Читать книгу Victorian England: Portrait of an Age - G. M. Young - Страница 10

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The years following the Reform Act were for the towns a time of quiet prosperity, which culminated in the golden harvest of 1835. Towards the end of 1836 a warning shiver ran through the commercial world: over-production and speculation were producing their natural consequences. There was a parallel depression in America, and the European States were raising their tariffs. Lancashire went on half-time; the harvest of 1838 failed; gold was exported to buy food, and the Bank of England was barely saved from default by credits in Paris and Hamburg. That a bad period was approaching was evident. But few could have guessed through what misery the country would have to pass before the clouds lifted again. In Stockport nearly a fourth of the houses were empty. Thousands of families were living on relief administered at the rate of a shilling a head. Out of 15,000 persons visited, not one in ten was fully employed. Wages had fallen from a pound and more to 7s. 6d.; the average weekly income was less than 1s. 6d. Manchester and Bolton were in like case: the Potteries, the Black Country, the cloth towns of the west, all told the same tale. It was the background of Chartism and the Free Trade League.

The Chartists wished to make a revolution: the Leaguers asserted that the revolution had happened, and drew out the consequences. Lancashire, the home of the movement, was the most typical product of the new civilization, and it needed little argument to prove that Lancashire could not live without imported cotton, could not maintain her increasing population without expanding markets, could not expand her markets unless the foreigner was kept in funds by the sale of food to England. Did the workshop of the world need a hobby farm, with a subsidized gentry to manage it, especially a gentry which was beginning to show an inconvenient interest in factory children, and the tendency of the fourteen hour day minuere et contrahere pelvem?^[45] The League was founded in January 1839. For the first years of its existence it was fighting on two fronts, against the Protectionists and against the Chartists. Free Trade lecturers ran the double risk whenever they stood up in a market-place of being fined by the magistrate and ducked by the mob. To hungry men the prospect of relief by Free Trade was more remote than the prospect of relief by direct action, and it was as easy to represent the League as a coalition of mill-owners bent on reducing their wages bill, as a coalition of democrats bent on destroying the landed interest. ‘You are a Chartist, Sir; you are a leveller,’ the Home Secretary shouted at the respectable Mr. Ashworth, manufacturer, when he came on a Free Trade deputation. The self-protective instinct of the aristocracy felt in the League its most dangerous enemy. But the instinct of society as a whole was more sensitive to the growing menace of Chartism.

The political creed of the Chartists was an amplification of the Radical formula, one man one vote, one vote one value. How they were going to get the vote was not so clear, and what they were going to do with it remained, even to themselves, unknown. Judged by what they did, they might be considered a body of decent, hardly used, and not particularly intelligent men, whose allegiance, given with equal readiness to high-minded leaders like Lovett and Hetherington and to pitiful demagogues like Feargus O’Connor, would probably be at the service of the first Conservative or Liberal who showed that he deserved it. Judged by what they said, or by what O’Connor, ‘false, malignant, and cowardly’, said for them, both their objects and their methods seemed to involve a bloody progress from confiscation, through anarchy, to famine and a dictatorship. The Socialism of Robert Owen, the doctrine that industrialism was not an impersonal force to be adored or bewailed, but a way of life to be controlled by co-operation, had gone underground. The young Queen was gracious to him for her father’s sake, who had been his friend in the days when Napoleon had studied his projects in Elba, and Castlereagh had laid them before Congresses. But his mind was failing, and to most people Owenism meant a crazy multiplication of Trade Unions with long names, and the combination of economic heresy with irreligion and sexual depravity. ‘You tell us’, a Parliamentary Committee once said to a clergyman, ‘that the railway navvies are mostly infidels. Would you say that they are also socialists?’ ‘In practice, yes; because though most of them appear to have wives, few of them are really married.’ The more intelligent workmen professed a belated rationalism,^[46] nourished on the writings of Tom Paine, with which often went, for philosophy, a wondrous addiction to the phrenology of George Combe.^[47] The older sects meant little to the working classes. The Wesleyans, whose services in humanizing the masses were handsomely recognized by authority, on principle held aloof from political contests; and Chartism, which disgusted fair-minded men by the violence of its invective, terrified a still larger class by its supposed designs, not only on movable property, but on religion and the family. Yet there was much silent sympathy with the Chartists as men; if the new rich had been their only enemies, many young gentlemen would have been glad to strike a blow for the old poor. Young England was a sincere if boyish gesture of goodwill, and to play King Richard to somebody else’s Wat Tyler has always been a Tory fancy.

How far the mass of the workpeople were at any time seriously engaged is a question not easy to answer. The Londoners, who were most closely allied with the Parliamentary Radicals, stood for caution and constitutional methods. The admixture of cheap Irish labour and cheap Irish rhetoric alienated the Englishman, and the party of physical force were unlucky in their choice of military advisers. In no age are Count Chopski and Colonel Macerone names to conjure with in English working circles. The Convention summoned to London withdrew to the less frigid air of Birmingham: it was known that Lancashire was arming; regiments were recalled from Ireland, the army was increased by 7,000 men, a White Guard instituted, and Sir Charles Napier, a wise and sympathetic choice, was sent to take command of the Northern Division. In 1839 the Charter was presented and rejected: the Convention considered a general strike and a march on London. There was no strike; no one marched, and the insurgents had to be content with a wild riot in Birmingham. In a few weeks 400 Chartists were in prison, and the revolution ended in a splutter of musketry and a dozen men killed outside the Queen’s Hotel, Newport. Chartism, though there was some brief, fierce rioting in 1842, when the Charter was again presented and rejected, was effectively dead.

It is impossible to gauge the danger of a revolution which refused to happen. But in estimating the alarm we must allow for the melodramatic streak in the early Victorian temperament. When Wellington said on the morrow of the riots that no town sacked in war presented such a spectacle as Birmingham, he did not mean that he had gone to see it for himself, any more than when Lord Shaftesbury said that Ecce Homo was the foulest book ever vomited from the jaws of hell, he meant that he had read all the others. Events, like books, still came widely spaced, with time between to set the imagination working; and that generation was still overshadowed by the revolutionary years and read itself in their volcanic light. In 1840 there were many men living who could recall the flight of the French nobility. The sacking of Bristol was still fresh in all memories, and England had hardly the elements of a civil force capable of stopping disorder before it reaches the point where factories are burnt and the troops must shoot.

London was provided for by the Peelers and the mounted patrol who kept order within five miles of Charing Cross. The parish had its constable, and the police of the boroughs were reinforced in emergencies by specials: on election days and other occasions of riot the specials might be numbered by hundreds. There were five hundred private associations for the prosecution of felons; but there was no county police;^[48] and the mainstay of the public peace was not the constable but the yeoman, and behind the yeoman, though cautiously and reluctantly employed, the soldier. Lord John Russell, accounting to the Queen for the progress of the Tories at the elections of 1838, added that the Military had in all cases conducted themselves with great temper and judgement. They were employed on even humbler duties: once, at least, troops were called out to enforce the Act of 1823 and save a poor ox from being baited on his way to market. England as a whole, and the country gentlemen in particular, were highly suspicious of anything in the nature of a national police, and the Act of 1839 went no further than to permit the Justices of a County to appoint a Chief Constable and form a police force if they so desired. The boroughs already had the power. But in that alarming year it was discovered that neither Birmingham nor Manchester could maintain a paid force, and an emergency detachment had to be sent from London. So sensitive was the feeling of sound constitutionalists in the matter of police, that Lord John, having sent London constables to Bradford to help with a Poor Law riot, decided on reflection to withdraw them and enjoined the magistrates to use dragoons instead. The Permissive Act of 1839 was generalized by the Compulsory Act of 1856. The interval had been well employed. Essex selected as Chief Constable a retired Naval Officer. He very soon made it appear that a paid constabulary was not only more efficient but actually cheaper than the gratuitous service of Dogberry and Verges. One by one the counties adopted the model he had devised, and all that was necessary in ’56 was to bring the laggards into line. There are many famous men to whom England owes less than she owes to Captain M’Hardy, Chief Constable of Essex.

But his career, and his achievement, are typical of a general rule. The English administration was made by administrators throwing out their lines until they met and formed a system. In the fustian phrase which exasperated clear-headed Radicals, it was not made, it grew. In 1830, except for the collection and management of the revenue, for defence, and the transmission of letters, there was hardly anything which a Frenchman or a Prussian would have recognized as an administration. The national expenditure was £50,000,000, of which the debt absorbed £29,000,000, defence £15,000,000, leaving £6,000,000 only for collection, for the Crown, and the whole civil service. The total and the proportions did not vary greatly till the Crimean War. But by 1860 the cost of defence was £26,000,000, the balance for civil purposes £15,000,000. These figures, which point to the emergence of the armed administrative State, show also with what a slight equipment early Victorian government operated. Local revenue was about a quarter of Imperial, and on an average one-half went in the relief of the poor. The rest was spent on Police, Bridges, and Highways; on Lunatics; on the upkeep of Parish Churches. The Church rate, an inconsiderable sum, but the occasion of much agitation and some painless martyrdom, was persistently evaded, made voluntary in 1853, and abolished in 1868.

The Civil Servants who ran this light machinery were of two sorts: clerks, infallible in accounts, writing a fair hand, the repository of precedent; gentlemen, or the protégés of gentlemen, of the political class, whose position when young might be anything from a copying clerk to a private secretary, and who when old were rather assistants and advisers to an executive chief than executants themselves. There was much routine, so much that by the time the juniors were seniors they were usually unfit for anything else, and the higher posts had to be filled from outside. But almost everything that rose above routine was, except at the Treasury, policy, requiring the personal attention of the Minister: the intermediate sphere of administration did not exist, because there were hardly any laws to administer. Readers of Disraeli’s novels must sometimes have been puzzled by the importance of the Under-Secretaries as a class. When the Cabinet was open only to birth, to exceptional genius or exceptional influence, men of excellent gifts had to be content, and were content, with Under-Secretaryships, and the unbroken Tory régime had given some of them a very long innings. Croker was of this class, so was ‘gray-headed, financial’ Herries; and the Whigs of 1827 could not master their wrath when they were asked to accept as a Cabinet colleague a fellow whom they had always looked upon as a Tory clerk. A Treasury official in Early Victorian English means a Junior Lord.

Well on into the reign the line between politics and administration could be crossed and recrossed as it was by Endymion. Cornewall Lewis was a Civil Servant for fourteen years before he entered Parliament, where he reached Cabinet rank in eight. Benjamin Hawes from Parliamentary Secretary became Permanent Secretary to the War Office. William Blamire made his mark in Parliament with a speech on tithes, and was given a post which made him, in effect, for twenty years a non-parliamentary Minister of Agriculture. But the dismissal of the Under-Secretaries with their chiefs in 1830, the inexperience of the new Whig Ministers, and the reform of the Poor Law, made a fresh departure. The Benthamite conception of a trained staff dealing with specific problems entered the Civil Service at the very point where the Civil Service impinged most forcibly on the public. The Poor Law filled the whole horizon in 1834. And here, there, and everywhere were Chadwick’s young crusaders, the Assistant Commissioners, scouring the country in stage-coaches or post-chaises, or beating up against the storm on ponies in the Weald, returning to London, their wallets stuffed with the Tabular Data so dear to philosophic Radicals, to draft their sovereign’s decrees declaring the Union and stating his austere principles of administration, and then back to see that they were carried out. It was an exciting life. Once they had to be protected with cavalry. When they appeared at Todmorden, Fielden rang his factory bells and beat them out of town. In so splendid and imperial a manner did the English Civil Servant first take his place in the national life.^[49]

The Radicals had conceived the possibility of applying disinterested intelligence to social problems. Chadwick realized the idea and created the organ of application. The administrative temper was in being before there was an administration to give it effect. The Poor Law schools at Norwood were taken as a model by the new Education Department. The Poor Law framework was adopted in 1838 for the registration of births, marriages, deaths, and the causes of death. In the same year a London vestry, baffled by an outbreak of fever, turned to the Poor Law Board for help, a step from which descends by regular stages the Health Board of 1848, the Local Government Board of 1870, the existing Ministry of Health. What was growing up, in fact, in the thirties, under the vigorous impulsion of Chadwick and Kay and the bewildered gaze of Ministers, was a Public Welfare Service, which was bound sooner or later to demand compulsory powers, and to receive them as soon as the public mind was sufficiently moved, enlightened, or alarmed.

But the rapid growth of our administrative services is on the whole due less to head-quarters than to the Inspectorate. Inspection was in the air: the Factory Inspectors of 1834 were followed by the Prison Inspectors, and these by the School Inspectors, the Railway Inspectors, and the Mines Inspectors. The Inspectors, like the higher officials, were often men of mature experience who came to their duties with ideas already formed. Leonard Horner, whose reports underlie so much of our industrial legislation, was nearing fifty when he entered the Factory department, and was already a man of note in education and science. Hugh Tremenheere, joining the Education department at thirty-five, had fourteen Acts of Parliament to his credit when he retired. With them must be ranked the specialists in public health; above all, Southwood Smith and John Simon. Smith, a Unitarian minister, whose devotional writings must have had some singular quality to be admired both by Wordsworth and Byron, came late to the profession of medicine, but he found his place at once with an Essay on Fever. Cholera was a visitor: typhus a resident who Southwood Smith believed could be expelled. Joining forces with Chadwick he became, in effect, Medical Adviser to the Poor Law Commission. His junior, Simon, a cultivated surgeon of French descent, a connoisseur and the friend of Ruskin, covered in his official life the development of the Board of Health into the Local Government Board, of which he was the first medical officer. In the careers of men like these, or of Arthur Hassall, who took the adulteration of food for his province, we see the impact of the educated intelligence on the amorphous, greedy fabric of the new civilization, and I know nothing which brings the epic quality of the early Victorian warfare against barbarism into such vivid relief as the reports, eloquent, impassioned, and precise, which from 1848 onwards Simon addressed to the Corporation of the City of London.

[45]	Lord John Manners let the cat out of the bag when he talked, apropos of a Factory Bill, of ‘putting a curb on the manufacturing interest and making it know its rider’.

[46]	The term Secularism was invented by Holyoake and first appears in his paper, The Reasoner, 1846. The badge of the Secularist was the defiance of Sabbatarian restrictions.

[47]

Which was shared by Cobden. Phrenology was regularly taught in Mechanics’ Institutes, and did, I think, help to keep the idea of personality alive under the steam-roller of respectability. Otherwise, science (for want of apparatus) did not much affect the workman. The culture of the self-educated man was still literary. He began with the Bible and its commentators and worked up through Milton to the economists, philosophers, and historians. This was of some importance politically. If the speeches of Bright, Gladstone, or Disraeli ad Quirites are examined, they will be found to imply a considerable body of literary culture common to the speaker and at least a great part of his audience.

[48]	This is not without its bearing on Victorian psychology. With 25,000 vagrants on the pad, and all the village idiots at large, the unprotected female really had something to be afraid of.

[49]

The distinction between administrative and clerical duties which lies at the root of the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms in ’53 was carried out at the Poor Law Commission from the first. James Mill had already introduced it at the India House. The confusion of functions reached its height at Dublin Castle, where the duties of the Under-Secretary were, inter alia, to deputize for the Lord-Lieutenant, to docket incoming letters in red ink, to advise on all criminal business, and to see that the stationery was not wasted.