be regarded to-day as inconceivable hours1 and denying themselves every comfort to purchase a mill where others should work as hard for them in their turn.