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The Present Ceisis 9

Life and Writings of Paul Lotjis Courier . . . 175

Letter I

Dear and Respected John, — Although I deeply sympathise with your natural vexation at the troubled state of your Town Household in Downing Street, and although at other times, I might have much to say upon the disorders of that establishment, yet at this moment your rural affairs appear to me in a condition so bad and unpromising, as to claim all the attention which you can spare from your just quarrel with the Pope, and your hospitalities to the strangers you have invited to your Barmecide's feast on the banks of the Serpentine.

I bear no ill-will, my dear John, to your present servants, they are horrible plagues to you, it is true, — but servants always are. I believe many of them to be extremely intelligent, — I am sure that they are as honest as day. All they want is a comfortable situation — wages no object. And that, somehow or other, the situation is not comfortable, seems perfectly clear ; for though they've expressed themselves ready to go, yet, when it comes to the point, nobody else appears anxious to step into their shoes. It used not to be so, my dear John : I remember the time when you could not discharge a servant from Downing Street but what his face was as long as my arm, and you had plenty to choose from, amongst applicants who were thoroughly up to their business.

For this domestic dilemma of yours, so wounding to your pride and destructive to your peace, no doubt there are many causes ; but I suspect that the one most serious is this — you have allowed your town servants to regulate all

* [Originally published in 1851 as an 8vo pamphlet.]

t [And they renewed or remodelled life and secured or established laws.]

your country affairs, and they know just as much about them as — common sense might have told you ! They have thus got the poor land, on which, sooner or later, you are doomed to fall back for the expenses of housekeeping, into such a deuce of a mess, that I don't wonder they are willing to shift to others the task of hearing the complaint, and contriving the remedy ; while those who might otherwise be disposed to succeed, have the wit to perceive that it will be no easy matter to undo what is done, or restore what is — undone. For, unhappily, in the dispute so inevitably created between your town and country establishments, the neighbours of each have been called in to take part in the quarrel; and the question is, how to give content to the one side, without making the servants' hall too hot to contain the other.

This I believe to be the true state of things. And this, my dear John, it behoves you to consider with that freedom from prejudice and passion which should characterise the head of a family when its peace is disturbed by dissensions.

There drop we the metaphor, and enlarge the scope of our views.

That the existing government cannot last as it is now composed, all men seem to admit. We may galvanise the lifeless muscles, — we may give to the worn-out frame the grimace and convulsion of simulated vitality; but the animal spark has fled. We feel that the body is only kept above ground for the purpose of philosophical experiment, and are quite indifferent to the shocks it receives or the gashes inflicted on it, because we say to ourselves, "It is a dead thing practised upon for a short time for the sake of the living.' '

Whether this Government, by some gentle metempsychosis, shall pass into another much resembling itself, — or whether the party it embraces shall rise into vigour and power as an antagonistical principle to some Government by which my Lord Derby may boldly replace it, — is a speculation that I leave to the hopes and the fears of others. I shun in these Letters all mere party questions. I stand alone from all party. I will not attack the Minister. I will not panegyrise the rival. I leave to those whose support, as the representatives of manufacturing and urban populations, Lord John Russell unhesitatingly preferred to all terms with the agricultural constituencies, — the grateful task to extenuate his merits, and enforce his offences. To me his name is identified with the memory of imperishable services ; and I feel too much regret to differ from him, not to be reluctant to blame. If in him could yet be supplied what appears to me the main want of the time, there is no man I should be so proud — what ? — to follow as a Leader? No. To support as a Conciliator. What the time now demands is, not the Leader ; it is the Conciliator. Wherever I turn, I dread the chance of a chief who is to represent all the passions of class or the selfishness of interests, — wherever I turn, I see cause to desire that the Coming Man may covet, not the bays of the conqueror, but the oak wreath of the citizen.

Is it not so, my dear John ? — pause and reflect ! Carry your eye from these figures in the front ; examine the vast background that lies beyond. Is it simple strife between two parties, in which each requires the strong hand and fierce heart of the captain, that meets your survey, and solicits your preference ? — No : everywhere you behold divisions between classes; jealousies, and feuds between national interests; and victory, pushed too far by the one against the other, will be a victory achieved over the country itself by its own sons, far worse than the fears of Lord Ellesmere could ever anticipate from the fleets and hosts of the foreigner. Penetrate the smoky atmosphere through which rise the tall chimneys of countless factories ; examine the heart of those mighty towns, in which all theories that affect the interests of labour are discussed with the passions which numbers speed and inflame ; where the spirit of an eternal election agitates the mass of the everlasting crowd — say, if there be not yet reserved for the Coming Man the consideration of social questions which no Factory Bill has yet settled ; which no Repeal of the Corn Laws, after its first novelty is worn away, can lull into rest ; and tell me whether it be better for the solution of these that the Man shall come as the leader or the conciliator ? What are become of our sanitary regulations ? Where are the reforms in the law ? Doomed to " lie in cold obstruction, and to rot," till statesmen have time to conciliate, and till we can look to the forum and not find it a battle-field.

What have we done to regain the affections and arrest the min of our West Indian colonies ? What is the nature of the emigration now ponring into Australia and America ? Friendly to the mother country, or carrying thence all the bitterness engendered by that scorn of complaints which has compelled expatriation ? If our colonies are to be our foes or our friends, our weakness or strength, all depends on whether the Coming Man shall be the leader of a party or the conciliator of discontents that may dissolve an empire.

Look to the state ' of the Church, with a schism that threatens far more peril to its future integrity and wellbeing than the petty questions of surplice and gown, which inflame congregations, and trouble the peace of bishops, So much of learning, of earnestness, of zeal, rising with each generation of Churchmen, that leaves the college for the pulpit, against the popular feeling, clashing with it, warring on it, and remaining within the camp, under its separate banner of mutiny, or deserting to the Roman Gonfalon, with all the arms of controversy it had found in the very arsenal which Oxford had established against the foe. " Atque, atque accedet muros Siomana juventus." — " And more and more Home's youth invades our walls." Woe to the Church, and woe to the peace of our religious community, if we are to have our statesmen of the laity appear as leaders for or against these spiritual factions of the Bianchi and jSTeri, in a war of which texts and citations are the ostensible weapons ! A Minister who has the confidence, not only of the Church, but of the main body of Protestant belief, might possibly be able to conciliate — if not, time and common sense will ultimately settle — these disputes, as they have hitherto settled all disputes among the clergy, where they are not whirled away and mixed up with the party passions of politicians. Behold the vast question of Popular Education, checked in the Legislature by the rival jealousies of Church and Dissenter, but daily and hourly, without-side the walls of Parliament, occupying the thoughts of intelligent men, who see not only, in the want of education, an element of crime and misery, but who see in education itself, unless it be taken up in a noble and fitting spirit, evils as great as can befall society, if intellectual cultivation (limited to the extent that it must be when you deal with large masses whose destined employment is manual labour) is to be held a thing wholly different and apart from moral instruction and religious discipline. Who, regarding popular education in its comprehensive application to states, — who, knowing the statistical fact, that whereas with us the larger proportion of criminals can neither read nor write, in France the larger proportion of the worse sort of criminals possesses even more than that elementary instruction;* — who does not hope that some statesman may arise, with the happy art to conciliate Church and Dissent, and to insure to the rising generation those early lessons which not only quicken the thought, but guide the conduct ?

Carry your gaze across the Channel — look at Ireland. Long distracted from the true objects of civilisation by the genius of one leader — Heaven preserve her from another ! Consider there the differences affecting the very core of society, which hitherto you have so vainly struggled to adjust. Recall the late famine there — contemplate the vast diminution in the produce of the soil, which your laws, intended to prevent the recurrence of such famine, have already effected ; while Ireland at least has no foreign commerce that can be supposed to recruit the capital that is lost to the land. Recall, too, the toil it has cost to the wisest to harmonise religious distinctions with due regard

* By the elaborate tables of M. Guerry, it would seem not only that this applies to individual cases, but that in those departemens of France in which the average of education is highest, it is found, almost invariably, that crimes, against both life and property, are the most relatively numerous ; and crimes against life especially, rarest in some districts, such as Limousin and Brittany, where the people are most ignorant. Beaumont and Tocqueville, in their works on Crime in America, have also rather startled us with the remark, that "they cannot attribute the diminution of crime in the northern states to instruction, because in Connecticut, where there is more instruction than in New York, crime increases with terrible rapidity." It is obviously needless to say that such facts prove nothing against popular instruction ; but they do prove that popular instruction alone does not suffice for the ends required from it ; that it cannot be safely dissociated from direct moral and religious cultivation. A critic in the Edinburgh Revieiv, in noticing these Letters, asserts that M. Guerry' s tables, which were published some years ago, have been explained away ; and that, though crime may have been found most in educated districts, it was not among the educated part of their population. But M. Guerry, who is one of the most illustrious statists in Europe, visited England this very year, and in an address at the great meeting of our men of science, repeated and enforced the inferences drawn from his tables, refuted the explanations on which the reviewer relies, and brought forward new facts in support of his proposition, "that mere mental education has not been found to diminish crime."

to the conscience of both, between Protestant Britain and Roman Catholic Ireland — then see this new brand which the Pope and his Cardinal have flung amongst the smouldering fires of recent rebellion — and who does not sigh, " May the Coming Man be the Peace-maker! "

Conciliation! — this is in all times, and all lands, the master-art of the administrator. As the vehement advocate once raised to the bench becomes the impartial judge, so he who in opposition is the leader, in office should become the arbiter. And that authority has ever been the firmest which reconciles the differences of each with the order and progi^ess of all. Difficult task, and rarely undertaken ! — but wisdom is difficult, and firm administrations are rare.

So far, my dear John, methinks I have your approval ; — nay, had I the voice of the orator, here perhaps I might be flattered by your cheers. There remains yet a class and an interest, towards the propitiation of which there is more doubt of a fair hearing. Nevertheless, I deliberately approach that subject ; for I honestly think that here the conciliator is the most immediately needed. I speak of the class which cultivate the land we live in ; I speak of the interest which comprises a vast mass of the real property of the country — an interest which supports the bulk of our poor ; which maintains the clergy and defrays the costs that uphold civilisation in rural districts ; which, whether it be or be not disproportionately taxed, does at all events contribute towards the State to so large an amount, that it cannot be materially injured nor depressed by any change in the law, without affecting the very capital upon which depend the income of the fund-holder and the solvency of the nation.

Now, dear and respected John, when we survey this important tribe of your family — pretty well united in the complaints of distress, and in the assertion of its cause — do you think we may say that this is precisely the class in the kingdom to which we can safely refuse attention, and which we will thrust out of the pale of all paternal and beneficent legislation ?

But, hark ! — it seems to me that I hear a loud and derisive outcry. " Pooh ! — Stop your ears, John ! This gentleman, who is in reality a vampire, wants to open the ques-

G tion of the Corn Law. Don't listen to him ; that question is settled. The law is passed — once passed, it cannot be repealed. As well talk of repealing the Reform Bill ! "

You scratch your head, John ; you look puzzled ; but still you listen to me : for a moment's reflection tells you that there is all the difference in the world between a question of constitutional change, and a question of political economy or fiscal arrangement. It is rare, indeed, that a law which serves to popularise a Constitution, or advance democracy, is repealed. But even that has been done in times the most agitated, where the public expediency seemed to require it. You yourself, John, once advanced into a republic, and drew back into monarchy as fast as you could. Again, you once transacted your affairs through a triennial parliament, yet you very soon made a retrograde movement, and are still compelled to grant a seven years' lease to the occupiers of St. Stephen's, notwithstanding all the arguments of the National Reform League to prove that lease a great deal too long for your interests as landlord. You have only to look to the Foreign News in the Times to see that it was but as the day before yesterday, compared with your long life, when universal suffrage was proclaimed in France ; and but as yesterday that a law has been passed which shakes off a weighty per-centage from the suffrage so recently created. And the whole history of Europe for the last few years does little more than chronicle the sudden enactment and as sudden repeal of charters and constitutions which wise-heads declare to be the irrevocable advance of entire populations. You know, therefore, that even a political step backward has been taken, sometimes because of the brute force of a despot — but sometimes, also, as the voluntary choice of a nation. The Seel revocare graclum* applies to progress, not towards the region where we all wish to go, but to its dismal antipodes. It is only the first step to the infernal regions which Virgil so emphatically implies that mortal man can never recall. But, bless your heart, my dear John, as to changes and rechanges in commercial regulations, in duties and non-duties upon produce, raw and manufactured, — what man in his senses, or with no more knowledge of history than he could pick up at a grammar-school, ever dreamed that laws affect- * [But to retrace the step.]

LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. S3

ing them were not, by their very nature, experiments, and the most liable of all laws to revision or repeal? "Ay — but corn — the staple of food — the big loaf ? " The very thing, my dear John, of all others, that your experience tells you has been most subject to the mutability inherent to affairs mundane and mortal.

What, did we never try this experiment before ? Why, throughout all the dark ages, the importation of foreign corn was substantially free. For about five hundred years that experiment was tried ; and much good it did to commerce and manufactures — much good it did to the condition of the people ; and well it prevented fluctuations, scarcity, and famine ! Free importation of corn ! The duration of that experiment extends through the history of our barbarism. From the dawn of civilisation dates the record of Protection : it commenced under the dynasty of the House of York, in which commerce was first especially honoured and upheld — in which, under a king who himself was a merchant,* began the sagacious favour to the trading middle class, as a counterpoise to armed aristocracy, that, under the more tranquil intellect of Henry the Seventh, created the civil powers ruling modern dominions ; and that Protection, thus first admitted in theory, but long defeated in practice, can hardly be said to have been vitally and resolutely incorporated in our national system till the very era that confirmed our constitutional freedom, and saw the rise of Great Britain to the rank it now holds amongst nations — the reign of William the Third.

Well, this Protection, first vigorously enforced at the Revolution of 1688, f lasted for the best part of a century ;

* Edward IY. — " King Edward went beyond all the contemporary sovereigns in commercial transactions. He owned several vessels, and, like men whose living depended on their merchandise, exported the finest wool, cloth, tin, and the other commodities of the kingdom, to Italy and Greece, and imported their produce in return by the agency of factors or supercargoes." — Macpher son's Annals of Commerce. In one sense of the word, it was very injurious to merchants to have a royal competitor, who paid no duties ; but his example served very much to increase the power and dignity of the mercantile order ; and during his reign that order gained the authority which enabled Henry the Seventh to found a middle class on the ruins of the Eeudal system.

f In 1463, reign of Edward the Fourth, importation was legally prohibited until the home price reached that at which exportation ceased, viz., 6s. 8cl. a quarter (money of that period) ; but, as Mr. M'Culloch observes, " the fluctuating policy of the times prevented these regulations being carried

G 2

81 LETTERS TO JOHiN BULL, ESQ.

"and under it," says the commercial historian, " the commerce and manufactures of the country were extended to an unprecedented degree." The country wished then, as now, to have some return to the system of those blessed five centuries of Free Trade in corn; and in 1773 a law was passed which a few years ago would have satisfied, I suspect, Manchester itself ; for foreign wheat was permitted to be imported on paying a nominal duty of 6d. whenever the home price was at or above 48s. per quarter. The Nation tried that plan for about eighteen years, and then what did it do ? — this England that the newspapers tell us " never goes back ! " — why, it went back, of course ! And the price at which foreign importation could take place at 6d. was raised in 1791 from 48s. to 54s. ; while under 50s. the home producer was protected by a duty of 24s. 3d. And observe this date, 1791 ! Was that a period when the temper of the times was peculiarly submissive, and inclined towards political retrogression? It was a time more democratic than this — a time when the spirit of the first French Revolution was at work through all the great towns of the empire. " But the people cried out ? There were riots, rebellions, for the sake of the big loaf ? " Not a bit of it, my dear John ! The people were a sensible people, as the English are in the long run : they had tried their experiment — did not like it ; " And," says Mr. M'Culloch, with a candid sigh, " there was a pretty general acquiescence in the act of 1791."

" Pretty general acquiescence ! " — the admission is satisfactory in extent, but lukewarm in expression : the truth is, that no more popular act passed throughout the whole reign of George the Third.

And yet " laws against protection are never repealed ! as well repeal the Reform Act ! — England never goes back ! — A law about corn is as fixed as the nod of Jove ! " And all the while you are going back to the reigns of the Nor-

into full effect, and, indeed, rendered them in a great measure inoperative."

The subsequent law that imposed prohibitory duties on the importation of wheat, till the price rose to 53s. 4<tf., and a fixed duty of 85. between that price and 8O5., was enacted eighteen years before the great Revolution that placed William the Third on the Throne ; but " the want of any proper method for the determination of prices went far to nullify the prohibition of importation." — M'Culloch. Protection against importation cannot be said to have been vigorously and systematically earned out before the reign of William.

man and Plantagenet ! and insisting on the stability of experimental legislature npon the very article and in the very mode upon which the History of Civilisation abounds the most with precedents of change !

I read, indeed, in very popular and influential journals — I hear, indeed, from grave authorities ''speaking in their place in Parliament " — that " all sensible men " are of one opinion upon this point; that to doubt for a moment a dogma of the Corn Law Catechism is to forfeit one's claim to understanding. Were it an actual fact that the opinion of " sensible men " was thus forcibly expressed, I confess to you frankly, my dear John, that it would not, as a matter of logic and reasoning — as a proof upon which side lies the truth — have the slightest weight upon my convictions. And it never ought to have the slightest weight on the convictions of the man who calls himself a reformer in politics, or a student in philosophy ; for is there a simple question of reform in the laws, or a single principle now maintained in philosophy, which has not had at one time nearly all who, in their own day, were called " sensible men," dead against it ? The " sensible men " of their age were, at one time, for burning the Lollards and drowning old women with bleared eyes and hook noses — nay, theorems in sciences far more positive than Political Economy professes to be — in Astronomy, in Chemistry — which, not twenty years ago, all "sensible men" were agreed on, are now maintained to be errors. The history of Truth, is the history of her opposition to "sensible men." And Truth, would never have advanced one step from the wilds of the savage, if those who sought for her traces had paused a moment to ask of her " whereabout " from the public opinion of their day. But not to go further than the very subject before us, pray were not the great majority of " sensible men," even though. favouring Free Trade, against a total repeal of the Corn Law some dozen years ago ? And when you — the Free- Traders — so exultingly taunt my Lord Derby that, on the recent resignation of the present ministers, he could not form a cabinet of statesmen in favour of a fixed duty of five shillings — pray is it ten years ago that you could not maintain a cabinet in favour of a fixed duty of eight ? All your argument as to the fashion of opinion being wholly on your side, would prove nothing more than the changeability of such fashion, so far as the positive truth of the question at issue is concerned. If wholly correct, however, I allow that, whether the doctrine itself be true or false, it would present on your side the argument of tyrants — Might, if not Right. And public opinion is, I allow, to the legislator, though not to the mere seeker of truth, an adversary against whom it were idle to hoist the banner and flourish the sword.

But I have lived long enough to find out that there are two Publics — a Public invisible, with " airy tongues that syllable men's names," much quoted in newspapers, much referred to by members of Parliament; — and another Public that is visible and tangible, that we meet in street and club, in market and shop ; and I cannot say I find this latter Public of the same mind as that first mentioned and mythical Public, with which neither you nor I, nor any creature of flesh and blood, ever comes into positive contact. I have as wide a range of acquaintance as most people, amongst all ranks and all classes ; and whether I talk with the statesman, the man of the world, the abstruse thinker, whose task it is to master these topics, or with the merchant, the man of business, and the intelligent tradesmen, I find a very large proportion who are in favour, certainly not of prohibitory duties, not of a reversal of the general policy involved in our tariffs, but of a moderate fixed duty upon foreign grain. And, moreover, amongst those not in favour of attempting such a modification of the law, I find at least half who are far from disliking the notion of that said fixed duty in itself — far from doubting its beneficial effects, if it could be carried ; but who merely doubt whether that incorporeal essence, the other Public, will be disposed to accept it. And, though it may seem strange to persons less acquainted with the inconsistencies of mankind than it has been my professional lot, as a writer, to make myself, I positively aver, that among those who, thus seen in the streets, and talked with in tranquil nooks, either favour a fixed duty altogether, or wish the other metaphysical Public might so favour it, I find no small number of the very men who enjoy, by votes in Parliament or paragraphs in print, the reputation of being " sensible and enlightened," and go the whole loaf with Mr. Cobden !

The Corn Law settled ! No ! Free-traders and Protectionists alike feel in their heart of hearts that it is not settled ; that it is not in the power of this Parliament to settle it. Many large portions of the constituent body, many agriculturists themselves, were induced, by the calculations of great authorities, to consent to what was called an experiment. Those calculations have been tested ; and it is now not on the speculative probabilities, but on the experiment itself, that the agriculturists at least desire to pass their opinion. There has been a Parliament with faith in the prophecy; there must be a Parliament to decide on the nature of its fulfilment. " It is one thing," said the shrewd Arab, ; ' to believe the assurance of Mahomet that he can move a mountain, and another thing to say before the kadi that the mountain has been removed."

Let there be fair play. Let this be the question at the hustings. Do not try, by a new Reform Bill, cut and carved so as to adjust the franchise to a particular party question ; so as to create a constitution for the purpose of enforcing an experiment in political economy — do not try, by a proceeding so obviously disingenuous, either to silence the expression of the complaint you have occasioned, by the uproar of recruits to the aggressors, or represent the man who contends that one class of his countrymen is wronged, as an enemy to the claim of another class not yet enfranchised. This great and solemn question of an extended suffrage should be approached in a spirit free from what, at this moment, must warp justice on either side; viz., the heated jealousy of town and country — agriculture and manufactures. The Corn Law, the cry of the day, should be really settled, ere a question that may affect the duration of the empire can be fairly considered.