Lord Shaftesbury 1923

Front matter

SIS ESISOS TS.

Peter Allen :

LORD SHAFTESBURY,, "ay

Preface

THE writers of this volume have not attempted to give an exhaustive account of a singularly many-sided career. They have aimed at describing Lord Shaftesbury’s work and character and the significant contribution that he made to the politics and history of his age. With this object before them they have omitted many incidents which, though interesting in themselves, do not illuminate or affect his place in the life of the nineteenth century.

The late Mr. Edwin Hodder published in 1886 a large biography of Lord Shaftesbury in three volumes. In preparing this book Mr. Hodder was allowed the use of Lord Shaftesbury’s diaries, and he received some guidance from Lord Shaftesbury himself. Messrs. Cassell & Co. have been kind enough to permit the writers of this volume to quote from Mr. Hodder’s work, and the writers desire to thank them for this indulgence. They wish also to make their acknowledgments to Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, who have allowed them to quote from two letters printed in the volume “ Lady Palmerston and her Times,” by Mabell, Countess of Airlie, published last

ear.

‘ The writers wish to thank Professor Basil Williams for very helpful criticism, and Dr. Sidney Coupland, formerly Commissioner in Lunacy, for his generous kindness in giving them information about Lord Shaftesbury’s connection with the Lunacy Commission. Dr. Coupland is, of course, in no way responsible for any statement that appears in these pages.

Heme. HempsteD, February, 1923.

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

SHAFTESBURY was out of the general run of statesmen and politicians; yet there are few statesmen of the nineteenth century to whom England owes more in the way of solid and lasting benefit for the general mass of her population. He is one of a remarkable band of Englishmen who busied themselves with politics, not with the object most usual with politicians, in order to carry out the business of the country in accordance with the views of some political party and by means of the responsibility of office, but simply in order to carry into effect certain definite views of their own, quite outside the creed of any party in the State. In this band should be included men like Wilberforce, with his zeal for the emancipation of negro slaves; Cobbett, the tribune of the agricultural labourer ; Bright and Cobden, of the anti-Corn Law League; Plimsoll, scornful of the amenities of parliamentary conventions in his struggle for the lives of our sailors; Courtney, who gave up brilliant prospects of a successful ministerial career for causes unattractive to the ordinary politician. Some of these men did, indeed, take office, but the work for which they are known was accomplished as private Members. Again, some of these men were narrow in their views and concentrated all their efforts on the one object they saw clear before them, being almost wilfully blind to evils, as in the case of Wilberforce, much nearer to them; and yet this very narrowness and single-minded concentration is probably one reason why their advocacy of their one pet cause became all the more convincing. It is remarkable, too, that though all these men cared little, if at all, for responsible office, they instinctively felt that it was only through the politicians in Parliament that their objects could be attained, whereas in many other countries such objects are more often attained, x GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE not by direct political action, but by extraneous propaganda and agitation. Of course, the agitation and the propaganda have not been wanting in such movements as Bright, Plimsoll and others directed, but it is a tribute to the soundness of our political institutions that they always felt that their chief efforts must be concentrated on persuading the House of Commons. )

Shaftesbury is one of the most eminent of these freelances. In many of the aspects of his life he shows the want of perception and narrowness characteristic of several among them. He was, indeed, both an aristocrat and a Puritan,—an aristocrat in his belief that men of his birth and rank were better qualified to judge what was best for those in a lower rank of society, a belief that has some interesting analogies with the doctrines of a certain school of socialists,—and a Puritan in his conviction that modern life must be directed solely by a special interpretation of the Biblical ordinances. But whatever may have been his aristocratic and religious preconceptions, at any rate he conceived true aristocracy and religion both to imply that it was not enough to save a man’s soul if he were starving or living like a pig or had no time for thought ot recreation.

No two living authors could speak with so much authority as Mr. and Mrs. Hammond of the evils Shaftesbury set himself to remedy or of his successful achievement. In the tale of his life, as told by them, one realises . the pathos and grandeur of this solitary, self-willed and deeply melancholy man battling and struggling for his weak and helpless fellows.

BASIL WILLIAMS.

McGitt UNIVERSITY, MonTREAL, December 7th, 1922.

CHAPTER

LF i

Contents

AsHuuEy’s Earty CAREER .

Tue STATE OF THE FACTORIES .

Tue First Battie .

CHAPTER I ASHLEY’S EARLY CAREER ; Lorp SHAFTEsBURY was born in 1801, and he died in

- 1885. His public work began early, and mind and body served him to the end. Few men have looked out on the world in old age with emotions and principles so unchanged from the emotions and principles that had touched and guided their youth. A career so single in its aims, so settled in its judgments, so gallant in its enterprises, could not fail to leave its impression on the society to whose improvement it was devoted. His name recalls great achievements in the reform of law; a powerful force in debates and contests, on the issue of which depended the fortunes of England, and not merely the fortunes of party. No student of the history of the last century would omit him from the gallery of those who helped to create or to destroy institutions, habits, beliefs, that were full of significance to that age and full of consequence to its successors.

Antony Ashley Cooper was the eldest son of the sixth Earl of Shaftesbury. He was styled Lord Ashley from 1811, at which date his father became a peer, until he succeeded his father in 1851.1. Fortune, kinder to the

1 The change of name led to a piquant confusion. In 1853, when Shaftesbury was engaged in the anti-slavery crusade, the editor of a religious paper in the Southern States wrote: ‘‘ And who is this Lord Shaftesbury ? Some unknown lordling ; one of your modern philanthropists, suddenly started up to take

L.s. B world than to him, gave him an unhappy boyhood. His father, who was a very competent Chairman of Committees in the House of Lords,! and a heartless and negligent landlord in the county of Dorset, was hard and cold to all his children, and his mother, a daughter of the fourth Duke of Marlborough, was a woman of fashion, who took no interest in them. It was a nice question whether he hated his home, or his first school, the Manor House, Chiswick, to which he was sent when he was seven, with the greater bitterness. His lot, indeed, was not unlike that of Tozer in “ Dombey and Son,” who did not know whether his home or Dr. Blimber’s establishment was the more disagreeable, for his biographer tells us that he cried, when at home, at the thought of going back to school, and that he cried, when at school, at the thought of going back to his home.

Of his home he wrote: “ I and my sisters—all three of them older than myself—were brought up with great severity, moral and physical, in respect both of mind and body, the opinion of our parents being that, to render a child obedient, it should be in constant fear of its father and mother.” * In another passage he speaks more strongly: “‘ The history of our father and mother would be incredible to most men, and perhaps it would do no good if such facts were recorded.” ? Of his school he wrote: “ At seven went to school—a very large one at Chiswick. Nothing could have surpassed it for filth, bullying, neglect, and hard treatment of every sort ; nor had it in any respect any one compensating advantage, except perhaps, it may have given me an early part in a passing agitation. It is a pity he does not look at home. Where was he when Lord Ashley was nobly fighting for the Factory Bill, and pleading the cause of the English slave? We never even heard the name of this Lord Shaftesbury then.”—Edwin Hodder, “‘ The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G.,”’ Vol. II., p. 439, afterwards referred to as Hodder.

1 The description of his father in the Annual Register shows how different he was from his son in appearance and bearing: ‘‘ He was certainly a man of undignified presence, of indistinct and hurried speech, of hasty and brusque manner, but there was a general impression that the House of Lords could not have had a more efficient Chairman.”—Annual Register, 1851, Appendix to Chronicle, p. 292.

ASHLEY’S EARLY CAREER 3 horror of oppression and cruelty. It was very similar to Dotheboys Hall.’”!

This, if a bad beginning to a man’s life, was not so bad a beginning for the kind of career that Ashley was to pursue. Melbourne could shut his eyes to the misery of children working in his mines for fourteen hours out of the twenty-four, and persuade himself that there was nothing very wrong with the arrangements that gave England for her rulers the cultivated and gracious men with whom he mixed. Ashley’s sensibilities were quickened by memories of his own childhood.

This misfortune was important for another reason. Ashley was rescued from the solitude of his early life by an old servant of the family, a strict Evangelical, of the name of Maria Millis. She died soon after he had gone to school, but she made such an impression on him by her love and devotion that he always spoke of her as the best friend he ever had. But she was more than a friend, for she fixed this lonely child’s mind on the simple, obstinate dogmas of her faith with such intense rapture that, to the day of his death, he kept resolutely within its narrow circle. About the government of the world, the sanctions of conduct, the standards of truth, and the sources of revelation he believed at eighty what he had believed at seven.

From his first school he passed at the age of twelve to Harrow, where he was in Dr. Butler’s house. A memorial stone records an incident there that gave, as he believed, a bias to his life. He happened to meet a pauper’s funeral, and the shock given to his deepest senses by the coarse levity of the scene made him resolve to devote himself to the neglected interests of the poor. At

* It happened that Bentham, who was in a sense a rival force in industrial politics, had an experience not unlike Ashley’s, for Fénelon’s ‘‘Télémaque,” which his French tutor put into his hands at the age of six, filled his head with the dream of serving mankind that gave a purpose to his life from childhood. Thus the book that Fénelon wrote for the guidance of a French prince had more influence in England than in France, for the Duke of Burgundy never governed

France, whereas Bentham, of course, became a power in England. See Graham Wallas, ‘‘ Foundation Oration on Jeremy Bentham,” 1922, p. 3.

B2

Harrow he spent three happy years. He left at the age of fifteen and went to a clergyman’s house.

“ Left Harrow soon after fifteen years of age. Had reached the Sixth Form and had learned very little. But that was my own fault. Though I obtained some prizes, I was, on the whole, idle and fond of amusements, and I neglected most opportunities of acquiring knowledge. At about - sixteen I went to reside with a clergyman in Derbyshire who had married my first cousin. I was sent there, in fact, to be got out of the way, for the clergyman never professed that he was able to teach me anything, nor, indeed, did my father require of him any such services. I had a horse, and there were dogs belonging to the house that constituted my great amusement; and a family in the neighbourhood showed me abundant hospitality. I remained there about two years, and perhaps no two years were ever so mis-spent. I hardly ever opened a book, and seldom heard anything that was worth hearing ; nevertheless, there were constantly floating in my mind all sorts of aspirations, though I never took a step to make their fulfilment possible. My father had resolved to put me in the army, but he was dissuaded from that purpose by the influence, I believe, of a friend, of whose kind act I shall always think with the deepest gratitude.” +

In 1819 he went to Oxford, where he worked hard and overtook the consequences of this interruption. He was at Christ Church with his cousin and lifelong opponent, Pusey, and, like him, gained a first-class in classics in 1822, but no man of his time carried away so few traces of the influence of Oxford. Dicey has remarked that any one would have supposed that he had graduated at Cambridge and never missed a sermon of Simeon’s. Shaftesbury’s Simeon was Maria Millis.

After Oxford, Parliament followed as a matter of course. He went into the House of Commons in 1826 as Tory M.P. for Woodstock, the pocket borough of his uncle the Duke of Marlborough. Those were days when a man of Ashley’s rank was not expected to wait for his spurs until he had won them, and a year after his admission to Parliament he was offered a place in Canning’s Ministry ; _ he declined it from loyalty to Wellington, who was at that time his hero. Next year, 1828, when Wellington became Prime Minister, Ashley was made a Commissioner of the India Board of Control. He took his duties seriously, and prepared a memorandum on a proposal

4 Modder iy st:

ASHLEY’S EARLY CAREER 5 to establish agricultural societies in Madras and Bombay. A speech of his on the extension of judicial forms drew _a compliment from a politician who was as thrifty with his praise as with everything else, for Joseph Hume said of it that he was surprised to hear so much good sense from the noble Lord, or from any member of His Majesty’s Government. An entry in Ashley’s diary shows the simple hopefulness with which his evangelical mind measured the obstacles to India’s religious conversion. He urged that an Indian should be appointed to the vacant post of astronomer’s assistant at Bombay: “This man, by contemplating the purity of Almightiness, will soon learn to despise Brahma, and Vishnu. Who knows but what he might become an Orpheus to his compatriots?” 1

The Ministry of which Ashley was a subordinate member is famous in history for the act which composed or prevented a rebellion in Ireland, and provoked a rebellion in the Tory party. In the winter of 1828-1829, Wellington and Peel made up their minds that Catholic Emancipation could no longer be resisted without fatal disorder in Ireland. Ashley records in his diary his satisfaction at this decision: ‘‘ The Duke, to my great joy, has resolved upon considering the expediency of removing al]l Catholic disabilities, and substituting in their stead other defences for Church and State. I have long and deeply desired this policy. Who but he would have dared to conceive and execute it—persuade the king and overcome popular abhorrence? Peel has resolved to aid him ; this is public virtue. I offered to say a few words expressive of my hearty concurrence. Peel was delighted.” 2 Years later he spoke in rather a different sense.

“‘T was very young in Parliament, and younger still in office. I only entered Parliament in 1826, and the Bill was passed in 1829. At first I voted against it, but when Peel and Wellington took it up and showed the necessity for it, | saw that resistance was impossible. It was a subject that was always coming up, and was always leading to endless machinations. . . . It stood in the way of everything. So although I voted against it at first, when Peel and Wellington changed, I changed, and recorded my vote for Emancipation as a member of the Commons and of the Government. But I thought then, and I have never had reason to alter my opinion, that, good as the measure was, they were not the proper men to carry it. They held office on it, instead of handing it over to those who had been its advocates. They should have said boldly to the Crown : ‘ It is a measure that must be passed, but it should be passed by those who agree with it. We are not the men to doit.’ And { have often thought, in subsequent years, that their action inflicted such a deadly blow on confidence in public men that there has never since been a complete recovery.” 1

Ashley’s first considerable speech was made in supporting a Bill to amend the Lunacy Laws in 1828. The scandalous and revolting treatment to which lunatics were exposed had been brought before the public thirteen years earlier, but all attempts to reform the law had been baulked by the Lords, who had four times thrown out a Bill that had passed the Commons for compelling inspection of mad-houses and appointing Lunacy Commissioners. In 1827 a Parliamentary Committee was set up, at the instance of Mr. Robert Gordon, to inquire into Pauper Lunatics and the Lunatics Acts. Of that Committee, Ashley was a member. The Bill introduced next year, 1828, by Mr. Robert Gordon, and supported by Ashley, had better fortune than its predecessors, and it passed without difficulty. A Commission was created with fifteen members, and Ashley served on this body, and the body that succeeded it, with indefatigable zeal from the day of its appointment to the day of his death.”

Ashley made, in 1830, a marriage that looked on the face of it a hazardous experiment. He married into a set that lives, with its indulgent morals and its loose thinking in religion, in the most lively literature of the time. Its politics were as alien to him as its habits, for his bride, Lady Emily Cowper, was the daughter of the Whig magnate, Lord Cowper, and the niece, on her

2 See Chapter XIV.

* Creevey wrote in 1829 : “I saw a good deal of young Lady Emily Cowper, who is the leading favorite of the town so far. She is very inferior to her fame for looks, but is very natural, lively, and appears a good-natured young person.” —“ The Creevey Papers,” Vol. II., p. 198.

ASHLEY’S EARLY CAREER 7 mother’s side, of Lord Melbourne. The disadvantages of the match struck some of the Lamb family very strongly, and Lady Cowper’s brother, Sir Frederick Lamb, afterwards Lord Beauvale, set them out in a letter written in 1829, which gives the impression that Ashley’s family made on some of his contemporaries.

* You have now stated the case yourself. 3,000 a year whereof the third comes from a place which he will probably lose very shortly and which you and I both devoutly hopehe may. An odious father, and four beggarly brothers. What has poor Min done to deserve to be linked to such a fate, and in a family generally disliked, reputed mad, and of feelings opinions and connections directly the reverse of all of ours? Do you know what 3,000 a year or probably two can furnish to a couple anda family ? You people who have had profusion all your lives are apt to imagine that it can be done very well upon, but I can tell you it is a privation of anything. If it were for a man she doated upon and who would live well with all of us, it might be endured and softened, but in this case Cowper thinks him odd. William laments it as a bad look out and an undesirable connection. The Girl has no fancy for him and what the Devil there is in its favor I am at a loss to perceive, except his being what you call in love with her and a Person as you think to be fallen in love with... .” 1

It says a great deal for Ashley that his wife, who was a woman of singular charm and beauty, adopted all his views of religion, morality and politics, that his married life was as happy as his early home life had been miserable, and that his wife’s family showed their affection for him by allowing him to treat the Cowper house at Panshanger as if it were his own.” His objections to taking office on one occasion distressed his wife, and she regretted his refusal of the Garter because it vexed the Court, but their close companionship was never broken. He let it be known late in life that at the chief turning point in his early career he left the decision to his wife, and that it

1 “Lady Palmerston and her Times,” by Mabell, Countess of Airlie, Vol. I.; p. 146. Ashley’s name is not mentioned in the letter, but it obviously refers to him.

2 Lord Beauvale does not seem to have altered his views. Writing in 1839 about projects for the marriage of Lady Ashley’s only sister, he says: ‘‘ As to Fy what could I say to the girl? Billy tells me she wants a Hero. Somebody to look up to and be afraid of, not a smock faced youth. A 2d Ashley in short. I always foresaw this. If Minny can’t succeed in shewing her the inconvenience of it nobody else can. She must follow her destiny.” —Jd1d., Vol. II., p. 35.

was she who made him accept the invitation to take up © Sadler’s task.1 |: Two extracts from his diary are interesting for the light they throw on his state of mind and his experience of marriage. The first comes from his diary of 1828, and if Lady Cowper’s brother had read it, it certainly would not have quieted his misgivings: ‘ Marriage, I have seen, corrects many and various errors in a man’s character. I know and feel the vices of my moral constitution, but I dread the chance of a Jezebel, a Cleopatra, or that insupportable compound of folly and worldliness which experience displays every day, but history has not yet recorded. Give me the mother of the Gracchi, exalted by the Gospel!” 2 The second is taken from his diary of 1839: “It is a wonderful accomplishment, and a most bountiful answer to one’s prayers, to have obtained a wife, in the highest matters and the smallest details, after my imagination and my heart. Often do I recollect the very words and sentiments of my entreaties to God, that He would give me a wife for my comfort, improvement, and safety ; He has granted me to the full all that I desired, and far more than I deserved. Praised be His holy name.” 3

Flis marriage had an important consequence Jater. His mother-in-law married Palmerston for her second husband in 1839, and thus Ashley owed to his wife the strangest, and in some senses the most important, friendship in his life. Some of Lady Cowper’s children resented her marriage, but for one of them at any rate it was a great stroke of fortune.

On the dissolution of Parliament, in 1831, Ashley stood as the anti-Reform candidate for Dorsetshire, where the family possessions were at the moment a help, though afterwards they were to become an embarrassment. He won his election, but at a severe cost, for his bills ran into some {16,000. Of this sum £12,000 went to the public-houses in Dorchester, Weymouth, Portland,

ASHLEY’S EARLY CAREER 9 and other places. When Ponsonby, the defeated candidate, threatened to bring a petition, Ashley let his friends know that he would not contest it. He was hurt that Wellington did not offer to help him with his election debts, and the correspondence that followed showed how quickly he smarted under anything that looked like neglect. In the end the petition was successfully resisted by the party, and Ashley went to the House to give a silent vote for “‘ the glorious Constitution in Church and State ” which disappeared in the year 1832.

Ashley, who had been a Minister at the age of twenty-six, never held office again throughout his long public life, except for a few months in the winter of 1834, when he served in Peel’s short-lived Government. Fortune had reserved for him a different career, and he goes down to history, not as a great Minister or as a successful party leader, but as one of the guiding forces in the reconstruction of English life. It was lucky that the conditions of the time allowed independent men an active leadership in politics. Nobody who was asked to give the three most important men in the history of this period would omit Cobden, who never held office at all. The world will never forget the Bright who broke the spell of wat, who discovered the desperate wrongs of the Irish peasant, who won the franchise for the English worker, but it never remembers the Bright who was Minister of Trade or Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Ashley, whose name comes to every mind that dwells on the dark passages of the Industrial Revolution, has outlived nine out of ten of the Cabinet Ministers with whose ambitions and fears he wrestled for the children of the mill and the pit. He _ was not a constructive thinker, but'by sheer persistence he shamed his age out of its principles, and the Factory Acts and the Mines Act, that preserve his reputation for humanity and patience, are events of the Victorian age not less decisive than the measures that removed the burden of the Corn Laws and swept from the government of England some of the worst of its ancient abuses.

Chapter II

To understand the series of events that made Ashley so important a figure in our social life, it is necessary to glance at the early history of factory legislation.

The first factories, which used water power, and were therefore built in country places by streams, depended on the labour of pauper children sent up in great numbers from workhouses in London and elsewhere. These children were called apprentices, but they were as much, slaves as any creature on two legs to be found in the plantations of the West Indies. In respect of hours and general conditions they were indeed worse off than slaves of a different colour. Most of them (and they included children of all ages) were working, at the beginning of the century, not less than fourteen hours a day for six days of the week. In 1802, Sir Robert Peel, father of the famous statesman, carried a Bill through Parliament limiting their work to twelve hours a day, and forbidding night. work.1 The magistrates were to appoint two visitors, one a parson, the other a magistrate, to visit the mills and enforce the Act. The mill-owners received the Act with a cry of consternation, exclaiming that the cotton industry was ruined, but they took heart again when they discovered that the bark of the Act was worse than its bite. It was, indeed, a dead letter, because evasion was easy and the inspections were perfunctory.

The Act applied only to apprentices ; it did not apply to *‘ free labour children,” or the children of the local inhabitants, who were sent or carried to the mill by their

1 The two men associated with Peel in the early days were Robert Owen and Nathaniel Gould, a Manchester merchant, who spent {15,000 on the campaign.

THE STATE OF THE FACTORIES II parents. At the time it was passed apprentice labour was the rule, but the development of the Industrial Revolution changed the character of the problem. For the discovery of steam power led to the building of mills in or near towns where there was a large population, and the hand-loom weaver, steadily impoverished and degraded by the forces that were making the capitalist more and more his master, found himself in time compelled to send his children to the hated mill. The overseers often refused relief, and the employer often refused employment to the parent who was obstinate. Consequently the “ free labour ” children increased rapidly, and they inherited all the hardships of the unfortunate apprentices whom they succeeded, except that they did not pass the night in an apprentice house. Thus a new problem arose, and in 1815 Sir Robert Peel, who had insisted on restricting his first measure to “ apprentice ”’ children, proposed a wider Bill to include these other children, forbidding employment of children under ten, and limiting the work of children to ten hours a day.

This was too much for the House of Commons, and the most that Peel could extract from his fellow-legislators was their consent to the appointment of a Committee which took evidence from doctors, magistrates, merchants and employers, but not from any of the workers. The evidence, though Peel and Owen were the only two employers who were sympathetic, strengthened the case for legislation, and Peel was able in 1818 to persuade the House of Commons to limit the working hours of children to.eleven a day. But the Lords rejected his Bill, and set up another Committee which discovered doctors of standing ready to swear that factory life was most wholesome for children, and that it was doubtful whether it would hurt them to work twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. Peel’s friends in the Lords responded by pressing for yet another Committee, and doctors were brought before this Committee to declare that the first set of doctors had been talking mischievous nonsense. Inthe end a modest Act was passed, applying to cotton mills only, which forbade the employment of children under nine, and Jimited the hours of children between nine and sixteen to twelve, exclusive of meal times. There were no efficient arrangements for inspection, and over most of the country the Act was a dead letter.1