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 THE LIBRARY 
 
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 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
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 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE WORKMAN AND THE 
 FRANCHISE
 
 ALEXANDER STRAHAN, PUBLISHER. 
 London, .... 148 Strand. 
 
 New York, .... 178 Grand Street
 
 ftfje flJEotfcmatt anti tfje jFtanrfjise 
 
 CHAPTERS FROM ENGLISH HISTORY ON 
 
 THE REPRESENTATION AND 
 
 EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE 
 By FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE, m.a. 
 
 ALEXANDER STRAHAN, PUBLISHER 
 
 LONDON AND NEW YORK 
 
 1866
 
 V 
 
 
 Mr J. K, 
 
 FORMERLY A PUPIL IN THE WORKING MEN'S COLLEGE, NOW A 
 TRADESMAN IN NEW YORK. 
 
 My dear R. — 
 
 You wrote me an affecting letter last 
 April, when you had just received the news of President 
 Lincoln's assassination. I have often thought of that letter 
 whilst I have been composing this book. It suggested the 
 connexion between the questions which are agitating your 
 old and your adopted country. It showed how much you 
 were imbued with the spirit of an English citizen, and, there- 
 fore, how solemnly, and with what brotherly interest you en- 
 tered into the struggles and sorrows of the American people. 
 You spoke warmly and affectionately of the studies which you 
 had pursued, and of the friendships which you had formed, 
 whilst you were with us. Perhaps these chapters from our 
 own history will recall them to your mind, and will link the 
 wonderful events of this day, in both continents, to the edu- 
 cation which God has given our common fathers. — Believe 
 me, very truly yours, 
 
 F. D. Maurice. 
 
 736138
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 HOW I have been led to think on the subject of " the 
 Workman and the Franchise," and why I have 
 ventured to speak on it, I will endeavour to explain. 
 
 For eleven years I have been connected with a Col- 
 lege, professedly for the education of working men. 
 It started from the principle, that no education could 
 be good for them, which did not recognise them as 
 English citizens, and did not aim directly at the object 
 of qualifying them to perform their duties as English 
 citizens. It assumed, that if we would benefit them 
 as a class, we must first of all treat them as men whose 
 highest interests must be the same with those of the 
 millionaire or the noble. 
 
 Intercourse with even a small body of Englishmen 
 who accept these as the principles of their union, must 
 often suggest questions concerning the franchise ; how 
 any of us have become possessed of it ; what kind of
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 benefit we derive from it ; whether it is valuable to us 
 as individuals, or as members of a class ; what amount 
 of desire there is for it in those who are without it ; 
 whether they wish for it as individuals chiefly, or as 
 members of a class ; whether their exclusion is desir- 
 able or undesirable for the whole land. 
 
 It will be easily supposed, that these questions must 
 often assume a different aspect to us from that which 
 they present to accomplished statesmen. Thus, for 
 instance, the division of workmen into those who claim 
 the franchise as a right, and those who will accept it 
 as a privilege, may appear to us not quite an exhaust- 
 ive one. We have known some who were impressed 
 with the thought of certain obligations, from which no 
 Englishman who has faculties for fulfilling them should 
 plead exemption. We may even be conscious of hav- 
 ing striven to cultivate that thought in them, rather 
 than the other more complicated one, how they might 
 wrest rights or privileges from those who have them in 
 their keeping. 
 
 Again, it may seem doubtful to us whether the de- 
 mand which we encounter for an expression of the real 
 manhood of the working class in the House of Com- 
 mons can be met merely by a vast expansion of the 
 number of separate voters ; whether we do not need
 
 PREFACE. IX 
 
 some careful inquiry where the strength of this class 
 lies ; how it is most likely to make its voice heard, sup- 
 posing its voice ought to be heard. On the other hand, 
 if we are tempted by our own special enterprise to 
 assume that the true force of the workmen must de- 
 pend upon their education, we are continually reminded 
 by our ambitious efforts and great failures, how little 
 any formal teaching would benefit our most intelligent 
 pupils, if they had not the education of rough toil, of 
 domestic sympathies, of national institutions, such, e.g., 
 as the trial by jury. So that we may often doubt 
 whether the exercise of the franchise, provided the 
 sense of its being a trust coidd once be awakened, 
 might not itself be a better discipline, morally and in- 
 tellectually, for the English citizen than the knowledge, 
 however desirable in itself, which some would demand 
 as the condition precedent to his acquisition of it. 
 
 And to the great inquiry, how may the sense of 
 its being a trust be best awakened, our experience may 
 at least suggest this negative reply. If you would 
 crush it in one set of men as much as another, in the 
 existing town or county constituencies, in any who 
 may be admitted to it hereafter, make money the 
 standard of worth, the characteristic glory of the 
 citizen. If you take that course, you will reduce at
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 last the upper, the middle, the working class to such a 
 level, that it will signify almost nothing which have or 
 have not the franchise, — all will abuse it to the ruin 
 of themselves and of their country. Therefore, to 
 counteract by all means a tendency which has led, and 
 does lead, Englishmen to sell their votes, their freedom, 
 their souls to the highest bidder ; a tendency which is 
 at work in every civilised community, and is the seed 
 within it of barbarism and slavery ; this should surely 
 be the first aim of all who educate ; to this all teaching 
 of arithmetic, languages, physical science, should be 
 subordinate. Unless the gentleman commoner in 
 Christ Church, the mechanic in Great Ormond Street, 
 is reminded that he has relations to the human beings 
 about him — to those who have left the earth, to those 
 who shall be on it when he has left it — which are 
 stronger than all the accidents that separate one 
 class from auother, it is hard to say which will grow 
 to be the more ignominious man, which will do least 
 good or most mischief to the land. 
 
 These thoughts, however precious to ourselves, we 
 might have kept to ourselves. A veiy secular 
 motive led me to utter them. The rooms in our 
 college became too small for the pupils who fre- 
 quented it. We desired to build new rooms. Very
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 reluctantly we determined that we must ask for help 
 from the public. It seemed right, first, that we should 
 try to earn some money before we begged for it; 
 secondly, that we should show some excuse for our 
 begging. It was suggested that a course of lectures 
 might be delivered which should explain the objects 
 of our college. But they can be explained very 
 easily without such a course. A single sheet con- 
 tains an account of our teaching. Any one can come 
 and see what we are doing. General disquisi- 
 tions would be wearisome and superfluous. A com- 
 mendation of our own modes or our success would 
 be more odious to the speaker than even to the 
 hearers. If the lectures could turn on some 
 topics connected with the state and capacities of 
 the working class — which were at the time occupy- 
 ing the thoughts of the other classes — both these 
 objections might perhaps be avoided. An impression 
 had been left on the minds of many intelligent and 
 well-disposed persons by the very able speech of Mr 
 Lowe against the bill of Mr Baines, that any exten- 
 sion of the suffrage to workmen implied a concession 
 to mob force, a concession which some said was a 
 needful one, which Mr Lowe, with more manliness, 
 denounced as ignoble. A person who sincerely be-
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 lieved that a new life-blood would be poured into the 
 body politic if the workmen had a stronger feeling 
 that they were an integral portion of it, might en- 
 deavour to explain why he held this opinion. Sup- 
 pose he could show that instead of reverencing mob 
 force, he regarded the cry to be represented as a 
 pledge that those who make it despise and repudiate 
 mob force ; that instead of being indifferent to the old 
 maxims of the constitution he wished to recover them : 
 a few persons of the middle and upper classes might be 
 induced to reconsider the grounds of their fears, a few 
 of the working class to set more distinctly before 
 themselves the nature and object of their hopes. 
 Lectures of this kind, linking together the education 
 and representation of the people, would illustrate the 
 purpose for which a college of working men might 
 serve, better than any formal arguments or any ego- 
 tistical apology for our own. 
 
 A series of such lectures on the representation of 
 the people were read to a very small circle of ladies 
 and gentlemen, who kindly consented, for the sake of 
 the object, to come to a street in the north of London 
 in the very midst of the London season, and on the 
 eve of the general election. The price of the tickets, 
 though far too hio-h for the value received in ex-
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 change, of course added very little to the funds of the 
 College. The liberality of a publisher enabling me to 
 make a considerably larger contribution to them, in- 
 duced me to print what I had written. I have 
 adopted for the lectures the title of " Chapters 
 from the History of England," which corresponds 
 faithfully to their contents. They attempt to set forth 
 the growth of our people in successive periods. I 
 have wished especially to trace the influence of the 
 culture and belief of the nation, under our different 
 dynasties, upon the House of Commons, and its recip- 
 rocal influence on them. The imperfections and errors 
 of this experiment will, I trust, be imputed solely to 
 me ; any hints in it which may assist the reader in 
 connecting the perplexities of other days with those of 
 our own, and in seeing a path out of them, I would 
 thankfully trace to the College, the pupils in which 
 have taught me far more than they have learnt from 
 me.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAOB 
 
 How the Roman, Saxon, and Norman Times illustrate 
 the Words People, Citizen, Representation, Edu- 
 cation, Commons, Freeholder, Freeman, . . 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The House of Commons from the Reign of Henry III. to 
 
 the Reign of Henry VII., 33 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 The House of Commons in the Tudor Period, ... 65 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 The House of Commons in the Stuart Period, ... 98 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 The House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century, . 137 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The House of Commons in the Nineteenth Century, . 169 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Manhood Suffrage and Money Suffrage, . . . 205 
 
 APPENDIX, 241
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 How the Roman, Saxon, and Norman Times illustrate the words 
 People, Citizen, Representation, Education, Commons, Free- 
 holder, Freeman. 
 
 fTnHE words, Representation of the People, Education of 
 -*- the People, are continually ringing in our ears. It 
 is felt by all that Education and Representation must be 
 connected with each other. How they are connected, how 
 one depends upon the other, is a question of deep interest 
 to England. 
 
 I propose to consider this question. I desire not to 
 treat it speculatively, but practically ; not to propound 
 certain theories of my own upon it, but to consider what 
 light history — especially the history of our own country — 
 throws upon it. 
 
 I have said, the words People, Representation, Educa- 
 tion, are ringing in our ears. There is a danger of theso 
 words passing into mere sounds. There is a danger of 
 our affixing to them loose, capricious senses, or senses de- 
 rived from particular times and accidents. Let us begin 
 with examining them a little ; not for the purpose of find- 
 ing such definitions of them as might appear in a diction-
 
 2 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 ary, but that we may have some impression of their 
 living force, that we may use them intelligently. The 
 word People we may perhaps give ourselves credit for 
 understanding without any examination. I suspect that 
 it is one about which we are specially liable to fall into 
 mistakes. Even our best writers will not always help 
 us to avoid mistakes, until we have reflected upon their 
 language, and have profited by information which they 
 may not have possessed. 
 
 Take an instance from Shakspeare's " Coriolanus." That 
 play is founded on an old tradition preserved in the 
 patrician families of Eome. Though it may have no posi« 
 tive historical foundation, it embodies most remarkably, 
 most truly, the spirit of Eoman history. It exhibits 
 faithfully the temper of a class which was vindicating 
 to itself the exclusive right to the government of the 
 commonwealth, to the privilege of citizenship. That class 
 is represented by an individual man of distinct purpose, 
 great courage, within his own circle of warm affections, 
 full of contempt for all who lie outside of that circle. 
 Shakspeare has thoroughly appreciated the force of the 
 story in this sense. No one could have made us feel it as 
 he has done. "We have accepted the play as a substantive 
 part of our literature. It is truly English, as well as 
 truly Roman. It assists us in understanding our own 
 men, as well as the men of the old world, — the good and 
 evil of the patricians who have been born on our soil,
 
 THE PEOPLE, WHO THEY WERE IN POME. 3 
 
 as well as of those who belonged to the mistress of the 
 world. 
 
 If you turn to the first scene of this great drama, you 
 will find a Roman citizen saying, " You know Caius Mar- 
 tiusis chief enemy of the people." And another speaks of 
 Menenius Agrippa, as " one that always loved the people." 
 It would be worse than hypercriticism to complain of 
 Shakspeare for using the word " people" here. It would be 
 sheer ignorance. It would be demanding from him a know- 
 ledge of Roman habits which we ought to be aware that 
 he could not have. And it would be to lose the benefit 
 of the knowlege which he had of modern habits — a know- 
 ledge which unconsciously modified and determined his 
 expressions about other times. But it is right for us to 
 understand that he was using the word people in exactly 
 the opposite sense to that in which Caius Martius, or Me- 
 nenius, or any Roman patrician of any age, would have 
 used it. Instead of despising the people, or favouring the 
 people, they would have said, " We, the members of the 
 old families, are the people ; you plebeians have no preten- 
 sion to that great and honourable name." 
 
 If you turn from Shakspeare's plays to the " Lays 
 of Ancient Rome," by Lord Macaulay, you will meet 
 with a very inferior exhibition of the internal, the great 
 moral, struggle between the patrician and plebeian spirit in 
 Rome. But you will see that the later writer, possess- 
 ing all the modern erudition upon the subject of Roman
 
 4 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 history — saturated also with the thoughts and conceptions 
 of his own history — is able to find exactly the right substi- 
 tute for the expression of our dramatist. Where Shak- 
 speare uses the word people, Lord Macaulay uses the word 
 commons. No better, no more instructive translation of 
 the Latin glebes could be found. It throws back a light 
 upon the annals of the great Italian state. It removes 
 many confused impressions from the annals of our English 
 state; especially, I would add, from the annals of our 
 representation. I hope to show you presently what I 
 mean. But I have a little more to say first about the 
 relations of the old Roman people to the men who aspired 
 to be sharers of their position, who claimed to be re- 
 cognised as really — not merely by the accident of neigh- 
 bourhood — fellow- citizens. 
 
 The patricians were undoubtedly possessors of lands. 
 Many of the questions between them and the plebeians 
 turned upon the possession of lands, especially of those 
 which were acquired by conquest. But land was the sign 
 of the ancient family. It had permanence. It could 
 be transmitted from father to son. It was the witness of 
 the endurance of the race. If, therefore, rights to land 
 were one topic of contention between those who wished to 
 keep the name of people to themselves, and those who 
 demanded a share in that name, questions about marriage, 
 ultimately about the intermarriage of plebeians with patri- 
 cians — questions, that is to say, concerning the family
 
 THE FREEDOM OP ROME. 
 
 principle itself — formed a still more vital subject for con- 
 troversy. Another subject of debate related to the claims 
 which the owners of property had upon the persons of 
 those who had come under obligations to them. That 
 power over the peuson reduced the debtor, probably, into 
 very much the condition of the slave who had been the 
 prize of conquest. The distinction between the two cases 
 seemed to be almost in favour of the last. And yet could 
 one who claimed to be a Roman bear that the difference 
 between them should be effaced 1 
 
 Here, then, w r e have come to the characteristic which 
 the patrician boasted of as his own, which the plebeian 
 was more and more determined to assert as his also. The 
 patrician was the Free Man. He was also the freeholder. 
 He had land by transmission and inheritance. That was 
 the token of his dignity, of his lordship. The word " free" 
 might often seem to him inseparable from this possession. 
 But he knew — he confessed, in a thousand ways — that 
 it had another and deeper signification. If he had not a 
 hide of land, still it behoved a Roman to be a free man. 
 At all hazards, at all sacrifices, he must maintain his 
 freedom. 
 
 Caius Martius Coriolanus embodies distinctly, to our 
 imagination, the sense of freedom as it dwelt in the heart 
 of the Roman patrician. The opposition to him makes 
 us feel how the same sense was awakened in the heart of 
 the plebeian. And we perceive also, partly in this story,
 
 b THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 more clearly in all the actual records of Koman life, what 
 school nurtured this sense, both in one and in the other • 
 where both learnt entirely to separate the idea of freedom 
 from the idea of savage independence ; to regard the last 
 with contempt, in proportion as they prized the first. The 
 camp was the real education of the Roman, — of the lordly 
 race and the aspiring race. There was brought out the 
 consciousness of a country which both were to defend, in 
 which both were interested. There the general came to 
 perceive that his authority was a service, that he could only 
 be above his soldiers if he encountered their risks, or greater 
 risks than theirs, if he shared their privations. There the 
 soldiers learnt the sacredness of law, the necessity and the 
 blessing of obedience. The oath of service became, indeed, 
 a bond between them. As each man obeyed the word of 
 command, as he kept his place in the ranks, he had a con- 
 sciousness that he was one of a body; he rose by that very 
 consciousness to a feeling of individual dignity, of self- 
 restrained strength, which nothing else could give him. 
 His religion, too, was the conviction of an unseen power 
 which was knitting the host together, which was giving it 
 a common united heart. Such a conviction expressed it- 
 self in acts, not words. But it moulded the society in the 
 city as much as in the camp. There were conflicts in the 
 first which there were not in the second, — conflicts of 
 Orders, which there worked together against the enemy. 
 But the conflicts were all pointing towards some recon-f
 
 ROMAN EDUCATION. 
 
 ciliation of forces ; each Order, in its very effort to be 
 exclusive, was discovering that it could not exist without 
 the other. The conflicts, like the battles abroad, became 
 part of the Roman education. Out of them was formed 
 the City, which was to exercise so mighty an influence over 
 the destinies of all cities in the time to come. The grand 
 principles were asserted in Rome amidst all its contradic- 
 tion, that a people can only consist of freemen ; that the 
 freeman and the citizen are interchangeable names ; that 
 freedom cannot be attained till all are under the dominion 
 of the same law ; that law becomes itself an oppression if 
 there is not a living sympathy between those who obey it 
 and those who administer it; that freedom and citizen- 
 ship are impossible where discipline is wanting; that 
 discipline loses its name, and becomes the management of 
 a machine, if it does not aim at forming citizens and free- 
 men. After-ages were to develop these great maxims; 
 to remove monstrous contradictions from their applica- 
 tion ; to elevate the idea both of freedom and education ; 
 to expand the conception of a people; to connect the 
 citizen much more closely with the man. But the maxims 
 were never to become obsolete. The records of every 
 country of the modern world were to enforce and 
 illustrate them — no records more than those of our own 
 land. 
 
 I have given a hint or two about the words " People'' 
 and " Education,'" which may become more intelligible here-
 
 8 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 after. But can we learn anything about the word " Repre- 
 sentation'" from the Eoman story ? 
 
 There is a passage in " Coriolanus " which states, as 
 well as any prose narrative could, a great fact in Roman 
 history, a fact that marks a crisis in it, and which at the 
 same time reveals most strikingly the temper of the 
 Roman aristocrat, and the light in which he regarded, 
 not the people, but the commons. Caius Martius is talk- 
 ing with his more moderate and reasonable friend, Mene- 
 nius Agrippa, about some concessions which had been 
 made to the plebeians by the Senate, concessions which, of 
 course, seem to him cowardly and ignominious. Mene- 
 nius asks — 
 
 What is granted theui ? 
 
 Mar. Five tribunes to defend their vulgar wisdoms, 
 Of their own choice : one 's Junius Brutus, 
 Sicinius Velutus, and I know not. — 'Sdeath ! 
 The rabble should have first unroof'd the city, 
 Ere so prevail'd with me : it will in time 
 Win upon power, and throw forth greater themes 
 For insurrection's arguing. 
 
 Men. This is strange. 
 
 Mar. Go, get you home, you fragments ! 
 
 That word fragments is chosen with marvellous skill. It 
 expresses better than any epithet could the scorn of 
 Martius for a mere crowd. It has nothing organic in 
 it ; nothing of the fellowship which belongs to a race ; 
 nothing of the cohesion which is in an army. He despises 
 those who form the crowd for this reason. And if the
 
 REPRESENTATION IN ROME. 9 
 
 assumption were a true one, if these plebeians had been 
 only fragments, one would recognise in the scorn the 
 sentiment of a gallant soldier who entered Corioli alone, 
 who felt in himself how much manhood is above multi- 
 tude. But Caius Martius was uttering a falsehood, — a 
 falsehood which has been odious in those who have re- 
 peated it in later days, if it was not so in him. These 
 men were not fragments. They belonged to families. They 
 had mothers, if not so stately as Volumnia ; wives, if not 
 so full of fears as Virgila. They had a past in their 
 ancestors, as he had in his ; a future in their children, as 
 much as he could have in his. And they were members of 
 the same city, whether he thought so or not. How could 
 that be proved ? How could it be shown that they were 
 not fragments ; that they were organic ; that they had 
 a common mind 1 It was shown by that demand for 
 tribunes, which the Senate, in spite of its own reluctance, 
 in spite of the remonstrances of such men as Caius Mar- 
 tius, was forced to concede. When the plebeians elected 
 tribunes, they refused to be trcafed as portions of a 
 mass or a mob. They proved themselves an integral por- 
 tion of the commonwealth. Now, any man who acts as 
 the spokesman of a number of men, any one to whom 
 they habitually commit the management of their interests, 
 the defence of their privileges, is their representative. The 
 tribunes of the plebeians were the representatives of the 
 plebeians. From the time that these tribunes became one
 
 10 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 of the institutions of Rome, the plebeians were represented 
 in the state. They might acquire a further representation 
 afterwards ; they might become eligible for various func- 
 tions in the state ; they might make their voices heard 
 through various organs. But whenever they did make 
 their voices heard through any organs which they selected, 
 and not merely by force of numbers and the cries which 
 numbers could raise, they were represented. The disgust 
 which Caius Martius is supposed to have felt for this 
 representation was a natural disgust in a patrician who 
 wished his Order to be the people. But it was an unpatri- 
 otic disgust ; it was ultimately a suicidal disgust. If the 
 patrician reverenced organisation, despised what was in- 
 organic, he should have desired that all the loose frag- 
 ments which he saw moving about him should become 
 organic. If he wished to assert Borne as a city of free- 
 men, he should have welcomed the cry for freedom in all 
 who dwelt under its shadow. That would have been the 
 true security for the reverence of the old families. 
 
 That the Bomans *of the old families had but seldom 
 this faith, that they thought the strength of the common- 
 wealth dwelt in them, and that the adoption of any new 
 forces into it must tend to its weakness, is grievously true. 
 And it is also true that the sorest punishment awaited 
 them for this want of wisdom and justice. The multitude 
 which they would not raise to be a people, found leaders 
 to flatter it and pamper it as a multitude; leaders from
 
 THE DEATH OP THE ROMAN PEOPLE. 11 
 
 whom it would receive, not an education, but bread and 
 entertainments to prevent it from seeking an education, to 
 keep it lazy and brutal. These leaders of the mob, when 
 they had made themselves its dictators, might allow them 
 all the names which once denoted the existence of a people, 
 which marked how their fathers had striven to be a people. 
 What harm could the names do when all which they sig- 
 nified was departed? What harm could it do to throw 
 about the title of citizenship with magnanimous profusion, 
 when citizenship implied no fellowship in a body 1 What 
 harm could it do to bestow an unlimited privilege of voting, 
 if voting involved no representation '? And the old fami- 
 lies, — why should not they retain all the images and house- 
 hold gods which told of ancestors who could govern, if the 
 actual government had passed to mere officials ; if the 
 family feeling, with all the virtues which appertained to it, 
 was utterly dried up ; if all visions of the past, and hopes 
 of the future, were buried in a dull and miserable present, 
 given up to luxury and lies 1 
 
 Here was that abyss which the Roman aristocracy saw 
 opening before them, for which civil wars and proscriptions 
 were preparing the way, which some of the most courageous 
 of them thought they could avert by cutting off the man 
 whom the soldiers and the people counted as their cham- 
 pion, and who actually did sympathise with them as none 
 of the exclusive patricians had done. What could such a 
 murder avail to arrest the establishment of a tyranny over
 
 12 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 hearts which had become slavish ; which the lust of con- 
 quest and the gold that was the fruit of conquest were 
 making more slavish because more venal ; which was losing 
 the sense of freedom and of law through that discipline 
 that at first had done so much to awaken the sense of 
 both ; which was drawing disorder and death to itself from 
 those very provinces to many of which it was imparting 
 order and life % For this mighty encouragement, this blessed 
 proof of a Divine government over the world, comes to us 
 out of the contemplation of that empire which carried in 
 it the seeds of its own inevitable decline, of its ultimate 
 fall ; that it was preparing the countries which it ruled for 
 freedom and healthy government and a noble, civilisation, 
 whilst these were perishing within itself. Those coun- 
 tries might often groan under the yoke of governors who 
 had imbibed the debasing maxims of the capital, and 
 only went forth to eat up their fruits, to torment their 
 inhabitants. But they also experienced the blessing of 
 being guided by wise and honest men, who had inherited 
 the traditions of Roman law and equity, who believed that 
 the task of Rome was to conquer only that it might improve. 
 Such men could not form a people, or give the provinces 
 the education which a people requires, or teach them 
 the meaning of representation. They could establish in 
 the provinces institutions which had once denoted the exist- 
 ence of a people, which expressed the results of their edu-
 
 THE BIRTH OP A PEOPLE. 13 
 
 cation, which had represented their mind. Such institu- 
 tions might last on till other influences came over the lands 
 wherein they existed, which should convert them into 
 instruments of education, which should cause them to 
 embody the wishes and purposes of freemen. 
 
 I need not tell you that the grandest of these influences 
 for the regeneration and reconstruction of society, seems to 
 me that proclamation of a ldngdom utterly opposed in its 
 principles and its object to the kingdom of the Caesars, 
 which proceeded from Judea just as that kingdom was 
 supplanting the old Roman republic. In every way that 
 proclamation encountered the imperial conception and the 
 imperial practice. The gods of the empire upheld the 
 despotism of a military ruler over all the different races 
 which had confessed the might of the Roman arms. The 
 God who spoke in the Gospel was emphatically the deli- 
 verer of men out of bondage ; He could be described by no 
 other name. The man who reigned by the power of arms 
 was recognised as a god in virtue of his power. The Man 
 who was set forth as the Head of all men by the Church, had 
 proved His Godhead by stooping to the weakness of all His 
 subjects, to the death of the cross. The Caesars tolerated 
 the different religions of the provinces on condition that 
 each ministered to the supreme monarch. The message 
 went into all nations that there was a Spirit of God calling 
 them to be members of one body, but assigning to each
 
 14 THE -WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 offices and functions suitable to its own place and circum- 
 stances ; this Spirit was especially announced as the Spirit 
 of Liberty. 
 
 All the conditions of the new society stood in the same 
 striking contrast to those of the empire into the midst of 
 which it had come. There is an imposing sense of multi- 
 tude, if one reckons up the subjects of the Csesars, with all 
 their different customs and dialects. Nothing is so striking 
 as the insignificance of those bodies which rose up in the 
 different provinces, each claiming to be a section of the 
 Christian kingdom. The enumeration of the treasures which 
 were accumulating as the centre of the world, and were 
 pouring in from all parts of its circumference, is appalling. 
 The poverty of these bodies is as conspicuous as their small- 
 ness. Yet they are distinctly organic — they have a strong 
 sense of being connected, as a family under an elder Brother, 
 who is gone out of sight, and a divine Father. They claim 
 to be a people, as the old families of Rome did. They 
 believe themselves to be the subjects of an education by 
 the Divine Spirit. Each of them is to help in the education 
 of the rest. There are persons who represent the body of 
 which they are members, who are recognised as its repre- 
 sentatives by the other bodies which belong to the same 
 fellowship. Many therefore of the ideas of the old re- 
 public seem as if they were starting again into life ; that 
 fundamental idea of freedom being inseparable from obedi- 
 ence, of the highest being servant to the lowest, finds here
 
 THE CLERGY AND THE PEOPLE. 15 
 
 its justification, its full manifestation, its hidden root. 
 There was, no doubt, this amazing difference between the 
 Christian and the old republican conception, that the Man 
 was exalted above the Roman, that the message was 
 addressed to Jew, Greek, bond and free. But it was 
 not a message which levelled the freeman to the condi- 
 tion of the slave. That was the effect of the imperial 
 system. A dead equality was what it practically recog- 
 nised, what it was always threatening to produce. The 
 Gospel spoke of the slave as redeemed and raised to the 
 highest privileges of the citizen. 
 
 Such an organisation as this could not be tolerated by an 
 empire which felt its own existence to rest on very insecure 
 foundations. The persecutions, on the whole, gave consis- 
 tency to the body which they sought to extirpate. But 
 the maxims of the empire affected that body in a multi- 
 tude of ways most injuriously, even whilst they were open 
 enemies. One distinction which particularly disturbed the 
 use of the word " People " grew up in the midst of a per- 
 secution, was almost caused by it. The clergy were sharply 
 divided from the laity or the body of the people. The 
 ministers or servants claimed to be masters. The nomen- 
 clature was Greek, but the Church which most eagerly 
 adopted it was Latin. It soon connected itself with all 
 the habits of the Latin mind when the Church and the 
 empire were reconciled. The clergy were accepted as a 
 privileged order. Those who entered that order ceased to
 
 16 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 be a portion of the people. Had there been nothing to 
 counteract this habit of feeling in the constitution of the 
 Church itself — in its fundamental principle — and had the 
 ecclesiastics been permitted to mould European society 
 according to their conception — the result must have been 
 a caste system, like that in Hindostan. But it was not 
 to be so. If the Church was to be the instrument of im- 
 parting a new civilisation, it was to work on materials 
 already provided for it. To know what it could do, we 
 must know what those materials were. Our England was 
 to take its shape from an order which had been recognised 
 by the worshippers of Odin, from institutions left for it by 
 old Rome, before it was to receive any impression from 
 the new Rome of Gregory and Augustine. 
 
 I suppose there are no conclusions about which Anglo- 
 Saxon scholars are better agreed than that which one 
 of the most learned of them has expressed in the fol- 
 lowing words : — " All that we learn of the original prin- 
 ciples of settlements, prevalent either in England or on 
 the continent of Europe among the nations of German 
 blood, rests upon two foundations ; first, the possession 
 of land ; second, the distinction of rank : and the public 
 law of every Teutonic tribe, implies the dependence of one 
 upon the other principle to a greater or less extent. Even 
 as he is who is not free can at first hold no land within the 
 limits of the community, so is he who holds no land 
 therein not fully free, whatever his personal rank or char-
 
 THE OLD TEUTONE. 17 
 
 acter may be." Mr Kemble adds, " Tims far the Teutonic 
 settler differs but little from the ancient Spartiote or the 
 comrade of Romulus." "These," he says presently after, 
 " are the first principles or rudiments of the English law, 
 and in these it assimilates to the system which the German 
 conquerors introduced into every state which they founded 
 on the rains of the Eoman power." And then again, 
 " However far we may pursue our researches into the 
 early records of our forefathers, we cannot discover a 
 period at which this organisation was unknown." I must 
 refer you to Mr Kemble's interesting and valuable chapter 
 on the Mark, in his book on the Saxons in England, for 
 a full description of the most primitive form of society 
 which he can trace among our ancestors. I can only 
 afford space for two striking passages. The first relates 
 to them before their coming to Britain. " I represent the 
 Markmen to myself as great family unions, comprising 
 householders of various degrees of wealth, rank, and au- 
 thority ; some in direct descent from their common ances- 
 tors, or from the hero of their particular tribe, others 
 more distantly connected through the natural result of 
 increasing population, which multiplies, indeed, the mem- 
 bers of the tribe, but removes them at every step further 
 from the original stock ; some admitted into communion 
 by marriage, others by adoption, but all recognising a 
 brotherhood or kinsmanship ; all standing as one unit 
 together in respect of other similar communities; all 
 
 B
 
 18 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 governed by the same judges, and led by the same captains ; 
 all sharing in the same religious rites, and all known to them- 
 selves and to their neighbours by one general name." The 
 other passage describes these same Markmen in Britain. 
 "In general, we may admit the division of a conquered 
 country, such as Britain was, to have been conducted upon 
 settled principles derived from the actual position of the 
 conquerors. As an army they had obtained possession, 
 and as an army they distributed the booty which rewarded 
 their valour. That they nevertheless continued to occupy 
 the land as families or cognationes resulted from the method 
 of their enrolment in the field itself, where each kindred 
 was drawn up under an officer of its own lineage and 
 appointment, and the several members of the family served 
 together." Here, then, you have the groundwork of our 
 English People — a society or organisation closely connected 
 with the land — a society or organisation closely connected 
 with the family. Yet, as Mr Kemble shows us very 
 clearly, not one which is the least like an Arab horde ; 
 not a mere set of clans such as might be found among 
 Celts ; but a body of men, united under laws, and because 
 united under laws, and because confessing obligations to 
 each other, claiming the title of Freemen. 
 
 These Freemen had slaves ; if we attempt to conceal 
 that fact, if we try to make out a better case for our an- 
 cestors than for Greeks or Romans — if we pretend even 
 that these slaves lost their chains so soon as they heard the
 
 THE AGRICULTURAL FREEMAN. 19 
 
 Christian message — we deceive ourselves entirely, we per- 
 vert and destroy history. Those whom they conquered 
 did some of them — not all, by any means — fall into the 
 condition of slaves ; we have no excuse for describing 
 their circumstances as better than those of any other land 
 in which men are considered the chattels of their masters. 
 What we have a right to say — what we are bound to say — 
 is, that the state of the freeman, not the state of the slave, 
 determined the character of the society. Liberty was re- 
 cognised as the proper condition of the Man. Those who 
 claimed to be kinsmen — those who had common religious 
 rites — were free. Whoever should hereafter be recognised 
 as kinsmen, whosoever should hereafter be recognised as 
 having common religious rites, must become free. The state 
 of servitude was inconsistent with these. What a rise from 
 the accursed equality of an imperial system, from the state 
 in which the family was lost, in which the religious rites 
 were only the signs and pledges of a common debasement, 
 the protection against any attempts to emerge out of it ! 
 
 The description which Mr Kemble gives us is of a purely 
 agricultural people ; certainly not a savage people, for 
 nothing can be savage which is organic, but wanting in all 
 that civilisation which is implied in the existence of towns 
 or cities. In Britain this agricultural people found such 
 towns or cities already existing. I know not where we 
 can find a better account of them than in a book which I 
 am sure is destined some day to take a high place in Eng-
 
 20 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 lisli historical literature, and which, I trust, will not be 
 long left incomplete, though its excellent author has for 
 a while banished himself to our antipodes. After pointing 
 out the military origin of the Roman town, its type being, 
 as we know, the camp, Mr Pearson remarks : — 
 
 " The nucleus of the town population consisted of Legion- 
 aries who obtained a settlement in return for their services. 
 A motley array of traders and camp-followers grew up 
 around these, while the old occupants were dispossessed 
 by the new comers. To the last these colonists remained 
 distinct from the British population, though every year 
 must have added a British element to them. It is pro- 
 bable that for a long time the towns retained their military 
 character. During this time they were no doubt towns 
 in this sense, that they were not country ; fortresses in 
 the midst of an alien population ; busy with the stir of 
 trade ; possessing the bath, the forum, sometimes even the 
 amplutheatre ; but centres of corporate, self-governing 
 communities, they could not be in any sense. Before 
 the end of the Roman dominion they had probably changed 
 their character; the warlike habits of the colonists had given 
 way to the arts of peace ; the framework of civic institu- 
 tions had been introduced, and the people left to govern 
 themselves, perhaps by the very laches of the imperial 
 government. But the liberty which they had at last 
 received wanted time and peace to strike root; their 
 municipal constitutions, their laws, their mercantile guilds,
 
 THE FKEEMAN OP THE TOWNS. 21 
 
 have all been transmitted to us, with more or less change, 
 through the stormy Saxon times ; but they were informed 
 with a new spirit, and disguised under new names. The 
 prefects, Scabini, and Curiales of our old cities were no 
 more connected by popular apprehension with the mayor, 
 aldermen, and common council of our own time, than 
 Saxon architecture with its exemplars of Roman art. But, 
 in fact, the constitution of our towns is as Roman as the 
 bricks of St Martin's Church in Canterbury." And again, 
 in a very striking passage, in which Mr Pearson confutes 
 the common notion, that either the Celtic population 
 or the Roman colonists were exterminated by the Saxons, 
 he says, " If the Roman towns in some cases fell into 
 decay, the poverty of a war-stricken people and the decline 
 of commerce and the arts of peace may well account for 
 it. But the Roman colleges of trade were continued as 
 guilds, Roman local names were preserved by the con- 
 querors as they found them. Roman laws formed the 
 basis of the Saxon family system, and of the laws of pro- 
 perty. The Saxon conquest was a change of the highest 
 moment no doubt ; but ifc did not break up society : it 
 only added a new element to what it found. The Saxon 
 state was built upon the ruins of the past." * 
 
 These remarks are in strict harmony with those of Mr 
 Kemble, if we only consider what element the Saxon 
 added to that which lie found ; how he availed himself of 
 * Pearson's " Early and Middle Ages," c. vi.
 
 22 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 the ruins of the past. The new element was precisely that 
 which the Empire had expelled. The Saxon restored 
 life to the admirable institutions which Home had set up 
 in her colony ; he made them institutions for freemen ; 
 he connected them again with the household ; the family 
 became once more the root of the state ; the king was 
 a king of men, not a master of slaves. His descent was 
 traced to a mysterious ancestor, a divine leader of men 
 who had shared in their toils, fought with their oppres- 
 sors, won for them a settled habitation. The process by 
 which these sons of Odin passed into Christian kings is 
 worthy of all study. Augustine and his monks had cer- 
 tainly no thought of consolidating a nation. They would 
 have brought England within the Latin world of which 
 Gregory was the head ; as the old conquerors had brought 
 it within the Latin world of which Claudius or Severus 
 was the head. The distinctness of the Saxon life they 
 might gladly have abolished. But if this was in their wish, 
 it was not in their power. The character of their own 
 message hindered that result. It developed the sense of 
 kingly power and kingly responsibility. It developed the 
 reverence for women, for the sanctity of marriage. It 
 developed the sense of freedom. The world's redemption 
 could not be the most characteristic note in the gospel — 
 addressed to a simple, practical people — without keeping 
 alive and expanding all the associations which had clung 
 to that sacred name. Old Roman ideas mingled with the
 
 THE CLERICAL INFLUENCE. 23 
 
 preaching of the Koman missionaries; one of those ideas 
 pointed to the emancipation of the slave as a possible 
 blessing which did not interfere with the dignity or 
 privilege of the citizen who conferred it. The distinction 
 of clergy and laity was strongly asserted. All the dangers 
 to which I alluded before lurked in it. But there was the 
 compensation that the existence of the clergy bore witness 
 that physical force, hereditary rank, the possession of land 
 or of money were not entitled to the highest reverence. 
 "Wisdom was above these. The poorest man might receive 
 a training in that wisdom — might become one of the clergy. 
 This wit or wisdom must be the characteristic of the 
 council, without which the kings could not decide or act. 
 And if the wisdom of the clergy descended, as it so often 
 did, into cunning ; if the divinity of the office attracted, as it 
 so often did, the laymen to desert their own duties for the 
 cowl ; if the clergy forgot their allegiance to the native 
 monarch, in the sense of their corporate sanctity, and in 
 the service of the Latin bishop ; there was a redress, 
 if not always an adequate one, for these evils. The spirit 
 of the thane, if not of the king, rose against the ecclesias- 
 tical assumption, opposed the courage which is half-brutal 
 to the intellectual cleverness which is half- devilish. In- 
 vasions of Pagan tribes, sweeping away churches, schools, 
 monasteries, recalled the old Saxon strength which a per- 
 verted reverence for weakness had joined with ease and 
 luxury to undermine. As Mr Pearson remarks, the Danes
 
 2i THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 saved England from becoming a part of the Carlovingian 
 world. It is equally true that Alfred, fed in childhood 
 with the national songs, cultivating the native speech, 
 causing the most sacred and the most useful books to 
 be translated into it from the learned tongues, did more 
 than any one to save England from becoming a mere 
 portion of the Latin world. He is to us the typical 
 Saxon and Christian king • because we feel that he helped 
 to educate a people, not a class ; and that he restored to 
 life those old institutions of the land which were grounded 
 on the principle that wherever there is life, there must 
 be, in one form or another, representation. The tithing, 
 the hundred, the jurors, if we understand them aright, 
 were precious instruments in English education, as precious 
 as any books — making books intelligible. But they are 
 also proofs that wherever a free community exists, it must 
 have a mind or a soul, and that this mind or soul must 
 have some other way of uttering itself than through noisy 
 shouts. If we would reflect on that fact, we might arrive 
 at a sounder idea of representation than we can get by 
 connecting it with any single assembly ; we may also ap- 
 prehend what our house of Representatives has meant to 
 our country hi different stages of its existence. 
 
 All that has been told us of the Saxon people shows 
 us that it has as much its root in families, and that it had 
 as much tendency to become exclusive as the Roman 
 people, from which we derive the word. The conquest of
 
 SAXON EXCLUSIVENESS. 25 
 
 the Britons and Roman colonists gave the distinctions 
 which existed in its order, a new force and significance. 
 The occupation of the land, of which an inferior race had 
 been dispossessed, but from which it had not been driven 
 out, made the honour of the freeholder — always, as Mr 
 Kemble assures us, greater than that of the noble by ser- 
 vice — more intensely felt, the dependence of the unfree 
 more vehemently and cruelly asserted. But that privilege 
 of enfranchisement which lay in the original constitution 
 of the masters may, by degrees, have been extended, 
 almost unawares, to members of the subject race. There 
 were also the humble kinds of enterprise which the towns 
 presented to those who were less fit to draw the sword or 
 plough the soil. Occupations necessary to the landlord 
 and the warrior were pursued in them. These occupations 
 became arts. They must be studied. They must be pur- 
 sued in concert. Those who took part in them must have 
 laws, must be under government. The wiser among them 
 must exercise government. The members of the guilds, 
 Ptoman in their form, Teutonic in the spirit, discovered that 
 they were in the truest sense freemen. If the holder of 
 land, subject only to the king and a common law, exhibits 
 freedom under one aspect, the organisation of trades ex- 
 hibits it under another, and quite as real a one. The latter 
 becomes more strictly and properly, though not exclusively, 
 associated with the name of the citizen. 
 
 The regular clergy, though they frecpiently interfered
 
 26 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 with the authority of the sovereign, though their sacredness 
 seemed to put a scorn on domestic life, nevertheless con- 
 tributed much both to the knowledge of the arts in which 
 the citizen was engaged, and to the form of his society. 
 They set an example of an organised social existence. 
 Their rules and obligations were imitated by the guilds. 
 Cities were connected with the Episcopal see, with an 
 ecclesiastical centre. The towns acquired a more laic char- 
 acter, and ultimately became homes for the secular priests. 
 But at first, no doubt, their military origin, their com- 
 mercial objects, were curiously blended with the lessons 
 and discipline of the monasteries in their neighbourhood. 
 
 This Saxon life, it will be said, whatever was its worth, 
 its weakness vanished before the Norman Conqueror. 
 Not I believe the Saxon life. By the Norman conquest, 
 as by the Roman, as by the Saxon, it was proved that 
 nothing which lives can be swept away, that only what is 
 dead finds the burial which it needs, and has been waiting 
 for. The sottishness of the Saxon, the arrogance of the 
 Saxon, the anarchy of the Saxon, the feebleness of the 
 monarch who preferred to be an ecclesiastic, the ambition 
 of the ecclesiastic who tried to be a monarch, the turbulence 
 of the thane who would be a master and would not be a 
 servant, these found their stern punisher. The will which 
 coidd reduce all lands and all holders of lands under itself; 
 the will which could apportion lands after its pleasure ; 
 the will which could lay waste lands for its entertainment —
 
 THE CONQUEST. 27 
 
 this was assuredly in the Norman. He was the king, and 
 the foreign king. He might be the organising king, such 
 as the first William was, or the merely arbitrary king like 
 Rufus, one who acknowledged no power but force, or the 
 conciliatory king like Henry, who saw that force could not 
 avail without wisdom. Whatever he was, he could create 
 notliing, and, except for the moment, could destroy nothing. 
 There was no doubt this great difference, which Mr Kemble 
 insists upon with much earnestness. The Saxon king was, 
 he says, the king of men. The Norman king claimed to be 
 proprietor of the land. I do not underrate the importance 
 of that distinction. But I think the history shows that 
 the Norman assumption served to unite the country as it 
 had never been united before ; that it gave the sovereign a 
 power over the barons who held their lands of him, which 
 his Saxon predecessors had never had over their thanes • 
 that at the same time it enabled those barons to appeal to 
 the obligations by which the king had bound himself to 
 them ; which obligations by their nature could not be 
 limited to them, but must ultimately, if not at once, 
 become checks upon their own violence ; finally, that 
 in this way the king was led to feel that the English 
 were his subjects as well as the Normans, and that it 
 might be his wisdom to enfranchise them in various ways, 
 if it were only for the sake of curbing and counteracting 
 those who who were more dangerous to him. 
 
 And it must not be forgotten that the better part of
 
 28 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 the Norman ecclesiastics did much more to further this 
 assimilation than the Saxon ecclesiastics did to break down 
 the barriers between classes in their society. They were 
 more learned, they felt more the necessity of counteracting 
 the pride of force which was trampling upon them. Anselm 
 is not more celebrated for his philosophy or for his conflicts 
 with William II., than for his solemn declaration when he 
 came to Canterbury, that he should recognise no distinc- 
 tion between the races, that he must regard them as they 
 stood in the sight of God, not according to the judgment 
 of men. The instruction in the Norman schools, though 
 it was purely Latin instruction, was not unfavourable to 
 this equality. The sacred language was at least not the 
 Conqueror's language. The English peasant might learn 
 it as well as the Norman noble ; probably he oftener availed 
 himself of the privilege. 
 
 But there was another language than this, a language 
 which had never died, a language which Alfred had vin- 
 dicated for the highest uses, a language which, when 
 it appeared to have sunk to the uses of the market, was 
 really gathering strength and vitality to itself from its 
 Latin and its Norman oppressors, which was in time to 
 come forth clothed with their spoils, the organ of a glorious 
 and enduring literature. Whose language was this ? We 
 must now revert to that word which Lord Macaulay, so 
 felicitously I thought, used for the rendering of the Roman 
 plebeian, The Norman barons or lords spoke the tongue
 
 Tni: commons. "29 
 
 which they had brought with them. The English tongue 
 was the tongue of the commons. 
 
 It is a word with which we are very familiar, and yet 
 one which often confuses us. We are so used to talk of 
 the House of Commons, that we do not always ask our- 
 selves who inhabit the House, or how they came to need 
 a House. If we did ask the question, history would give 
 us a simple and direct answer. Knights of the shire, bur- 
 gesses of the towns, these inhabit the House. Freeholders 
 and freemen, these needed the House. There was a time 
 when they did not need it ; when they could not haft^c 
 made any use of it. But by some means or other the 
 Saxon holders of lands have been getting quit of interme- 
 diate lords, have been acquiring the freedom of being merely 
 subject to the king. By some means or other the Saxon 
 inhabitants of the towns have been acquiring a recognition 
 of their freedom, have been rising to municipal dignity. 
 And now comes forth that great sign that these Commons 
 have made themselves in very deed a part of the people. 
 They have a language which is becoming rapidly the 
 people's language. What the process of their education 
 has been we may not always be able to trace. That it has 
 been a stern one we know. Their schoolmasters have not 
 been sparing of the rod. The events which seem most to 
 occupy us in history have scarcely seemed to concern them. 
 Had they anything to do with the struggles of the great 
 Plantagenet king against the great Archbishop ? What
 
 30 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 signified to them the victories of Richard in Palestine, or 
 his captivity 1 Were their interests involved in the battle 
 of John with the pope, or even in his battle Avith the 
 barons 1 Yes ; I apprehend every one of these transactions 
 was affecting them in manifold ways, was conspiring with 
 their homely life to prepare them for a change that was 
 at hand. Grand principles were asserted not on one side, 
 but on both sides, in the conflicts of Henry with Becket. 
 " The same law must be for all classes of my subjects," said 
 the monarch. " But there is a law higher and more uni- 
 versal than the mere law of custom, than mere English 
 tradition," said the prelate. The Commons had need that 
 both those truths should be maintained, that some recon- 
 ciliation should be sought for them. The lion-hearted king- 
 was not merely fighting battles abroad. He was leaving 
 his subjects to all that fermentation at home which the 
 romance of Ivanhoe, whatever be its mistakes as to the 
 relations of the different portions of society, has set so 
 vividly before us. 
 
 Think over that brilliant picture. Think what an utterly 
 disorganised society it presents to you. There are all the 
 elements which once went to make up a nation. The 
 Norman baron, the abbot, the templar, remain. But all 
 sense of law has departed from the baron, all religion from 
 the abbot, all feeling of a lofty calling and connexion with 
 an order from the templar. Will the discontented Saxon 
 proprietor, or the Jester, or Gurth the serf, recompose
 
 MAGNA CHARTA. 3l 
 
 society 1 Will the hoards of the Jew be the instrument of 
 doing it ? Or Robin Hood and the foresters, who bear such 
 clear testimony that the world is out of joint, and who fancy 
 that they are born to set it right ? There must be some 
 fusing power which we do not discern in any of these ; or 
 the English people must fall into utter decay. Neither in 
 the king, nor in the prince, do we discover any signs of 
 such a power. In his " King John," Shakspeare perhaps 
 gives us a hint, though drawn from another country, where 
 it may be found. The citizens of Anglers, who bring the 
 feudal monarchs to terms, may indicate what strength was 
 hidden in the communes of France, in the commons of 
 England, which might show itself hereafter, and might 
 compel the acknowledgment of them as a substantive 
 part of the nation, and prevent the whole from perishing. 
 
 But another work must be done before this could be 
 done. The barons must discover that they are a living 
 element of the nation, not an independent force which is 
 crushing both king and commons. They must feel that 
 the duty of maintaining the laws, of resolving that they 
 shall not be violated, belongs especially to those who claim 
 to represent a race, to sustain a history. If they perform 
 that work faithfully, they may be allowed for the present 
 to treat the commons as English churls — as beings of 
 another creation from themselves. Their day will come. 
 They will find charters established which they could not 
 have won, principles recognised which can be confined to
 
 32 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 no class. The barons having asserted at Runnyniedc 
 maxims which looked before and after, which were im- 
 plied in the life of their own ancestors, as well as of the 
 ancestors of the Saxon — which would be mighty for many 
 more than their descendants — yet showed that something 
 was needed to make them truly national. They could not 
 trust their swords or their cause or the King of Kings; 
 they must invite a foreign prince to defend their liberties 
 by invading their soil. A Class was needed with sym- 
 pathies less European, more tied to hearth and home, if 
 England was to be saved. It might be ordained that a 
 foreigner should vindicate the position of that class, should 
 give it a representation. However the gift was obtained, 
 the rise of a House of Commons would be the token that 
 the freeholder and the freeman had learned the force of 
 their names ; that they were henceforth as integral por- 
 tions of the people as the peers temporal or spiritual.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The House of Commons, from the reign of Henry III. to the reign 
 of Henry VII. 
 
 TT lias been the fashion of late to celebrate centenaries. 
 ■*- With less violence than we often practise to make 
 times and seasons lit, the six hundredth birthday of the 
 House of Commons might have been kept this year. The 
 writ by which Henry III. summoned knights of the shire 
 and burgesses of the town to Parliament, bears date January 
 1265. That there were earlier instances of election by 
 the freeholders of the counties may be true ; it would ap- 
 pear that there is no previous recorded precedent for the 
 coming together of both the orders. 
 
 There have been, I am aware, eminent antiquaries who 
 have attached little significance to this event. In his 
 •' Merchant and Friar," Sir Francis Palgrave asks how 
 it happens that the contemporary chroniclers take so little 
 note of it, supposing it were a critical event in English his- 
 tor3 r . There are two answers, it strikes me, to this ques- 
 tion. One is supplied by Sir Francis Palgrave himself in 
 this very book. Marco Polo, his merchant, goes with
 
 34 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 Eoger Bacon, his friar, to the shire oak. He discovers there 
 " groups of peasants, who, it must be observed, [I quote 
 his words,] were the representatives of their respective 
 townships, the rural communes into which the whole 
 nation was divided, and which had a species of chief- 
 tain, who, though it was evident that he belonged to the 
 same rank of society, gave directions to the rest. Inter- 
 spersed among the churls, though not confounded with 
 them, were also very many well-clad persons, having an 
 appearance of rustic respectability. These also were sub- 
 jected to some kind of classification, being collected into 
 sets of twelve men. These were the jurors, who an- 
 swered for and represented their several hundreds." Now 
 here is an organisation — a representative organisation — 
 which must have been preserved in these county districts 
 of England from the old Saxon times. If again we turn 
 to Sir Francis's account of the London Guildhall, — though 
 the description is far less clear, being mixed with many 
 allusions to passing controversies, which dirmnish its his- 
 torical value, — there are indications of a whole scheme of 
 municipal organisation. A representation is found in the 
 very heart of the old city, linked to its most venerable tra- 
 ditions. It need not have caused great wonder then, to 
 contemporary onlookers, that this organisation should have 
 received at any time a new development. Even if there 
 were no more stirring events to distract their attention — 
 even if all around had been peaceful — a particular incident
 
 SIMON DE MONTFORT. 35 
 
 which may seem to us of immense importance might have 
 been overlooked by them. But, secondly, this was not a 
 quiet time. It was the time of a revolution. All historians 
 are impressed with the importance of that revolution; those 
 who contemplated it close at hand were distracted and 
 overwhelmed by it. As usual, the outside transactions in 
 it, those which most affected the condition of the men who 
 were passing through it, would be dwelt upon ; some of its 
 most pregnant acts, which have influenced generations to 
 come, would be scarcely heeded. In 1265 the king was in 
 durance. The writs which went forth in his name were 
 really drawn by the Earl of Leicester. 
 
 That name is certainly not one which contemporary 
 chroniclers have forgotten to commemorate. There was 
 much to excite prejudice against Leicester at the moment. 
 He was a foreigner ; he had been the favourite, he was a 
 brother-in-law of the king. He had become the cham- 
 pion of the barons. He had lost his reputation with 
 them. He could be plausibly described — he has been 
 often described— as one who only gratified his personal 
 ambition, as a reckless rebel. He has hereditary claims 
 to the suspicion of later writers. The worst atrocities of 
 the Albigensian war were connected with his father. Yet 
 he became dear to the commons. He was celebrated in 
 English speech and song as their deliverer. He was the 
 man, to borrow the title of one of Miss Martineau's books, 
 who fitted the hour. The moment was come when a
 
 36 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 work was to be accomplished which had long been prepar- 
 ing. A House of Commons had become a necessity. He 
 perceived the necessity, and was the instrument of bring- 
 ing it into existence. 
 
 How this necessity had arisen, I partly endeavoured to 
 indicate in my last chapter. I spoke especially of the 
 English language as coming forth out of its swaddling- 
 bands, as giving signs that it was not merely meant to be 
 an organ of communication for those who bought and sold, 
 but an organ of human thoughts, which should live from 
 age to age. The Latin of the schools, the French of the 
 law-courts, the more graceful language of the troubadours, 
 must bow before it. The old speech of the Saxon strength- 
 ened and renovated, must be accepted as the speech of the 
 Norman conqueror ; even the monk of the cloister must 
 use it habitually. Here was a revolution indeed ; wrought 
 out very slowly, unobserved by those who in different ways 
 were taking part in it, but altogether irresistible, rich in 
 its effects upon the institutions of the land, and upon every 
 inhabitant of it, from the highest to the lowest. 
 
 But along with this English revolution there was going 
 on a European revolution, apparently of the most opposite 
 kind, likely to produce the most opposite results. In the 
 latter days of John, and when Henry III. was a little boy, 
 whose protectors were struggling in his name against the 
 invading foreigner, the voice of the mendicant friars was 
 beginning to be heard in every corner of Christendom, was
 
 THE MENDICANT OKDERS. 37 
 
 penetrating into every hovel, and, at the same time, was 
 compelling the professors in every university to change 
 their system of teaching, or to give up their seats to the 
 members of the new orders. Orders emphatically they were, 
 bodies held together by a severe rule and by strong internal 
 sympathies. But their power seemed to lie in their de- 
 fiance of what had been esteemed the distinction of orders, 
 in their indifference to ranks, classes, property, in the con- 
 tempt which they poured upon the wealth of the high 
 ecclesiastic as much as upon the family privileges of the 
 baron. The Franciscans and Dominicans had different 
 objects, their founders were of different nations, and of 
 widely different characters. Their opposing tendencies 
 soon became conspicuous in their followers ; but they 
 were alike in the qualities to which I have alluded. In 
 the common sense, if not in the correct sense, of the word 
 they wore equally democratic. 
 
 How did this movement affect England 1 It must have 
 a very powerful influence here as elsewhere. What the 
 influence was we are in some degree able to guess from the 
 story of a remarkable English bishop, one of the best men 
 surely of his time. Grostcte, afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, 
 was completely carried away by the reports which he 
 heard of the Franciscan preaching. He longed to be 
 admitted into so holy and noble an order. The denuncia- 
 tions of ecclesiastical wealth, the honour put upon the 
 poorest people, the implicit protest against baronial
 
 38 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 tyranny, were all most acceptable to Mm. An age of 
 reformation had begun. What a privilege to have any part 
 in it ! Sir F. Palgrave's hero, Eoger Bacon, was a dear friend 
 of his. They had shared their thoughts and hopes at Oxford. 
 They had worked at mathematics together. Eoger Bacon 
 had talked to him of mysteries in nature which it would 
 be a wise and devout exercise to explore. What could he 
 do better — so it is said, Grostete spoke to him — than take 
 the vows of a Franciscan. Then he might cultivate with 
 some hopefulness the life of a student ; he would have 
 the divinest sanction in his great experiments. 
 
 Thus dreamt the good man. Before many years had 
 passed away, so Matthew Paris reports, two Franciscans 
 came to Lincoln on goodly caparisoned horses. They were 
 the agents of Innocent IV. for collecting tributes from the 
 poorest clergy of the bishop's flock. The more he conversed 
 with them, the more he began to think that they were up- 
 holders of a great European tyranny which must interfere 
 with the life of the English citizen. It ended with his 
 denouncing them as the servants of Antichrist, not with- 
 holding that terrible name from Innocent himself. He 
 might have learned had he lived a little longer in what way 
 the order regarded that student life and those devout 
 experiments which were to have been carried on under its 
 auspices ; he would have known that Bacon was cast into 
 prison as a magician by the superior of that very society. 
 
 These biographical passages would not concern us — they
 
 THE BISHOP AND THE REBEL. 39 
 
 would be irrelevant episodes — if Grostete had not been 
 intimate with another man who has not the scientific 
 glory, who has not the magical reputation, of Bacon, but 
 who is associated with the political life of England. " To 
 the blessed Kobert of Lincoln," says the chronicler who 
 continued Matthew Paris, " did the Count of Leicester 
 steadfastly adhere. Under his counsel he attempted 
 arduous enterprises, ventured on uncertain paths, brought 
 imperfect schemes to completion. For the remission of 
 his sins, so it is said, the bishop bade him enter upon the 
 cause for which he contended unto death. Some tell that 
 the bishop once laid his hands on the firstborn son of the 
 count, saying to him, ' My dear child, thou and thy father 
 will die in one day by the same kind of death, struggling, 
 however, for righteousness and truth.'" 
 
 From such a testimony we may gather how very sacred 
 the cause in which Leicester was engaged appeared to the 
 most earnest men of his age. We may also judge, and this 
 is my main reason for quoting the passage, how much the 
 Englishmen who were most likely to sympathise in the 
 great European movement of the time, and had actually 
 sympathised in it, were drawn in another direction — were 
 induced to believe that a reformation, apparently of a far 
 more purely national — what some woidd call, of a far 
 more secular — kind than that which the Franciscans had in- 
 augurated, would Avork more effectively for the great moral 
 ends at which they were aiming. The words in which
 
 40 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 the chronicler I have quoted sums up his lamentation for 
 Leicester, after his fall at Evesham, expressed, no doubt, 
 the feeling of those who had the best education of the 
 time. " Thus," he says, " did this magnificent man conclude 
 his labours ; a man who gave not only all he had, but his 
 ownself, to relieve the oppression of the poor, and to defend 
 justice and the right of the kingdom. For his knoAvledge 
 of letters he was worthy of all honour ; in the divine offices 
 he was assiduous; he was frugal, faithful to his word, severe 
 in countenance, constant in his prayers, reverent to his 
 teachers ; giving his nights to watching more than sleep." 
 
 Make what allowances you please for the partiality of 
 this historian ; he had the reasons which I have men- 
 tioned already for suspecting Leicester's motives ; he must 
 have had the dislike of a cpiiet ecclesiastic to revolutionary 
 tumults ; he had the reverence for the person of the king, 
 who had been Leicester's captive, which an Englishman 
 seldom loses. There must have been a strong conviction 
 in him, and in numbers besides him, that Leicester had 
 done something for England which none ever before him 
 had done, and which could not be undone. 
 
 I have admitted, however, that if he was all which his 
 admirers gave him credit for being, if he did all which we 
 have ever imputed to him, he was only fulfilling that which 
 must have come to pass by some agency or other in this 
 period. No one doubts, I suppose, that the name of Par- 
 liament was an old and familiar name. No one could ever
 
 THE KING'S COUNCIL. 41 
 
 imagine that it was an English name, or that it was espe- 
 cially appropriate to English customs and usages. The 
 idea of a king acting without counsellors, merely upon his 
 own responsibility, is one which is as remote from Norman 
 as from Saxon royalty. Independence is a barbarous notion 
 for ruler or for subject, inconsistent with either name, only 
 possible when both names have become practically extinct 
 in an imperial system ; when the monarch, instead of being 
 really independent, is the victim of a hundred advisers, 
 male or female, whom he may change from day to day ; 
 when the subject is independent in this sense, that he has 
 lost the sense of relation to any master, of restraint from 
 any law, and is merely the sport of all accidents. The 
 feudalism which we impute to the Normans, so far as it 
 involved a principle at all, was the renunciation of this 
 independence on the part both of sovereign and subject. 
 The freedom which we suppose to be latent in the Saxon 
 institutions was ecpaally incompatible with it, equally an 
 acknowledgment of civic obligations, and of obligations due 
 from one proprietor to another. The Saxon might speak 
 of a council of the Wise; the Norman might speak chiefly 
 of a council of the King, and when he cared to describe it, 
 might take, as of course he would take, a word of French 
 origin for the purpose ; but a council could never be far 
 from the thoughts of either. 
 
 Why, then, does the word Parliament thrust itself upon 
 us in this reign of Henry III. with a force and emphasis
 
 42 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 which we never supposed to be in it before ? Why does it 
 seem as if we had not fairly got hold of the word till we 
 can connect it with the freeholders and freemen 1 It 
 sounds strange to say so, but the assertion is, I think, 
 abundantly confirmed by evidence, that neither the Norman 
 king nor the Norman baron could realise their position to 
 each other, could be what either was meant to be, till the 
 Saxon element was combined with them, till each had, 
 however reluctantly, done justice to that. I said in the 
 last chapter that it is a great mistake to undervalue the 
 strong will of the Norman kings, or to treat that will as a 
 mere souroe of tyranny. How wild and weak it was when 
 it became a mere self-will, the reign of Rufus shows us. 
 How useful it was when it confessed an order, and sought 
 to establish an order, we see in his father. How it sought 
 an alliance with English sympathies, and gave a recognition 
 to English rights, that it might not be crushed by its 
 Norman subjects, we learn from the experience of his 
 brother. What a tremendous anarchy was the result of 
 this power being withdrawn or being divided, and when 
 the barons were left to assert the omnipotence of castles, 
 the reign of Stephen demonstrates. It might seem as if the 
 great talent of Henry II., and his determination to restore 
 order, had abated this confusion. But then it was only to 
 bring forth that other great struggle between the monar- 
 chical and the ecclesiastical power, to show that there was 
 at all events one class which would not submit to be reck-
 
 THE COMPLETE PARLIAMENT. 43 
 
 oned merely a part of the English nation. And when 
 this question had seemed partially adjusted, we found in 
 the following reign every indication that the most living 
 forces which had been at work in the land, civil or eccle- 
 siastical, were utterly unable to cohere, were exhausted, 
 and had no secret of renovation hi them. 
 
 I cannot take John's reign, as Lord Macaulay and some 
 others have done, to be the commencement of English 
 history. The barons, it seems to me, were true in their 
 profession that they were only re-asserting principles which 
 had been involved in all their relations to the king from 
 the first. But in this sense it is the commencement of a 
 history, that from his time each party confesses its obliga- 
 tions to the other. They are set down in letters ; the record 
 of them can be appealed to at all times. And then it 
 begins to be understood that these relations can only be 
 maintained either by force — and if by force, then it would 
 seem from the invitation of the barons to Louis, by a 
 foreign force — or else by a continual conference and con- 
 sultation of the two parties with each other, not by occa- 
 sional advices given by the barons to the king, but by a 
 Parliament which should be an organic, habitual, necessary 
 part of the State. 
 
 This necessity had worked itself out in the minds of the 
 barons, as we see in the reign of Henry III. The Parlia- 
 ment was accepted as a legitimate institution, a part of the 
 natural order of things, a return to the laws of England
 
 44 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 which the barons would not have changed. And yet there 
 was in it the rawness, the incoherency of a new institution, 
 which could not be easily got into a working condition, 
 which involved perpetual collisions, contradictions, tumults, 
 lying promises of the king to observe the charter, violent, 
 often mad, devices of the barons to force him into 
 keeping his word, or to punish him for the violation 
 of it — a very hopeless, ineffectual conflict of acid and 
 alkali which could never combine, till by some means or 
 other that third element found its way into the mixture, 
 till it was perceived that those Commons, those English 
 churls, must speak somehow in the Parliament if there was 
 to be anything done in it, if it was not to be a mere 
 battle-field between enemies who would soon have other 
 battle-fields if they had that. 
 
 Now, I do not claim for the Earl of Leicester any special 
 prescience, which enabled him to divine that, if the king 
 summoned knights of the shire and the burgesses of the 
 town to send their spokesmen to Parliament, he would 
 provide what was wanting to this constitution, what might 
 lieal this disorder. I have no proof that any such thoughts 
 occurred to him. He may not have devised the plan, or 
 circumstances of which he knew nothing may have sug- 
 gested it to him. It is foolish to speculate about motives, 
 and imagine elaborate reasonings for any given action. 
 The motives may have been better or worse than they look 
 to us through the mist of six centuries. Reasonings justify
 
 REPRESENTATION DISTASTEFUL. 45 
 
 an action when it is done, they seldom lead to the doing of 
 it. But it would not seem to me strange that an enlight- 
 ened foreigner, who had had many opportunities of observ- 
 ing the temper both of the king and the nobles, especially 
 if he was intimate with the most intelligent and disinter- 
 ested Englishmen, should have perceived more clearly than 
 a native what might be needful for the reformation and 
 pacification of the State. His popularity must have had 
 some ground. The Commons would not have loved him 
 as they did, if he had not given them a new position in 
 the State, if he had not vindicated rights for them which 
 they had never been able to vindicate for themselves. 
 There is surely no improbability in such an opinion ; 
 though I care much more for the fact itself, than for any 
 discussions about the author of it. 
 
 If we pass from the thirteenth century to the fourteenth, 
 from the reign of Henry III. to that of Edward I., we may 
 begin to suspect that all our conclusions on this subject have 
 been mistaken ; that the Commons really gained nothing by 
 the revolution under Leicester; that it Avas a torment 
 rather than a blessing to them, to have the right of 
 choosing representatives either for burghs or . counties. 
 In that period the scene of the dialogue between the 
 [Merchant and the Friar, to which I alluded before, is hud. 
 Sir Francis Palgrave brings Bacon and Marco Polo to the 
 shire oak. The Sheriff is about to read King Edward's 
 writ for calling a Parliament. His appearance causes the
 
 46 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 greatest dismay. An abbot, who is served with it, rides 
 off at full speed to avoid attendance on his duty. The 
 knight who is elected by the freeholders, chiefly by way 
 of punishment, also flies, taking refuge in the sanctuary 
 of the Chiltern Hundreds. The whole transaction appears 
 to be utterly unwelcome to those who are engaged in it. 
 "We ask ourselves with wonder how the man could ever 
 become a hero who inflicted such a curse upon those whom 
 he pretended to benefit. Then we are transported to the 
 Parliament House itself. There indeed we hear of peti- 
 tions presented and grievances considered and redressed. 
 But it is the king who listens to the cries that go up from 
 the sufferers. He has a body of Triers for examining and 
 considering what help can be given in all cases of com- 
 plaint. He has a claim to be popular. The representa- 
 tives of the Commons seem to exist for the purpose of 
 laying burdens on them. They are called together be- 
 cause taxes must be imposed — that is their special business 
 — surely not one which is likely to buy them golden 
 opinions of the class to which they belong. 
 
 All those statements I accept on the authority of so well 
 informed and excellent a judge. If he had not been com- 
 posing a political pamphlet in the form of a mediaeval 
 romance — if he had been treating this part of our annals 
 with the carefulness which he bestowed on the Norman age 
 — he might have combined some other facts with them, and 
 have presented them in a somewhat different perspective.
 
 THE ENGLISH JUSTINIAN. 47 
 
 But in themselves they are very valuable, and are such as 
 we might easily credit from internal evidence, though they 
 had not such learned corroboration. 
 
 Prince Edward, we know, spent the latter years of his 
 father's reign in an expedition to Palestine. He must 
 have had many things to ponder during his exile besides 
 his chances of conquering the Mussulman — must have re- 
 flected on his father's blunders, on his deposition, on the 
 course which it would behove him to take, that he might 
 maintain something more of the dignity of a sovereign, and 
 secure a class of more submissive subjects. A man he 
 was, undoubtedly, of clear intellect, capable of profiting by 
 misfortunes, with more kingly qualities than any of his 
 predecessors since Henry II., perhaps since the Conqueror. 
 If it was good for him to have the prestige of a knight in 
 the Holy Land, he also deemed it good — so we are told — 
 to spend a certain time at Bologna, the great University 
 for Jurisprudence. There he would undoubtedly be com- 
 plimented on his legal astuteness, and would receive 
 many sagacious hints from admirers of the imperial code, 
 as to the course which it behoved a monarch to pursue, 
 in making it understood that the law issued from him, 
 and that he was in no sense its servant. Which hints 
 Edward would duly and silently lay to heart, not without 
 a suspicion that he could manage his own people better 
 than any Italian professor could teach him to do it. He 
 would have thought, no doubt, how inconvenient a set of
 
 48 THE AVORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 legislators with, local feelings and interests would be to him ; 
 how specially they would interfere with his purpose of 
 establishing a general code for the whole land — of break- 
 ing down the customs and traditions of particular races. 
 But when he found, on coming home, that the name 
 of Leicester was still dear to the commons, that it 
 was joined to songs, which might live as long as those 
 in which French minstrels had celebrated the glories of 
 Eichard — he may have deemed it the more prudent 
 course to accept his position, not to question the revolu- 
 tionary origin of the new* representation, rather to adopt it 
 into his own system of government, only taking care that 
 it should be as disagreeable as possible to those who had 
 hailed it as a boon. From the monarch should come all 
 grace, all redress of wrong-doings ; the knights of the 
 shire, the burgesses of the town, should be only thought 
 of as a machine for extracting money for the use of the 
 State from those who were most anxious to keep it for 
 their own use. Such a policy would be in strict accord- 
 ance with what we know of this monarch. Just as he 
 tricked the Welsh into the acknowledgment of a prince of 
 his blood — just as he taught the Scots to despise the native 
 monarch, whom he had turned into a tributary — so he 
 would cause the English to loathe the food for which they 
 had craved, and to esteem simple subjection to his will 
 much better than any freedom. And thus we should have 
 a full explanation of the scenes under the shire oak and
 
 DE TALLAGIO NON CONCEDENDO. 49 
 
 in the palace at Westminster, which Sir Francis Palgrave 
 has so graphically depicted. 
 
 The policy was very ingenious. And like most ingeni- 
 ous policy, it proved abortive. The king was not found 
 to be the source of all grace. It was not found that taxes 
 were only laid on by the Parliament. He laid them on 
 without consulting his barons or the citizens. Barons, eccle- 
 siastics, citizens, rose against his exactions. Another rebel- 
 lion threatened the land. That able monarch used the wit 
 which was always at his command — used his strength — 
 to maintain his prerogative, and to put down the resistance 
 which became daily more organised. It was proposed that 
 certain grave sentences should be added to the charter, 
 of which this was the first : — " No tallage or aid shall hence- 
 forth be laid or levied by us or our heirs in this our realm 
 without the good-will and common consent of the arch- 
 bishops, bishops, and other prelates — the earls, barons, 
 knights, burgesses, and other freemen in our realm." A 
 Parliament was summoned to discuss the proposition. It 
 contained all the elements of a Parliament. But the king 
 was in Flanders. He had not called it. The meeting of 
 its members was as much a defiance of him, as the meet- 
 ing of the barons at Eunnymede was a defiance of his 
 grandfather. He consented to their demands. Of course, 
 when he returned he withdrew his consent. The demands 
 were renewed in a Parliament which he had summoned. 
 There were concessions and evasions. The king asked the
 
 50 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 pope to cancel his oath. But the leek was at last fairly 
 eaten. Dr Lingard, I think, does not exaggerate when he 
 says that we scarcely owe more to Stephen Langton and 
 the barons who won the charter, than to Archbishop Win- 
 chelsey, the Earl of Hereford, and the Earl of Norfolk, who 
 were the instruments of establishing the sole right of Par- 
 liament to grant supplies for the king's necessities. 
 
 This privilege, it may be said, was won for the commons, 
 not by them. The nobles and the prelates secured the 
 addition to the charter, as well as its original clauses, 
 though one as much as the other were for the good of the 
 whole land. The objection is a sound one ; if we had only 
 the records of the reign of Edward I., there might be nothing 
 to diminish the weight of it. Nay, if I looked at these 
 events merely as establishing what is called " a parliament- 
 ary government," I might join with those who sneer at the 
 importance which historians have attached to them. I do 
 not undervalue the blessing of a real king such as Edward 
 had the capacity of being and such as he sometimes was ; 
 or the obstacle which a set of turbulent counsellors might 
 often have been to the execution of wise plans. But it has 
 been proved again and again, that the false derivation of the 
 name " king" which connects it with can-ning or cunning, 
 will be realised in fact ; that craft, in the sense of mere 
 power, or in the sense which it bears amongst us, will be 
 his idol ; that his life will become a very ignominious as 
 well as very mischievous example to his land ; if there is
 
 THE LORDS WORKING FOR THE COMMONS. 51 
 
 not some very distinct and emphatic voice which reminds 
 him that a throne stands upon truth, not lies. Here was 
 the blessing of those baronial checks upon the royal power 
 which we have begun in our enlightenment to regard with 
 a certain indifference or contempt. And there was a far 
 greater blessing in reserve for the land. The barons spirit- 
 ual and temporal were unconsciously labouring for a class 
 which might prove the most effectual counteraction to their 
 tyranny, which might support a really wise king in pur- 
 poses that they were inclined to frustrate. Their assertion 
 of the privileges of Parliament, if not yet regarded as an 
 assertion of the privileges of the Commons' House of Par- 
 liament, would soon acquire that force. For there was a 
 new strength in the Commons, which would speedily repre- 
 sent itself in the knights and burgesses who occupied their 
 chamber. 
 
 To what causes may this new strength be traced 1 I 
 have spoken of the Mendicant Friars, and of the immense 
 power which they exerted in every country of Europe. 
 That England was not an exception, the enthusiasm of 
 Grostete for them is a sufficient proof; that there was 
 something specially antagonistic to them in our English 
 life, his case is also a proof. Nothing, doubtless, was more 
 wanted in England than some testimony to the existence 
 of a fellowship which was not bounded by its seas; no- 
 thing was more wanted than some testimony to its great 
 lords and proprietors that the serfs on the soil, the slaves
 
 52 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 in the houses, were of the same flesh and blood with them, 
 and had a portion in the highest blessings which they could 
 claim. This testimony the friars bore ; it was effectual, for 
 it was true. But there was a negative side as well as a 
 positive side in their teaching. They not only spoke for 
 a universal society, they spoke against a national society. 
 They not only honoured the poorest beggar, they dishon- 
 oured whatever elevates the citizen above the beggar. They 
 scorned the order of the land as if it were something vulgar 
 and secular ; they levelled themselves to the most vulgar 
 and secular habits of those among whom they went. Hence 
 they provoked some indignation in those who were already 
 an organised and conspicuous part of the commonwealth, 
 an indignation qualified by the hope that they would help 
 to make those who were not admitted into it content 
 with their position. But they excited an ever-growing 
 disgust in those who were aspiring to be a part of the 
 commonwealth, who were already exercising some of the 
 functions of citizens in their municipabities ; and they 
 excited a similar disgust in those who were trying to 
 educate this class of their countrymen, to show them how 
 they might fulfil their common duties better, and to give 
 them higher aspirations. The English citizens and the 
 better part of the secular clergy had equal reasons for sus- 
 pecting and disliking the friars. Nor had they yet so far 
 conquered the Universities that there was not a strong 
 party capable of being stirred to activity, who looked upon
 
 THE COMMONS ACQUIRING A SOUL. 53 
 
 them as intruders. Several of the colleges at Oxford were 
 established chiefly to counteract their influence. 
 
 Now, the education of the commons of England in the 
 reign of Edward I. is mainly due to the union of these 
 influences, Wycliffe is the man who is taken, and rightly 
 taken, as the exponent of them. No one combined so re- 
 markably the three characters of the university schoolman, 
 the defender of the royal power against the papal, the 
 secular priest or teacher of the commons. The three func- 
 tions cannot be separated, though the first belonged espe- 
 cially to the opening of his career, the last to the close of 
 it. All are connected with opposition to the Friars. The 
 real work of his life — the translation of the Bible — would 
 have been impossible for one who had not had the Latin 
 discipline of a university and the English discipline of a 
 provincial town; I may add, for one who had not acquired 
 the Old- Testament feelings respecting the sacredness of a 
 nation's life and history. In these feelings lay most of the 
 power of the man. If the book did more than any 
 teacher to keep them alive, it would not have been listened 
 to or understood if they had not been already awakened 
 in the English farmer and artisan. 
 
 But though Wycliffe explains to us better perhaps than 
 any one the process which was at work in our Commons, 
 it would be a mistake to separate him from a multitude 
 of influences that were acting in the same direction. 
 Unquestionably his translation struck the hour, just as
 
 5i THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 Leicester struck it by his writ. And the writ would, I 
 apprehend, have proved very ineffectual for its purpose 
 without the translation. But the " Vision of Peirs' Plough- 
 man on the Malvern Hills," had shown what the teachers 
 of the commons were thinking about ; how full they were 
 of political and social grievances, how full of the sense of 
 a political and social order ; how these grievances and this 
 sense of order blended with all their religion ; what an un- 
 speakable discontent they had conceived with much of what 
 was passing under that name ; how they clung to the con- 
 viction of a Divine government, which would in some way 
 or other set the abuses of the world right. Our literature, 
 our poetry especially, is born amidst these throes. And it 
 is emphatically the literature, the poetry of the commons. 
 You must allow me to be pedantical in the use of that 
 word. It was not at present the literature of those who 
 called themselves the people. The court had nothing to 
 do with it. The baronial halls knew nothing of it. The 
 higher ecclesiastics heard of it first to scorn it ; then 
 began to tremble at it. The pure schoolmen, those who 
 had not like Wycliffe come out into the air, could not con- 
 ceive that it had any significance. Among the commons, 
 it had originated ; they listened to it with open ears ; slowly 
 it was giving shape to a number of strange impressions 
 which they had received from the past, to others which 
 were coming to them from the events of their own 
 times.
 
 THE REPRESENTATIVES AND THE REPRESENTED. 55 
 
 That the wars of Edward III. compelled him to have 
 continual resort to parliaments ; that in his reign the 
 composition of the houses and their relations to each other 
 began to be understood ; that the practice at their meet- 
 ings acquired a certain uniformity ; that the knights and bur- 
 gesses saw how needful it was to work together ; that their 
 complaints of grievances took the form of petitions, but 
 that they denied the legality of any proclamation which 
 was made without their assent ; that their power, therefore, 
 was growing steadily ; that it was manifested in many 
 of the beneficial statutes of the reign, especially in those 
 respecting the papal "provisions;" these are admitted 
 facts which few historians care to dispute. What I desire 
 is, that we should associate them more directly and more 
 closely than they have been associated, with that other 
 class of equally notorious facts to which I have just ad- 
 verted. The House might have been called together by 
 the authority of the king or the suggestion of Leicester. It 
 might have been in strict harmony with a previously existing 
 agricidtural or municipal constitution. It might have been 
 sanctioned and made use of by the kings. It might have 
 won privileges by the intervention of nobles resisting ex- 
 actions on their order. Still it would have been a mere 
 cipher ; unless it had been turned into an engine of 
 oppression, or an engine of rebellion. The nature and 
 worth of the representation depended wholly and absolutely 
 on that which was to be represented. If that was a dead
 
 56 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 thing, a mere fossil relic of Saxon times, to which an arti- 
 ficial momentary impulse had been given by a revolution, 
 there might be all imaginable contrivances to make the re- 
 presentative assembly work ; it might be constructed and 
 reconstructed ; it might acquire powers and lose them. It 
 could mean nothing. But if the commons acquired a real 
 moral life — if there were a soul in them — then all events 
 would conspire to give that soul a true and effectual expres- 
 sion. Then the wars of Edward III., though undertaken to 
 maintain his own title, would tend to bind together Norman 
 and Saxon in the common English name ; though never so 
 purely chivalric and contemptuous of churls, he would give 
 strength to the churls. Then let there be ever so many 
 contrivances to make the representation a nullity — to make 
 the king or the nobles the real electors — it would assert its 
 own distinctness, it would do what they could not do, Avould 
 speak what they could not speak, would prove itself essen- 
 tial to their existence, and to the existence of the whole 
 land. 
 
 If the House of Commons had owed its strength to the 
 wisdom of the monarch, or to his skill in devising a counter- 
 action to the power of the barons, its position in the reign 
 of Richard II. would be inexplicable. Under the weakest of 
 all rulers — that ruler who, according to Shakespeare's splen- 
 did irony — an irony true in spirit, if not in the letter — 
 could talk of the divinity that doth hedge a king at the 
 very moment when he was about to let the sceptre drop
 
 DOCTRINES OP EQUALITY. 57 
 
 from his hand — there were parliaments which earned a 
 better name from their own age, and did more for after 
 ages than any which had preceded them ; and the virtue 
 of those parliaments certainly lay not in the higher, but in 
 the lower House. For it represented those freeholders and 
 freemen who had caught a new sense of their dignity and 
 responsibility from the reforming teachers. The import- 
 ance of those teachers as a political force is evident from 
 the use which John of Gaunt sought to make of them. 
 They may have been concerned — Chaucer appears certainly 
 to have been concerned — in the insurrection of John of Nor- 
 thampton, which was a strictly civic insurrection, and was 
 probably instigated by the Duke of Lancaster. It would 
 be a great mistake, I apprehend, to connect them with the 
 other more memorable insurrection of the same reign. If 
 Wat Tyler did, as we are always taught, adopt those 
 phrases and watchwords about the equality of men which 
 became mighty in an after period — which had perhaps 
 already been seized by the Jacquerie in France — he may 
 far more easily have learnt them from the Mendicants 
 than from their enemies. The citizen class would repudiate 
 instead of hailing that language. Their religious teachers, 
 in Richard's reign, still connected respect for the throne 
 with opposition to the pope. Wat Tyler's movement is 
 important as showing that there was a class which the 
 House of Commons did not represent, which might some 
 day become organised and demand to be represented in it ;
 
 58 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 it is only an indistinct background in the picture of the 
 age wherein it occurred. 
 
 But there are prominent figures in that picture which we 
 ought not to overlook. The earliest literature of England, 
 I have said, is the literature of the commons. It expresses 
 the religious discontents and aspirations of the commons. 
 Chaucer links their literature to that of the nobles and 
 the court, and so becomes the poet of the English people. 
 Contemplated from one side, he is under the patronage of 
 John of Gaunt ; he has a kind of laureateship ; he writes 
 legends of fair women. He is half French, but in an 
 age when the French tale or the Latin tale, the French 
 or the Latin song, must become English, even that nobles 
 and dames may listen to it. And he can make it English, 
 for he is essentially the English citizen. Therein lies his 
 power. His melody is his charm; his love of fact, his 
 sympathy with the forms and phases of ordinary English 
 existence, his humorous appreciation of them, give all the 
 substance to his poems. The man of the commons has not 
 become the man of the court; he has only learnt just 
 enough of its lore to make him capable of entering more 
 thoroughly into the richness and beauty of homely life. 
 He has been called a Wyclifnte. He is not that. He is 
 simply an Englishman. He hates friars, because they are 
 not English and not manly. He loves the poor parson, 
 because he is English and manly. He and all his heroes 
 and heroines are going to the shrine of the great English
 
 CHAUCER. 59 
 
 saint who had helped them when they were sick. It never 
 occurs to him that there is anything superstitious in 
 such a pilgrimage. He never thinks of asking whether 
 Becket was a very dutiful subject of the king in his day, 
 whether he preferred the monarch or the pope. These 
 are merely antiquarian questions, or questions of formal 
 divinity. Becket had acquired a national position, and a 
 national sanctity ; if friars, monks, and pardoners consented 
 to pay him homage, that is accepted as a confession on 
 their part that they have certain obligations to the country 
 in which they dwell. The Prologue to the Canterbury 
 Tales, the Tales themselves, belong strictly to the four- 
 teenth century, to the century at the commencement of 
 which Dante asserted the glory of the vulgar speech ; the 
 century of Van Artevelde, and of the fraternity on the 
 Lake of Lucerne ; the century in which the civic life stood 
 up side by side with the chivalric life, and showed that it 
 could contribute at least as much to the enduring spiritual 
 and intellectual treasures of every land. It is emphatically 
 the age in which the commons of England began to show 
 that there could be no English people apart from them. 
 
 The fifteenth century despised its predecessor. It 
 assumed a general European character. Battles for na- 
 tional and personal life, for the right to think, to speak, to 
 breathe, are lost in projects of reconciliation, in the dream 
 of some great republic of letters in which men of refinement 
 shall have their own way, and be the dictators of mankind.
 
 60 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 I do not for a moment undervalue this period, or the ines- 
 timable benefits which it has bequeathed to after times. 
 Thus, in England, it is the period which gave birth to the 
 English public schools. If we did not participate like 
 other nations in the great revival, if we were too busy 
 with wars and tumults to be ready for taking much interest 
 in Greek letters or Greek art, there was at least the soil 
 prepared in which these might be planted and might 
 flourish hereafter. Prelates and kings were rendering that 
 service to coming ages, if they were ever so much inclined 
 to bind them by the maxims of their own. 
 
 But I cannot discover that the education and the repre- 
 sentation of the people were as much in harmony with 
 each other — were as much acting and reacting on each other 
 — in the Lancastrian period as in that which preceded it. 
 The policy of the descendants of John of Gaunt was alto- 
 gether unlike his. He was in sympathy with the great 
 religious movement of the commons. At all events he 
 saw his wisdom in favouring it. The usurping monarchs 
 of his house saw their wisdom in crushing it, in enlisting 
 as far as possible the ecclesiastics on their side, in making 
 them their tools, in persecuting for them. To their period 
 belong two classes of statutes which would seem directly 
 opposed to each other; the statutes for prohibiting all 
 intercourse with Rome under the severest penalties — the 
 statutes for burning heretics. They were really parts of 
 the same system. One was the price paid for the other.
 
 A REVOLUTION WITHIN AND WITHOUT. 61 
 
 The clergy made themselves the servants of the monarch on 
 condition that the monarchs should do their work. While 
 this state of things was going on, the power of the House 
 of Commons, as a mere branch of the legislature, was 
 steadily increasing. The power of the House of Com- 
 mons, as representing the true mind of the commons, was, 
 I conceive, as steadily diminishing. Or, to speak more 
 accurately, that mind was becoming more bewildered and 
 unstable, losing its tone, even changing its convictions. 
 Men who had followed Wycliffe as the English teacher, the 
 champion of our life and freedom against the foreigners, 
 became a sect of Lollards, looking with discontent upon 
 the rest of the nation, finding ever new and just reasons 
 for complaining of ecclesiastical oppression and ecclesiastical 
 tyranny, gradually learning to think all government and all 
 property secular, if not devilish. The other classes were 
 offering much justification for these opinions, whilst they had 
 also abundant excuses for violent measures to put them down. 
 A frightful confusion, such as could only issue in a frightful 
 civil war ; a war not of principles, or even of classes, but of 
 adverse families, which had lost all sense of a common 
 country, or only regarded it as fair spoil for the strongest. 
 Neither regal government nor parliamentary govern- 
 ment could avert this ruin. Neither regal government 
 nor parliamentary government could provide any adequate 
 restoration from it. All the forms of a constitution had 
 worked themselves out in the Plantagenet period. There
 
 62 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 were kings, lords, and commons, if the names could pro- 
 duce any results. But what can names avail when those 
 who bear them are utterly unconscious of any obligation 
 implied in them to each other, or to themselves ? There are 
 those who will say that a power was provided in this time 
 which might redress the evils of' the age, though kings 
 and parliaments could not. The printing press was born. 
 Surely a wonderful infant, to be received, if its descent and 
 capacities were known, with thanksgivings and processions ; 
 to be hailed especially by those who prize what is common 
 above what is rare, who count that more blessed which can 
 diffuse itself everywhere, than that which can be appropriated 
 by a few. The more one thinks of the low origin of the 
 press, the more amazing and divine the gift appears. But 
 we must recollect always that it is a representative, not in 
 itself a restorative, institution. It can only exhibit what 
 it finds. Its worth depends on the worth of that which is 
 put into it. If a man or an age has nothing to communi- 
 cate, the smaller the circumference through which that 
 nothing spreads, the better. If a MS. contains no life, 
 what is the good of a machinery to diffuse it ? What one 
 hopes and believes is, that so magnificent an instrument has 
 been revealed to men, because there are words which it is 
 good for men of all orders to be acquainted with, which 
 deserve the most enduring letters to set them forth, be- 
 cause they are meant to endure. 
 
 According to Shakespeare, the spirits of those who had
 
 THE NEW AGE. G3 
 
 been slain in the civil wars, or by the axe of Richard, 
 stood at the couch of Henry of Richmond, on the eve of 
 the battle of Bosworth, to sing the advent of a new era 
 which he was to introduce. I doubt not the spirits were 
 right in their prediction. But we do not, at the first con- 
 templation of his reign, discover how it was fulfilled. 
 Many tokens there are surely that an old and exhausted 
 time has passed away. The factions have fought out their 
 battle and are thoroughly wearied. There shall be no 
 more a feudal ascendancy : the king has determined that. 
 So far as he can determine, he will have officials who shall 
 do his work in the best way that it can be done; men 
 shall not do it merely because they hold certain estates, 
 or have succeeded to certain families. The priests who 
 are without hereditary honours, or children to whom they 
 may leave what they hold — will they not serve the purpose 
 best 1 Will they not be on the whole the most dexterous 
 servants of the crown ? Then, again, trade — ought not 
 that to receive all encouragement 1 If it can be fostered, 
 will not the glory of the mere landowner decline? Are 
 there not signs that it is advancing itself even without our 
 help 1 Has not that strange Genoese adventurer accom- 
 plished his wild project, though monarchs frowned upon 
 it, though it looked monstrous to all judicious men ? That 
 certainly will be one of the characteristics of the new time 
 which is coming. Will Money be the great power in that 
 time 1 Will all things in heaven and earth bow before it ?
 
 G4 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 This, perhaps, was the belief of the first Tudor king, 
 oftentimes his most settled belief. If it should turn out to 
 be a true belief, one may doubt whether the spirits who 
 spoke such words of comfort to him before the battle would 
 not have been wise to confine their messages to Richard — 
 only to tell of the misery that had been and of the punish- 
 ment which it had brought forth. In that case — if the 
 tyranny of force in the Plantagenet period is only to be 
 supplanted by the tyranny of gold in the Tudor — one may 
 be sure that the representatives of the commons will re- 
 present that tyranny and the subjection to it. But there 
 may be some other power stronger than this. It may be 
 that both king and lords will find out that there is 
 something stronger. Perhaps the commons will discover 
 that they cannot be freeholders or freemen unless they 
 confess something to be stronger. If that should be so, 
 the spirits may yet be right. The Tudor age may burn 
 up what is vile and refuse in the Plantagenet age, if it 
 leaves a deposit of its own which will require to be 
 also burnt up. It may establish what was good in the 
 Plantagenet age, and discover some further good. The 
 Commons' House may represent the country better than 
 it did under the former dynasty, because it has something 
 higher and nobler to represent. Commerce, printing, the 
 old and «new schools, the old and new literature, may all 
 give their help towards the education of the people.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The House of Commons in the Tudor Period. 
 
 A PARADOX came before us in the last chapter, to 
 ■^- which I. must again draw your attention. The friars, 
 I said, in the reign of Henry III., appealed to the lowest 
 masses of the land, treated them as having rights in a 
 divine and universal society, trampled upon the pride of 
 wealth and the exclusiveness of family. Their preaching 
 made its way here as everywhere. After a while we per- 
 ceived a vehement opposition to them. Whence did it pro- 
 ceed 1 Not from the nobles, whom it seemed to depress ; 
 but from the commons, whom it would seem to exalt. Not 
 the dignified ecclesiastic, but the poor parsons of the town 
 lifted their voices against maxims and practices which put 
 contempt on riches and honoured beggary. 
 
 This contradiction explained itself to us by degrees. 
 We found that there had always been in the Saxon churls 
 the seeds of a national organisation, the craving for a place 
 in the national order. They had been crushed ; but the 
 domestic life, the municipal life, had never perished in 
 them. They had been gathering strength. The old names 
 of the freeman and the freeholder were still dear, and were 
 
 E
 
 66 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 recovering something of their old force. The language of 
 their forefathers, deepened and enriched by foreign in- 
 fluences, was proving its power, was subduing its con- 
 querors. The native priests who were most in contact 
 with the towns had shared these feelings. Their morality, 
 their divine messages, had mingled with the sense of 
 citizenship, had quickened it, and been quickened by it. 
 Citizen life was felt to be a sacred life : the man could 
 not be separated from the good citizen. To all such belief, 
 the friars gave a rude shock. England and its traditions 
 were nothing to them. The family life was nothing to 
 them. The desire of the citizen not to be a dependent on 
 the charity of others was mocked by their own profession, 
 which seemed to say that the greatest holiness was ex- 
 hibited in this dependence. The war became fiercer day 
 by day. The virtues and learning which distinguished a 
 number of the friars — which have given them a wide- 
 spread and enduring reputation — were not of the kind 
 which the English commons could appreciate. The vices 
 which appeared in a number of these friars came directly 
 under their eyes, disturbed their family peace, outraged 
 their consciences. The manliness of the citizen, his self- 
 conceit, his respect for the money which he had saved or 
 won, were equally scandalised by those levelling notions, 
 in which we who look at them from a distance may 
 see much to admire. And so the whole life and order 
 of the English commons shaped themselves in antago-
 
 THE FRIAR AND THE CITIZEN. 67 
 
 nism to these instructors. Had it been a merely nega- 
 tive antagonism, nothing could have come of it, except 
 insular vanity, a detestation of foreigners, an impatience 
 of all Latin lore, a disbelief in all pretensions to faith, 
 in all acts of sacrifice for the good of other men. But 
 it became associated "with faith, with learning, with the 
 most genuine unobtrusive sacrifices. The parson was 
 celebrated by Chaucer especially in contrast to the friar, 
 for his simple trust, for his freedom from self-indulgence, 
 for his sympathy with the poorest of his flock. The old 
 learning was used to provide a Bible for the people. A 
 new native literature grew up under the shadow of it. 
 
 How much these feelings affected the House of Commons 
 during the fourteenth century, and were kept alive by it, 
 I endeavoured to point out. I could not overlook a change 
 which became evident in the fifteenth. The Wicklifnte 
 doctrines, which had influenced the commons so strongly, 
 had also been a defence of the king's prerogative against 
 the papal assumptions. But the Lancastrian princes dis- 
 claimed this alliance ; and though as jealous as their 
 predecessors of any Koman ascendency, encouraged the 
 higher ecclesiastics in putting down the followers of 
 "Wickliffe as disturbers of the peace. A corresponding 
 change in them became almost inevitable. Treated as a 
 sect, they assumed the habits and title of a sect. Though 
 still numerous, perhaps prevalent in the citizen class, they 
 no longer appear as citizens. The contempt for property,
 
 G8 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 the indifference to national life, which had been character- 
 istic of their opponents, began to show itself in them. 
 They continually gave their enemies an excuse for treating 
 them as the foes of civil no less than ecclesiastical order. 
 The Parliaments were not unwilling to pass laws against 
 them, even to let the spiritual courts exercise their own 
 cruel vengeance upon them. 
 
 Another phenomenon of the opposite kind was seen not 
 in England but in Italy, at the close of the fifteenth and 
 the beginning of the sixteenth century. A Dominican 
 monk appeared not merely as the impugner of ecclesiastical 
 luxury and oppression — that would have been in harmony 
 with the earliest traditions of his order — but as the organ- 
 iser of a city ; as the champion of civic freedom. The 
 story of Savonorola in Florence may be claimed by Do- 
 minicans as a testimony that if they have sometimes been 
 signalised as persecutors, there is a side of their minds 
 which is in strong sympathy with freedom, and which 
 treats it as inseparable from faith and morality. One 
 would rejoice that any of them should vindicate that part 
 of their heritage. If Protestants are jealous of their pre- 
 tensions, they may discover in the weaknesses of the great 
 Florentine preacher, how much Italian freedom suffered 
 in his hands through his estrangement from those domestic 
 tics out of which the life of the citizen unfolds itself. 
 
 We had no Florence in England, and we could have no 
 Savonorola — least of all in the Tudor period. For that
 
 THE TUDOE PRINCES. 69 
 
 was a time when separate cities were becoming more and 
 more merged in the whole nation ; when the central power 
 of the king was becoming greater than it had ever been. 
 The family factions had worn themselves out. Henry 
 VII., I remarked before, was fully resolved not to be 
 merely the first baron of his realm. To all appearance he 
 might become a merely arbitrary sovereign ; using the new 
 instrument which commerce and civilisation had put into 
 his hands, using his own dexterity, to rob the country of its 
 native strength, whilst he professed only to be uprooting 
 its feudalism. He was in no sympathy with the Commons 
 except as being the enemy of the nobles ; that which had 
 been most strong in them he would keep down to please 
 the ecclesiastics who were his servants. He did not care 
 much for the old learning or for the new. 
 
 Henry VIII. was surely not disposed to be less a king 
 than his father. But a greater geniality, a preference of 
 ostentation to the amassing of money, a love for the old 
 learning as well as the new, made an amazing difference in 
 his influence upon all classes of his people. Many springs 
 which had been dried up must have been let loose at his 
 accession. The chief minister might not be popular with 
 nobles or commons ; but he had caught the splendour of 
 the popes who believed that they might rule Christendom 
 by being heads of a commonwealth of letters. He would 
 raise universities ; he suspected that monasteries had done 
 their work ; he knew, at all events, that they needed refor-
 
 70 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 mation. A reformation, doubtless, lie would have been 
 well disposed to give the land ; such a reformation as 
 scholars would have thought sufficient then, as many of 
 them would prefer to that which actually took place now. 
 I apprehend his reformation would have stirred no depths 
 of human thought and belief, and could therefore have 
 really redressed no great abuses. It would have added to 
 the surface of English civilisation ; it would have removed 
 some of the absurdities which Erasmus had exposed ; it 
 would have made corruptions less odious and glaring. But 
 it would have left the commons much as it found them ; 
 it would not have brought out the heart and life of the 
 English citizen. That reformation which was not shaped 
 according to man's speculations, but according to God's 
 order, was strictly national. It did not, indeed, begin from 
 us. The spark which was lighted iu one of the cities of 
 the empire was that which blazed up in our land ; yet the 
 king who denounced Luther, and whom Luther denounced 
 — the king who to the last had no sympathy with his 
 followers or with him — was the centre of the movement. 
 The men who had most entered into Luther's mental con- 
 flict, who clung most to his watchword, looked on the 
 king as their champion, even when they had most excuse 
 for suspecting him as their tyrant. 
 
 When King Henry asserted his supremacy and cast off 
 the pope's supremacy, we often say that he broke through 
 the traditions of centuries. Undoubtedly Sir Thomas
 
 STEPS TO REFORMATION. 71 
 
 More felt so ; perhaps the king felt so himself, since he 
 had within a few years identified the cause of the mon- 
 archs of Europe with the cause of their spiritual father. 
 And yet he was also maintaining the traditions of cen- 
 turies. Sir Thomas More could not have denied that he 
 was walking in the steps of his Norman and Plantagenet 
 fathers, if he had gone one step beyond them. Henry 
 must have often strengthened himself by precedents drawn 
 from their doings and their maxims, even when he seemed 
 to be most departing from his own. But how could he 
 take that one step in advance of them ? how could he 
 actually cut the thread which they had been continually 
 trying to untie 1 Because it was no longer a contest of 
 king against pope ; because there was a strong convic- 
 tion in the land which "demanded the severance of the tie 
 as being a greater bondage upon people than upon kings. 
 When I use the phrase " strong conviction," I do not mean 
 the conviction of a majority, I do not mean the conviction 
 of the highest men in the land. Very few laymen or eccle- 
 siastics in the upper stations of society were possessed by 
 it ; if the poor of the land had been polled, they would 
 unquestionably have been on the side of the convents. 
 It might have been said, it was said, by many an eccle- 
 siastic, that the passion for reform dwelt only in a few 
 students of the universities, whose heads had been turned 
 by reading the Dialogues of Erasmus, or listening to 
 his lectures on the Greek Testament ; by some who had
 
 72 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 caught the Wittemberg fever, by a few Lollards of the 
 towns, whose fathers and grandfathers had heard Wycliffe's 
 Bible read out of MSS. copies, who had themselves 
 evaded the vigilance of the courts by obtaining it in print. 
 The calculation of the priests about the insignificance of 
 the voices from which the cry against them arose was 
 correct — only two items were overlooked in it. One was 
 the fact that the cry arose out of human spirits, which 
 must obtain deliverance in some way from fetters with 
 which they were sure that men and not God had bound 
 them ; the other was that these men, however little they 
 understood each other — to whatever different classes or 
 schools they belonged — really expressed the mind of the 
 English nation, not of any sect or school. And therefore 
 they could range themselves with no sect or school. They 
 might be passing through the very agonies of conscience 
 Avhich Luther had passed through, but they were not 
 Lutherans. Some of them might have learnt much through 
 Wycliffe, but they were not Wycliffites. The king, who 
 hated sects and foreign innovations, and was shaking off 
 a foreign yoke, was their natural head. Him they could 
 recognise as God's own gift to them. He was the point 
 of union which they required. He made them feel that 
 they were champions for the nation against its oppressors. 
 His faith might not be theirs, but their faith sustained 
 him. He might suspect, even persecute, those who 
 cherished their creed. Still they were sure that it was a
 
 THE KING AND THE COMMONS. 73 
 
 faithful act — a protest against the most unpatriotic and 
 immoral tendencies of the Church — to claim him rather 
 than any favourite preacher or doctor as their leader. 
 
 In the memorable year 1529, the House of Commons 
 led the movement which issued in the greatest acts of 
 reformation. How their sympathy with the king developed 
 their own strength and freedom — how great the difference 
 is between a House which merely goes through the trade of 
 meeting and legislating, and one which represents a strong 
 conviction, I do not know where we can learn better than in 
 the following passage from Mr Froude's first volume. After 
 quoting from Hall an account of the opening of the Parlia- 
 ment, the first after the fall of Wolsey, and after giving the 
 oration in which the Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, standing 
 on the right hand of the king, set forth the causes for which 
 he had summoned them, the writer remarks : — 
 
 " The world was changing ; how swiftly, how completely 
 no one knew ; but a confusion no longer tolerable was a 
 patent fact to all men, and with a wise instinct it was 
 wished that the grievances of the nation, which had 
 accumulated through centuries, should be submitted to 
 complete ventilation, without reserve, check, or secrec} 7 . 
 For this purpose it was essential that the House should not 
 be interfered with, that they should be allowed full liberty 
 to express their wishes, and to act upon them. Accord- 
 ingly, the practice usual with ministers of undertaking the 
 direction of the proceedings was clearly on this occasion
 
 74 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 foregone. In the House of Commona, then as much as 
 now, there was in theory unrestricted liberty of discussion, 
 and free right for every member to originate whatever 
 motion he pleased. 'The discussions in the English 
 Parliament,' writes Henry himself to the Pope, 'are free 
 and unrestricted ; the Crown has no power to limit their 
 debating, or to control the votes of their members. They 
 determine everything for themselves, as the interests of the 
 commonwealth require.' But," Mr Froude goes on, " when 
 there was confidence between the Crown and the people, 
 these rights were in a great measure surrendered. The 
 ministers proposed the business which was to be transacted ; 
 and the temper of the House was usually so well understood 
 that, except when there was a demand for money, it was 
 rarely that a measure was proposed, the acceptance of which 
 was doubtful, or the nature of which could provoke debate. 
 So little jealousy or dread was in quiet times entertained 
 of the power of the Crown, and so little was a residence in 
 London to the taste of the burgess or the country gentle- 
 man, that not only were their expenses defrayed by a con- 
 siderable salary, but it was found necessary to forbid their 
 absenting themselves from the duties by a positive enact- 
 ment," ("History of England," vol. i., pp. 187, 188.) 
 
 That enactment was passed in the sixth year of Henry. 
 Mark the difference between that and the twentieth year : — 
 
 " In the composition of the House of Commons, which 
 had now assembled, no symptoms appeared of such in-
 
 THE REFORMING HOUSE. 75 
 
 difference. The election had taken place in the midst 
 of great and general excitement, and the men who were 
 chosen, if we may judge from their acts and their peti- 
 tions, were men of that broad, resolved temper, who, only 
 in times of popular effervescence, are called forth into pro- 
 minence. It would probably have been impossible for the 
 Crown to attempt dictation or repression at such a time, 
 if it had desired to do so. Under the actual circum- 
 stances its interest was to encourage the fullest expres- 
 sion of public feeling," (p. 188.) 
 
 I cannot extract the long petition "To the king, our 
 sovereign lord," which contained their statement of public 
 grievances. It is one of the great documents for the 
 history of this period, and would illustrate many points 
 of which I have been speaking. But it would draw us 
 away from the business which I have now in hand. I 
 wish you to see first how the moral feeling in the country, 
 the sense of immoral abuses which must be removed, pro- 
 duced an altogether new energy in the House of Com- 
 mons ; next, how this energy served to unite instead of 
 to sever the different parts of the constitution; how it 
 caused the king and the commons to realise their relation 
 to each other, as they had never realised it. We may 
 take in this lesson without accepting the favourable opinion 
 of Henry's character to which the eminent historian I 
 have just quoted has given the weight of his knowledge 
 and judgment. We may, if we please, hold fast to the
 
 70 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 old notion that lie was a self-willed tyrant ; the facts 
 will remain the same on that hypothesis ; and it will be 
 all the more wonderful, that, in spite of such a disposi- 
 tion, and in the very acts which might seem to gratify 
 it most, he rendered such homage to the mind of the 
 country and to the spirit as well as the form of its 
 institutions. After considering what Mr Froude has said 
 so ingeniously and ably about the executions of Sir 
 Thomas More, Ann Boleyn, and Cromwell — fully admit- 
 ting also that he is more in accordance with Shakespeare 
 than the more recent opinion is, and giving great weight 
 to the testimony of Michelet, who cannot be suspected of 
 Anglican partialities, that Henry was the most straight- 
 forward and honest of all the monarchs of his time — I 
 yet feel unable to overcome my old prejudices, or to under- 
 stand how the example of the king's domestic conduct 
 can have been otherwise than most injurious to the land. 
 Yet I do perceive that he became, by the very necessity of 
 his position, such an instructor of his people as no sove- 
 reign since the conquest had been. He was imbued, as 
 I said before, with the old education and the new. He 
 had been trained in the theology and the logic of the 
 schools, he had delighted in the conversation of his chan- 
 cellor, and had entertained Erasmus. Both kinds of 
 knowledge were equally foreign to the habits of the 
 English citizen. The king's ambition to display the 
 first had made him an anti-reformer. If he had yielded
 
 THE TEST OP THE COMBATANTS. 77 
 
 to the second he would have become a mere dilettante, 
 after the model of Francis I. But the mixture of the 
 two, the conflict of the two in his mind, after he had 
 thrown off the papal yoke, while it often gave the most 
 inconsistent appearance to his own opinions, helped to 
 counteract a number of tendencies that would have been 
 mischievous to his subjects, and to develop what was 
 most vital and most strong in them. The king was in- 
 clined to be a theological dogmatist. But his dogmatism 
 could not assume a settled form of opposition to the 
 papist or to the reformer. He was ready to curse each 
 in turn ; he really gave play to the thoughts and ener- 
 gies of each. He was obliged to accept the work which 
 they could do in raising the mind of the citizen, in 
 making him a healthier and more useful man, as the 
 test of their divinity. And it is striking to observe 
 how willingly the most distinguished men of the time, 
 though nursed in controversy, though full of the keenest 
 spirit of controversy, submitted to this test. They must 
 give signs of their own power to endure it — they must 
 show that their opponent cannot endure it. The com- 
 plaints which the reformers make of abuses in doctrine or 
 practice, must take the form of showing that the doctrines 
 were unable to form good fathers, sons, brothers, subjects,. 
 or that their promoters set up some artificial inhuman stan- 
 dard of worth instead of this. The Romanist advocates 
 charged them with injuring Christianity by overthrowing
 
 78 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 ancient traditions, and by substituting faith for good 
 works. The answer was, that there were moral com- 
 mandments of God, which were older than traditions, 
 and that the works which they disparaged were not good. 
 Both parties staked their credit on the results of their 
 teaching, upon its power to form a people. 
 
 No person illustrates the position of one party in this 
 time so well as Hugh Latimer. In the reign of Henry, 
 after he had been made Bishop of Worcester, he preached 
 a Latin sermon to his brethren in convocation. It is on 
 the children of this world, who wish to keep all things 
 dark, and the children of light, whose function is to 
 spread light. The preacher is quite aware that his hear- 
 ers would say, "The lay people, with the king at their 
 head, are the children of this world ; we are of the other 
 class." He does not the least encourage them in that 
 delusion. In the following reign he translated his ser- 
 mon, " to the intent that things well said to a few may 
 be understood of many, and do good to all those that 
 desire to understand the truth." So that I may give his 
 own nervous English : — 
 
 " The end of your convocation shall show what ye have 
 done ; the fruit that shall come of your consultation shall 
 show what generation ye be of. For what have ye done 
 hitherto, I pray you, these seven years and more ? What 
 have ye engendered? What have ye brought forth? 
 What fruit is come of your long and great assembly?
 
 LATIMBE IN CONVOCATION. 79 
 
 What are they that the people of England have been the 
 better of a hair ? or you yourselves either made accepted 
 before God, or better discharged towards the people com- 
 mitted unto your care 1 For that the people is better 
 learned and taught now, to whether of these ought we to 
 attribute it : to your industry, or to the providence of 
 God and the foreseeing of the king's grace 1 Ought we 
 to thank you, or the king's highness 1 Whether stirred 
 other first : you the king, that he might preach ; or he 
 you, by his letters, that ye should preach oftener 1 Is it 
 unknown, think you, that both ye and your curates were, 
 in a manner, by violence, forced to let books to be made, 
 not by you, but by profane and lay persons — to let them, 
 I say, be sold abroad, and read for the instruction of the 
 people ? I am bold with you ; but I speak Latin and 
 not English — to the clergy, not to the laity. I speak to 
 you being present, and not behind your backs. God is 
 my witness, I speak whatsoever is spoken of the good- 
 will that I bear you. God is my witness, which knoweth 
 my heart, and compelleth me to say that I say." 
 
 These words were spoken, as Latimer says, in the face 
 of the clergy, and not behind their backs ; still we might 
 fancy that he was seeking favour with the sovereign at 
 the expense of his brethren. There is a letter of Master 
 Latimer's to King Henry VIIL, " for restoring again the 
 free liberty of reading the Holy Scriptures," which will 
 certainly save him from this imputation. It will show,
 
 80 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 that if it was a time when men of the commons trusted 
 in their king, it was not a time when they crouched to 
 him with any cowardice : — 
 
 " Here I beseech your grace to pardon me a while, and 
 patiently to hear me a word or two ; yea, though it be so 
 as concerning your high majesty and regal power, where- 
 with Almighty God hath called your grace. There is as 
 great a difference between you and me, as between God 
 and man ; for you be here to me, and to all your subjects, 
 in God's stead, to defend, aid, and succour us in our right, 
 and so I should tremble and quake to speak to your grace. 
 But again, as concerning that you are a mortal man, in 
 danger of sin, having in you the corrupt nature of Adam, 
 in the which all we are both conceived and born, so have 
 you no less need of the merit of Christ's passion for your 
 salvation than I and other of your subjects have, which 
 be all members of the mystical body of Christ. And, 
 though you be a higher member, yet must you not disdain 
 the lesser; for, as St Paul saith, those members which 
 are taken to be most vile and had in least reputation, be 
 as necessary as the other for the preservation and keeping 
 of the body. This, most gracious king, when I considered, 
 and also your favourable and gentle nature, I was bold to 
 write this bold, homely, and simple letter unto your grace, 
 trusting that you will accept my true and faithful mind 
 even as it is." 
 
 The object of the letter is to fight against those " who
 
 APPEAL TO THE KING. 81 
 
 boast themselves to be guides and captains unto others, 
 and challenge unto themselves the knowledge of Holy 
 Scripture, yet will neither show the truth themselves, as 
 they be bound, neither suffer them that would." " They 
 will," he says, " as much as in them lieth, debar not only 
 the Word of God, which David calleth a light to direct 
 and show every man how to order his affections and lusts 
 according to the commandments of God, but also by their 
 subtle wiliness they instruct, move, and provoke in a man- 
 ner all kings in Christendom, to aid, succour, and help 
 them in this their mischief. And especially in this your 
 realm, they have blinded your liege people and subjects 
 with their laws, customs, ceremonies, and Banbury glosses, 
 and punished them with curses, excommunications, and 
 other corruptions — corrections, I would say. And now, 
 at the last, when they see that they cannot prevail against 
 the open truth, which, the more it is persecuted, the 
 more it increaseth by their tyranny, they have made it 
 treason to your noble Grace to have the Scripture in 
 English !" 
 
 This was the Reformers' battle. They invoked the 
 king's help on the side of the citizen. They urged him as 
 a king to uphold domestic morality and civil order ; to 
 put forth the Bible as the defender of both ; to put down 
 superstitions which undermined both. As long as they 
 could not call the monarch the patron of their cause — 
 while they could only reason with him as a king — so long, 
 
 F
 
 82 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 I believe, every day's experience gave new force to their 
 arguments ; if some of the bishops persecuted, Latimer 
 could avouch that " the truth increaseth more by their 
 tyrannies." 
 
 But the time arrived when the Reformers had a king 
 whom they could claim as a patron ; when they had licence 
 from his council to persecute; when the destruction of that 
 which had been dear and sacred in the eyes of the people 
 became a fashion. Then the other party could bring forth 
 their reasons with the greatest effect ; then they could pro- 
 duce evidence — to me it appears indisputable evidence — 
 that the morality of the land had been shaken, that the 
 citizen had turned the new doctrine into a reason for his 
 own ill doings and a licence for slandering and despising 
 his neighbour. Mr Froude quotes from Foxe a remon- 
 strance of Gardiner's at the beginning of the reign of 
 Edward VI., of which he says that "it was not recom- 
 mended by the maker of it, but was not the less wise in 
 itself." Most men who are not partisans will, I should 
 think, agree with this judgment. And, considering the 
 language in which later defenders of Romanism have 
 spoken of Henry, it is curious to hear the great champion 
 of it in that day saying, when he had no longer any fear 
 of his frown or hope from his smiles, that " for himself he 
 would rather be wrong with Plato than right with the 
 others ; and that if, as some alleged, Henry had but one 
 eye, and saw not God's truth perfectly, he had rather go to
 
 PROTESTANT SUCCESS. 83 
 
 heaven with one eye after him, than travel for another 
 eye with danger to lose both." 
 
 Such testimonies may go very little way in settling 
 our judgment about a historical character. But they go a 
 great way in showing how much a king might do to give 
 the different influences which were working in the com- 
 monwealth a national and not a party character ; how 
 much he might remind each party of the end for which it 
 professed to exist. I certainly feel that the bishop with 
 whom I have the least sympathy did something which the 
 one with whom I have most sympathy could not do ; 
 their common allegiance to the king and their common 
 respect for him was the bond which held them together, 
 when each would have deemed that he was doing good 
 service in exterminating the other. 
 
 A higher ruler than Henry did not permit the Keform- 
 ers or the Komanists to effect that object, though each in 
 turn was permitted to try what it could do. Most hu- 
 miliating to the victorious party was the experiment in 
 the reign of Edward VI. I do not dwell here upon the 
 other crimes of that reign, which have been so honestly 
 and admirably illustrated in Mr Froude's account of it. 
 I wish to fix your minds on one subject which directly 
 concerns the business of these Lectures, which has forced 
 itself upon us already, and which will occupy us more 
 and more as we proceed. That a people must be organic 
 — that an inorganic mass, though we may carelessly and
 
 84 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 even with a very good purpose, give it that name, can 
 never vindicate it for itself — this has been the maxim 
 from which I started, and of which I hope not to lose 
 sight. That there is always a tendency in those who are 
 organised to prevent the entrance of any who lie beyond 
 their circle within it, and that a severe penalty awaits 
 their selfishness ; that they put in peril the position which 
 they have achieved, and incur the danger of sinking them- 
 selves into an undistinguished mass ; these are lessons 
 which the Roman history taught us, and which have been 
 repeated in various passages of our own. And now came 
 a critical moment, when they would be directly connected 
 with the history of the Reformation. The citizen has 
 maintained his rights against the friar. The mere glorifi- 
 cation of poverty has been put down. Beggary has 
 become discreditable. The yeoman and the freeman of 
 the town have asserted their dignity. They have their 
 own house, their veritable representative, which has proved 
 that it is mightier than the old baronial house, which has 
 co-operated with the king in a work to which that house 
 would not have been inclined. The citizen has had his 
 own minister, his Thomas Cromwell, who, in spite of the 
 jealousy of nobles, in spite of the opposition of a mighty 
 and aged corporation, has overthrown the monasteries — 
 the nobles being then, by a policy for which some per- 
 son or other is answerable, bribed by the spoils of the 
 convents to acquiesce in the new system, and dread any
 
 THE NEW PERIL. 85 
 
 return to tlie old. And now the reformer can boast that 
 all is proceeding according to his pleasure. His enemies are 
 humbled ; the young king is wholly on his side ; he may 
 mock and persecute those who mocked and persecuted 
 him. The story would be too old a one to point any special 
 moral, if there were not the ghastly fact that there were 
 multitudes of poor who were not citizens, who were not 
 cared for any longer, of whom some account must be 
 taken, who must destroy the new order of things if it 
 could not, in some way, deal with them. This terrific 
 problem begins to stare the reformers of the reign of 
 Edward VI. in the face. They know that to go back is 
 impossible. The friars have been weighed in the balances, 
 and found wanting ; the citizens have conquered them. 
 The convents cannot be recalled into existence to feed the 
 beggars at their doors ; that business is evidently obsolete. 
 But the disease is not the less appalling because these 
 remedies are clearly inapplicable. It confronts the best 
 teachers of the land in the moment of their exultation. 
 It makes them utterly ashamed; for they not only see 
 that there is another class to provide for which lies be- 
 yond the sacred enclosure : those who are within that 
 enclosure, the class of the freemen, are losing their posi- 
 tion, are sinking to a lower level. Hear Latimer on 
 this point. He is a man who must speak truth at 
 all times, and before all persons. He is now preaching 
 before King Edward, as he did before the Convocation : —
 
 86 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 " My father was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own ; 
 only he had a farm of three or four pounds by the year at the 
 uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a 
 dozen men. He had walks for a hundred sheep ; and my 
 mother milked thirty kine. He was able, and did find the 
 king a harness, with himself and his horse, while he came 
 to the place that he should receive the king's wages. I 
 can remember that I buckled his horse when he came to 
 Blackheath field. He kept me to school, or else I had not 
 been able to have preached before the king's majesty now. 
 He married my sisters with five pounds, or twenty nobles, 
 apiece ; so that he brought them up in godliness and the 
 fear of God. He kept hospitality to his poor neighbours, 
 and some alms he gave to the poor. And all this he did off 
 the said farm, when he who now hath it payeth sixteen pound 
 by year or month, is not able to do anything for his friends, 
 nor for himself, nor for his children, or give a cup of drink 
 to the poor. Thus all the enhancing and rearing goeth to 
 your private commodity and wealth. So that where ye had 
 a single too much, you have that ; and since the same, ye 
 have enhanced the rent, and so have increased another too 
 much ; so now you have double too much. But let the 
 preacher preach till his tongue be worn to the stumps, 
 nothing is amended. We have good statutes made for the 
 commonwealth as touching commoners and enclosures ; 
 many meetings and sessions ; but in the end of the matter 
 there cometh nothing forth. Well, well, this is one thing I
 
 THE SELFISHNESS OF PROPRIETORS. 87 
 
 will say unto you; from whence it cometh I know, even from 
 the devil. I know his intent in it. For if ye bring it 
 to pass that the yeomanry be not able to put their sons to 
 school, (as indeed universities do wondrously decay already,) 
 and that they be not able to marry their daughters to the 
 avoiding of whoredom ; I say ye pluck salvation from the 
 people, and utterly destroy the realm. For by yeomen's 
 sons the faith of Christ is and hath been maintained chiefly. 
 Is this realm taught by rich men's sons 1 No, no ; read 
 the chroniclers ; ye shall find sometimes noblemen's sons 
 which have been unpreaching bishops and prelates, but 
 ye shall find none of them learned men. But verily they 
 that should look to the redressing of these things be the 
 greatest against them. In this realm are a great many 
 folks, and amongst many, I know but one of tender zeal 
 who at the motion of his poor tenants hath let down his 
 lands to the old rents for their relief. For God's love let 
 him not be a phoenix, let him not be alone, let him not be 
 a hermit closed in a wall ; one good man follow, and do 
 as he giveth example. Surveyors there be that greedily 
 gorge up their food ; hand-makers, I mean ; they make up 
 their mouth, but the commons be utterly undone by them ; 
 whose bitter cry ascending up to the ears of the Lord of 
 Sabaoth, the greedy pit of hell-burning fire, without great re- 
 pentance, doth tarry and look for them. A redress God 
 grant ! For surely but that two things do comfort me, I 
 would despair of redress in these matters. One is that the
 
 88 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FKANCHISE. 
 
 king's majesty, when he cometh to age, will see a redress of 
 these things, so out of frame ; giving example by letting 
 down his own lands first, and then enjoin his subjects 
 to follow him. The second hope I have is, I believe that 
 the general accounting day is at hand — the dreadful day of 
 judgment, I mean, which shall make an end of all these 
 calamities and miseries." 
 
 So spoke this great Eeformer, this yeoman's son, in the 
 days when his own party was in the ascendant, when Pro- 
 testantism had ajDparently beaten down all its foes. Here 
 and elsewhere Latimer, instead of singing paeans for that 
 victor}', labours to turn it to some account by fairly count- 
 ing out the losses as well as the gains of the conflict, and 
 by warning his friends that if they had won for themselves, 
 and hoped to gain honour and spoils for themselves, there 
 would be a curse upon their banners, whatever grand names 
 and watchwords might be inscribed upon them. To us, 
 looking back upon the reign of Edward from this distance, it 
 seems as if the two permanent fruits which had survived its 
 crimes and miseries, had been, first, this great lesson, next the 
 witness which it bore that a common worship is a bond for 
 the subjects of a land which theories are seeking to divide; 
 that such worship may find its expression in words com- 
 posed in earlier ages by men who spoke different languages, 
 and looked at the universe from very different points of 
 view ; that it should, however, be rendered into a dialect 
 which all members of a nation can recognise as their own.
 
 THE REFORMERS HUMILIATED. 89 
 
 The ignominious acts of Edward's reign, the debasement 
 of tlie coinage, the wretchedness of its factions, only bring 
 forth the worth of this testimony, and of that which was 
 borne by such faithful men as Latimer, into greater bril- 
 liancy. They make us feel how true the anticipation of 
 the honest preacher was, that a judgment was approach- 
 ing the land — whatever confused notions he might have 
 about the nature of that judgment; a judgment which 
 would sift men of all professions, and through which only 
 such as he would pass safely. 
 
 Certainly the reign of Mary was as great an evidence 
 as that of her father's had been, how little the English 
 people will ever endure the rule of a sect — call that sect 
 by what name you please ; how it turns to any sove- 
 reign who has legal and hereditary claims upon its alle- 
 giance as a protection from that rule. The conscience of 
 the English citizen, as much as of the noble — the con- 
 science of the whole people — revolted against the scheme 
 of Northumberland to substitute his excellent kinswoman 
 for the daughter of Catherine. It was not merely the 
 selfishness of the project which made it hateful, not merely 
 the suspicion of utter hypocrisy in its author. There was 
 a deep, genuine, national conviction that the Protestant 
 preachers and nobles were endeavouring to set aside God's 
 order for their order. Every charge which they had 
 brought against Papists came back with tremendous force 
 upon themselves. It was a miserable pretence that they
 
 90 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 were sacrificing merely secular arrangements to the para- 
 mount claims of faith. None had affirmed so strongly as 
 they had done that all such calculations were unlawful 
 and unbelieving. They were proving that their belief 
 was in themselves, in their secular arrangements, not in 
 the government of God at all. Such a contradiction had 
 its necessary fruit in a vehement reaction — a reaction in 
 which the whole land participated, a reaction which was 
 visible in the house that represented the commons, the 
 only part of the legislature, indeed, wherein it coidd be 
 conspicuously visible, since it was the only part which 
 had entered heartily into the Reformation. The reaction, 
 up to the point which it reached, cannot be imputed to 
 them, or to the people of England generally, as an incon- 
 sistency. The Reformation had been a protest for national 
 order. If it lost that character, the sympathy which 
 accompanied it was not strangely or unnaturally with- 
 drawn. There were persons among the clergy, as well as 
 the nobles, who consciously deserted their faith, or who 
 showed that it had never been their faith at all. One 
 cannot say so of the body of the people, or of any in- 
 tegral part of that body. It adhered, on the whole, to 
 the conviction with which it had started. The national 
 flag — that which bore the sovereign's name upon it — was 
 dear to the heart of the Englishman. What other char- 
 acters there were upon it he read but indistinctly. He 
 might be told, by one party or another, that they were
 
 THE TWO REACTIONS. 91 
 
 sacred characters. Now and then, some flash of light 
 might show him that they were. But it was the king 
 who spoke to him of the King of kings, confusedly 
 enough no doubt, very often ; but more clearly, so as 
 to convey a greater sense of trust in a living person, than 
 any opinions which divines might entertain or inculcate. 
 
 It was therefore the proof which such men as Latimer, 
 Ridley, Rogers, Hooper gave, that they were believing in 
 an actual person, to whom they were not afraid to trust 
 themselves in life or death — not in some subtle points of 
 divinity or casuistry — which was the great instrument of 
 stopping this reaction and producing another. The test 
 which had been applied in Henry's reign was still the 
 effectual one in Mary's. What are your methods of mak- 
 ing good citizens ? How do you hope to give the queen 
 faithful and obedient subjects? Mary's counselors an- 
 swered, " Here is our method ; we think this the most 
 effectual." It did not seem so to the English commons. 
 They had entertained no very high standard of human 
 excellence. The comfortable man, the man who could 
 make money and keep it, had for them many of the 
 tokens of the man of worth. But they were capable of 
 acknowledging higher worth than this. A powerful 
 demonstration might establish the belief in the stubborn 
 English heart that there were men who could give up 
 money, respectability, life, rather than tell a lie. The 
 demonstration would not have been effectual if the men
 
 92 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 who made this sacrifice had despised the earth, if they 
 had been indifferent to domestic ties. But the Marian 
 reformers had wives and children, boasted of them, 
 counted them a part of their religion. Even these proofs 
 might have failed, if Mary's persecutions had not been 
 accompanied with other acts, which destroyed altogether 
 the thought that she was a national sovereign. The 
 Spanish marriage went some way towards removing that 
 prestige from her character, even though there might 
 be good reason to believe that Philip did not kindle, but 
 rather tried to abate, the fires of Srnithfield. And if the 
 dream of England's being reduced into a province of Spam 
 haunted the mind of the commons, the submission to 
 Home, which Pole considered more important than all 
 suppression of Protestant opinions, was more directly an 
 affront to the national feeling than that suppression could 
 be. It became strangely complicated through the Pope's 
 personal hostility to his greatest defender. And that 
 hostility again brought out the sovereign in something of 
 the special Tudor character, as an asserter of her own 
 authority against the ecclesiastical authority. 
 
 Strangely, therefore, as this reign is contrasted with the 
 next, there was the closest connexion between them ; the 
 one was the natural precursor of the other. We may enter- 
 tain the most various opinions about the character of 
 Elizabeth, as we do about the character of her father. 
 The same person may be conscious of often changing his
 
 QUEEN GLORIANA. 93 
 
 opinions about it as it lias presented itself to him in dif- 
 ferent lights and in different periods. New evidence may 
 sometimes shake old conclusions. But on the whole the 
 impression that is left in our minds by the literature of 
 the period remains. The queen is the centre of the time. 
 The vicissitudes of her opinions, the changes in her affec- 
 tions, are not only necessary to the history, they even help 
 to make it intelligible. After considering Edward's reign 
 and Mary's, we feel that her uncertainty, whether she was 
 a Protestant or a Catholic, was what determined her posi- 
 tion as a national sovereign, was what gave the whole 
 reign so intensely national a character. The queen was 
 neither Romanist nor Protestant, was both Romanist and 
 Protestant ; for that was the condition of her subjects. 
 She was not indifferent to either faith — there was no 
 indifference in the time. There was earnestness in the sup- 
 port of each conviction in those who clung to each, a vehe- 
 ment Protestantism, a vehement Romanism ; there was 
 also a sense in the strongest minds, in those who most 
 set forth this time to all times — in Spenser and Shake- 
 speare, as well as in Hooker — of some meeting-point 
 which there must be, of something imperfect in each, 
 unless it has the aid and support of the other. The 
 habit of the age was to exaggerate the worth and 
 grandeur of the queen, as if she were herself the reconciler ; 
 as if in rallying round her there was a sufficient protest 
 against foreign aggression, against the glorification of par-
 
 94 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 ticular opinions, which the heart of the nation demanded. 
 It was a temper which had been manifesting itself through 
 all the Tudor reigns, which reached its climax and con- 
 summation in the last. Throughout, the House of Com- 
 mons had been a tolerably faithful index of it. The 
 opinions of the Lords had been influenced by various 
 causes. In them was seen much adherence to the old 
 habits and tendencies, qualified by some personal dislike of 
 ecclesiastics, and by unwillingness to surrender the revenues 
 which they had won from ecclesiastical corporations. The 
 house of the freeholders and the freemen, less affected by 
 these disturbing influences, was a more exact barometer of 
 the feeling, not only of those who elected it, but of the 
 country at large. It adhered in general to its Plantagenet 
 traditions. It suspected the higher ecclesiastics, chiefly as 
 not being thoroughly English in their tastes and sympa- 
 thies. Protestantism was valued so far as it was opposed 
 to foreign practices ; the sovereign, male and female, was 
 dear as the protector against priestly ascendancy and con- 
 tinental usurpation. With these fundamental principles, 
 all changes which ajjpeared merely to affect opinion were 
 compatible ; efforts to define opinion were not understood, 
 or regarded as specially necessary, unless they could be 
 used as tests of fidelity to the national order. 
 
 This state of things, especially this sympathy of the 
 Crown with the House of Commons, was to be rudely 
 shaken in the coming period. There were signs before
 
 THE TUDOR AGE PASSING AWAY. 95 
 
 the close of Elizabeth's reign that the powers which had 
 worked harmoniously together might become antagonists. 
 Hitherto the reverence for charters and precedents, as a 
 protection against the sovereign, has belonged peculiarly 
 to the nobles. It may become the great characteristic of 
 the commons ; the watchwords of Prerogative and Privi- 
 lege may mingle with all the religious questions with 
 which the Tudor time has been occupied. 
 
 That this time has left some enormous questions un- 
 solved, which would torment subsequent generations, we 
 have had evident proofs. The peasants' war in Germany 
 perplexed Martin Luther with the strangest doubts. The 
 farmer class, the citizen class, had responded to his 
 words ; he was sure that he had done something for their 
 emancipation, if they would only take up their freedom. 
 Here was a class which said that he had not emancipated 
 them ; which had the wildest conceptions of a divine 
 power that could emancipate them. There was not a 
 similar struggle in England , but there were the rumblings 
 of the storm. There were tokens that the peasants here, 
 as little as there, were satisfied with what the Eefor- 
 mation had done for them ; that they even suspected it 
 of doing them mischief. These, too, were surely men; 
 interested in any redemption that had been made for men. 
 The friars had said so. Were the reformed teachers un- 
 able or unwilling to recognise the claim ? 
 
 But if the Tudor period left this knot for other genera-
 
 96 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 tions to untie, it has borne fruit, which after generations 
 have gathered and fed on. The money god, whom 
 Henry VII. worshipped, had abundance of homage from his 
 successors. Sovereigns and priests, lords and commons, 
 offered sacrifices and poured out incense at his shrine. 
 He tasted the human blood, which he loves. But it had 
 been shown that he is not the Lord of lords. He had 
 been defied in his high places. From the day that Luther 
 put forth his theses against the sale of indulgences, popes 
 have been admonished, to their great astonishment, that 
 money is not the instrument for remitting sins. The king 
 who deprives himself of the authority which the Pope's 
 sanction gives him, must appeal to another power than the 
 money power to keep his subjects in obedience. The 
 book which was written by fishermen and a tentmaker, 
 which says that it is hard for rich men to enter into the 
 kingdom of God, which declares one who passed as a 
 carpenter's son to have all power in heaven and earth, 
 must go forth as the argument from the king that the land 
 owes Him, as he owes it, all loyal service. The lords may 
 exchange military duties for rents paid in coin ; but if that is 
 their only bond to their tenants, preachers will bear witness 
 to them — facts will bear witness to them, — that a judgment 
 of God must one day rend that frail bond asunder. The 
 freeholder and the freeman often fancy that the gold which 
 is the reward of their industry is the standard by which 
 they themselves, as well as the tilings they buy and sell,
 
 SUMMARY. 97 
 
 is to be measured. The dishonesty of statesmen, the sel- 
 fishness of preachers, strengthen the delusion. But they 
 also help to scatter it. The standard is found to be 
 an utterly precarious one ; any caprice subverts it ; a re- 
 volution causes the riches to make themselves wings and 
 fly from their possessors. The men who can part with 
 them, who can throw away themselves, are the strong men. 
 By them the hearts and minds of the commons are roused 
 and moulded. "Whatever energy there is in the House 
 of Commons to assert freedom for the land is learned 
 from these. So far as this influence triumphs over the 
 money influence, the House is an instrument of preserving 
 what is best in their constituents — of delivering them from 
 what is worst. So far as it succumbs to the money influ- 
 ence, it represents the baseness of the constituency ; it per- 
 petuates its baseness to the generations that are to follow. 
 These are some of the lessons of the Tudor period Will 
 the Stuarts confirm or reverse them ?
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The House of Commons in the Stuart Period. 
 
 A PEOPLE must consist of freemen ; this, we found, 
 "^^- was the maxim of the Roman ; this has been our 
 English maxim. It may become in practice a very ex- 
 clusive maxim ; the number of the free may be small, the 
 number of the unfree may be great. The free may do 
 their utmost to exclude the unfree from rising to the same 
 position with them. But the distinction must be kept in 
 mind amidst all changes in the condition of one class or 
 another. It is never more important than in the Stuart 
 period. The greatest questions of our history are involved 
 in it, and become hopelessly intricate if we forget it. 
 And it affected the history of the settlement of the North 
 American colonies ; the earliest and the latest events in 
 their life are only intelligible in the light of it. 
 
 I observed that our best writers had not always ad- 
 hered consistently to this use of the word " people." 
 Shakespeare departs from it in his Roman plays. He 
 makes it sometimes represent those who were asking for 
 freedom, not those who had attained it. There was a
 
 THE HISTORICAL DRAMA. 99 
 
 special difficulty in the time of Elizabeth in finding a name 
 to express that great body of poor for whom the celebrated 
 law of her reign made a provision. The words " serf " 
 and " slave " were becoming odious in themselves, and 
 were entirely inapplicable to this class. The serf or the 
 slave is dependent upon some master • these were recog- 
 nised as under the care of the state. It was bound to 
 take account of them, at least not to let them starve. 
 Again, to call these the " commons " would have been a 
 great offence. The commons were a substantive recognised 
 part of the commonwealth. They were emphatically the 
 freemen and the freeholders. They were represented in a 
 House which was every day feeling itself more and more 
 the steward for that age of an inheritance which Lad 
 descended from other ages. 
 
 The sense of this inheritance was a characteristic of the 
 Elizabethan life and literature. If Shakespeare had some 
 trouble in finding a name to denote those who were not 
 yet organised, no one realised more strongly the continu- 
 ance from age to age of a people which had been organised. 
 No country possesses such a treasure as the historical 
 plays. I do not speak of the genius exhibited in them, 
 except so far as his genius enabled him to perceive a real 
 divine drama working itself out through some of the most 
 confused, even some of the dullest, passages in our an- 
 nals. I speak of the assurance which they give us that the 
 England of Henry VIII. was the same as the England
 
 100 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 of John, in spite of all the changes and convulsions which 
 it had undergone. I speak of the witness which they bear 
 to the intimate relation between the life of the king and 
 the life of the whole land. That characteristic they derive 
 from Shakespeare's Elizabethan education. He could not 
 have had it if he had been born in the reign of James. He 
 could not have retained it if he had caught the complexion 
 of that period. He might have picked out some pretty 
 story of Prince Arthur's murder by his uncle. He might 
 have introduced a set of Gadshill pickpockets about Prince 
 Harry. These might have been admired as the cunning 
 inventions of a clever artist; the stage might have wel- 
 comed them. But they would have been no helps in un- 
 derstanding the reigns of King John or Henry IV. In 
 the actual play, the boy Arthur helps to link together the 
 history of conflicts of feudal kings with each other and 
 with the citizens of the towns — of struggles between the 
 king and the pope, the king and his barons. The Gadshill 
 pickpockets enable us to apprehend one aspect of a con- 
 fused period, all the aspects of which are presented with 
 equal fidelity, and illuminate each other ; so that no errors 
 of costume hinder us from feeling that the picture is in con- 
 formity not only with the general laws of humanity, but with 
 the special conditions of the time which it brings before us. 
 It is impossible to find any hero in any of these plays 
 except the king. Let him be as contemptible as John, 
 as feeble as Pdchard II. or Henry VI., still he is the centre
 
 THE TUDOR AND STUART SOVEREIGNS. 101 
 
 of all the movements of the drama, all the persons and 
 events dispose themselves naturally about him. The poet 
 cannot choose his favourite, he must follow what he per- 
 ceives to be the actual order of things. For Elizabeth, as 
 we have seen, whatever she was, held this position in the 
 eyes of her subjects. They could not frame the scheme of 
 their lives without reference to her. She may discourage 
 piracies on the Spaniards, but Drake commits them in her 
 name, and for her glory. She may not in the least under- 
 stand Raleigh's enterprises, but Virginia must testify of her 
 presence. She may look with a cold eye on the great strife 
 in the Low Countries, but Sidney fights and dies that she 
 may be associated with their freedom. You cannot pene- 
 trate into the fairy realm without finding that she marshals 
 the knights, assigns them their adventures, dispenses their 
 crowns. 
 
 It was impossible that this state of things should con- 
 tinue. It survives in the noblest literature ; but it was 
 becoming fantastic ; there must be a change. It came 
 very suddenly. To all appearance literature would not 
 suffer from it. That was to receive all manner of patronage. 
 James would pay it an honour which Elizabeth had never 
 paid it. 2-To man with the temper of Burleigh should hinder 
 the distribution of his favours to those who could produce 
 great books. The king would certainly be the centre of a 
 set of wise men ; what better government could there be 
 than one of which they should be the chief counsellors ?
 
 102 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 Dr Johnson may have had excuses for ridiculing the 
 pompous line of one of his contemporaries — 
 
 " Who rules free people must himself be free ; " 
 but certainly the case of James I. strengthens it more than it 
 can be weakened by the cleverest parody. The unfree king is 
 the description that might fit him better than any other. All 
 classes in the country must have felt it. The noble who con- 
 nected freedom with manly bearing and courage — to whom 
 the word Frank was so nearly a synonyme with free — saw a 
 man utterly without grace, trembling at a sword, practised 
 yet not skilful in evasions, cultivating chicanery. Such a 
 spectacle, one would have thought, must have been more 
 painful to the great lords than to any other part of the 
 community, especially as it was connected with a king 
 who here, as in Scotland, poured out his favours on ignoble 
 parasites. But though those who frequented the court 
 might see most of the king's weakness, and might ridicule 
 it most, they were not the persons whom his acts and 
 his mode of thinking scandalised most. Men who never 
 came near the person of the sovereign had often a much 
 profounder loyalty than those who could complain of his 
 slights and criticise his manners. The freeholders of the 
 counties, even the freemen of the towns, would have liked 
 to think of their monarch as the model of British chivalry, 
 as the champion of British dignity in every country of 
 Europe. They were forced to think of him as one who 
 disliked the name they bore, who had no notion of any
 
 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS' AGE. 103 
 
 order of society but one consisting of clans, who thought 
 that the king represented the majesty of God, and therefore 
 was to be always on the watch against the liberty of his 
 people. 
 
 It was this conviction of the unfree king which intro- 
 duced what must be called the age of the House of Com- 
 mons — the age when it was driven into a position of direct 
 antagonism to the monarch — the age when it represented 
 the freedom which he counted it the main function of his 
 kingcraft to counteract and abridge. We naturally turn 
 to the most stirring part of this struggle, to the battle 
 of the next reign. But it is only intelligible when we con- 
 sider the commencement of it, and connect that with some 
 of the pecidiarities of the first Stuart. 
 
 It was the melancholy fortune of two sets of men that 
 James made himself their patron, and that they became 
 his allies and worshippers. The first were the bishops 
 and the dignified clergy of the English Church. They had 
 trembled at his Presbyterian education and oaths, at his 
 Roman Catholic mother. To find him utterly renouncing 
 the first, with the most undoubted sincerity, with a pas- 
 sionate loathing ; to find him proving the Pope to be Anti- 
 christ in his books, and, at least after the Gunpowder 
 Plot, prepared heartily to persecute his adherents ; — this 
 was a surprise and a triumph which might easily turn the 
 heads of well-disposed men, convinced that they were 
 maintaining the true line of peace and moderation against
 
 104 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 enemies on both sides. It did lead to some of the most 
 humiliating exhibitions of which there is any record — to a 
 tacit, often an expressed, agreement — " Since you identify 
 your prerogative with the maintenance of our order, we will 
 enter into a war, defensive and offensive, on behalf of it j" 
 — to this agreement, and thence to a real persuasion, that 
 the cause of the Church and of freedom were hostile 
 causes; that the influence of the one must be used to 
 subvert the other. 
 
 The second class which was to undergo perilous honours 
 and grievous transformation through the influence of the 
 Stuart king was that to which I alluded before. Men of 
 letters were becoming, more than they had ever been 
 before, a profession, or guild, or free-masons' lodge, with 
 James as their grand-master. That Atticus was he who 
 prepared and sealed this compact ; that Bacon represents 
 the submission of scholars and men of science to the royal 
 pedant; and that the terms of the submission are- to be 
 found blended with the grand dogmas and high anticipa- 
 tions of the Advancement of learning, — this all who revere 
 a great name must sorrowfully confess. That he suffered 
 ample punishment for this offence and the other offences, — 
 into which he was betrayed less by an ambition for selfish 
 honours than by a vain dream that they would reflect 
 some dignity upon his studies and give some help in the 
 pursuit of them, — ought to excuse us from passing any hard 
 censure on his memory. But it could not rescue litera-
 
 BONDAGE OP LITERATURE. 105 
 
 ture, in all its different forms, from a contraction, an im- 
 poverishment, which is all the more painful to remember 
 when one considers the immense ability which was at work 
 in every direction during James's reign, in verse and in prose, 
 on the stage as well as in the pulpit. Unrivalled dramatic 
 ability ; but displayed in the representation of humours, 
 not of characters; in the construction of most ingenious 
 and impossible plots, not in illuminating history or com- 
 mon life; in exquisite conceits, often most musical songs, 
 seldom in poetry that springs from the heart or goes to it. 
 Whatever could be done in the way of elaborate composi- 
 tion, worthy to be admired for the study and diligence 
 that were bestowed upon it, was done in that time. But 
 the shadow of the king is over it all. We never can feel 
 that wo are out of the range of his influence ; that his 
 ingenious, coarse mind is not at work, spoiling the best 
 thoughts, profaning the most sacred images. Our grati- 
 tude to Bacon must be all the greater for striking out a 
 new path, in which these arts could be of no avail ; for 
 teaching men that it was more glorious to explore than to 
 construct ; for discovering the use of an instrument with 
 which the king would not care to meddle, and which he 
 could not turn aside by any exercise of his prerogative or 
 his craft. Science might defy him ; but till the appear- 
 ance of the great Puritan poet in the next reign, literature 
 had to endure patiently the gilded chains with which he 
 had bound it.
 
 106 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 In the great conflict between the king and the House 
 of Commons, which lasted through the reigns of James 
 and of his son, the bishops, as well as the men of letters, 
 were inclined to regard that House as representing the 
 Puritan feeling of the country in both its aspects — as hos- 
 tile to the established ecclesiastical order, as hostile to the 
 art and letters which the court patronised. There was 
 an excuse for both opinions in that time ; an excuse for 
 their adoption by Mr Gifford and many others, in a later 
 time. Yet both opinions are extremely exaggerated ; and, 
 in the form in which they are often put, are contradicted 
 by notorious facts. The Puritan party — that is to say, 
 the party which regarded every approximation to Roman- 
 ism with horror — was undoubtedly powerful among the 
 freemen of the towns, as the WyclifBte party had been in 
 the Plantagenet period. Its strong convictions were fairly 
 represented in the House of Commons, especially by those 
 who sat for the towns. Among the freeholders there was, 
 of course, less collision of opinion, more of the old tradi- 
 tions. Those who most truly represented their feelings 
 were men strongly attached to the national order, opposed 
 to Romanism, specially as interfering with that; but with 
 no addiction to the special lessons of the Puritan preachers 
 — averse from them so far as they were not national, so far 
 as they tended to create any sect in the nation. These 
 members of the House of Commons, so far from having 
 any dislike to refined literature, were cultivated and tra-
 
 THE COUNTRY AND THE TOWNS. 107 
 
 veiled men, acquainted with, the history and poetry of the 
 old world, students of French and Italian history. The 
 best and noblest specimen of the class is undoubtedly Sir 
 John Eliot, whose sufferings had always made him a con- 
 spicuous figure in English history, and with whom we 
 have become better acquainted lately through the valuable 
 labours of Mr Forster. It would be absurd to suppose 
 that there were many of his stamp and calibre in either 
 reign. But he was able to command the sympathies of 
 a great many : they looked up to him as their leader. 
 John Hampden, himself a country gentleman, was his in- 
 timate friend ; there appears to have been the greatest 
 fellowship of thought and sentiment between them. The 
 question becomes a very interesting one, and one exceed- 
 ingly important for the subject of these chapters — what it 
 was that bound these men to the townspeople and their 
 leaders, with whom they had so many real as well as 
 apparent differences — what national feeling it was which 
 the House of Commons embodied. The changes which 
 that national feeling underwent may then be more easily 
 explained ; we may trace more clearly the connexion be- 
 tween the Stuart time and the Tudor time — between both 
 these times and our own. 
 
 All readers of Clarendon will recollect the row of stately 
 figures which he draws out before us at the commence- 
 ment of his history. They represent the nobles who had 
 survived the reign of James, and formed the court of his
 
 108 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 son. How dull and dreary and respectable they were, 
 how utterly unaware that they were approaching a great 
 crisis, how unprepared to meet it, the writer makes us 
 feel ; he felt it himself. In the struggle that was at hand, 
 it could not be predicted what part these noblemen would 
 take ; they might be swayed at times to either side ; no 
 distinct principle would determine their course; they had a 
 sense of certain obligations to the order of the land, of certain 
 others to the person of the monarch. Within these there 
 was another circle ; the favourite whom they had feared in 
 the former reign, and who was master still ; who had for 
 a while been the popular champion while he opposed the 
 Spanish alliance ; but who was now regarded as the most 
 mischievous of all the royal advisers, if he did not divide 
 that fame as well as his influence with the queen. She — 
 the centre of a much more graceful society than that of 
 the previous reign, as she was the wife of a far more 
 graceful man — had all the suspicion attaching to a. French 
 Roman Catholic, not untruly imagined to have a much 
 stronger and steadier purpose than belonged to Charles. 
 That he was quite free from his father's pedantry,- — that 
 he admired the best painters, and bestowed favours on 
 the most ingenious men, that the masques and entertain- 
 ments which he patronised were such as any court 
 might admire, — so much all confess. But what was 
 there in any literature which he cultivated that could 
 raise or could reach the heart of a people ? It helped
 
 THE COURT AND CHURCH LITERATURE. 109 
 
 those who had much time on their hands to kill it. Men 
 who were full of fervour and earnestness found no nourish- 
 ment in it ; were repelled by it ; could endure, if they 
 did not love, the protests of such writers as Prynne 
 against it. 
 
 The higher clergy approved these sports for the court ; 
 tolerated sports of another kind for the multitude. But 
 what did they supply to those who were craving for illumi- 
 nation 1 They wrote tractates against Puritanism, they 
 wrote tractates against Eomanism. They promoted learn- 
 ing of a certain kind — useful antiquarian learning. Laud 
 was very meritorious in this way. But such lore, desirable 
 as it was, lay altogether out of the range of the people's 
 thoughts — could have no influence upon them. The argu- 
 ments against Romanism might be useful to persons in 
 the court and the higher ranks who were inclined to that 
 doctrine. The commons were not the least inclined to it. 
 They suspected the sincerity of elaborate confutations which 
 to them were unintelligible, and which appeared to have very 
 slight effect. upon those for whom they were intended. They 
 did not suspect the sincerity of the attacks on Puritanism ; 
 by these they were irritated into increased sympathy with 
 it. And the writings which were especially designed for 
 their edification, which were to guide them out of the dan- 
 gerous paths wherein they were wandering, were outrageous 
 defences of the prerogative — violent attempts to wrest the 
 Scriptures into witnesses that the sovereign was an irrespon-
 
 110 THE ■WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 sible person — threats of what must follow if there were any 
 questioning of his decrees. 
 
 Such writings were as utterly intolerable to the edu- 
 cated gentlemen of England as they could be to the citi- 
 zens. They felt that the king was putting forth his prero- 
 gative to the overthrow of the old laws and charters of the 
 land. These were sacred witnesses in their eyes of the per- 
 petuity of the nation ; these were dear to all their family 
 traditions and associations. The duty of adhering to these 
 they learned from their classical instructors, as well as from 
 the Jewish books. Tacitus told them what had come to 
 Home when the sense of law and the reverence for ances- 
 tors had been exchanged for subjection to the mere will of 
 a man. The life and morals of a nation, they felt, were 
 connected with the reverence for the past, with the belief 
 in laws which no temporary decrees could set aside. Was 
 not the court showing indifference to ancient forms and in- 
 difference to morality at the same time 1 Did it not palter 
 with truth ? Did it not depart from the word once given 
 in a way that no English gentleman could bear to trifle 
 with any word which had once gone out of his lips ? And 
 what were the clerical defences, but apologies in the 
 name of God for insincerity, for falsehood ? Could those 
 be religious arguments against which the conscience pro- 
 tested? Did not they involve the sins which had been 
 imputed to Jesuits ? Must not they spring from the same 
 principle ? Must not they lead to the same result ?
 
 THE TWO ENEMIES OF THE COURT. Ill 
 
 There was no Puritanism in such reflections as these. 
 They belonged to the Englishman trained in the ordinary 
 belief of his forefathers ; instructed to worship a God of 
 truth, and count all untruth the greatest abomination. 
 But at this point they come into contact with the thoughts 
 which the English citizen had received from the divines 
 to whom he listened with the greatest sympathy ; those 
 who taught him to abhor every rag of idolatry, the slight- 
 est contact with the unclean thing ; those who bade him 
 count a Papist from Eome, or an Arminian from Amster- 
 dam, as one carrying about with him the scent of the 
 infernal pit. Such words could not have much influence 
 on men who had visited Rome and Amsterdam, who had 
 shared the hospitality of both Papists and Arminians. 
 Yet it had in this application a very real significance for 
 them also. That which threatened the subversion of their 
 country's liberty, that which undermined their country's 
 honesty, smelt as foully in their nostrils as it could in those 
 of any Puritan. They were sure that it must be odious 
 to Him who hates robbery for burnt- offering. 
 
 Here, then, would be a sufficient explanation of the fact 
 that these two classes of men sat, as we should say in the 
 dialect of our day, on the same side of the House, and 
 joined in the same votes and denunciations. For a long 
 time, what I may call the country-gentleman feeling 
 appears to have the preponderance. The cry that 
 charters should not be trampled upon, that the pre-
 
 112 THE WOKKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 cedents of other days should be reverenced, that the 
 king should not injure the honour of his throne by listen- 
 ing to mad and evil counsellors — these rose above all 
 others. The ecclesiastics were included among the evil 
 counsellors. If the dislike to them was sometimes greater 
 than to any others, it was because the scandal of their 
 support to the immoral acts of such men as Bucking- 
 ham was intolerable to the English conscience ; and 
 because divines like Sibthorpe and Mainwaring were 
 using the Book which Englishmen had accepted as 
 the charter of their freedom to make them content with 
 slavery. 
 
 In the first two Parliaments of Charles, Puritanism is 
 chiefly seen co-operating with this national temper, which, 
 in itself, is distinctly not Puritan. A change, I think, is 
 manifest in the third Parliament. Such men as Pym, 
 who represented the civic feeling, rose in influence ; i Eliot, 
 of the other class, accepted, to a considerable extent, their 
 maxims and watchwords. Had he ever left his prison 
 and entered the House which assembled when parliaments 
 came into existence again, he might have been obliged to 
 accept them altogether. 
 
 Many have lamented this victory of the Puritan or civic 
 party over that which was once rightly regarded as the coun- 
 try party. They have said that if the latter could have 
 maintained its ground, the monarchy might have been re- 
 conciled with the House of Commons ; there need have been
 
 THE PURITAN ELEMENT TRIUMPHANT. 113 
 
 no civil war, no protectorate. I cannot understand such 
 speculations more than those about the Keformation, which 
 might have been managed by Wolsey or Sir Thomas 
 More. I cannot imagine how the civil war or the protec- 
 torate could have been spared. I cannot cast the horoscope 
 of England without them. I confess to a sympathy with 
 such men as Eliot, which I cannot always feel for those 
 who adopted the dialect of Puritanism. I confess that 
 the civil war did become a religious war, and that the 
 protectorate was the attempt to set up a kingdom of God 
 in place of the Stuart kingdom, which had been put down. 
 But it seems to me that the conflict for English freedom — 
 that in which the English House of Commons engaged at 
 this time — would have been a far more imperfect conflict 
 than it was — would have left far less precious legacies 
 behind it — if the element which the Puritan contributed 
 to it had not proved itself to be the vital, and for a while 
 the overpowering, one. What was grotesque, narrow, un- 
 real in that element would be made more manifest through 
 its success than it could be in any other way. * 
 
 It seems to me that the claim of the king to such a 
 divine delegation as gave him a right practically to do what 
 he liked, could not be resisted by any reference to con- 
 stitutional maxims — venerable and sacred as those maxims 
 are. The most conspicuous members of the House of 
 Commons— men not of a tender southern nature, but hard, 
 tough, undemonstrative Englishmen, ashamed of betraying 
 
 H
 
 114 THE WORKING MAX AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 their feelings — actually burst into tears, we are told, on the 
 great day of remonstrance, when the king trafficked with 
 words in a double sense, and they felt that they must put 
 themselves in direct opposition to him. No mere notion 
 that legal forms or precedents were violated could have called 
 forth such a passion as that. There was the under-con- 
 viction, that the king, in setting aside the old order, in 
 trifling with the sincerity of human speech, was declaring 
 war with a greater King ; that the question was carried into 
 a higher court ; that the realm of England had subsisted 
 from generation to generation under that sovereignty which 
 Charles supposed had been transferred to him and was 
 vested for the government of England at least in him. 
 
 Such a belief could not find full expression at once. 
 But the strength of it became apparent, I am convinced, 
 to at least one man. Thomas Wentworth, who had de- 
 spised the court as long as Buckingham ruled it, who had 
 used the same constitutional language which the other 
 patriots used against the court, hated the Puritans more 
 than he hatoti any counsellor of Charles. The moment it 
 seemed to him that they were getting the ascendency, 
 patriotism became disgusting to him. The constitutional 
 forms might be worth something at other times. Let 
 them be spurned, trodden under foot, placed at the mercy 
 of an army, which he would gather together, rather than 
 that the party to which Pym was attached should pre- 
 vail. So I explain the conduct which his old friends
 
 STRAFFORD. 115 
 
 regarded as a desertion, his close alliance with a man so 
 unlike him as Laud, his desire that the king should reign 
 without a Parliament, his readiness to stake his head on 
 the success of his "thorough." The struggle, he per- 
 ceived, was no longer between different orders in the state. 
 A belief which he connected with everything vulgar and 
 enthusiastic must have the mastery, if he could not crush 
 it with his Irish army. What signified all other consider- 
 ations if this was the issue 1 Laud's dogmas and formali- 
 ties might be insignificant and unintelligible in his eyes ; 
 but they were the only spiritual agency that he knew 
 which could be set against the Puritan agency. Laud was 
 evidently as much in earnest as he was, as ready to de- 
 stroy or to die rather than succumb to his foes. This was 
 a bond of fellowship between them. Let him set up Epis- 
 copacy in Scotland with what weapons he could, Strafford 
 would try to forge other, that were, in his judgment, 
 much more efficient weapons. 
 
 The Scotch scheme was disappointed. The Covenant 
 came forth in its strength. The name of God was invoked 
 against the name of the king. The Scotch nation bowed 
 to it, the English army retreated, the Long Parliament 
 was summoned. The most courageous of its opponents 
 were the first whom it grappled with. Nothing could be 
 done till Strafford was taken out of the way. The court 
 gave up the man whose purposes had always been too 
 distinct and vast for it. But Laud also was impeached.
 
 116 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 The seats of the bishops in the House of Lords were at 
 once threatened. The House of Commons decreed its 
 own perpetuity. It was evident that the forms of the 
 constitution were not henceforth to be the motives of the 
 conflict. Yet it must be remembered that some of those 
 who adhered to those forms most tenaciously — who ulti- 
 mately fought for the king when they supposed that the 
 Parliament was violating them — assented to some of the 
 strongest of these measures. Falkland spoke and voted 
 for the motion to deprive the bishops of their seats. Their 
 defences of the prerogative, he evidently felt, had deluded 
 the king into his worst measures and had undermined the 
 order of the commonwealth. Hyde dissented from his 
 friend on this subject, though in general they were in 
 agreement as to the mischief of the course into which 
 Charles had gone. Soon they both became his advisers, so 
 far as the queen would permit them ; for they believed 
 that the watchword of the Covenant must become the 
 watchword of the Parliamentary leaders, however they 
 might seek for some other. At the beginning of the war 
 it appeared as if some other had been found. Essex and 
 Manchester had no interest in supporting Presbyterianism 
 against Episcopacy — and was not that what the Covenant 
 meant ? Their cause, they said, was the cause of the old 
 order of the kingdom, yes, of the king himself against his 
 evil advisers. But how languidly they fought with such 
 names as these on their banners ! Who cared to follow
 
 CROMWELL. 117 
 
 tliem 1 The better men in the royal army had the old 
 love for the person of the king. Some, like Falkland, felt 
 that their cause was now that of law as well as of king. 
 The worst of them had the hatred of Puritanism and the 
 love of wine and wassail to give them zeal. What inspi- 
 ration was there in the Parliamentary army to meet this 1 
 But might not some in those armies really care that Pres- 
 byterianism should conquer Episcopacy 1 No doubt some 
 London apprentices did care ; their preachers told them 
 that it was an object worth caring for. There was one in 
 the army of Fairfax who listened patiently to such admo- 
 nitions, and on whom they produced exceedingly slight 
 effect. Systems of church government were as little to 
 Cromwell as Parliamentary formulas. He did not believe 
 in one more than in the other. Nor did he trust the 
 London apprentices, or the preachers, much more than the 
 aristocratical generals, to secure the triumph of the cause 
 to which he was devoted. The Scotch Covenant meant to 
 him the setting up of the name of God against the name 
 of the earthly king, not at all the setting up of Presby- 
 terianism against Episcopacy. The soldiers whom he 
 gathered about him had no Scotch feeling. They were alto, 
 gether English — of the class of freeholders, I apprehend, 
 rather than of freemen ; brought from the country for the 
 most part, though no doubt with a fair sprinkling of the citi- 
 zens, provided they would submit to drill and learn obedi- 
 ently how to use their arms. At first it may not have been
 
 118 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 perceived that the Ironsides were working that double 
 change of which I have spoken. It may have been fancied 
 that they only threw the aristocratical leaders into the back- 
 ground, and that they would gladly allow the Westminster 
 Assembly to utter its decrees and organise the land ac- 
 cording to its system ; the new soldiers would put down 
 their enemies and establish their authority. The new 
 soldiers had no such dream ; their leader was as free from 
 it as they were. Baxter found, when he mixed with them 
 as a chaplain, that they understood none of his distinc- 
 tions, that they could not appreciate his moderation. If 
 the distinctions did not mean that there was a divine 
 kingdom which their swords were to establish, what were 
 they good for? If his moderation was to hinder them in that 
 work, must he not be one of the wicked ? What inspiration 
 had he which was not equally theirs % " Yes,'' their chief 
 would have told them, " you are quite right, my friends, 
 you have this inspiration, and you are to use it for this 
 end. But if it interferes with discipline, if it prevents you 
 from obeying orders, it is evil inspiration, and I must put 
 it down." And what he said must be done, he always did. 
 It is easy to talk of the enthusiasm of Cromwell and his 
 troops, and of the victory which that enthusiasm won. But 
 the enthusiasm, I suspect, had a ground and an object, or 
 it could not have prevailed ; all the less if there was mixed 
 with it, as we think there was, so much of what was weak 
 and fantastic. The ground and the object had been con-
 
 THE BELIEF IN A DIVINE KING. 119 
 
 tinually proclaimed in creeds and acts of worship by their 
 opponents ; the Ironsides did not assert the dominion of 
 God, or His influence over the hearts and spirits of men, 
 more strongly than it had been asserted by those who 
 called them fanatics and rebels. But it had been asserted 
 without being believed. It had passed into a phrase, a 
 mere " term of art," to use an expression of Jeremy Taylor's. 
 When it presented itself to the minds of English free- 
 holders and freemen as a truth — a truth which was the 
 foundation of all their liberty, and yet which had been 
 twisted into a proof that they were not free — the con- 
 sequences which followed are not astonishing. The trial 
 of the king, who had fallen into their hands and about 
 whom there had been so many insincere negotiations, may 
 appear to us one of the greatest outrages upon justice 
 and order. It appeared so to a great part of the land, to 
 the Presbyterians as well as the Episcopalians. But to 
 men become suddenly possessed of this conviction, it ap- 
 peared like the vindication of an order and justice which 
 had been set at nought — like a sentence coming forth from 
 the highest Throne against an earthly throne which had 
 lifted itself up against that. Whatever perversion there 
 was in the feeling — however righteous our protest against 
 the result to which it led — we gain nothing by. conf ound- 
 Ing It with an entirely different feeling, defended upon 
 entirely different maxims, which was at work a century 
 and a half later in France. We gain nothing; we lose
 
 120 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 much for the understanding of that period, and o all 
 subsequent periods in our history. 
 
 The purging of the House of Commons, the closing of 
 the House of Lords, before the death of the king, show 
 clearly enough that a dislike of monarchy and a pre- 
 ference for the other branches of the constitution had 
 nothing to do with this act. A love for the rule of 
 the House of Commons was certainly no part of Crom- 
 well's creed now. I do not see how it can ever have 
 held any strong place in his mind. The Long Parlia- 
 ment, he thought, had been called to do a work. When 
 the king was dead, when his son was subdued, had 
 it any more work to do ? It had said that it was 
 immortal. Could it really make itself immortal? Did 
 it any longer represent the freemen of the towns or the 
 freeholders of the country? They seemed not to think 
 that it did ; to be rather weary of it. But some one was 
 wanted to say that they were weary of it. If Cromwell 
 undertook the office, it was not an exception from his other 
 acts. It waT exactly in the spirit of them. He could not 
 dissolve the Parliament ; but he could say, " Go your 
 ways, the nation does not need you longer ; the Lord of 
 all does not need you longer." 
 
 That was the end of the House of Commons, which had 
 exalted itself so high ; which had done much for the 
 land ; which was striving to make itself the one estate of 
 the realm. It could not be that. Cromwell spoke the
 
 THE CALL TO RULE. 121 
 
 language of fact, of reason, even of old constitutional maxims, 
 though he might not care much for them, when he said 
 that it could not. There must be some one to convoke 
 a Parliament. It must sit to advise one who adminis- 
 tered, not to administer itself. The notion of its electing 
 such a one, or of the body of the people electing such a one, 
 would have clashed as much with the ideas of Cromwell 
 as with those of any Stuart. He, more than any Stuart, 
 believed that the chief ruler must have a divine call to 
 his office, in whatever way he is made aware of it. And 
 he did not conceive, so far as one can judge from his acts, 
 that he had the least call to be an unchecked ruler — a ruler 
 without a council. He tried to get parliaments — I think, to 
 get them fairly chosen ; though he may not have succeeded 
 well in his experiment. The longer he held his office, the 
 less he showed a wish to make it dependent on the plea- 
 sure of the army, the more he strove to connect it with 
 such institutions as the country had known and recognised. 
 It must depend upon our estimate of his character, whether 
 we judge him to be sincere in these endeavours, and sin- 
 cere also in his hesitation about the crown. I take him 
 to have been sincere in both ; to have had a sense that his 
 position was given him, and that he must not part with it ; 
 to have felt that it woidd be a truer position, if it were not 
 at variance with the ancient order of things ; and, at the 
 same time, that there was the danger of making a childish 
 imitation of the old order ; that it was a folly to clothe
 
 122 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 himself with a name which was surrounded with hereditary 
 associations, and had scarcely any meaning apart from 
 them. To the worth of such associations he bore witness 
 in the last, and what we may regard in one aspect of it as 
 the strangest act of his life, his nomination of Eichard to 
 be his successor. Monstrous as the contradiction was of 
 appointing a man without the least sign or dream of a 
 calling to a function which he exercised solely in the faith 
 that he possessed one, yet the contradiction was a homage 
 to a principle that he had seemed to set at nought. After 
 that acknowledgment, the restoration of Prince Charles 
 was clearly inevitable. The English people may not be as 
 logical as some others ; but they have a certain sense of 
 moral consistency which sometimes supplies the place of 
 logic. 
 
 Any one who contemplates this series of events, may 
 feel exceeding gratitude to Mr Carlyle for scattering some 
 of the mists in which court, clerical, constitutional, and 
 republican historians had enveloped the life of Cromwell 
 It is not the exaggeration of a hero-worshipper to say that 
 Cromwell interprets the Puritan movement of the time, 
 redeems it from its merely sectarian character, shows it to 
 have had a might which the preachers could not have 
 imparted to it, and which no parliamentary government 
 could express. The exaggeration of the hero-worshipper 
 only appears when the man is glorified to the denial of the 
 very truth which the man asserted ; when the belief in a
 
 did cromwell's truth die with him? 123 
 
 divine government, permanent through all changes of out- 
 ward events, is treated as having perished with him, and as 
 needing the avatar of some similar champion to restore it. 
 Supposing he was right — supposing what he said, and strove, 
 amidst strange confusions, to translate into action, was not 
 a fantasy, — it ought to be good for all the previous and for 
 all the subsequent stages of English history. An inter- 
 ruption in the sequence of that history must then have 
 been permitted, not really to break the chain of it, but to 
 show how closely all the links of it are bound together ; 
 to explain what truth was hidden under the arbitrary 
 claims of monarchs, under the ambition of Churchmen, as 
 well as under all the protests against those arbitrary claims 
 and that ambition ; to discover the great worth of a repre- 
 sentative assembly, as well as the limits of its worth ; to 
 give us some scale for ascertaining the power of a religious 
 conviction in promoting moral and political freedom ; some 
 test of the check which the same conviction imposes on moral 
 and political freedom, when it loses its life and passes into 
 the symbol of a smaller or a larger, a patronised or a mili- 
 tant school. 
 
 On all these subjects the life and writings of Milton are 
 even a clearer commentary than the acts of the Protector 
 whom he served. The student of English history during 
 the first sixty years of the seventeenth century should 
 never try to spell out the hieroglyphics which he will find 
 in it, without the use of this cipher, as well as of the
 
 124 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 other. There is no part of Milton's beautiful career which 
 does not contribute something to our illumination. The 
 boy who came from the scrivener's house in Cheapside — 
 from the Puritan lessons of his father and mother — to 
 spend his nights and days at St Paul's school in imbibing 
 the old heathen wisdom — already foretold how the Hebrew 
 lore was to sustain and quicken the Greek lore in his mind, 
 till they found their full and final union in the choruses 
 which sang how the blinded and down-trodden Israelite 
 should yet see his enemy at his feet. It was even a rarer 
 gift to combine a devoted study of the old romances with 
 the continual growth of manliness and purity of heart ; a 
 delight in every sight and sound of the outward world, with 
 a profound awe of the eye and voice of the secret Task- 
 master; the enjoyment of the cloister and the cathedral, 
 with the anticipation of the two-handed engine at the door, 
 which stood ready to smite once, and smite no more ; a 
 vigorous, even imprudent Protestantism, with such an 
 enjoyment of the literature, the language, the friendship of 
 Italians as they had supposed that no northern could pos- 
 sess. Then came the glorious day when the Long Parlia- 
 ment was summoned. To witness the reformation which 
 it was to introduce, what bright visions in Italy and Greece 
 must not be left behind ! What weary toil with untractable 
 schoolboys in Aldersgate Street may not be endured ! For 
 now ecclesiastical tyranny is to be scattered, the poor Pres- 
 byter is to put down the proud prelate ! Yes, the day of
 
 MILTON. 125 
 
 the House of Commons is indeed a day of the Lord ! Alas ! 
 we must yet hear of forcers of conscience in this very 
 Parliament ; we must discover that new Presbyter is but 
 old priest writ large. The poet must stand before the 
 House of Commons of England to plead against their pur- 
 pose of strangling at birth the sacred progeny of men's 
 brains ; to ask that the assertors of freedom would not 
 bind the press with new chains forged by themselves. 
 The disappointment is very grievous ; yet still he holds 
 right onward, bating not a jot of heart or hope. The 
 king's death is for him the vindication of that divine 
 right which had been converted into a plea for mortal 
 prerogative. He can bear the loss of the assembly which 
 once seemed to promise all blessing, for 
 
 *' Cromwell, our chief of men, that through a cloud, 
 Not of war only, but distractions rude, 
 Guided by faith and matchless fortitude, 
 To peace and truth his glorious way has plough'd," 
 
 might yet 
 
 " Help us to save free conscience from the paw 
 Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw." 
 
 A pursuit of freedom surely for many a weary hour; 
 through all changes of times and circumstances, through 
 all failures of human agents. A pursuit which must 
 seem to many a profitless endeavour. Milton knew 
 that it was not so. He knew that freedom did not 
 depend, never had depended, upon these human agents.
 
 126 THE WOKKING MAN AND THE FKANCHISE. 
 
 Every step in his painful discoveries had led him more 
 to see that it belongs to the spirit of man ; that parlia- 
 ments and protectors can give it as little as kings — 
 preachers as little as prelates ; that all may do something 
 to crush or weaken the hearts in which it should dwell 
 and grow; that all may do something to strengthen it in 
 those hearts, if they will confess a God who demands obe- 
 dience of His creatures as the condition of their freedom. 
 
 The sense of this union was never so strong in Milton 
 as in those evil days on which he complained that he had 
 fallen. The men who were flushed with insolence and wine 
 showed him how indifference to the one involved the loss 
 of the other. " Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Eegained" 
 embodied his conception of their separation and of their 
 reconciliation. There is the greatest possible contrast be- 
 tween the lofty and various music of a poem and the 
 vulgar actualities of a colonial existence ; yet it seems 
 to me sometimes as if New England were a translation 
 into prose of the thought that was working in Milton's 
 mind from its early morning to its sunset. 
 
 And what was to become, in those days which appeared 
 to him so evil, and which in many respects were so 
 evil, of the House which he had once hoped would work 
 deliverance for the nation? Let us not suppose that 
 the Restoration brought back all which the civil wars 
 had taken away. The abolition of the tenure of knight- 
 service by one of the early acts of Charles II. 's reign may
 
 THE RESTORATION. 127 
 
 have affected chiefly the greater lauded proprietors. It was, 
 however, the recognition of a change which was going on 
 through the whole land ; it was a sign that feudalism had 
 done its work, and was in process of dissolution. The 
 civil wars had produced an effect similar to that of the 
 wars of the Roses. What the first Tudor king had done 
 from policy and necessity combined, the restored Stuart 
 king assented to from necessity simply. He was too in- 
 dolent to have a policy. But feudalism had been among 
 the traditions of his house ; his father had lamented the 
 weakening of it as one of the causes of his own failure. 
 I am far from considering that weakness, now more than 
 in the time of Henry VII., as an unmixed blessing. The 
 money power now, as then, was threatening to be in the 
 ascendant. There was much in the temper of the restora- 
 tion age which led to the belief in it as the great power of 
 the universe. But there were some of the circumstances 
 of the time, even of its calamitous circumstances, which 
 tended to check this danger in a class that was most 
 likely to be affected by it. The citizens of the towns had 
 always been in danger of magnifying personal wealth, as 
 the gentry were in danger of magnifying landed wealth. 
 The Wycliffite influence had been their protection from 
 this danger in the earlier times. The reverence which 
 they felt for the Nonconformist preachers who resigned 
 their livings at the passing of the Act of Uniformity, was 
 a counteraction to it at this time. The creation of such a
 
 1 2S THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 body of separatists was, of course, an enormous evil. The 
 persecutions which were inflicted upon them constituted one 
 of the great crimes of the civil and ecclesiastical rulers 
 of Charles's reign. But both one and the other had this 
 attendant blessing — they gave the citizens a set of teachers 
 who had a moral influence over them — a more direct access 
 to their minds than those would have had who used the 
 Prayer-book. And the sufferings of these men awakened 
 in the trading class a belief in qualities which they would 
 not otherwise have recognised, a respect for the want of 
 the gold which it was the temptation to idolise. 
 
 When we are casting up the accounts of this time, 
 these items must always enter into the calculation. The 
 notorious corruptions and profligacy of the court must 
 not usurp all our notice. A strange fermentation was 
 going on in the land, of which that profligacy was one 
 symptom, and of which there were other symptoms scarcely 
 less melancholy. But if we look below the surface, we 
 shall discover proofs that the nation was shaping itself into 
 a kind of order, and that the influences which most con- 
 tributed to its disorder might ultimately be brought into 
 harmony. 
 
 On the whole, I believe the House of Commons through- 
 out this reign was a fair index of its character, a true repre- 
 sentation of that which was working in it both for de- 
 struction and towards health. As an institution it has 
 established its place. The notion of doing without it has
 
 THE NEW PARTIES. 12'J 
 
 passed out of the Stuart mind. Its power may be often 
 inconvenient ; but it must be recognised. When we look 
 into it, we see that two parties have formed themselves in 
 it, very like and very unlike the old Cavaliers and Hound- 
 heads. The Tories and Whigs seem exactly to correspond 
 to these. They are their legitimate successors. Nothing 
 is wanting to each but the faith which was found in the 
 former time. The Tory does not really see any divinity in 
 the person of the king, though he has a theory which as- 
 sumes that a divinity does of right belong to him. The 
 Whig is inclined to smile at the acknowledgment of a divine 
 ruler of the nation which was contained in the Covenant, 
 though he has derived his nickname from those who fol- 
 lowed Argyle, and who would have died for the Covenant. 
 An immense transformation, no doubt — connected with the 
 vehement reaction of this period, with disgust for the 
 cant phrases of the former period, with the desire if possi- 
 ble to separate its politics from any associations with them. 
 But this proves to be absolutely impossible. Every mea- 
 sure which is introduced into the House brings back the 
 ideas to which these phrases pointed, associates them 
 with patent facts or terrible fears. The House is occupied 
 with trying to put down conventicles, or with arresting 
 popish plots, or with excluding the Duke of York lest 
 he should introduce popery. The old names cannot be 
 got rid of, the old impressions cannot be got rid of. In 
 this indevout time there are more phantasms, more mon- 
 
 i
 
 130 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 strous impostures, all coming forth under religious names 
 and appealing to religious fears and suspicions, than were 
 ever heard of in the parliament of Barebones. Foreign 
 affairs are as much under this influence as home affairs. 
 Louis XIV. may have wondered to think what different 
 questions stirred the English nation from those which had 
 occupied France in the days of the Fronde. But he found 
 that these were the questions which interfered with his as- 
 cendency in the councils of England ; that it was not diffi- 
 cult to have kings for his pensioners ; but that he must 
 make the kings independent of their parliaments, he must 
 profit by their preference for the religion of a gentleman — 
 if he was to effect his object of reducing England into a 
 province of the great monarchy. 
 
 The House of Commons, therefore, whilst it reflected the 
 turmoil, the scepticism, the fanaticism of the land, was 
 really its preserver. The weakening of its power through 
 the wild counsels into which it was led, was the cause of 
 the triumph of the Court at the end of the reign and of 
 the reckless use which it made of that triumph. Keckless 
 in one sense, but not inconsiderate. In taking away the 
 charters from the towns, the Court was striking at one of 
 its greatest enemies, one of the powers which had been a 
 chief restraint upon absolutism. To undermine muni- 
 cipal government was the most natural, the most reason- 
 able road to arbitrary rule. 
 
 The reign of James II. ratified all these lessons, and
 
 AGE OF JAMES II. 131 
 
 brought them to their climax. It was felt to be more and 
 more impossible to sever the questions which involved 
 faith from those which concerned government. Every 
 step in the career of James brought them into closer 
 fellowship, compelled the statesmen to recognise their 
 combination, however little they might be disposed to 
 fall back upon the language or the notions of the Crom- 
 well period. The acts of James had a corresponding 
 effect upon the different religious parties, upon Conform- 
 ists and upon Nonconformists equally. The bishops had 
 preached passive obedience ; the Nonconformists were be- 
 ginning to content themselves with authority over their 
 congregations, to give up the dream of influencing the 
 government of states. Both were compelled to change 
 their course ; the former certainly with the most awkward- 
 ness. The common enemy brought them together ; the 
 Dissenters became the defenders of the bishops, the bishops 
 became the victims of the king. There was a strange 
 dance of parties, a curious interlacing of interests ; what 
 was more consolatory, a confession of principle, a submission 
 to duty in opposing parties. But for this the Revolution 
 could never have taken place. For so all mere notions 
 about the divine authority of kings, all mere notions about 
 the separation of religious questions from political ques- 
 tions, all mere notions about the crime of resistance or the 
 right of resistance, gave way to the belief — diffused won- 
 derfully through all classes of the land — that there is a Will
 
 132 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 which is higher than that of any mortal or any dynasty, 
 and that there are moments when it is treason against this 
 higher will not to treat the authority of the lower as abro- 
 gated. The coming of William to our shores brought this 
 belief into definite action ; Somers, and those who framed 
 the Declaration of Rights, gave it a formal expression in 
 words. 
 
 I hold this Declaration to be a ratification of the Puritan 
 principle, of the real doctrine which had been asserted in 
 the Scotch Covenant, stripped of all sectarian technicalities, 
 and identified with the old principles of the constitution. 
 In this sense I cannot think that its worth has been the 
 least overrated by the Whig historians, though they have, 
 in their eagerness to clear themselves of all fellowship with 
 their godly predecessors, explained away unfairly the lan- 
 guage of the Declaration — reading it by the light of Locke's 
 defence of what he took to be its principles in his " Essay 
 on Governments." I do not undervalue that masterly work 
 if I prefer to read a document of such grandeur and sig- 
 nificance by its own light and by the light of all the 
 previous history of our land. 
 
 I cannot think that the events of William's reign, and, 
 above all, the doings of its Parliaments, offer us any en- 
 couragement to accept a party view of the transactions with 
 which it commenced. The parties of the time — let who will 
 represent them to us — come forth with anything but bril- 
 liancy and honour. If Lord Macaulay is the Whig his-
 
 THE REVOLUTION". 13' 
 
 torian, he has certainly done little to make us in love with 
 his own school, though we may admire their opponents 
 even less. He is probably I'ight in his main conception — 
 into whatever occasional idolatries and concealment of 
 dark spots in his favourite character it may have betrayed 
 him — that the king was the great preserver of the land, 
 that he prevented the rival parties from destroying it. 
 Such a proof of the worth of monarchy was exceedingly 
 important at a time when so many influences had tended 
 to bring it into disesteem, when the Revolution itself 
 might have suggested the idea that the representative 
 house was the supreme authority. All the events of this 
 time as much confute that doctrine as they establish 
 the dignity of the House, whilst it preserves its true 
 character and office. It was passing, in the reign of 
 William III., into a new phase. It was as much on its 
 trial as it ever has been in any later period. A very 
 severe trial indeed it was ; one not to ascertain its func- 
 tions, but to see how it would use them when they had 
 been fully conceded and defined. I will not anticipate the 
 result ; I will only make two observations upon the period 
 which has been under our review. 
 
 The first has reference to the whole of it. The people, 
 I think it is evident, have been growing during the century 
 between the reign of James I. and the reign of Anne — 
 growing, to use the distinction of Laertes, in thews and 
 outward bulk — ffrowine in the inward service of the
 
 134 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 mind and will. The growth has an outward development : 
 serfs emancipated, freemen and freeholders multiplied ; 
 the House which they call theirs, taking up a magnifi- 
 cent position as defenders of freedom ; then claiming an 
 authority winch was incompatible with freedom ; strain- 
 ing its cords till they burst ; finally, becoming the genuine 
 expression of whatever there was in the mind of the 
 country to express, its wisdom or its folly, its belief 
 and unbelief, its unity and its factions. The people, now 
 as before, is not identical with the Commons. The Com- 
 mons cannot assume to be the people, without weakening 
 themselves. But in them lies the developing power of the 
 people. What they are determines what it shall be. 
 
 The next remark has especial reference to those last 
 reigns of which I have been speaking. To understand 
 them, we must observe not merely the outward condition 
 of the time, but all that gives us a clue as to its 
 education, its secret life. I have referred often to the 
 literature of this period. I have taken Milton as the 
 highest specimen and illustration of the century down to 
 the Eestoration. I do not think you can find a better illus- 
 tration of the period subsequent to it than Dryden. The 
 contrast between the two men, between the styles and 
 subjects of their poems and of their prose, is, in fact, the 
 contrast between the periods in which they flourished. A 
 most pathetic history of a man and of an age is that which 
 we read when we begin from Dryden's " Monody on the
 
 DRYDEN. 135 
 
 Death of Cromwell /'' when we go on to the " Astrsea Redux," 
 which commemorates the glories of the Restoration ; when 
 we study his Ahithophel ; when we pass from his " Reli- 
 gion of a Layman," wherein he performs the part of an 
 Anglican advocate, to the " Hind and Panther," wherein 
 he defends Romanism. The political vicissitudes in the 
 two first poems — the manifestation of all the party feeling 
 and personal grudges of the time in the satire on Shaftes- 
 bury and Monmouth — the exhibition in the two last poems 
 — a faithful exhibition, as I think — of the way in which a 
 most accomplished man, not governed by any moral con- 
 viction or principle, adopts a religious system, and main- 
 tains it with much learning and very ingenious arguments, 
 then drifts into another which offers him the promise of 
 greater repose ; — these are such pictures of a generation as 
 only a great artist, and an artist who was drawing from 
 the world within, as much as from the world without, 
 could have bequeathed to us. These changes were 
 imaged, as I take it, in the House of Commons. Was 
 there nothing permanent also which was imaged in 
 it 1 We have seen the patriots in the reign of Charles 
 I. claiming it to be the witness for abiding forms of 
 the constitution. We have seen it surviving a civil 
 war, coming out, after a revolution in which Dryden 
 saw only the triumph of a Dutch stadtholder, fresh and 
 vigorous. It is not the institution which is inconstant. 
 The inconstancy is in those whom the institution repre-
 
 136 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 sents. If they have any stability in them — any feeling of 
 fellowship with the past and the future, it will not fail to 
 stamp itself upon those whom they send forth to speak in 
 their name. Clearly mere attachment to an old family — 
 mere dislike of Puritans and Whigs — does not confer that 
 stability. Dryden had these, and he is the very type of 
 the mutability of his time.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 The House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century 
 
 f" HAVE endeavoured to show that the phrase " Kepre- 
 •*■ sentative System," if it is derived from the circum- 
 stances of one Assembly, is an inadequate or misleading- 
 one. The Commons are represented, or ought to be, in 
 the Commons' House. The monarch is also represented. 
 The ministers, what we call the Cabinet, represent the 
 sovereign to his subjects, as much as those who are elected 
 by boroughs or counties represent the subjects to the 
 sovereign. 
 
 It has not been necessary to dwell much on this repre- 
 sentation in the periods through which we have travelled. 
 The king we have found occupying a very substantial 
 position, exercising a very direct influence on the country 
 which he ruled. Shakespeare felt that all our history was 
 the history of reigns ; the monarch was practically, not 
 nominally, the centre of its movements. I observed that 
 he had brought this maxim to the severest test. Richard 
 II., utterly feeble and self-indulgent, must still be the 
 leading person of his drama. Henry VI., longing to
 
 1 38 THE W0RKINO MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 change the sceptre for the shepherd's crook, and justifying 
 his desire by his acts, still is our guide through the dis- 
 tractions of the civil war; his wife, every one of his 
 nobles, may have a greater mental or physical force than 
 he has ; yet he interprets their acts to us ; he is the one 
 peaceful figure in the hurly-burly, saving it from being a 
 pure anarchy. 
 
 This conception of past history was abundantly justified, 
 as I observed, by Shakespeare's Tudor experience. I did 
 not deny that the next age was one from which he could 
 not have learnt the lesson. James I., assuming to be 
 more a king than all his predecessors, was essentially less 
 of one ; he had many gifts ; the specially kingly gifts 
 seemed to have been carefully withholden from him. It 
 was in his reign and id the next reign, that the distinction 
 between the person of the king and his evil counsellors 
 began to be dwelt upon with especial emphasis ; it became 
 the characteristic phraseology of the first three parlia- 
 ments of Charles ; it was not dropped by the Long Parlia- 
 ment ; it was preserved through the earlier years of the 
 war. The distinction seems often most difficult to main- 
 tain — yet it had expressed at first the sincere loyalty of 
 those who used it ; afterwards their desire to be loyal. 
 When they began to suspect that it was a fiction, the 
 struggle in the conscience of the nation was fearful. It 
 issued in the death of the king. He could not be separ- 
 ated from his advisers. He must have been the source of
 
 THE KING'S KEPRESENTAT1VES. 139 
 
 their evil acts. He must be more guilty than they were. 
 Only a few could adopt that terrible logic. There was a 
 revolt against it in the people generally. The restored 
 king was welcomed with passionate affection. There was 
 a determination not to see wrong in him, whatever wrongs 
 he might do. He tempted that resolution fearfully. Sus- 
 pected Romanism — suspected transactions with the French 
 king ; these belonged to him individually : they could not 
 be transferred to his advisers. Still he was forgiven for 
 his good nature. His subjects acquired so much of his 
 image that they could not dislike him. James was evi- 
 dently independent of his counsellors ; he followed out his 
 own personal tastes and persuasions ; he braved the re- 
 sponsibility of them, and fell. His successor had recog- 
 nised advisers — sometimes Whig, sometimes Tory ; but 
 the management of European policy which interested him 
 most, he took upon himself. He was, as Lord Macaulay 
 is careful to point out, his own minister for foreign affairs. 
 Up to the close of the seventeenth century, then, this re- 
 presentation of the monarch by ministers has not been 
 prominent. It has suggested itself often ; it has not 
 forced itself upon us as a cardinal fact of the history. 
 
 This it becomes in the eighteenth century. It not only 
 cannot be overlooked; no political facts can be contem- 
 plated apart from it. All questions respecting the House 
 of Commons can only be viewed in relation to it. The 
 character and influence of that House are determined,
 
 140 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 in a great measure, by it. There are, in fact, for our 
 purpose but three great topics to be considered in the 
 life of the eighteenth century. First, how this representa- 
 tion of the sovereign by ministers affected the education 
 and representation of the people ; secondly, how this 
 education and representation were influenced by certain 
 great material changes which took place in the condition 
 of England ; thirdly, how they were affected by certain 
 moral movements which occurred here, and by certain 
 others, apparently of a very different character, which took 
 place in France in the course of this century. 
 
 1. How the notion of the divine right in the sovereign 
 had influenced the minds of the Stuart princes — how it 
 had been encountered by the strong Puritan belief of a 
 divine right over the sovereign — we have seen. That 
 struggle is, in fact, the history of the seventeenth century. 
 It had terminated; but it had left its legacies. The 
 belief in a divine right had passed into the most elaborate 
 and artificial scheme about the way in which this divine 
 right had been obtained. Adam had received it by a 
 special grant from God; he had transmitted it, through 
 various channels, to different patriarchal monarchs ; some- 
 how it had descended, or a portion of it had descended, 
 upon the kings of England. How could such an autho. 
 rity, dating from the very day of creation, be set aside 
 by any presumptuous people in the seventeenth century 
 after Christ 1
 
 THE OPPOSING THEORIES. 141 
 
 Such was the doctrine of Sir R Filmer, which must have 
 had considerable hold on the public mind, or on something 
 which called itself the public mind, since Locke did not scorn 
 to refute it in his Essay on Government. How easily hands 
 skilful as his were could tear such a web as this to pieces, 
 need not be told ; if demolition was needed, the demolition 
 was perfect. But if this was the best embodiment of his 
 thought which the Tory could invent, surely the Whig 
 might have a much better. Locke undertook to pro- 
 vide him with one. There was no descent of authority 
 from Adam upon a race of monarchs ; but there was, at 
 some time or other, somewhere or other, a contract entered 
 into between a society and the man or men by whom it 
 pleased to be governed. So long as the contract was 
 observed, there could be no wish in the subjects to get 
 rid of their rulers. It might be broken, and then they 
 were quite justified in doing what England had done in 
 the case of James II. 
 
 The accomplished statesmen in the reign of Queen 
 Anne, who adopted the Tory side, had as little belief as 
 possible in the dogmas of Sir Robert Filmer. it was con- 
 venient for the clergy to be provided with such arguments. 
 The pulpits would send them forth. They would have 
 an influence on the vulgar. They would help the states- 
 men in pursuing their scheme of policy at home or abroad. 
 The statesmen would, of course, be bound to reward the 
 Churchmen for their aid, by assisting them against the
 
 H2 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 Dissenters. They would also defend the landed interest, 
 their natural allies, against the city or moneyed interest, 
 which always inclined to their opponents. If they did not 
 directly support the exiled family, they could comfort 
 the queen with the assurance that she had as good a divine 
 right as her father or grandfather. Such were nearly the 
 maxims of St John — the most sagacious of the champions 
 of the Tory and High Church party — the most utter dis- 
 believer in all which priests of one communion or an- 
 other taught then, or ever had taught. 
 
 Was the faith of Sir Robert Walpole, the leading Whig 
 of that reign and of the succeeding reign, in the doctrine 
 of a contract, much deeper or firmer than that of St 
 John in Sir Robert Filmer 1 One faith, I conceive, an- 
 swered very fairly to the other. It was exceedingly well 
 for philosophers, if they liked, to have a well-compacted 
 theory. It was useful for those who were writing pamph- 
 lets against the Tories to be furnished with an available 
 argument. But statesmen bad business on their hands 
 Avhich left them no leisure for such questions. They were 
 to hold things together as well as they could, whilst they 
 were in office, to show cause against their opponents whilst 
 they were out of it. As for notions about the origin of 
 government — well, those who could believe in them, might 
 do so. 
 
 I have taken my specimens not only from the two oppo- 
 site schools, but from the two typical men of these schools,
 
 THE GREAT FICTION. 143 
 
 — men personally as well as politically hostile to each other, 
 men most unlike in all the habits of their minds ; the one 
 ostentatiously a philosopher and man of letters, the other 
 ostentatiously a man of business who despised philosophy 
 and letters. But the residt is the same in both cases. A 
 fiction is supposed to underlie the whole of society. The 
 sovereign himself is that fiction. To the Tory statesmen as 
 to the Whig, he becomes merely an ornamental appendage 
 to the system of government. The party which predomi- 
 nates in the House of Commons and out of which the 
 Cabinet is chosen, these constitute the government. The 
 sovereign is their puppet ; what he is signifies little, only 
 what they can make him do by moving their wires. 
 
 There were many signs during the eighteenth century that 
 the supposed puppet could exhibit an inconvenient vita- 
 lity and energy. Queen Anne, swayed by her Duchess of 
 Marlborough and her Mrs Masham, could show her masters 
 that their places depended on her favour. George I. and 
 George II. were continually disturbing the purposes of the 
 ministers by their determination to protect their own elec- 
 toral dominions, and to use the arms of England for their 
 support. George III. would have established independence 
 of his ministers into a maxim of his government. All these 
 proceedings, however, being fruits of self-will and evidently 
 injurious to the land, only seemed to support the notion 
 that it was desirable as much as possible to limit the ac- 
 tion of the sovereign, to reduce him into a cipher.
 
 144 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 But if politicians can easily persuade themselves to 
 accept a fiction, a nation cannot. It must have a faith : 
 and the faith must be in a person, not in a notion or a con- 
 geries of notions. The English people no more regarded 
 the sovereign as a cipher now than in former days. 
 There was not much in Queen Anne to inspire rever- 
 ence. But they recognised her as a British princess ; some- 
 thing of the tenderness and chivalry which female sove- 
 reigns always have called forth, was directed towards her 
 as it had been towards her sister. Loyalty might be a 
 harder task towards Germans who could not speak our 
 language, who did not understand our customs, who im- 
 ported some that were very offensive. But to zealous Protes- 
 tants, to those who dreaded arbitrary rule, they represented 
 a principle. They represented it ; the principle without 
 them would have been an abstraction ; so they drew a 
 kind of affection towards them, which their disagreeable 
 acts and qualities could not extinguish. George III. as a 
 Briton born, received at his accession much of the loyalty 
 which had been bestowed on the Stuart over the water ; 
 that which had been withdrawn from his predecessors. He 
 alienated the Whigs, insulted the most popular of all minis- 
 ters, created a strong suspicion that his British birth had not 
 preserved him from the maxims of his mother, which were 
 not British at all. But again and again, the affection which he 
 had first enkindled, revived; his prejudices often helped it to 
 procure it for him ; his calamity riveted it. Never had the
 
 THE HOUSE IN ITS FEEBLENESS. 145 
 
 monarchy endured ruder shocks than during these reigns; 
 never was it more proved to be a reality, possessing the great- 
 est influence for good and evil, apart from those repre- 
 sentatives in whom it was supposed to be swallowed up, 
 as well as through them. For these representatives could 
 not separate their existence from the sovereign. The 
 people understood them to be what they were called, his 
 servants ; the notion that they were his substitutes would 
 have destroyed their power. 
 
 There was, however, this curious contradiction, which 
 has often been noticed as specially characteristic of the 
 first two reigns of the House of Brunswick. The Tories, 
 whose creed seemed to consist in attachment to the person 
 of the monarch, only submitted with sullenness to the rule 
 of German princes ; the Whigs, whose creed was to rever- 
 ence institutions above persons, were continually tempted 
 to trifle with the institutions of the country for the sake of 
 maintaining the existing family on the throne. It was this 
 perplexity of parties, this uncertainty whether either of 
 them meant what it said, or knew what it meant, which 
 makes us feel that the House of Commons during the first 
 half of this century had lost all the greatness which be- 
 longed to it in the former century. What, we ask, did it 
 express ? Some conviction, doubtless, there was ia its mem- 
 bers ; perhaps two opposite convictions, each important to 
 the well-being of the land. But have they any force, any 
 charm in them which can resist the vulgarest temptation ? 
 
 K
 
 146 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 Sir Robert Walpole says not ; lie knows the price of every 
 man. One hopes that he lied ; such boasts have been made 
 at other times in reference to other subjects, and we accept 
 them as indications of the character of the speaker more 
 than of those about whom he speaks. But that the words 
 should have gone forth at all — that a prudent man should 
 have counted it prudent to indulge in such a vaunt — even 
 that it shoidd have been attributed to him — is a sign that 
 either by public auction or private contract the consciences 
 of men in high stations was to be had, and that neither 
 buyer nor seller was much ashamed of the transaction. To 
 Sir Robert Walpole, I apprehend, who was far from a bad 
 man, it appeared a quite inevitable arrangement. He saw 
 no other way of keeping out the Pretender, and preserving 
 the country in tolerable prosperity. If statesmen demanded 
 bribes that they might do what seemed to him the best 
 thing for the country, was he to refuse them ? He must 
 use the materials which he found. He had no call to make 
 them better. 
 
 Such apologies would occur naturally to a man who 
 probably was a more competent administrator than most 
 of those who found fault with him. They indicated the 
 victory of that great money power which had already shown 
 itself in the South Sea speculation. They showed that 
 there was no belief awake in the House of Commons, or 
 in those who chose the members of it, which could suc- 
 cessfully struggle with this money power. Some protests
 
 BOLINGBROKE AND PITT, 147 
 
 against it came from the Tory squires. They felt that the 
 dignity of the land was at stake; that the fundholders were 
 becoming an estate in the realm ; that in a little time they 
 might be supreme. Lord Bolingbroke hinted to them that 
 Sir Robert Walpole was the agent of the fundholder ; that 
 they must collect their strength and be ready to part with 
 old names and prejudices in their warfare against him. 
 His letter to Sir William Wyndham on Parties is a highly 
 interesting document, illustrating the action of a man of 
 extraordinary ability and no real conviction upon the 
 country gentleman class ; his skilful management of their 
 passions and partialities ; his efforts to indoctrinate them 
 with a political philosophy which is strange to them, that 
 he may accomplish a personal object which they have in 
 common ; altogether showing how many fine things may be 
 said without much principle to bind them together, but 
 how little can be done until some man shall appear who in 
 his heart despises dishonesty and corruption, who feels that 
 he cannot faithfully represent either Commons or King 
 unless he has a higher object than that of securing the 
 favour of either. 
 
 It was the serious conviction of the English people that 
 the elder Pitt was such a man. They might credit him 
 with it before he deserved the reputation, whilst he was 
 still mixed in the discreditable politics of the Prince of 
 Wales, whilst he was dreaming that odious family feuds 
 could promote the prosperity of a nation. But the
 
 148 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 instinct which raised him to be the great commoner, was 
 a true instinct, one which has been recognised as true by- 
 historians of the most dissimilar tempers. He believed 
 that there was something besides a voracious stomach in 
 the House of Commons, and in the people generally; he 
 spoke to a heart in them ; and one came forth in answer 
 to his speech. There was that in those very men whose 
 price Walpole knew, which was not willing to sell itself, 
 which could confess a higher standard than gold. The 
 statesman who acted as if there was, could command a 
 sympathy which Walpole had not been able to procure. 
 And because he knew a good man, and coidd frown upon 
 a bad, he was able to administer the affairs of the nation 
 in the midst of a war which involved four continents, as 
 Walpole, with all his skill, had not been able to administer 
 them in the midst of peace. 
 
 The consequence was, that though Pitt belonged to no 
 great Whig family, and was connected with no strong Whig 
 traditions, he was able to maintain the old Whig principle, 
 which gave so much dignity to the House of Commons 
 as the organ of the country's voice, in a way which none 
 of his predecessors had done. Walpole had made the 
 House ignominious, whilst his maxim bound him to assert 
 its importance. Pitt really -vindicated its dignity by 
 treating it as if it was an assembly of gentlemen, not of 
 tradesmen who had come to find the best market for the 
 most worthless of all commodities, themselves. He vindi-
 
 THE KING BY HIMSELF. li'J 
 
 eated also the dignity of the Crown by bringing it into 
 sympathy with the Commons. He restored the popularity 
 of the occupier of the throne by showing that his German 
 sympathies might be enlisted in support of a cause and 
 a monarch that were dear to the nation. 
 
 The difference between that monarch and one who 
 merely acted through representatives, or who was shackled 
 by a parliament, has been vividly brought before us by Mr 
 Carlyle. Let his display of Frederick's power of judging 
 and acting for himself have all the credit and worth that 
 can be given it. But let us, also, not fail to observe that 
 the honest historian has exhibited with all his own clearness 
 and vigour, the terrible disasters which his hero suffered 
 from refusing to be represented by his generals in great 
 battles ; from choosing, through an " Olympian temper," 
 to interfere just at the moment when it was most impor- 
 tant to trust them and let them determine for themselves. 
 Nearly every defeat which threatened the existence of the 
 Prussian kingdom was caused, if we accept Mr Carlyle's 
 narrative as true, by this kind of self-will. No book, 
 therefore, suggests more directly than his the thought 
 that there may be — nay, that there must be — some way of 
 reconciling kingly strength and government with that ap- 
 parent absorption of it into responsible ministers which 
 appears to be implied in our Constitution, and to have 
 been developed in the eighteenth century. In peace, just 
 as much as in war, there may be a way of recognising his
 
 150 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 representatives, which, takes nothing from the dignity, 
 even from the free action, of the sovereign; which only 
 proves his self-restraint, and preserves him from igno- 
 minious failures. 
 
 It will be admitted that the less there is of pettiness or 
 pettishness in any ruler, the less he yields to any mere 
 private fancies or influences, the more he fulfils his function. 
 Suppose there were two principles really at work in the 
 mind of the English nation at this time ; two principles, 
 with neither of which it could dispense, yet which could 
 not be brought into fellowship; was the sovereign a puppet 
 or a cipher, if, instead of merely following his own will, he 
 expressed, in the choice of his ministers, the one which at a 
 given time had obtained predominance, — he himself perpetu- 
 ally suggesting by the changes in his ministers, that there 
 was somewhere a synthesis of these principles, however little 
 he or any philosopher might be able to state it in formal 
 words, however perilous might be the experiment of 
 forcing either party to abandon its own maxims for the 
 sake of giving effect to those of the other ? That there were 
 two such principles struggling in the nation at the time, 
 between which there could be no formal or real adjust- 
 ment, we may learn from the instances of two men, — 
 friends entertaining a sincere and profound respect for 
 each other , both thoroughly honest, and thoroughly able ; 
 one of them almost entirely withdrawn from the sphere of 
 political interest and intrigue. Samuel Johnson and Ed-
 
 THE TWO SCHOOLS. 151 
 
 luund Burke met and conversed at their club. Each day 
 of social intercourse and private study made the one a 
 more thorough type of the most genuine and determined 
 English Tory, the other of the most sagacious and far- 
 seeing Whig. Johnson, of course, had no temptation ever 
 to attempt an alliance with his opponents. Burke had 
 the temptation, yielded to it, and produced the Coalition 
 Ministry, which most men esteemed the great mistake of 
 his life. He believed that he was not sacrificing principle 
 in that act ; was maintaining the principle, that the king 
 should be hindered from acting independently of Par- 
 liament, or of his constitutional advisers. But clearly he 
 illustrated at once the impracticability of any experiments 
 to make Tory and Whig elements sincerely coincide, the 
 great practical influence of the monarch when he has the 
 country to support him, and the danger of his using that 
 influence to gratify a personal prejudice and dislike. 
 
 There is much in this century of wearisome Court 
 plots and family intrigues, concerning which it is a privi- 
 lege to know nothing ; so we are often unable to convince 
 ourselves that there was any principle at stake on either 
 side ; that the names of place-holders and place-hunters do 
 not supply the only definitions of parties which we need. 
 It is necessary to fight against this plausible opinion, to 
 resist it resolutely, or we shall begin merely to rail at a 
 past age for tempers and habits which may not be worse 
 than our own. I have referred to Johnson and Burke,
 
 152 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 as proofs that our disparaging phrases, however ap- 
 parently justified, do not express the whole truth; that 
 there were convictions, real and deep convictions, beneath 
 the hollow surface. But were these convictions adequate 
 for the times in which their strength was greatest? If 
 they could not be brought into fellowship, might there 
 not be some third principle which would demand expression 
 through them or beside them ? 
 
 When the younger Pitt came into the House of Com- 
 mons, he seems to have felt strongly, if not distinctly, 
 that it behoved him to assume a position which no Tory 
 or Whig had as yet assumed. His father, he said in his 
 first speech on the Reform of the representation of the 
 House of Commons, had believed it to be the great 
 necessity of the time. This opinion must have been ex- 
 pressed privately in his declining years : it had never been 
 announced to either branch of the Legislature. But events 
 which could not be disregarded had been affecting all the 
 calculations of statesmen. The colonies which Lord 
 Chatham hoped in his last hour would be retained as the 
 great ornaments of the British Crown, had been recognised 
 as independent. A new empire in the East had risen to 
 compensate the loss in the West. Maxims as to the nature 
 and origin of Government were suggested by the new 
 world of America; quite other maxims were applied to 
 the old world of Asia. Young men in France and Eng- 
 land were busy with discussions about the question which
 
 THE YOUNGER PITT. 153 
 
 the declaration of independence had raised. If they con- 
 cerned England, they must concern the democratical side 
 of its constitution ; that must require enlargement and 
 rectification. But the influences from the East especially 
 tended to increase the corruption of the Lower House — 
 to make it — these were Mr Pitt's own words — nearly as 
 much the representative of the Nabob of Arcot as of the 
 English people. Theories on the origin of Government 
 affected the youthful minister very little; he distinctly 
 disclaimed all sympathy with them. The positive evi- 
 dence of dishonourable effects, arising from particular in- 
 terests, like that of the Leadenhall Street Company, and 
 the probability that they would increase, weighed much on 
 his mind ; the changes which time and circumstances had 
 produced in the condition of different boroughs, was his 
 second plea for alteration. It is a significant fact that he 
 did not consider a reform in the House needful, as a means 
 of diminishing the influence of the Crown. He entirely 
 approved of the resolution of Mr Dunning respecting that 
 influence, which the House had adopted during the ad- 
 ministration of Lord North. But he said the evil was 
 caused by want of principle in the servants of the Crown ; 
 when they were honest, as he believed the successors of 
 Lord North to be, it might be fully redressed. The 
 characteristic feeling of the eighteenth century was thus 
 clearly manifesting itself in the statesman, who was, in 
 some sort, preparing the way for a new state of things
 
 154 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 who was giving the first hint of it in his resolution for 
 inquiry into the state of the representation. The need 
 of righteous and wise administration was still accepted by 
 him as the great need of the country. The belief was 
 strong in his mind that it might effect what no legislation 
 and what no changes in the structure of the legislative 
 body could effect. 
 
 There were two objections to Mr Pitt's scheme, one of 
 which may have affected honest statesmen of his own day 
 who had no personal reasons for disliking reform ; the 
 other may be more obvious to us. If mere ministerial 
 virtue could control the abuses of the Crown's influence, 
 might not some way be found of curbing those other in- 
 fluences which Mr Pitt had shown to be so dangerous and 
 more successful, besides that of altering the constitution of 
 the House 1 It was soon found that some such measure 
 must be devised for bringing the most formidable of these 
 interests under some dominion ; of what kind it should be 
 the faculties of his two greatest rivals and his own were 
 tasked to discover. Once involved in the question — how 
 England ought to administer the world which the Mogul 
 once ruled — such a field was opened to the politician 
 and the moralist, that inquiries about the places which 
 should or should not return members to the House looked 
 very insignificant. And as Mr Burke pointed out in his 
 speech on Mr Fox's India bill, and again and again in the 
 course of the prosecution of Hastings, the right treatment
 
 mr pitt's scheme of reform. 155 
 
 of India, and the punishment of those who turned it merely 
 to their own aggrandisement, would have the most prac- 
 tical reflex operation upon this country ; nothing would so 
 much tend to stop the mischief, of which Mr Pitt had 
 spoken, at its source. Mr Burke may have believed that 
 his scheme for economical reform on the one hand, and his 
 efforts for justice to our Eastern allies and tributaries on 
 the other, would reform Parliament more than the best 
 attempts to disfranchise one place or enfranchise another. 
 No doubt, also, he was the more indifferent about such 
 measures, because his mind was penetrated with the 
 principle which he announced in his speech at Bristol, 
 that the member for the smallest borough or the largest 
 county is really not member for that borough or county, 
 but for England. 
 
 These considerations may have been specially likely to 
 weigh with the men of that time. The one which I said 
 must weigh more powerfully with us is this : Mr Pitt 
 dwelt much upon the changes which had taken place in 
 the circumstances of the country since writs for knights of 
 the shire and burgesses of the towns were issued. He 
 remarked that the Crown had sometimes interfered to 
 withhold writs, in order to remedy the anomalies which 
 these alterations had occasioned. Was not the exercise of 
 such a discretion very dangerous 1 Should not the House 
 attempt to provide some measure of its own which should 
 be final as to its principle, though providing for variations
 
 156 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 in details ? Such a measure he thought he could suggest. 
 The counties were least open to corruption. The greatest 
 changes of population had been in the boroughs. What 
 so desirable as to deprive some of them of their represen- 
 tatives, and to bestow the privilege which they had lost 
 upon the shires. Surely a plausible scheme ! And now 
 consider how far it would have provided for certain 
 changes which, as we know, were taking place in the 
 country at the very time when Mr Pitt was ruling it. 
 
 2. This was the second subject on which I proposed to 
 speak. We talk of the religious revolution in the sixteenth 
 century, of the political revolution in the seventeenth 
 century. What shall we call that revolution in the 
 eighteenth century which was effected by such men as 
 Arkwright and Watt 1 Describe their work as mechanical 
 if you will — though the mechanism, in the case of the steam 
 engine at least, rested upon the acknowledgment of a 
 most mysterious power which had been always working in 
 the universe. Say if you will that the highest thought of 
 those who devised the new machines was that they should 
 increase the profits of those who used them or the material 
 resources of the land. It is not possible, I imagine, for any 
 discoverer, while he is working out his thought, to look so 
 far ahead even as such results ; he is too much absorbed in 
 the problem which has been set before him, or in the pure 
 delight of solving it. But let his thoughts have been low 
 or sublime — let them have turned as much or as little as
 
 THE NEW WORLD IN ENGLAND. 157 
 
 they may upon the kind of blessings or curses of which he 
 might be the author to his fellows — it was not in his power to 
 hinder that the conception which had gone out of his brain 
 should cause villages to grow into towns; the population 
 of towns to become doubled, trebled, quintupled ; places 
 almost solitary to be turned into the hives of a multitude 
 of creatures which were not bees, but which could extract 
 honey, which might also carry stings, which must be under 
 an order and government such as no Parliament could 
 establish. 
 
 A new world was coming into existence at this time in 
 the very midst of the old England. The descendants of 
 those who had appeared at different times of our history, 
 claiming some recognition, and who had been dismissed 
 into obscurity, as atoms of which the regular citizen could 
 take no account except when they whirled in strange 
 eddies about him and disturbed his slumbers — these were 
 now demanded by the citizen for his own purposes. He 
 must himself marshal them, and put them in order. They 
 accpiire solidity and cohesion under his own hands. 
 
 The study of this phenomenon naturally began to occupy 
 thoughtful men. Questions that had been supposed to 
 be settled long ago respecting the condition of trade were 
 reconsidered ; the practical conclusions at which men had 
 arrived were disputed and contradicted. Exclusive privi- 
 leges and monopolies were declared to be mischievous 
 attempts upon the part of human legislators to repeal
 
 158 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 laws older and more fundamental than their own. Again, 
 as in former days, it is debated whether land is or is not 
 the foundation of a country's wealth. And again the old 
 notion that labour has nearly as much concern in it as the 
 ground itself, started up as the rival hypothesis. 
 
 These controversies mainly concerned that which belonged 
 to a people ; the instrument which it wielded. But what 
 about the men themselves 1 Could they remain as they 
 had been amidst these great changes ? Were they to be 
 left to the operation of material and mechanic forces to 
 grind them or elevate them? Were no moral forces to 
 act upon them ? Were they to be destitute of the convic- 
 tions which had affected so mightily the citizen in former 
 centuries ? 
 
 It was hard to say whence such a moral force was to 
 come ; how such convictions were to be aroused. In the 
 country districts dwelt a body of respectable clergymen, of 
 which a favourable specimen is the chaplain whom Sir 
 Roger de Coverley chose on account of his pleasant voice 
 and his skill in selecting the sermons of the best English 
 divines for his Sunday readings. In the universities and in 
 the higher departments of the Church, were some men of 
 much learning, and some of profound thought, both equally 
 unappreciated by any except men of their own class. The 
 inhabitants of the towns were still much under the influence 
 of the Nonconformist divines, men» from whom most of the 
 ruggedness and most of the power of their Puritan ances-
 
 THE METHODIST MOVEMENT. 159 
 
 tors had departed ; men reasonably educated, well fitted to 
 keep up the usefulness and respectability of the class which 
 formed their congregations, quite incapable of stirring the 
 heart of any other. The Conformists and Nonconformists 
 both composed an establishment — the first more richly 
 endowed and more acceptable to the upper rank of society, 
 the second more dear to the middle ranks. Which had any 
 message for a set of men who were neither gentry nor 
 tradesmen — but were men nevertheless 1 
 
 The Wesleys and Whitfield had probably never meditated 
 on the existence of one class or another. They went among 
 colliers in Cornwall, who had a certain organisation ; 
 among Kingswood thieves, who were chiefly organised for 
 evil purposes. They spoke not to them in that character, 
 but as separate souls, which a Divine Spirit could raise 
 to a new life. But they had themselves been bred in an 
 organised society. They had been called Methodists, for 
 their strict adherence to its rules. The defiance of method 
 which seemed to make that name singularly inappropriate, 
 was itself a step to order. All who were brought under the 
 Wesleyan influence were organised. The Wesleyan rule 
 became a very strict one indeed, tending at one time to 
 absolutism, then to aristocracy, but always with a principle 
 of self-government at the heart of it. 
 
 These are important signs of that movement, though far 
 enough from the most important. The acknowledgment 
 of a spiritual power which had practically gone out
 
 160 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 amongst the most able and thoughtful both of Churchmen 
 and Dissenters, was that which made the Methodist preacher 
 effectual with rich as well as poor — but specially as an in- 
 strument of awakening manhood in those who had regarded 
 themselves, and whom others regarded, as mere parts of a 
 mass. The artificial mould into which those whose hearts 
 they had stirred were cast, was a proof that men must find 
 a home in some society, if they have any strong belief 
 stirring in them. The Sect organisation could never satisfy 
 the cravings of the age, not even of those who had sought 
 for it. But it contributed to foster a number of influences, 
 which were strong in the age, and which had a political 
 quite as much as a religious significance. 
 
 3. Whilst these changes were at work in the outward condi- 
 tion of England, and whilst this influence was acting on its 
 inner life, I do not see what hope there was of a statesman, 
 let his insight or his foresight be as great as it might, ar- 
 riving at any satisfactory scheme for the reform of the re- 
 presentation. That Mr Pitt should undertake such a task 
 at his entrance into life, is a pleasing proof that he was not 
 always, as some have said that he was, a full-grown man, 
 that he had many of the audacities and infirmities of youth. 
 He did a great service, as I think, in bringing the subject 
 under the notice of his countrymen. For the time was 
 coming when it would force itself upon them, and we may 
 be glad that they were prepared for it, by a statesman so 
 much pledged to the past, so little committed to any
 
 THE RISING DOCTRINE. 161 
 
 new opinions. But in that age it could only receive 
 a hasty and superficial treatment ; no party in the state 
 had any earnest convictions about it. I cannot there- 
 fore find fault with Mr Pitt for relinquishing the task in 
 despair, for not using his ministerial influence to thrust it 
 through the House, for not invoking any strong feeling out- 
 side, supposing such a feeling existed, to coerce the majo- 
 rity which opposed him. He was walking more in the 
 steps of his father and of his best predecessors in this 
 century, when he occupied himself with representing the 
 King to the people, than when he strove to devise a scheme 
 by which the people should more effectually represent 
 themselves to the King. 
 
 As facts opened upon him, he became more and more 
 aware that the opinions respecting the right of every man 
 to a share of the government which he had dismissed in 
 his first, speech as characteristic of a few fanatics, were 
 those which were mainly enlisted on the side of parliamen- 
 tary reform. And these opinions were not as he had 
 known them a few years before. They were no longer 
 English, but cosmopolitan ; they were connected with the 
 doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which had been 
 enunciated amidst the hills and lakes of Switzerland, which 
 had been translated into a formula by the constituent 
 assembly, into acts by the mob of Paris. What these 
 things meant Mr Pitt might not be able to tell. They 
 seemed to mean something very different from the dis- 
 
 L
 
 162 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 putes between Whig and Tory politicians which had occu- 
 pied English statesmen in the eighteenth century ; they 
 certainly did not mean what he meant, when he broke to a 
 certain extent through the Whig and Tory traditions, and 
 proposed a scheme which would have made the landed in- 
 terest in the house more powerful. Maxims essentially 
 different from his own were associated with his measures. 
 He abandoned the measures rather than be committed 
 to the maxims; if his repudiation ultimately took a 
 very vehement shape, those who had fancied him their 
 champion and fellow -worker might fairly complain, 
 but after times will not accuse him of any serious in- 
 consistency. 
 
 Mr Fox, who had honourably supported the reforming 
 propositions of his rival, had not the same motive for 
 changing his course. He had strong French sympathies ; 
 the phrase Sovereignty of the People did not startle him ; 
 he was inclined to adopt it, as if it signified little more 
 than the deposition of James II. had signified. Though 
 outrageous acts might accompany the demand for liberty 
 by the clubs of Paris, the word had for him essentially a 
 Whig sound ; his Whig instincts led him to accept it from 
 whatever nation it proceeded. 
 
 Mr Burke perceived keenly the confusion which lay in 
 this word — the utter difference, nay, the absolute contrast 
 between the ideas of the English and the French Revolu- 
 tion. His Whiggism, he said, bound him to a reverence for
 
 BURKE. 1G3 
 
 old charters, and to a recognition of history. Every appeal 
 of those who complained of arbitrary government in the 
 age of arbitrary government, had been to an existing con- 
 stitution which had been violated. In France, charters 
 were set at naught, history was disclaimed, the world 
 was to begin again at the end of the eighteenth century. 
 The evidence which he produced for these propositions was, 
 it seems to me, irresistible ; those who tried to patch the 
 old garment of Whiggism with the new cloth of the Decla- 
 ration of the Right must produce a hopeless rent. And 
 was he not doing a useful work in trying to keep that old 
 garment entire ? Could it be dispensed with or cast aside 
 as useless 1 I believe that his vindication of the worth of 
 the old was necessary before England could profit by any 
 of those lessons which God intended us to learn from the 
 new world which was coming to birth amidst such throes 
 and agonies. If the people was to be more a people than 
 it had been, it must learn its foundations were laid centuries 
 ago ; a republic which announced itself in the year One, 
 must die before it was out of its cradle. 
 
 Such a testimony, I conceive, was not only, not chiefly, 
 good for those who had lands and gold, and who feared 
 that these might be taken from them. They might 
 eagerly quote Burke's phrase about " the swinish multi- 
 tude." They might think that all fell under that descrip- 
 tion who had not lands or gold, that none came within it 
 who had. If they had understood Burke better, they
 
 164 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 would have seen that he was pleading for ancient laws 
 which had been the protection of poor and rich, which had 
 asserted for both a position in the commonwealth. If they 
 had known history as well as he did, they would have 
 been aware that men with lands and gold had continually 
 tampered with laws for their own ends ; that they had 
 found laws great impediments to their self-indulgence ; 
 that they had often exhibited a very " swinish " inclination 
 to trample them under foot. Alas ! Burke did not help 
 them to read — could not read himself — these lessons written 
 afresh in letters of blood on the records of the French 
 Revolution. He could talk foolishly and irreverently 
 of "vice losing half its evil in losing all its gross- 
 ness," not recollecting how gross, how " swinish " had 
 been many of the vices of the French nobility and the 
 French Court. He could bestow a generous and just 
 pity upon the sorrows of the noble Queen of France; 
 a pity, generous, at least, and partly just, on the sorrows of 
 the emigrants, priests, and lords. He did not own that if 
 they had done something to raise the multitude above the 
 condition of a mob into the condition of a people, they might 
 never have been obliged to fly from a land which -would 
 have confessed the worth and blessedness of their influence. 
 Burke could complain, as the pulpits of England com- 
 plained, of French atheism. He and they forgot how much 
 there was of atheism in refusing to confess the Divine hand 
 in these judgments ; how much they were glorifying the
 
 HOPES FROM THE REVOLUTION. 1G5 
 
 sovereignty which they denied, if they supposed that it 
 could overthrow a society that was good and healthy — 
 that had not become corrupt and rotten. 
 
 These were not lessons to be learnt at once, — or to be 
 learnt at all for the sake of diminishing the charity of 
 England towards the sufferers of any class or nation. They 
 were lessons which she had to lay to her own heart, to 
 turn to her own use. If she tried to do that, she might 
 profit equally by the stern admonitions of Burke, which ap- 
 peared to crush all hope from the French Revolution, and 
 by the warmest and most passionate of these hopes. It 
 may be strange to pass from his " Reflections" to such 
 lines as these, and yet I own to a profound sympathy with 
 both, and to a firm belief that both had a foundation in 
 truth : — 
 
 " Oh, pleasant exercise of hope and joy ! 
 For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood 
 Upon our side, we who were strong in love ! 
 Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
 But to he young was very heaven ! times ! 
 In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways 
 Of custom, law, and statute, took at once 
 The attraction of a country in romance ! 
 When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights 
 When most intent on making of herself 
 A prime Enchantress — to assist the work 
 Which then was going forward in her name * 
 Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth, 
 The beauty wore of promise — that which sets 
 (As at some moments might not be ucfelt 
 Amidst the bowers of Paradise itself)
 
 1G6 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 The budding rose above the rose full blown. 
 
 What temper at the prospect did not wake 
 
 To happiness unthought of ? The inert 
 
 Were roused, and lively natures rapt away ! 
 
 They who had fed their childhood upon dreams, 
 
 The playfellows of Fancy — who had made 
 
 All powers of swiftness, subtlety, and strength, 
 
 Their ministers — who in lordly wise had stirred 
 
 Among the grandest objects of the sense, 
 
 And dealt with whatsoever they found there 
 
 As if they had within some lurking right 
 
 To wield it; — they, too, who of gentler mood 
 
 Had watched all gentle motions, and to these 
 
 Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more mild, 
 
 And in the region of their peaceful selves ; — 
 
 Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty 
 
 Did both find helpers to their hearts' desire, 
 
 And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish, — 
 
 Were called upon to exercise their skill, 
 
 Not in Utopia — subterraneous fields — 
 
 Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where ! 
 
 But in the very world, which is the world 
 
 Of all of us — the place where in the end 
 
 We find our happiness, or not at all ! " 
 
 If these were the visions of youth, they were visions 
 which an old, grave, conservative poet registered as some of 
 the most precious of his life, as linked to all its hardest 
 battles, to its truest humanity. Can they have been dis- 
 appointed? Must not the bitter disappointments which 
 those who cherished them were called to undergo have been 
 for the very purpose of showing them the substance which 
 lay behind all that looked, all that was, fantastical in these 
 expectations ?
 
 THE SLAVE TRADE. 167 
 
 One hint I will offer before I finish this chapter, which 
 may lead us to pause before we assume that Wordsworth 
 and such as he must have been deluded in supposing that 
 an age was beginning in which man, as man, should have 
 an honour which custom, law, and statute had not hitherto 
 recognised. Among many indications which I should 
 dwell upon of the difference between the standard of 
 political morality in the latter part of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury and in the beginning of it, there is one which few 
 will now be inclined to dispute. The zeal of Burke and 
 Fox to inquire into Indian delinquencies may, though I 
 think quite unjustly, be interpreted into a desire for a 
 grand opportunity of rhetorical display. The motion of 
 Mr Wilberforce for the abolition of the slave trade will be 
 accepted as a sign that a question not concerning party — a 
 question of human interests — could engage the sympathies 
 of the greatest men of all parties. That Mr Wilberforce 
 himself was moved to undertake this cause by his sense of 
 the sacredness of every human being, of whatever colour — 
 that he had derived this sense from those teachers who 
 were called Methodists by the common public — will not 
 be denied. But it is equally certain that, though he was 
 the personal friend of Mr Pitt, though he went cordially 
 with him in all his denunciations of Jacobinism, Mr Wil- 
 berforce was charged by every advocate of the West India 
 interest with sanctioning the doctrine of the Rights of Man. 
 How could he or his disciples vindicate themselves from
 
 1G8 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 the accusation ? Were they not taking one of the lowest 
 specimens of the race, and asserting — in their popular ap- 
 peals — in the pictures that were meant to move the common 
 English feeling — that he was a brother as well as a man 1 
 Was not this fraternity ? Was not this equality ? Mr Wil- 
 berforce might feel — might be sure — that the difference, 
 the opposition common between him and those who used 
 these phrases in France, was as great as it could be. But 
 how was he to make the difference, the opposition, mani- 
 fest ? On what ground did he assert the humanity, the 
 brotherhood of the slave ? Was it a ground which inter- 
 fered with the honour of the freeman ? This was a ques- 
 tion which the next age would have earnestly to consider, 
 Avhich might affect profoundly all its thoughts respecting 
 the education and representation of the English people.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The House of Commons in the Nineteenth Century. 
 
 T READ to you at the close of the last chapter some 
 -"- verses describing, as I believe, most faithfully the 
 emotions with which a number of young Englishmen 
 welcomed the outburst of the French Revolution. It is 
 often said that those emotions were transitory ; that in a 
 number of persons, in the writer of these lines conspicuously, 
 they were followed by a violent reaction towards an ex- 
 clusively national temper, even towards a vehement Tory- 
 ism. That, we are told, was the fruit of all this passionate 
 delight, these fervid expectations ; a humiliating sense of 
 delusion, a return to an old superstition. The moral, of 
 course, is, " Beware of any strong belief, of any great en- 
 thusiasm. Keep the level road. Steer safely between ex- 
 tremes." I am aware how strong is the apparent evidence 
 for these assertions, how much attraction there is in a 
 critical and contemptuous age towards the inference. But 
 I fancy that the critics are open to the charge which they 
 woidd repudiate the most. They have not sifted the evi- 
 dence. Their wishes, not their reasons, have suggested the
 
 170 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 conclusion. If the history of these alleged reactions is 
 fairly examined, it will be found, as the writer of the verses 
 whom I quoted has sung, that there are 
 
 " Thoughts which wake 
 
 To perish never, 
 Which neither listlessness nor mad endeavour, 
 
 Nor man nor boy, 
 Nor aught which is at enmity with joy, 
 Can utterly abolish or destroy." 
 
 It will be found that there has been a great result from 
 the enthusiasm which is supposed to have been abortive. 
 I do not say that the opposite temper has no reward. I 
 am sure that it has. It adds greatly to the self-complacency 
 of its possessor ; it procures him considerable credit for 
 sagacity with his contemporaries. If it produces no great 
 good to mankind, he may fairly boast that he never aimed 
 at producing any. And he is useful " beyond the inten- 
 tion of his thought " in this way ; he detects and culti- 
 vates the enthusiasm which no scorn can quench, which 
 thrives best in the roughest weather. 
 
 The first thought in men trained like Wordsworth, when 
 they heard of the downfall of the Bastille, was this : " A 
 nation which has been struggling with unspeakable oppres- 
 sions, has declared itself free. The name which is dearest 
 to Englishmen, has been claimed by those whom we 
 counted our natural enemies, by a nation grown old in 
 luxury. Such emancipations are rare. Yet there have
 
 THE THREE IDEAS. 171 
 
 been examples of the recovery of a lost inheritance. But 
 here is a country not content with the blessing for itself ; 
 it would share the blessing with all nations. There is no 
 rivalry, no jealousy. It longs to give what it had re- 
 ceived. Is not this a new impulse 1 Is it not a sign that 
 the age, not of national freedom only, but of human free- 
 dom, is setting in ? " 
 
 Then there was another side to this great movement. 
 The apostle of it had published a new Code. Edu- 
 cation, he said, had been used to counteract Nature. The 
 most artificial, the more cruel system, had been accounted 
 the wisest. Ought not Nature to be the guide of all our 
 discipline 1 Should not our desire be to give it play — not 
 to contract and coerce it ? Evidently this was a further 
 step in the emancipation. It went to the root of society. 
 It entered into the household. It connected the free life 
 of the man with the free life of the child. 
 
 Thirdly, The old maxim of Louis XIV., which had been 
 felt in England to be at variance with all our constitutional 
 doctrines, "I am the state," had now encountered its 
 formal direct contradiction. Rousseau had taught the 
 French to say, " We are the state. We are the sovereign. 
 There may be nobles, kings, even priests, if we please. 
 But we appoint them. They hold their commissions from 
 us." 
 
 These we may take as the three dogmas of the Revolu- 
 tion. They could not remain dogmas. They burst forth
 
 172 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 at once into life and practice. They appealed, as Mr 
 Wordsworth showed us, to the intellect and imagination at 
 once. They linked reason to romance. They gave the 
 promise of an age which should supplant the age of dry 
 law, and custom, and tradition. 
 
 I. The first was the one which came into the most 
 immediate manifestation. The conspiracy of the allies 
 against France called it out. The nionarchs would put 
 down the Republic. The Republic would deliver the 
 nations from the nionarchs. What field for the experi- 
 ment so brilliant and glorious as Italy ? What defiance so 
 great as one which should comprehend its princes, its aris- 
 tocracies, the Austrian, the Pope 1 The defiance is hurled 
 forth. It is made good. The young soldier of the Re- 
 public wins for France, and for himself, such laurels as 
 none had won for centuries. Then he aspires to join the 
 Mohammedan with the Christian, to bestow on Egypt 
 the same freedom as on Europe. 
 
 And then this hero of Italy, this reconciler of creeds, 
 becomes the first consul, becomes the emperor. A mon- 
 arch, then, after all, is to establish the brotherhood of the 
 nations. Their freedom means that they bow down to him. 
 That lie understands to be his destiny. He must fulfil the 
 idea of the Revolution. He must destroy the barriers 
 which divide the nations. He must make them portions 
 of one grand democracy which has, as the Roman demo- 
 cracy had, a general at its head. It is, he says, his destiny;
 
 NAPOLEON REALISING FRATERNITY. 173 
 
 he appears to prove that it is. Kingdoms and empires 
 actually stoop to him. The nation which Frederick the 
 Great had raised crumbles under his feet. The German 
 empire ceases, for it cannot stand beside his empire. At 
 Tilsit Napoleon and Alexander consider how they may 
 divide the world between them. 
 
 And this, then, said those who had hailed the first 
 awaking of a nation to freedom — who had hailed with 
 still more rapture its promises of freedom to all nations — 
 this, then, was the idea of the French Revolution ! Thus, 
 even thus, it is realised. If you will turn from Words- 
 worth's description of his feelings at the commencement of 
 the Revolution to his " Sonnets to Liberty," you will see 
 this process of reaction in its different stages. I scarcely 
 know a more interesting or affecting study, or one which 
 more connects the biography of a recluse — as he had a 
 right to call himself — with English and European history. 
 The sentiment of liberty was the very one which the Revo- 
 lution had kindled. Whatever other applications there 
 might be of the word, that which connected it with the 
 Nation was the most simple, the most obvious. To an 
 Englishman the connexion was inevitable. England had 
 lived — when its life had been most vigorous — to resist all 
 experiments of universal government which had interfered 
 with its distinctiveness as a people. The pope, Philip 
 II., Louis XIV., all had alike been fought with on this 
 ground. No general language, it had been said, shall rob
 
 174 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 us of our language, no imperial or spiritual head shall 
 hinder us from recognising our own king as supreme in 
 the fullest sense of the word. All faith in a living God 
 had, as I have shown you before, been bound up with faith 
 in this national freedom. It was, no doubt, a sore trial, a 
 shock to the inmost soul, to part with the dream that 
 France was to regenerate the universe. But was it not 
 fidelity to one's deepest convictions to resist her in the 
 name of national freedom? No doubt after a time of 
 painful numbness there was the pleasant sense that the 
 old English belief was returning ; that traditions were not 
 worthless if they were traditions of deeds done, of victories 
 achieved on behalf of the very cause which had first enlisted 
 our sympathies for the foreign people. But there was no 
 need to abandon the larger hopes which the Revolution 
 had created. Was not England taking the very part which 
 France had claimed for herself ? In opposing Napoleon 
 was not she preaching liberty to the nations ? Could she 
 help Spain and Portugal with any watchword but that ? 
 Nay, was it not beginning to be heard through every part 
 of Europe 1 Did not Prussia call forth her sons in that 
 name ? Did not Austria herself — with whatever feebleness 
 and uncertainty — at last pronounce it 1 Was it not heard 
 from the Kremlin of Moscow ? Did not the Autocrat of all 
 the Bussias relinquish his vision of sharing the world with 
 Napoleon, and invoke the nations in God's name to cast 
 off a yoke which they could not bear ?
 
 CONSISTENCY AMIDST CHANGES. 175 
 
 That the nionarchs, whose object, in 1792, had been to 
 stifle the cry for liberty, which they thought would spread 
 from France into their countries, should one after another 
 join themselves in the cry, till the words " battle of the 
 nations " should be chosen to describe then- struggle, must 
 surely have seemed a triumph to those who had protested 
 most strongly against the convention of Pilnitz and the 
 manifesto of the Duke of Brunswick. If the parties had 
 shifted their colours — if the advocates for Imperialism had 
 become the leaders of the war against Imperialism — if 
 those who had begun with proclaiming the rights of 
 nations and of men had been the instruments of trampling 
 them down — this change could not affect the consistency 
 of men who, through good and evil report, had main- 
 tained Imperialism to be a curse, who had rejoiced when- 
 ever nations had discovered their own strength and shaken 
 it off. 
 
 There were, however, various dangers awaiting this con- 
 sistency. First, there was the danger of overlooking the 
 multitude of old and scandalous abuses in the different 
 countries, as well as the immorality of their different rulers 
 which had caused the victory of the imperial arms, and 
 on which they had executed a predestined vengeance. It 
 was well, no doubt, to forgive and forget past offences, to 
 give the rulers credit for a desire to begin a new career. 
 But it was not well to reject the divine warnings of twenty 
 years. It was not well to deny the blessings which the
 
 176 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 hurricane of these twenty years had produced by sweeping 
 away that which must have hindered all fresh growth. 
 There was another danger resulting from the feebleness 
 and wrong-doings of these nations which had revolted 
 against the oppressor. Wordsworth had said that the 
 power of armies was a visible thing, but that none could 
 measure the invisible strength which there was in a people 
 rising as the Spaniards rose. Our soldiers came back and 
 told us that this supposed invisible strength had been 
 connected with contempt of discipline, with great savage- 
 ncss and great treachery. The organic force of armies had 
 proved itself much mightier and much nobler. So spoke 
 men who could not be suspected of contempt for any 
 popular cause, any lurking passion for monarchies or 
 aristocracies ; such men as Col. William Napier. These 
 reports must have produced a distrust in all so-called 
 national movements, a belief that they tended to anarchy. 
 Then thirdly, it had been notorious that the Whig party 
 in England had been far less interested in the war against 
 Napoleon than their opponents, that some of them had 
 even expressed a sympathy with him. Hence those who 
 held the sentiments that are embodied in Wordsworth's 
 Sonnets, were drawn forcibly into alliance with the party 
 which had a nervous dread of the word "liberty." That 
 one who had written as he wrote about Milton and the 
 times of the Commonwealth, about Toussaint and the 
 patriots of St Domingo, should become identified with the
 
 THE DREARY AGE. 177 
 
 school of repression, struck many as a flagrant revolt from 
 his original principle. They did not see how much it was 
 the effect of his circumstances. Dislike for a party to 
 which he had never belonged — which was identified in his 
 mind with indifference to a cause that had been to him a pas- 
 sion — the most prominent and admired writers in which had 
 been contemptuous opposers of his poetical reforms — drove 
 him almost inevitably into sympathy with their opponents ; 
 for men as they grow older want some friends and allies 
 to compensate the loss of youthful vigour, and may overlook 
 much to procure them. Mr Wordsworth had other com- 
 pensations. He saw those maxims respecting the dignity of 
 the peasant and of his speech, respecting the meanness of the 
 artificial diction which had been called poetical — maxims 
 savouring of his French as well as of his English faith — sul- 
 lenly accepted in the very classes to which they were most 
 offensive, determining consciously the feelings and thoughts 
 of young men in England and America, moulding the 
 poetry of a new generation. He needed such comfort ; 
 for the time which followed the peace, the time of the Holy 
 Alliance and of our Regency, was not one in which it was 
 easy to feel that to be alive was joy, that to be young 
 was very heaven. It was a time of terrible exhaustion. 
 The past seemed past indeed ; the future had a very leaden 
 aspect. Efforts at repression were the great and successful 
 efforts. That the nations should not open their eyes, or 
 peep, or breathe, appeared to be the desire of those mon- 
 
 M
 
 178 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 archs who had encouraged them to such preternatural activity 
 against the French Emperor. And yet the Holy Alliance 
 was itself a testimony that the French had dreamed a 
 dream which would be fulfilled. " There must be a 
 union of nations — a common law of nations — a great 
 fraternity," said the enthusiasts. " There shall be such 
 a union, such a fraternity," said the monarchs. " We will 
 create it and put ourselves at the head of it." Not 
 a successful experiment more than that of the repub- 
 lic, more than that of the empire; one very perplex- 
 ing, very unintelligible to those who had entertained the 
 idea of fraternity ; to those who had thought it must be 
 associated with liberty for each Nation. But certainly a 
 sign of what the age was aiming at; certainly a witness 
 that the thought which had been awakened in it was one 
 that could not perish ; that there must be recognised some- 
 how a general humanity as well as a distinct national life. 
 Somehow, though not, it would seem, by any of these 
 methods ; the monarchs had proved that. " We must 
 have the nations alive," they said at one moment. " We 
 must kill them to get a general alliance," they said after- 
 wards. They alternately accepted and denied each side of 
 the gorgeous vision, showing they had not discovered how 
 either side should be realised. 
 
 Theirs was, they said, a Holy Alliance. The epithet 
 sounded hypocritical to the people who heard it ; most of 
 the acts which accompanied it justified the imputation. It
 
 THE HOLY ALLIANCE AND THE THKEE DAYS. 179 
 
 was adopted in opposition to the atheism of the Revolu- 
 tion ; often it seemed to be a perpetuation of that atheism. 
 Did the monarchs confess a Divine Ruler, or did they 
 think they were the divine rulers ; that the power of God 
 was vested in them — was absorbed into them ; that they 
 could reconstruct and remould His universe 1 They hovered 
 between these two opinions ; there were times when they 
 yielded to all the blasphemy of the second idea; there were 
 times when they rose to the truth of the first. They left 
 a witness that the second could not be true ; for what came 
 of their reconstruction and remoulding ; what proof did 
 they give of their creative power 1 They left a witness in 
 the name which they assumed, that there is a Sovereign 
 holy and just, not merely powerful, who might care more 
 for the nations than they did, who might design to bind 
 them into one. 
 
 The man who had most of this idea in its truth and in 
 its perversion — the real former and soul of the Alliance, 
 Alexander of Russia, left the world. Then its impotence 
 began to appear. To Metternich and his Austrians it was 
 merely a diplomatic invention. As such Mr Canning, when 
 foreign minister of England, shook it off. The stirrings of 
 the nations which had never ceased, but which had been 
 crushed as anarchical, and which had proved themselves 
 to be feeble, became more hopeful. France, which had 
 restored absolutism in Spain, became again impatient of the 
 tendency to it in herself. There was concession, there was
 
 180 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 more violent repression. Charles X. tried his coup d'etat, and 
 the second French Revolution revived for a moment some of 
 the fears and hopes which had been called forth by the first. 
 The fears were soon quelled. Louis Philippe took his 
 place among the recognised monarchs of Europe. He 
 was found to have no grand imagination of disturbing or 
 regenerating the nations. His ambition was to discover 
 the best means of keeping in order the discontent that was 
 stirring in his own. The hopes were not so manageable. 
 A government directed by a skilful head, with many able 
 subordinates — a government possessing the confidence of 
 the mercantile classes, and securing a material prosperity — 
 did not satisfy all the cravings of a nation which had 
 aspired to lead the world into freedom and order. The 
 thought of a distinct national life, the thought of a common 
 brotherhood for the nations — these were not dead during 
 the reign of Louis Philippe. They were felt in France 
 amidst all its materialism, they could not be extinguished 
 in England by all our railway speculations. There they 
 gave birth to republican conspiracies and to ecclesiastical 
 schemes, which appeared to be most alien from republi- 
 canism. Passionate efforts there were in this time to 
 recover the freedom for France which the Revolution had 
 claimed, which the citizen king was said to be stifling; 
 passionate efforts to recover an idea older than the Revolu- 
 tion, the idea of a spiritual government or universal society. 
 Chartist movements in England were a feeble reproduction
 
 STATE OF FRANCE AND ENGLAND. 181 
 
 of the first ; they testified that the middle class ascendency 
 was not satisfactory to all classes in the community. The 
 cries for a spiritual fellowship, which were heard more dis- 
 tinctly, expressed a similar discontent on other grounds. 
 " The Parliament," it was said, " is wholly secular, wholly 
 commercial. Yet it holds the Church and all divine inter- 
 ests under its yoke. Here or elsewhere, in the past if not 
 in the present, we must find some higher authority, one to 
 which we can bow without feeling that we are mere chil- 
 dren of this world." In some these cries exhausted them- 
 selves in mere protests against the vulgar practicality of 
 the English mind, in a search for the picturesque. In 
 some they became thoroughly practical as to their nature 
 and in their results. In both countries, modern and ancient 
 opinions and aspirations were often curiously blended. 
 A Church was demanded which should be emphatically 
 for the poor — in which all should be on a level. The new 
 Jacobinism of the Kevolution combined itself with the old 
 Jacobinism of the Dominican. Men who had abhorred 
 democracy felt the power of it, and allowed it through one 
 entrance or another to come into their minds, almost to 
 possess them. 
 
 The sudden downfall of that kingdom which had 
 appeared to stand so firmly on its material basis, gave 
 another turn to these speculations and a greater im- 
 pulse to them than before. The formation of a new 
 republic, the appearance of a new empire, have compelled
 
 182 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 us once more to collect all the experiences, to marshal all 
 the convictions, which have taught us how an empire tries 
 to satisfy the demands for a universal society ; how inevit- 
 ably it slays the nation to satisfy them. The struggles of 
 the empire with the popedom oblige us to ask ourselves 
 whether there must not be something hidden behind that 
 notion of a paternal rule which the Holy Alliance tried to 
 embody, that might harmonise with the freedom of distinct 
 peoples ; whether that hidden something may not be the 
 old confession of a God who makes free, and therefore who 
 cannot sanction the efforts of emperors or popes to make 
 slaves ? So far, then, as this first idea or dogma of the revo- 
 lution is concerned — that which affirms the existence of a 
 humanity as well as of a distinct national life — I think we 
 have proof enough that it is one which 
 
 " Neither listlessness nor mad endeavour, 
 Nor aught that is at enmity with joy, 
 Can utterly abolish or destroy." 
 
 II. The second dogma of the French Revolution related, 
 I said, to Education. It connected the education of the child 
 with the life of the citizen. The nineteenth century has 
 certainly never lost sight of this connexion. Each party 
 has acknowledged it ; each has attempted to show that 
 it can establish and realise the connexion as no other 
 can. This problem has been the great trial of the age. 
 We all feel that no political problem can be solved com- 
 pletely, unless it be solved. But the question of edu-
 
 IS NATURE GOOD OR EVIL ? 183 
 
 cation assumed a special form in the minds of those who 
 had most influence on the revolutionary movement. It 
 was the same form which we find in all the phrases of the 
 time: "Man is naturally free, — man has natural rights;" 
 that was the premiss. " Artificial society has robbed him 
 of his freedom — has cheated him of his rights. Bring him 
 back to Nature, that he may recover them ; " that was the 
 practical conclusion. 
 
 Now, there were in England no persons who felt and 
 recognised the importance of education more than the 
 authors of the religious movement to which I referred in 
 my last chapter. There were none who more desired that 
 education should be extended to all classes. But there were 
 also none who demurred more to the phraseology which 
 took it for granted that education ought to follow Nature, — 
 that the nature of the man, or of the child, could in the 
 least be trusted or treated as good. It was, they said, not 
 good, but evil; not to be obeyed, but to be subdued or 
 changed. This was that contrast to which I alluded in the 
 last chapter, as leading to so many curious perplexities with 
 reference to the question of the slave. He has been robbed 
 of his natural liberty, said the champion of the French 
 Declaration. He is a man and a brother, said the sup- 
 porter of Mr Wilberforce. Well ! are not the expressions 
 equivalent 1 May not they be interchanged 1 Continually 
 they ivere interchanged in rhetorical speeches, even in elabo- 
 rate arguments. Their opponents confounded them. Those
 
 184 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 who used them often could not distinguish them. Only 
 when it came to this test of education and the way in 
 which they were to be applied, either to the African or the 
 Englishman, the difference became manifest ; it was found 
 that there was a wide gulf between opinions which 
 seemed to be identical. 
 
 There was another idea distinct from both of these which 
 had been long at work in England. It was the idea of 
 our public-school education. Why was the boy sent to 
 school 1 To be under masters who would fit him for the 
 exercise of his functions as a freeman, as a citizen. He 
 must be subjected to laws ; he must be punished if he dis- 
 obeys the laws. He is in a society ; in the order of that 
 society he will learn some of the conditions to which he 
 must submit when he comes into the larger society of the 
 nation ; — what his relations will be to the other members 
 of it — what laws will bind him, when he hears no more 
 a voice bidding him do this, or not do that — what sen- 
 tences may await him when there is no longer a rod visibly 
 hanging before him. Here is a scheme of education very 
 unlike that which prescribes the following of Nature. Its 
 abuses supplied some of the strongest arguments to those 
 who urged that as the great principle of reformation. 
 But, on the other hand, it was anything but satisfactory to 
 those who based all their thoughts of man on the corrup- 
 tion of human nature. This school system, it seemed to 
 them, gave scope and play to many of the worst passions
 
 THE PROBLEM OF TUCLIC SCHOOLS. 185 
 
 of our nature. "Must not these," it was asked, "always 
 receive encouragement and development in a society not 
 carefully weeded and sifted, or else continually watched 1 
 Is it not the duty of a parent who does not wish to train his 
 child for the acquisition of worldly feelings and habits, 
 to keep him under bis own eye 1 Evils, no doubt, must be 
 encountered, but they will not be aggravated in each boy by 
 continual contact with the evils in his fellows." 
 
 Whatever maxims of the kind any parent of the upper 
 or middle class might adopt in reference to his own chil- 
 dren, it is clear that they were not applicable to the poorer 
 classes. And now was the time when the condition of 
 these classes must be faced, when all that amazing deve- 
 lopment of manufacturing industry and power which I said 
 would derange political calculations, must be contemplated 
 in reference to this question also. Evidently the provi- 
 sions for instruction which had been made in former days, 
 numerous as they were, elaborately as some of them had 
 been contrived to meet the circumstances of their own time, 
 did not in the least anticipate this alteration. Evidently, 
 too, the agricultural labourers, from whatever change hi 
 manners, from whatever neglect of those who should have 
 cared for them, were at least as much in need of teaching as 
 the mechanics. How must the case of either be treated ? 
 
 It was almost inevitable that when such large bodies had 
 to be considered, some of the first contrivances should con- 
 cern the way in which they could be packed together in
 
 186 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 a room, and in which maxims of organisation might be 
 applied to them. It was an important preliminary ques- 
 tion; it never could become an indifferent one. Most 
 especially it could not be indifferent if the old English 
 doctrine were in any degree the true one. The order 
 of a school must then not be merely a condition of its 
 efficiency ; it must be a substantive part of the lesson con- 
 veyed in the school — perhaps not the least important part. 
 Whatever else might be done for boys or girls, some sort 
 of drill, or military discipline and exercise, must at all 
 events be secured for them. But what was to be taught 
 these children ? who were to teach them 1 The first 
 inquiry has given rise to all those controversies about re- 
 ligious and secular teaching, and about different kinds of 
 religious and secular teaching, by which our time has been 
 distracted ; the second, to the controversies whether the 
 State or the Established Church, or different denomina- 
 tions, should be intrusted with the work. I need not say 
 how many arguments have been produced in favour of each 
 of these courses — how satisfied each reasoner is that he has 
 confuted his adversary and established his own conclusion. 
 But since something has had to be done, and it has been 
 impossible to wait till one of the theories conquered the 
 other, children have received purely religious instruction in 
 some schools, and what is called purely secular instruction 
 in some others, and what is called mixed religious and 
 secular teaching in a third. They have received lessons
 
 EFFORTS AT RECONCILIATION. 187 
 
 from clergymen of the English Church, and lessons from 
 all classes of the Dissenters, each imparting what seemed 
 to them the right kind of religious lesson. And the State 
 has gradually assumed a general superintendence over all 
 three ; not forcing them into a particular groove, but 
 stimulating the energies of each, and making what it can 
 of them all together, deeming that thus it was doing what 
 it could to form English citizens. 
 
 I do not see how we can find fault with any arrange- 
 ments which are the best that are to be had, or how we 
 can wish any effort which is at work suspended till some 
 other, which may strike us as more reasonable or efficient, 
 be put into its place. I rather think that in this seeming 
 medley of parties and influences, in their oppositions and 
 attempts at combination, we have a sign of what this age 
 is, and how it differs from the last. Then a union of parties, 
 it seemed, could only result in the loss of the principle which 
 each maintained. In our time there is an evident con- 
 sciousness in each of any two contending parties that its 
 own conclusions and position are not altogether satis- 
 factory. Something must be borrowed from the other, or 
 a third principle must be discovered which they must agree 
 to denounce, or else in which they must try to coalesce. 
 Unity is always escaping them, but it must be pursued. 
 
 I do not anticipate any union for those who are disputing 
 about kinds of teaching, or for the persons who are to teach, 
 or even for the children or men who are to be taught, till
 
 188 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 those who hold the opposite dogmas about Nature to which 
 I have referred, shall come to some adjustment of their 
 differences, to some truth that will harmonise them. I 
 cannot but see that Rousseau's denunciations of unnatural 
 education have had an immense effect upon the thought of 
 this age, upon every man and woman who has given any 
 consideration to the subject. All the questions which 
 Pcstalozzi raised about the development of the faculties, — 
 his practical efforts to bring forth that which is within 
 the child instead of merely forcing something upon it, — 
 received their direction from this hint. All the protests 
 against the system of terror which had become so prevalent 
 in our schools may be traced to that influence. Miss Edge- 
 worth's methods of scientific training were no doubt greatly 
 affected by it, if they were not derived from it. Every 
 attempt to connect external teaching with the life and ex- 
 perience of the subject of the teaching bears witness to it. 
 Still more evidently the denunciations of artificial diction 
 by Wordsworth, mixed as they were with a continual ten- 
 dency towards the worship of Nature, stood in the closest 
 relation to the maxims of Rousseau. But Wordsworth 
 was preserved from the full influence of those maxims 
 partly by his abhorrence of the Delia Cruscan school, which 
 adopted them ; partly by his severe life ; partly by his 
 sympathy with the actual peasant. Where naturalness 
 was pursued as a principle, it became, in the majority of 
 cases, not art, but artifice; where the man enthroned
 
 THE VICTORY OVER NATURE. 189 
 
 natural impulses as his lords and masters, he became an 
 ignominious, degraded man. 
 
 Here, then, we may find the vindication of the protest 
 which the school that followed Wesley has uttered against 
 the natural man. He is not the true man. He is 
 not the free man. He has stooped to inclinations and 
 tendencies which he was intended to rule. He has 
 sunk into the savage or the serf condition. The citizen, 
 the freeman, can never recognise that as the human con- 
 dition. It is the very reverse of the human condition. It 
 is the condition of the man who is trying to be a solitary, 
 selfish creature, who is forgetting that he is one of a 
 kind. The old doctrine of education, which treats humane 
 studies as those which distinguish the cultivated man from 
 the uncultivated, confesses that cultivation is for man, 
 not for any specific class of men. Here is the truth, 
 then, of that lesson which the French Revolution has 
 bequeathed to us, separated from its confused phraseology, 
 separated from a notion which has debased and vulgar- 
 ised it. Here we get a glimpse of the distinction be- 
 tween the acknowledgment of the slave as one capable 
 of citizenship and manhood, and therefore never to be 
 treated as a chattel, and the doctrine which would make the 
 grovelling state of the slave or of the savage, the measure 
 by which we estimate the man. The true education surely 
 is that which assumes that every boy and every man 
 has need to conquer his. selfish nature, to rise out of it, to
 
 190 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 acquire the true humanity. Whatever teaching most assures 
 him that he can do that, whatever most explains to him 
 the help that he has for doing it, must be the best for the 
 citizen and the man. I do not pronounce who could best 
 impart such an education ; but I think if we would fulfil the 
 dream of the French Revolution, we must find some way of 
 making our pupils understand that there is a manhood 
 for them all into whatever class they are born. And I 
 think that here, as in the last case, the proclamation of a 
 God who would raise them to the possession of that 
 manhood, must be that which they want more than all 
 lessons secular or religious, ecclesiastical or sectarian, which 
 proceed upon any other basis. 
 
 III. I pass to the third of these revolutionary dogmas, 
 the one which lays down the sovereignty of the people a3 
 the interpretation of all government and all society. That 
 toast, " the sovereignty of the people," was given once by 
 the Duke of Norfolk, or Lord Stanhope, and accepted by 
 Mr Fox, at a London dinner. What precise sense these 
 eminent men attached to the phrase, I do not know. If 
 they regarded it merely as a rhetorical phrase, they were 
 surely much mistaken. They were playing with edged 
 tools. The words had been associated with every act and 
 scene of the French drama. They signified that the Third 
 Estate was the estate of the realm, that the other (so 
 called) estates were of necessity and by an everlasting law 
 subject to that which was the most numerous. In this sense
 
 THE SOVEREIGNTY OP THE PEOPLE. 191 
 
 the statement must have been understood by those who took 
 it seriously in England. It was not an exaggeration of 
 any old sentiment about the right to depose monarchs. 
 It struck at the noble even more than at the monarch. 
 The Whig, who had always regarded the aristocracy as a 
 main barrier against royal oppression, could not adopt that 
 sentiment without deserting those which had been most 
 dear and sacred to him. 
 
 This fact soon became very clear to the most distinguished 
 and enlightened members of Mr Fox's party. Mr Grey 
 had presented the petition of the friends of the people. 
 No doubt those who signed that petition had various 
 opinions. Some wished for parliamentary reform that 
 they might invest the third estate with its sovereignty. 
 Some only wished, as Mr Pitt had wished, to remove 
 blots and scandals from the old constitution. This con- 
 fusion of objects continued in the supporters of reform 
 afterwards. But their illustrious advocate stood aloof 
 from them. Between the years 1793 and 1830, hardly 
 any one would have associated him with this cause. He 
 was the eloquent advocate of the Roman Catholic claims. 
 He was the opponent of the measures for restraining the 
 press and suspending the Habeas Corpus Act. But all 
 propositions for reform hi the House of Commons fell into 
 the hands of Sir Francis Burdett, who denounced Lord 
 Grey and the Whigs no less than the Tories. The new 
 class of Radical reformers — party they refused to call
 
 192 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 themselves — was forming itself very slowly. Its maxims 
 were not clearly defined. Sir Francis Burdett was a vehe- 
 ment admirer of Magna Charta ; though the idol of a 
 great city, his sympathies were with the land. But he 
 was nearly alone in the House. He often divided with one 
 other member in his motions for inquiry into the state of 
 the representation, or for any specific change. Those who 
 supported him outside of the House had a general conviction 
 that it was corrupt, and that to set it right would be to set 
 the nation right. They did not, perhaps, know themselves 
 whether they wished to restore an old edifice, or to build a 
 new one. In times of distress, the cry for reform among 
 the suffering class assumed a revolutionary character; it 
 was a cry for bread. Then came schemes for putting down 
 seditious acts and words ; supported commonly by the 
 prosperous members of the middle class ; increasing the 
 disaffection of the lower. 
 
 I do not imagine that the doctrine of the sovereignty of 
 the people penetrated deeply into the minds of English- 
 men during the reign of George III. ; there was a habitual 
 respect for the actual king which interfered with the spread 
 of it. After the accession of George IV., especially after 
 the trial of the queen, it must have made much more 
 way ; an energetic leader might cause it to take shape in the 
 words or acts of a mob. But when it did take that shape, 
 there was the interest of the middle class to fight against 
 it. There came a time, however, Avhen the middle class
 
 THE NEW SCHOOL. 193 
 
 began to share this feeling. A set of men joined the ranks 
 of the Radical reformers in the House of Commons, 
 who specially represented the temper of this class — men 
 free from all fancy — devoted to figures — careful in noting 
 and checking official abuses — indifferent to the traditions 
 of the past — incredulous of anything but statistics — apt to 
 measure all things by a pecuniary standard, but faithful 
 and honest in the use of that standard. Such men had 
 little in common with the reformers who spoke of Magna 
 Charta and the Bill of Rights. Being more patient of 
 details, and more occupied with the present, they acquired 
 an influence which the others did not possess. They held 
 that a better representation would promote economy and 
 diminish taxation. And presently they learnt from men 
 more educated and philosophical than they were, on what 
 principles they might defend it. 
 
 For more than half a century, Mr Bentham had been 
 sending forth books on morals and jurisprudence. They 
 had been translated from his own expressive and charac- 
 teristic, but singular dialect, into thoroughly readable French 
 by M. Dumont ; in that form they had exercised an 
 influence abroad which they had only possessed here over 
 a few niinds. They had a French side and an English 
 side. The doctrine of the Revolution, that a man has 
 any natural rights before he enters into society, was utterly 
 discarded; all that romance which had delighted the early 
 enthusiasts was stripped off; so Mr Bentham did homage to
 
 194 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 the habits and instincts of the English citizen. But not 
 only romance disappeared in his hands. The old Eng- 
 lish belief that the life of a people is a continuous life — 
 the dream of a nation as anything but the sum of its in- 
 habitants at any given time — was also scattered to the 
 winds. The greatest happiness of the greatest number — 
 the will of the majority — these were the formulas under 
 which all ideas of society and government were compre- 
 hended ; what could not be reduced to these must be 
 fiction. The bare enunciation of such propositions could 
 not in itself have commanded the assent or the reverence 
 of men busy with all the details of lif e. But Mr Bentham 
 had an immense skill in grappling with details ; he had gone 
 laboriously into the legal practices and customary opinions 
 which contradicted, or seemed to him to contradict, his 
 primary dogmas ; he had shown what a number of private 
 and particular interests clashed with the general interests ; 
 he had explained how all governments might be made into 
 a scheme of checks upon these interests. Men who had 
 leisure for examining his exposures of abuses, and his sug- 
 gestions of plans, came away with a high conception of 
 him as a practical reformer. Those who had not this 
 leisure, read his conclusions in manageable treatises 
 by able men thoroughly imbued with his principles, 
 who laid bare with singular cleverness the sophisms and 
 inconsistencies of both the English schools. Treatises 
 of this kind were eagerly devoured by many who had
 
 THE CHANGE IN OPINION. 195 
 
 grown to be weary of party government; the Eadical Re- 
 formers, from being treated as visionaries and fanatics, be- 
 came suddenly respected and feared as rigid and consistent 
 logicians. Tims France had won a singular triumph. The 
 idea of the sovereignty of the people — that is to say, of the 
 greatest number — had vanquished that class of Englishmen 
 which cared least about ideas. And this class was soon to 
 show what power was in it, how it could convert some who 
 were naturally least in sympathy with it, into its servants. 
 Unexpected circumstances helped forward the victory. 
 The claims of the Roman Catholics had been supported by 
 Mr Pitt. His distinguished pupil, Mr Canning, inherited 
 his opinions on that subject, as on many others. The 
 Whigs had supported the cause consistently and unani- 
 mously ; so alienating themselves from the Sovereign, and 
 setting themselves at war with a considerable section of the 
 middle class. And now these claims were suddenly conceded 
 by the minister whose whole life had been spent in oppos- 
 ing them. Apparently he yielded to a strong organisation 
 — to the manifested conviction of the Irish people. Such 
 an example made, no doubt, a strong impression upon that 
 part of the English people which cared more for reform in the 
 House of Commons, than for any relief to Roman Catholics. 
 But it operated also in another way. It produced in the 
 Tory party a disgust for their leaders — a notion that great 
 changes in the constitution of Parliament had been made 
 already, and that it was no longer that body which they
 
 196 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 had -wished to keep untouched. These Tories were not un- 
 willing to let the Whig leaders drive out those who had 
 lost their confidence ; though, whether it should be given 
 to them, must depend on the course which they followed 
 and the allies which they chose. 
 
 The choice of allies — even the determination of a course 
 — is seldom left to the will of statesmen. It might have 
 been predicted by some who looked for a dramatic har- 
 mony in a man's life, that the Mr Grey of 1793 would 
 crown his life, after years of absence from office, by intro- 
 ducing some measure of reform. It could not have been 
 predicted that one of the most lofty of aristocratical leaders 
 should introduce a measure, expressing very faithfully the 
 feelings of the middle class, and giving it a position which 
 would enable it to govern, to a great extent, the move- 
 ments of the State, even the action of the other assembly. 
 But the revolution of 1830 in France had, as I said, pro- 
 claimed the ascendency of that class there. A Reform 
 Bill of 1831 could do little more than affirm the same 
 ascendency here. 
 
 Was this bill, then, at variance with the old maxims of 
 the English constitution? Those who studied it in a strictly 
 antiquarian spirit felt that it was. The distinctions of free- 
 holder and freeman, which had been the great distinctions 
 in our representation, were nominally preserved in the dis- 
 tinction of counties and towns. But so little was the idea 
 of the freeholder recognised, that by a strange clause, in-
 
 THE REFORM BILL OP 1.831. 197 
 
 troduced by a Tory who valued himself on his adherence 
 to old maxims, accepted by Radicals Avho desired the inde- 
 pendence of electors — tenants at will, the direct opposite 
 of freeholders, were admitted to the county franchise. On 
 the other hand, what was there in the mere fact of a man 
 paying ten pounds a year for a house which connected him 
 with the old freeman, the member of some organised guild 
 or company? Looked at in this aspect, the bill would 
 seem to be a very wide departure from the ancient order. 
 Again, the ideas of numerical representation and money 
 representation mingled confusedly in it ; one cannot affirm 
 distinctly which is the predominant one. That would ap- 
 pear not to be an antiquarian objection, but an objection 
 of reason and principle. I cannot, therefore, wonder 
 that a man of such weight and learning as Mr Hallam 
 should have stood aloof from the party to which he was 
 politically attached, and should have said that he could 
 not discern in their measure the principles which he had 
 studied and had done so much to illustrate. And yet, 
 can a measure be lightly spoken of, or hastily judged for 
 any of these reasons, which was demanded by a nation if 
 it was ever so much limited by the opinions and habits of 
 a class — a measure which must have been carried in spite 
 of the opinions and inclinations of many of those who 
 framed and supported it — a measure which appears to 
 have averted a revolution, if it approached the borders 
 of one — to have saved the monarchy, if it implied
 
 198 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 another and different kind of dominion from that of any 
 monarch — a measure which has apparently produced all 
 those good fruits that were enumerated with so much 
 eloquence by Mr Lowe as arguments against any further 
 reform 1 It seems to me that in this sense the bill 
 has a basis in the history of our land, and affirms, not 
 contradicts, the lessons of that history. The most organic 
 class in the country — that which felt itself to be organic, 
 was able to assert for itself a place in the national order. 
 No inorganic body has done that, or has ever had the 
 least capacity for doing it. The enormous force which I 
 described as coming into existence during the last century, 
 as receiving its direction and form from the inventions of 
 Arkwright and Watt — this had stood aloof from the House 
 of Commons, had been most inadequately represented 
 in it. Yet it was one of the most compact and orderly 
 forces in the country, and one part of it — that part which 
 supplied the capital to great manufacturing enterprises — 
 was conscious of this force ; it knew that it was a 
 power. A dangerous knowledge for any body, I appre- 
 hend, which looks upon itself as a separate order, having 
 interests apart from those of the commonwealth ; — a use- 
 ful knowledge, if the body which possesses it can be ac- 
 cepted into the commonwealth, can become a living member 
 of the commonwealth, not an excrescence upon it. 
 
 Any one who has this conception of the nature of the 
 Eeform Bill will have the pleasure of regarding its authors
 
 EFFECTS OF THE BILL. 199 
 
 as benefactors to the land. He will be prepared to appre- 
 ciate that particular kind of service which it is said to have 
 rendered to England, and yet will not close his ears to the 
 different complaints which arose against it from very oppo- 
 site quarters in the years that followed the enactment of 
 it. Through it may have come — as Mr Lowe affirms have 
 come — the emancipation of different trades from the fetters 
 of restriction and encouragement, the repeal of the duties 
 on corn, certain acts of toleration and justice to religious 
 communities standing apart from the Established Church. 
 I do not undervalue these services when I say that they are 
 just such as might be expected from a tolerably enlight- 
 ened middle class. I show great thankfulness for the 
 position which it has obtained, when I contend that if it 
 had not been admitted to a substantive place in the legisla- 
 ture, and to greater influence in the elections, it would have 
 thwarted a number of those measures which it has promoted. 
 Mr Canning and Mr Huskisson dreaded, I apprehend, the 
 acquisition of power by the tradesmen and manufac- 
 turers, because they obstructed many of their schemes 
 for free trade as being injurious to their particular in- 
 terests. Would not these obstructions be greater, might 
 not the landed interest and the manufacturing interest 
 agree each to sustain the monopolies of the other, sup- 
 posing the boroughs, which often sent up ■ clever men 
 superior to the prejudices of both, were possessed by the 
 burgher class 1 It has proved to be a false calculation,
 
 200 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 though a very natural one. The burgher class, having a 
 voice in the legislature, has abandoned many of the narrow 
 notions which it had when it was apart from the legis- 
 lature ; it has forced the landed class to abandon many of 
 theirs. 
 
 All this is true. But was it not also true — as the most 
 intelligent men felt and said after the passing of the 
 Reform Bill — that there was a dead money weight upon 
 the thought and energies of the land which it must con- 
 trive to shake off, or it would lose its freedom and manli- 
 ness 1 Was there no logic in the cry of the lowest class, 
 that if the principle of number was that which determined 
 the representation, their exclusion was anomalous and 
 monstrous ? There was the ready answer to the first : 
 " You are not practical ; your notions smell of a mediajval 
 period, or else of some fantastic millennium to come here- 
 after." There was the ready answer to the second : 
 " Numbers without property can only lead to anarchy." 
 Each answer had its weight. Each acted upon the class 
 to which it was not addressed. The intellectual men 
 dreaded the invasion of the mob. The multitude regarded 
 the intellectual men as the natural allies of the aristocracy. 
 The monied class could keep them at a distance from 
 each other, if it could not reconcile either to itself. It 
 could exercise a similar influence on the religious in- 
 stincts which were at work in the land. It disliked 
 the enthusiasm of Churchmen and Dissenters, of Roman
 
 THE MIDDLE-CLASS RULE. 201 
 
 Catholics and Protestants. It could not actually quench 
 the enthusiasm of any, or prevent it from often passing 
 into fanaticism. But it could keep each apart from the 
 other i it could create perpetual suspicions and jealousies of 
 each in the other. 
 
 But the year 1848 came. The middle-class domination 
 in France collapsed. The under strata of society again dis- 
 covered the power that was latent in them. How different 
 the cries were in this revolution from those in the first, 
 must be perceived by every thoughtful man. Then it was 
 the shout for natural and individual rights ; now it was the 
 demand for the organisation of labour ; — a difference of the 
 most pregnant kind, affecting, I conceive, all the after- 
 history of other countries as well as of France. But the 
 difference was not perceived by the Chartists, who thought 
 of reproducing the movement in England. Some visions 
 they had of organisation ; but the force of mere numbers, 
 of an aggregation of units, was that which they were most 
 inclined to set against the forces which they saw were 
 chiefly recognised in England. The impotence of mere 
 numbers in the face of organisation was soon painfully 
 made known to them. The army was composed of units, 
 but the smallest troop had that in it which was wanting to 
 their millions. Whether their discomfiture, whether the 
 insanity of their monster petition, is an argument for 
 keeping the classes to which they belonged inorganic, or 
 for leading them to seek organisation, and, through that,
 
 202 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 the full responsibilities of citizenship, is a question 
 which may occupy us hereafter. With that question 
 another may arise : whether it is not possible that the 
 intellectual objections to the Reform Bill of 1831, and the 
 objections which have had most influence with the mem- 
 bers of the working class, may both be removed if we 
 recur to those principles of the constitution which both 
 are wont to regard as narrow and obsolete ; whether they 
 may not provide the fullest recognition of the positive 
 dignity of the middle class without permitting it to become 
 the tyrant over any other ? 
 
 Let me say here, in reference to the special subject of 
 this chapter, that I do not anticipate any satisfactory issue 
 of this inquiry, unless full justice be done to that phrase 
 " sovereignty of the people," which the first French Revo- 
 lution has bequeathed to us. Full justice, which does not 
 mean in this case, any more than in the case of the rights 
 of man, or education according to nature, an acceptance of 
 the phrase unsifted and untested, in the sense which was 
 given to it by those who first used it. They cast forth a 
 maxim on the world which was to prove what was in it by 
 a series of experiments ; so that at last the kernel might 
 be saved and the husk might be cast away. Whatever 
 involves the worship of Demus as of a divine monarch who 
 may decree what he likes, may put down one and set up 
 another, dealing with all as his tools to execute his com- 
 mands, I repudiate as a husk, hard, coarse, and tough, but
 
 THE WILL OF THE MAJORITY. 203 
 
 not substantial. Whoever natters a mob — I would say this 
 emphatically on the eve of a general election — does not 
 reverence a people, does not love them, but hates them 
 or despises them. With this flattery I would join the 
 boast of conforming to the will of a majority. So help 
 me God, I do not mean to follow the will of a majority, I 
 hope never to follow it, always to set it at nought. And for 
 that expression about "the greatest happiness of the greatest 
 number," I do not understand it. I have no measure of it. 
 I cannot tell what happiness is, or how it is to be distri- 
 buted among the greatest number, or how the greatest 
 number is to be ascertained. If it could be put to the 
 vote of the greatest number what they would have for 
 happiness, I have no security that they would not decide 
 for something profoundly low and swinish. 
 
 But I do find a kernel within this husk, and a very pre- 
 cious kernel. The chief of all is said, on authority which 
 I deem sacred, to be the servant of all. It was a truth 
 asserted in a thousand phrases and forms by kings and popes 
 at the time of the French Revolution. But it was practically 
 denied by kings and popes. Who should be above others ; 
 who should not acknowledge a service ; this was the strug- 
 gle. I cannot deny that it is the struggle still ; that we 
 are all competing for prizes, that we are all impatient of ser- 
 vice, even when we beg for it. Yet I trust there is a grow- 
 ing sense in sovereigns, in nobles, in all officials, that they 
 are to be servants of the people. If servants they cannot
 
 204: THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 be slaves; they must think and act as freemen; they cannot 
 perform their duties on any other terms. If servants of a 
 people, they must consider other days as well as their own; 
 what is due to the past, what is due to the future. To 
 give the men of our own day the sense that they belong 
 to a people, that they have an inheritance from the past 
 and in the future ; this must be the work of our education. 
 If any aspire to be our representatives, they must carry 
 with them the same conviction. If they think only for the 
 present, if they legislate only for the present, the interests 
 of the present will be sacrificed. In forgetting our fore- 
 fathers, they will forget us : in cheating our children, they 
 will cheat us.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Manhood Suffrage arid Money Surffage. 
 
 IT seemed to the Chartists, in 1848 and 1849, as if their 
 demands had been merely put down by force. Were 
 they not fair deductions from the principle of the Reform 
 Bill? "You have acknowledged that boroughs are to be 
 disfranchised which have not a certain number of inhabit- 
 ants. You have acknowledged that towns are to be en- 
 franchised which have a certain number of inhabitants. 
 Is not number, then, the ground of representation, accord- 
 ing to your own showing?" The champions of the bill 
 could answer, " No ! that was not our standard ; if it had 
 been, we should not have fixed the £50 qualification for 
 counties, the £10 for towns." "True," was the Char- 
 tist's response, "you did not mean what you seemed to 
 mean. But we did. You were glad of our help to cry 
 for the bill and the whole bill. Now we want you to 
 determine to which rule you will adhere. Avow one 
 principle or the other. Say the House of Commons 
 represents the possessors of land and money; or say it 
 represents the body of the people. If the last, you must 
 accept our charter,"
 
 206 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 I may not have put the arguments of the Chartists exactly 
 as they were put by their advocates. But this, I think, 
 was the dilemma in which they strove to involve, and did 
 involve, their friends of the middle classes who had worked 
 with them in 1831. I do not see any escape from this 
 dilemma, for those who thought they could ascertain 
 who constitute the people of any country, by taking the 
 sum of its inhabitants. /And that, as I have said already, 
 had become the prevalent opinion among those who most 
 directed the judgment of the ten-pound householders/ It 
 may be questioned whether their representatives in the House 
 of Commons would not, in general, have treated any other 
 conception of a people as fantastic and absurd. They were 
 therefore deliberately endowing a small section of the people 
 with privileges which by their own theory of the constitu- 
 tion belonged to a larger. 
 
 But if the numerical doctrine was accepted in terms, 
 resisted, in fact, by those who clung to the Reform Bill of 
 1831, it was rejected, in fact, though it was retained in 
 terms, by those who sympathised most heartily with the 
 French Revolution of 1848. The ouvriers of Paris prac- 
 tically disclaimed the notion that number was the secret 
 of power. We must, they said, have an organisation of 
 labour; we are nothing without that. An expression, I 
 think, of a great truth, whatever errors might be mixed 
 with their apprehensions of it ; of a truth which would in 
 due time become very intelligible to Englishmen of all
 
 NUMBER AND ORGANISATION. 207 
 
 classes. The middle class bad no real faith in units. The 
 merchants formed companies and partnerships ; so they 
 exhibited their strength. A hundred Englishmen, or less 
 than a hundred, went forth to found a colony. They felt 
 themselves a people. 50,000 or 500,000 savages might 
 be about them ; these they felt were not a people. The 
 labourers, in like manner, recognising organisation to be 
 their necessity, were abjuring the faith in units. They 
 were adopting the same idea of a people as that which had 
 been implied in all the social life which was already estab- 
 lished. 
 
 I have thus been brought back to the principle from 
 which I started. Every step in our history which we 
 have been considering, has illustrated and confirmed it. 
 We have been tracing the growth of a people ; there was a 
 living, however tiny, seed of order ; this the rains and the 
 sun nurtured ; it had all possible obstructions when it 
 came above the surface and began to send forth shoots. 
 But it became stronger for all the influences which threat- 
 ened to kill it, expanded in the air, became sickly under 
 every attempt to confine it in hothouses. Here is life; 
 here is the promise of ever-fresh development. Introduce 
 the miserable theory of numbers, and you have nothing but 
 a series of plots and counterplots ! plots to gain admission 
 into a narrow, exclusive circle ; counterplots to keep the 
 circle more narrow, to devise precautions against intruders. 
 Thence arise perpetual suspicions of the few against the
 
 208 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 many, and of the many against the few ; of the few against 
 each other, of each one in the many against his neighbours ; 
 ending in the domination of one who reduces all to the 
 condition of corpses, and then boasts that by destroying 
 freedom he has secured equality. 
 
 If Ave apply these lessons to the questions which are 
 agitating England now — which will undergo a discus- 
 sion at every one of the coming elections, and will cer- 
 tainly be brought before the next Parliament — we may 
 clear away some confusions, at least from our own minds. 
 I am not about to propose any new theory or scheme of 
 representation. I think wc have quite enough of theories. 
 I do not say we have too many, because each, I doubt not, 
 has something in it which is not in any other, and which 
 may contribute to a practical result. But I shall not add 
 one to the list. I woidd only inquire whether there is not 
 an old doctrine which we have somewhat lost sight of in 
 our pursuit of novelties ; whether we cannot recover it ; 
 whether, if we do, we may not turn all recent suggestions 
 to better account. 
 
 Two demands have survived the Chartist movement; 
 one is described as the demand for manhood suffrage, the 
 other for,janiversal suffrage. The phrases are often sup- 
 posed to be identical by their opponents ; perhaps they 
 often appear identical to the persons who use them. Yet 
 they express very different instincts ; if followed out, they 
 would produce very different effects. Listen carefully to
 
 MANHOOD SUFFRAGE. 209 
 
 the statements and arguments of any one who pleads for 
 manhood suffrage. -^ You will see that he means to protest 
 against the notion that a certain amount of capital, great 
 or small, determines the worth of a man, or his qualifica- 
 tion for being a citizen/- That anything which a man has 
 should be set above that which he is, shocks the objector's 
 conscience. He deems it an immoral inversion ; he sees 
 in it the root of meanness and injustice. I never could 
 discourage this kind of feeling. I should think that I was 
 injuring a neighbour s soul, and injuring my own, if I used 
 any arguments, however plausible, which could diminish in 
 him the sense of the preciousness of manhood, or which 
 could lead him for a moment to measure the preciousness of 
 money against it. The best argument I could employ would 
 be this, that a man who has earned a competence, who is 
 able to live without depending on the bounty of others, has 
 given a test of his manhood ; that he has shown himself 
 capable of self-restraint, and of patient toil. There is much 
 weight in that statement. I would gladly lead a capitalist 
 to dwell upon it, and to recollect that his worth lies not in 
 his capital, only in that which it indicates. If he brought 
 five shillings to London, and has become a millionaire, let 
 him have all the honour of his conflict with poverty, and 
 his endurance of it. And let him esteem that his main 
 honour. For the rewards which the struggle has produced 
 he is responsible. But if he tries to make the value of 
 them a part of his value, he posts his books wrongly, the 
 
 o
 
 210 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 ledger must be submitted to a more careful accountant. 
 Therefore I should be afraid to press this argument far, if 
 I were conversing with a mechanic. I do not want him to 
 envy the millionaire. I do not want him to think that he 
 has less an interest in the wellbeing of his country than the 
 millionaire. I do not believe that he has. I count it an 
 unsafe thing that he should hold that opinion. Therefore, 
 I will take no pains to discourage him when he defends 
 manhood suffrage on this plea ; I will rather try to en- 
 courage him in fully considering the signification of his own 
 words, in determining not to part with them. 
 
 But if I saw that by manhood suffrage he understood 
 universal suffrage, I should then ask to enter into explana- 
 tions with him. I should not run a tilt against the phrase 
 as if I thought it expressed a vague fanatical dream. I 
 should not show the least fear of it, as if it pointed to a 
 result which might endanger the stability of some class in 
 which I was interested. I do not reckon it a dream to 
 desire that all who dwell in a land should, in the fullest 
 sense, be citizens of that land. I do not know that univer- 
 sal suffrage if granted to-morrow might displace any class 
 in which I am interested. One of that class, whatever it 
 be, might, by fair or foul means, get an ascendency over the 
 voters. They might follow him blindly. He might make 
 them do just what he deemed most for the advantage of his 
 class. It is just on this ground that I should reason with 
 my friend who is disposed to identify manhood suffrage
 
 UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE. 211 
 
 with universal suffrage. " Is that blind following a 
 leader, say of my class or any other, what you mean by 
 manhood 1 May it not become the greatest idolatry of that 
 which is not manhood — of that very money which you set 
 in contrast to manhood 1 What you want," I should 
 say, " if I understand you right, is to get first the greatest 
 quantity of maidiness and wisdom — of really free judg- 
 ment — in the voters ; and next, so far as you can, to give 
 each one of them an opportunity of expressing his judg- 
 ment, his conviction. You would aim, if possible, at both 
 these objects. You would keep the second subordinate to the 
 first. Now, if you raise the cry for universal suffrage, you 
 run the hazard, it seems to me, of losing both. I like your 
 phrase, I confess, better than some which are often substi- 
 tuted for it, and are considered more moderate. I like it 
 better than any talk about the 'will of the majority.' It 
 comes nearer to my desire that the majority should not pre- 
 vail — that those who do not think with the majority should 
 have an opportunity of signifying what they think. But 
 by talking of general suffrage or universal suffrage, you will 
 only promote the slavish reverence for numbers, and with it 
 the dominion of some person who can turn numbers his 
 own way, — a noble, it may be — a millionaire, a priest, a 
 demagogue ; you will get your thousands or ten thousands 
 of votes, but their value will be nothing, except what they 
 derive from the unit which goes before them. Now, such 
 a suffrage, I say, is not worth the search of any set of
 
 212 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 serious or intelligent men. It will not express their serious 
 or intelligent purpose as a body. It will not denote the 
 serious or intelligent conviction of the distinct men who 
 compose the body." 
 
 Suppose, then, we did set this object deliberately before 
 us ; to get the greatest amount of manhood possible in 
 the electors, (we will waive the question which has been 
 raised by Mr Mill, whether under that name we are to 
 include womanhood, though it is worthy of all consider- 
 ation,) how may we hope for any solution of the pro- 
 blem 1 What I maintain is, that history has in great part 
 solved it for us, and that earnest reflection upon the cir- 
 cumstances of our time, upon the steps that have been 
 actually taken, upon the wishes that are strongest and the 
 energies that are most awake in the land, may complete the 
 solution of it. The hindrances to the attainment of a prac- 
 tical result are not to be dissembled. They arise from good 
 feelings as well as bad, in all the classes of the land ; from 
 genuine faith, as well as from unworthy distrust ; from a 
 perception of real clangers, as well as from cowardly 
 dread of imaginary dangers. But they may be overcome ; 
 nothing will help to overcome them so much, as a steady 
 examination of them. 
 
 You may remember the word which I quoted from the 
 speech of Coriolanus in Shakespeare, and which I said 
 described very admirably the feelings of a patrician of his 
 class respecting the plebeians. He regarded them as frag-
 
 RECAPITULATION. 213 
 
 ments. He did not like to see them acquiring the solidity, 
 the coherency which belonged to his own order. He saw 
 that if they did acquire it, the senate's concession to them of 
 a set of tribunes must be confirmed, and must be followed 
 by more concessions of the like kind. Well ; this contempt 
 for fragments in an organic society was, I thought, very 
 natural ; fragments cannot be respected as such. We re- 
 spect them, when Ave think they have the capacity for being 
 something else than fragments. In every stage of our own 
 history, the class which has been within the circle of the 
 people or the citizens has shown a desire that those who 
 lay without it might be kept in the fragmentary condition. 
 There was this desire at the time when Leicester summoned 
 the freeholders and the freemen to send representatives to 
 Parliament. But it could not prevail. The freeholders 
 had asserted a distinct position. They were not depen- 
 dent on the great lords of the soil ; they held only of the 
 King. They had attained their manhood. It must be re- 
 cognised. The freemen of the towns had served their 
 apprenticeship, had entered into guilds, had exercised 
 municipal functions ; they had attained their manhood. 
 They must be adopted as regular members of the common- 
 wealth. The freeholders had their forty shillings , no doubt. 
 The freemen might perhaps be householders. But in each 
 case it was not the money qualification which designated 
 them for their new duties. It was that which their name 
 expressed. They had passed through a stage of discipline.
 
 214 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 They had become emancipated. They had capacities for 
 serving their own neighbourhood, their own town ; serving 
 it as slaves could not serve it. They had capacities for serving 
 the country at large. The King must claim their services for 
 it. He did claim them as we have seen. If the House of 
 Commons was the fruit of a revolution, the legitimate 
 monarch maintained the institution. He tried to make it 
 merely his instrument for raising taxes. He tried to make 
 the position of its members a disagreeable one. Agreeable 
 or disagreeable, it became a mighty one. It upheld the 
 national feeling against the foreign ecclesiastical feeling. 
 It worked with the King in securing the Reformation. It 
 worked against the King when he tried to be absolute. 
 It fell when it tried to be absolute itself. After it had 
 begun to work harmoniously with the Crown, it sank into 
 corruption, the whole land felt the weakness which came 
 from that corruption. The question how to deliver it from 
 its corruption became one which able ministers of the last 
 century saw they must try to settle. They could not settle 
 it. There was a new power rising in the country, the great 
 manufacturing power which they could not take account 
 of ; till it was taken account of, there could be no parlia- 
 mentary reform. That power had organised itself in our 
 century. In 1831, it compelled a recognition of itself. 
 Because it was so mighty and coherent, the Reform Bill, 
 though introduced by members of the aristocracy, was in 
 fact its bill.
 
 ORGANISATION AMONG WORKERS. 215 
 
 What nest ? That part of the manufacturing body who 
 are not capitalists, who are simply workmen, have also 
 exhibited a longing to be organised. Those who arc 
 capitalists have exhibited the same disinclination to gratify 
 that longing which the English patricians exhibited when 
 their class established itself in guilds and corporations, and 
 then became represented in the legislature. Nevertheless, 
 it has been accomplishing itself by degrees. First, the ex- 
 periment took a mere negative form, the form of antagon- 
 ism to capital. Thence trade unions, which are so great a 
 power in the land, had mainly their origin — though positive 
 self-government, sometimes of a beneficial, sometimes of a 
 hurtful kind, mingled with their strikes and their denun- 
 ciations of employers. When the laws against the combi- 
 nation of workmen were taken off, these bodies, being less 
 secret, being open to observation from without, became far 
 less dangerous and oppressive than they had been. Still 
 they were in a normal attitude of hostility to another class. 
 After 1848 the dread of organised labour became stronger 
 in the middle class. " It must lead to a revolution like the 
 French." But it diffused itself further and further, especi- 
 ally in the north of England. The legislature was wise 
 enough to withdraw the restraints which it had imposed 
 on the partnerships of workmen. Associations, formed 
 not for resistance to capitalists, but for positive ob- 
 jects — for the production and exchange of goods — became 
 numerous. When these bodies were patronised by the
 
 21G THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 higher classes, they generally failed. Those which arose 
 from the spontaneous efforts of the workmen have suc- 
 ceeded beyond all the expectations of their most sanguine 
 members. They have borne the shock of the cotton 
 famine. Fifteen years ago both our great reviews held them 
 up to suspicion — the one, as being hostile to the maxims of 
 political economy; the other, as smelling of democracy. 
 Within the last year and a half both these reviews have 
 expressed the greatest admiration of them — the one, be- 
 cause they exhibit the soundest adherence to the maxims 
 of political economy; the other, because they have such 
 an essentially conservative character. 
 
 Now, it would certainly appear as if this were a de- 
 velopment of national life in the country pointing in 
 the same direction as that which led to the summoning of 
 freemen to Parliament in the days of Henry III. Here 
 you have bodies of men giving precisely the same tests of 
 capacity for management of affairs, for internal govern- 
 ment, which the men of the town gave at that time. 
 There may be many confusions in their proceedings, as 
 there were in those of their predecessors, but they com- 
 pel us to acknowledge that what we have to dread is 
 inorganic multitudes ; that which we have earnestly 
 to desire is that every part of that which we call, and 
 must call, the community, should be delivered from that 
 disorder. 
 
 To this conclusion the arguments of Mr Lowe, of which
 
 EFFECT OF BEING OUTSIDE TIIE STATE. 217 
 
 I spoke in the last chapter, evidently point. He made the 
 House laugh, and at the same time tremble, by quoting 
 passages from the celebrated Feargus O'Connor petition, 
 advocating that system of regulating wages and profits 
 which had yielded with such difficulty to the facts and 
 reasonings of free traders ; advocating also the abolition of 
 the national debt, of the House of Lords, of the Established 
 Church, «kc. He dwelt on the numbers who signed this peti- 
 tion. Admit their right in virtue of their multitude to vote, 
 and they must swamp all the other classes in the coun- 
 try ; they must destroy its institutions and its honesty. 
 Exactly ; and they may work this mischief though you do 
 not admit them to vote. A mere multitude must be dan- 
 gerous. It must be ready to adopt the opinions of any 
 leader who obtains temporary dominion over it, let 
 them be as wild as they may. Any multitude will do 
 this — a well-dressed one, a learned one, no less than one 
 in rags. And if you could induce any portion of those 
 multitudes — the well-dressed, the learned, or the ragged — 
 to feel that it had a position, a moral responsibility, that 
 it belonged to an order, the notions which it had adopted 
 in blind submission to some foolish guide would be at 
 once renounced or silently forgotten. If so, should we 
 not hail any rise of actual societies of men out of this inco- 
 herent mass ? Will not such societies, engaged in actual 
 business, feeling that they have responsibilities and a place 
 to maintain, be our best protectors against these destruc-
 
 218 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 tive dogmas 1 Should not we desire to include them in 
 the commonwealth, to make them know that they are 
 members of it 1 
 
 (2.) Looking at the subject from this point of view, I do 
 not feel quite able to understand the views of those who 
 opposed, or of those who supported the bill of Mr Baines, 
 for reducing the qualification for the franchise in towns 
 from ten pounds to six pounds. As to the first, though 
 we may attribute very great wisdom to the framers of the 
 Reform Bill of 1831, we cannot quite give them credit for a 
 divination which should have discovered the precise fraction 
 of revenue which makes an elector safe and worthy to be 
 trusted, and less than which makes him dangerous. Mr 
 Lowe supposes Lord Grey and Lord Bussell to have been 
 endowed with this miraculous gift, since he attributes all 
 conceivable blessings to a measure which settled the fran- 
 chise at ten pounds, and foretells evils unspeakable from 
 the descent to six. On the other hand, I would ask the 
 champions of that measure, whether they are not deluding 
 themselves in supposing that they approach one step nearer 
 to those who exalt a manhood above a money franchise, 
 by reducing the money scale 1 The objection, rightly 
 understood, is to the principle of such a franchise, which 
 the new bill would perpetuate. No doubt there is wisdom 
 in preserving this continuity of legislation. But to run 
 exactly in the groove of a bill just thirty years old, may 
 not be the best means of preserving that continuity. I
 
 CONTINUITY OF LEGISLATION. 210 
 
 have two reasons for thinking that it would not be the best 
 means. The first is, that the Reform Bill itself broke 
 through the continuity of legislation by substituting the 
 fifty pound and the ten pound franchise for the old dis- 
 tinctions of the freeholder and the freeman. If we try to 
 revive this distinction, we cannot be accused of deserting 
 the line in which our predecessors have travelled. The 
 second reason is, that we shall unfold the principle of the 
 Reform Bill, which recognised one part of the manufac- 
 turing force of the country (that winch was embodied in 
 the holders of manufacturing capital) as requiring to be 
 represented, if we now recognise the other part of it, the 
 working members of it, as having duties to the land which 
 they confess they cannot fulfil unless they also have the 
 obligation of chocking representatives. 
 
 (3.) I call it an obligation, rather than a privilege or a 
 right, two names about the value of which there has been 
 a dispute. In doing so, I encounter what was by far the 
 most powerful and telling argument in Mr Lowe's cele- 
 brated speech. He denied that there was any eager desire 
 for the franchise in those who did not possess it. Many, he 
 said, could obtain it at a very slight sacrifice, and they did 
 not care to make that sacrifice. I have no doubt that Mr 
 Lowe had the clearest and most satisfactory data for this 
 assertien. I believe it might have been carried further. 
 I am convinced that very many working men actually 
 decline the franchise when they might have it without
 
 220 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 any sacrifice at all. Not a few may take pains to avoid 
 it, calculating that the exercise of it may bring them 
 into trouble with men of the class above them, whose can- 
 didate they refuse. Not a few may shrink from the temp- 
 tation to which a privilege, notoriously so often abused, 
 may expose them. Among these recusants, therefore, there 
 may be many estimable people most advantageously con- 
 trasted with others who reckon their votes a commodity 
 which can be turned to profit. I think this statement 
 applies to working men ; but not at all exclusively. It is 
 the same with many, perhaps as many, of the shopkeepers. 
 It is the same with not a few of the professional class, and 
 with not a few men of letters. 
 
 Do I treat this fact as one of slight importance ? No ; 
 it seems to me one of the greatest importance ; full of sad 
 and serious warning to all the land, indicating a state of 
 mind which must be corrected, which we should use all 
 our energies to correct. It is one of many indications of a 
 listlessness and apathy about public affairs which cannot 
 be safe. It is one of the proofs that some new blood 
 requires to be poured into the commonwealth, some hearty 
 zeal for its interests. Where are you to find this ? Not 
 in a set of six-pound householders, Mr Lowe affirms. But 
 his statement goes beyond that. It applies to the present 
 franchise, whatever weight it may have in our judgment of 
 the future. The ten-pound householders show that they 
 do not prize the gift you have bestowed on them. Why
 
 WANT OP INTEREST IN THE COUNTRY. 221 
 
 should they 1 What bond is there between men because 
 they pay the same rent to different landlords 1 What is 
 there in that fact to inspire them with any common 
 interest or feelings? What is there in it to bring forth 
 the feeling in each man that he is a citizen, that he owes 
 something to the country 1 Where there is no fellowship 
 there will be no sense of individual responsibility; and, 
 therefore, what is coming to pass in your House of 
 Commons ? You have, and will have, various interests 
 represented there. The ten-pound householder will vote 
 for this railway director, for that great shipowner. They 
 will vote for him because he gives them a motive to vote 
 for him; it may be a respectable, it may be a discreditable 
 one. But they have no interest of their own, nothing 
 which makes them a substantive body in society ; nothing 
 which can make them understand why they should be 
 represented, or what there is in them which can be repre- 
 sented. The price which they pay for their tenement 
 does not create any of those instincts which belong to a 
 society of freemen. They may have those instincts ; for 
 they may be members of some religious congregation, of 
 some club or trade union. They may have the true sacred 
 sense of citizenship — the sense of being fathers, husbands, 
 brothers. But the ten pound or six pound has nothing to 
 do with any of these sympathies. That suggests nothing 
 but what is disagreeable. The Franchise is an additional 
 burthen on the rent ; the tenant must decide which of
 
 222 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 two sets of persons whom lie wishes to please he will 
 offend. 
 
 All traditions, then, of the past, all the circumstances 
 of the present time, all the confessions and arguments of 
 clever men who have opposed reform, suggest that the 
 pecuniary standard and the numerical are equally unsatis- 
 factory methods of ascertaining where the strength of a 
 people is, and whence it should be recruited. Various 
 symptoms show that the most intelligent and patriotic men 
 are becoming awake to this conviction. The co-operative 
 movement, where it has been vigorous, has proceeded from 
 the workers themselves. But there is another movement 
 in which they have cordially accepted the help of other 
 classes, and have submitted themselves to their guidance. 
 No greater sign of the new heart which is imparted to all 
 classes of a nation, when they can work for a common 
 object, no greater proof of the blessings and rewards of 
 mutual confidence, has ever been seen than the rise and 
 progress of our Volunteers. All now feel it to be so. Yet 
 it had at its outset to endure plentiful ridicule. Most 
 sagacious men doubted whether it was possible to get men, 
 with no evident personal interest, to endure the weariness 
 and humiliation of drill. Many declared that the whole 
 effort was the result of a temporary panic ; many ques- 
 tioned whether there was any national spirit left among 
 us which could respond to such an appeal. These doubts 
 have been generally quelled ; we have confessed that there
 
 CARE FOE MINORITIES. 223 
 
 is a sense of order, and a desire for order, among all 
 classes of our people, and that the order is associated with 
 thoughts of life and freedom. Surely the lessons are not 
 exhausted yet. Is there not a security in bodies like these 
 for an honest choice, for a choice which shall be deter- 
 mined by conviction, not bribes, such as no money tests 
 can give 1 Is there not a will and a purpose in them 
 which more deserves to be represented than the will of a 
 mere majority ever can 1 
 
 Most thankful also should we be for the various signs 
 which are afforded by recent schemes that this phrase is 
 losing the magical attraction which it once had for political 
 reasoners : that it can no longer be the watchword which 
 it was thirty years ago. All the most ingenious devices 
 of our day are to provide some way in which minorities 
 may express their sentiments, or to create particular fran- 
 chises which may give men, not able to make their voices 
 heard in a crowd, a chance of manifesting convictions which 
 the country cannot afford to lose. I value all such sug- 
 gestions as the token of a change which is at work 
 among us — of a willingness to undergo trouble for the 
 sake of ascertaining what there is among us which can 
 be represented, not to acquiesce in certain rough and ready 
 standards, which are easy enough to find, and are worth- 
 less when they are found. But I can understand the sus- 
 picions and protests which these ingenious arrangements 
 awaken. There is, to say the least, much awkwardness in
 
 224 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 first framing a general scheme, and then considering what 
 measures you can take to counteract the effects of it. 
 But there is more than awkwardness. Those whom you 
 enfranchise by your general measure, will suppose that you 
 have only adopted them because you are afraid of them ; 
 that you do not want them ; that you know they will be 
 about some mischief which you must try to neutralise. If 
 your object is to make a concession to a certain class, you 
 cannot do it more ungraciously. But if you have no busi- 
 ness to think about concessions to any class, if your only 
 duty is to provide the constitution which is best for the 
 whole land — then all notion of devices to enfeeble any 
 part of the representation should be cast aside ; you should 
 wish each part of it to be as strong as it can be. 
 
 I do not call these schemes crotchetty. That is a vulgar 
 epithet which may be used against the best plans or the 
 worst, which often denotes only the laziness of the man 
 who resorts to it. Nor do I doubt that their propounders 
 have a hearty desire to secure an efficient representation 
 for the country. But I think they have been misled 
 partly by the vehemence with which some able men still 
 plead for the will of a majority as the standard of truth ; 
 partly by certain habits which belong to a money-getting 
 race ; partly by what I must call the effeminacy of those 
 who belong to the intellectual or literary class. I will say 
 a word or two on each of these points. 
 
 The worshippers of majorities often appeal to the United
 
 AMERICA. 220 
 
 States ; I believe they could not choose a more unfortunate 
 instance for their purpose. Take their history at any 
 point you please. Did the New England colonists go 
 forth to assert the will of a majority, or to exhibit the 
 strength which lies in a small, persecuted minority actuated 
 by a strong conviction ? Did the colonies grow up as majori- 
 ties, or as little bodies, surrounded by an incoherent mass, 
 which some of them thought they might slaughter, which 
 some of them tried to civilise 1 Did they conquer the mother 
 country by majorities, or by the little force which Wash- 
 ington's calm and steady sense — hampered continually by 
 the perverseness and want of patriotism in majorities — was 
 able to bring into order and make efficient 1 Was not 
 the great resistance in the minds of educated men to the 
 emancipation of the slaves, the fear that the coloured 
 majority should crush the intelligence of the whites? 
 Was that fear and all the mighty interests which worked 
 with it, overcome at last by a majority, or by the steadfast 
 resolution of a small minority, convinced that the intelli- 
 gence and civilisation of the whites were not promoted, 
 but were certain to be extinguished, by their wrong-doings 1 
 All that has been greatest in the history of this great 
 country from its first days to its latest, has been a witness 
 not for, but against, the maxim which it has been used to 
 establish. You may call the States a democracy if you mean 
 that they are without a hereditary king, or a House of Lords. 
 But Jefferson, who pompously announced the sovereignty of 
 
 p
 
 226 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 the people, and the equality of men, was a slaveholder. 
 Lincoln, who broke the chains of the slave, affirmed in the 
 speech at his inauguration the great truth which he sealed 
 by his death — that the people is not its own ruler — that 
 there is a righteous Ruler over it, who calls it to account 
 for its oppressions and sins, and whose righteousness it 
 must confess, if it would not perish. Such a declaration 
 was much more than the sentiment of a devout and humble 
 man impressed with the awful responsibility of his own posi- 
 tion and of his country's position. It linked the old idea 
 of freedom in the New England Puritan, the freedom of him 
 whom God has raised out of his natural slavery, with the 
 later reverence for the man as man, without respect of race or 
 colour. It took away from the first idea its exclusiveness, 
 — from the second the vagueness which might easily sink 
 into carelessness about the strength of manhood, the de- 
 gradation of mere animal existence. If America enters 
 into the principle of her great chief, the problem which now 
 agitates her about negro suffrage will not be solved by 
 any pedantic adherence to the rule that all her inhabit- 
 ants must elect those who are to legislate for them, nor 
 yet by a prejudice about blood. How the fullest expres- 
 sion of the free mind of its citizens can be secured — 
 how the deepest moral convictions of the land can be 
 secured — will be the only question, a question upon which 
 Englishmen must be utterly unable to pronounce, but 
 which they may rejoice if their own annals should
 
 THE MONEYED INTERESTS. 227 
 
 afford any help in settling. The balance of instruction 
 will be still much in our favour. If our English workmen 
 remember the words of that admirable man of their own 
 order to which I have referred, they may restore the 
 faith in an actual Lord of the nation to us who are fast 
 losing it. I know no class which has so much interest in 
 not exalting the majority into His throne. 
 
 Whilst any rag of that worship cleaves to our minds, 
 we must look out for some inventions, clever or clumsy, 
 to avert the practical inconvenience of it. But there is an- 
 other worship which threatens us, that which, in our sneers 
 at a people who have made a grand effort for five years 
 to shake it off, we used to call the worship of the Dollar. 
 That various moneyed interests should get themselves 
 represented in Parliament, is not only inevitable, it is 
 most desirable. These interests have proved themselves 
 to be a power in the land. Every such power ought to 
 have an expression. But the prevalent notion is, that we 
 can have nothing but these interests, nothing but a per- 
 petual balance of one against the other. What can the 
 legislation be which is the result of a mere competition 
 and collision between the self-seeking of different companies 
 and capitalists? No wonder if many men as radical as 
 Cobbett — much less swayed by impulse than he was — 
 should exclaim with him, " Thank God, we have a House of 
 Lords ! " Any one who regards that House as a witness for 
 the sacredness of family life, for a continuous national his-
 
 228 THE WORKING MAN AND TIIE FRANCHISE. 
 
 tory, may join in that thanksgiving — may desire that the 
 Upper House should maintain its own position, and should 
 never seek to exercise a dishonourable influence over the 
 elections for the Lower House. But surely this House 
 cannot be a sufficient protection against the conflicting 
 force of trading interests. Hereditary property may be- 
 come mixed with them, even dependent upon them. May 
 there not be some element in the nation which is national, 
 and which might assist in turning partial sympathies, even 
 partial antipathies, to the service of the whole land ? Such 
 an element, if it exists at all, can scarcely be sought for 
 amongst capitalists. If it has not yet been found among 
 workmen, may not that be owing to the fact that capitalists 
 have not wished them to be united — have rather liked that 
 there should be as many separate interests amongst them 
 as among themselves ? Shall not those who care for the 
 intelligence, the dignity, the unity of the land, cherish the 
 opposite desire ? Are not these in danger, from the want 
 of some unmoneyed class to sustain them 1 
 
 I press this consideration upon that dainty and delicate 
 order called the intellectual or the literary one, which has 
 an extraordinary reverence for itself and its own powers, 
 and yet has, with that, a strange dread, lest those who are 
 without any of these powers should subvert and extinguish 
 it. Persons of this class are often eager to find some 
 security, that if the working men are allowed an increased 
 share in the representation, they also may obtain an increased
 
 NEED OP INTELLIGENCE. 229 
 
 share of it ; so there will be a counterpoise to what they 
 suppose must be a weight of uncultivated, semi-barbarous 
 opinion. That they should covet an opportunity of taking 
 part in public affairs, that they should be stimulated to 
 do so by almost any motive, is a good thing. For their 
 temptation is to stand aloof from affairs, to overlook them 
 with a lofty and serene pity, just to notice them for the 
 purpose of pointing out the absurdity of all parties that 
 are occupied with them. But I cannot admit that the 
 reason which they give for suddenly assuming the rights of 
 citizens, and desiring to have them in a larger measure, is 
 a valid or a creditable one. We do want the protection of 
 earnest intelligent thinkers against what is called, falsely 
 called, practical common sense. "We do want it, because 
 that which assumes the name of common sense is not com- 
 mon, but partial and narrow ~, because that which calls 
 itself practical is often the attempt to work out some ill- 
 digested theory, which cannot be worked out except to 
 the injury of all who meddle with it. But do not our wise 
 men find this bad counterfeit of a precious quality active 
 in the House of Common, and among the constituencies 
 now ? Does not the power of it lie in the notions about 
 money and money's worth which prevail in both ? Is it 
 not a very ignominious notion for men of letters to enter- 
 tain, that a constituency not representing money would be 
 their great antagonist ? If it is so, I am afraid literature 
 itself must be passing into a trade which clings chiefly to
 
 230 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 money for its support, which dreams of little beyond 
 the market or what can be procured in the market. 
 Whether this epicurism takes a gross or a refined shape, 
 whether it seeks its patrons among the nobles or the shop- 
 keepers, it must grow feebler, more merely sensational or 
 more merely scornful every day. Those who cultivate this 
 temper will be trodden under foot by some race of hardy 
 Goths, some stout sons of the soil. Would it not be 
 better if they tried to renovate their strength by com- 
 munion with those sons of the soil ? Might they not get 
 much from them and impart something to them 1 
 
 I shall have more to say on this subject before I con- 
 clude. I notice it now, because it bears upon a scheme 
 which I once thought very plausible, for introducing 
 into the legislature a set of men who should expressly 
 represent those who are engaged in pursuits of a more 
 or less decidedly literary character. I do not say that 
 no modification of such a scheme may be possible or de- 
 sirable; but I confess to having become more doubtful 
 of the expediency of investing men of letters with the 
 character of a separate caste, as I have become more con- 
 vinced of the duties which they owe to the rest of their 
 countrymen, and of the blessings which they may receive 
 if they do not prefer their magnificence to the perfor- 
 mance of these duties. I feel, however, much grati- 
 tude to the propounders of every such schemed All 
 any of us can hope, is to contribute some element to
 
 mk hare's scheme. 231 
 
 the consideration of the subject, to throw some seed into 
 the ground which may germinate hereafter. This hint is 
 of great value, inasmuch as it puts us upon seeking in 
 what way we may get the greatest amount of intelligence 
 into our representation. It may not, perhaps, be contributed 
 in its largest share by the classes which make intellect then- 
 profession. They may be liable to some conceits and affecta- 
 tions. They may choose candidates who embody certain 
 conceptions of theirs ; men with little thought, with 
 very feeble purposes, because so many different fancies 
 have to be consulted, and the compromise between them 
 may be a most unsatisfactory one. Intellect which should 
 be robust, may under such treatment become lean and fan- 
 tastical. That which should be original, may become con- 
 ventional. Still it is good to be reminded that in a House 
 of Commons, wisdom is wanted more than fine gold. 
 
 Still more important and free from the objection to which 
 this project is open, is the skilful and laborious contrivance 
 of Mr Hare, for giving every person in the country an op- 
 portunity of expressing a judgment, if he has one, in favour 
 of some candidate. When I use the word laborious, I 
 mean to describe only the great pains and industry which 
 must have preceded the invention of such a plan, not the 
 least to intimate, that it would cause labour to those who 
 should endeavour to act upon it. Men who have ex- 
 amined it most carefully, and have the best right to give 
 an opinion, are confident that it would be found easy and
 
 232 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 simple in its operation. If I do not enlarge upon it here, 
 it is not in the least because I am insensible to the interest 
 of the subject, or because I affect to think lightly of it as 
 being mechanical. Every good machine involves a prin- 
 ciple ; I do not see how a principle can ever come into 
 operation without a machinery. I only leave this scheme in 
 other hands, because they are more competent to deal with 
 it, and because the business that I have proposed to myself 
 is one of a different kind. The influence of education upon 
 representation is that which I have undertaken to consider. 
 With some remarks upon that topic, I shall gather up the 
 lessons which I have been trying to discover in our 
 history. 
 
 I have given the supporters of manhood suffrage credit 
 for two objects. First, they would seek to get the man- 
 hood of the community represented in Parliament; 
 secondly, they would as far as possible get the sentiments 
 of each man represented in it. I assumed that as wise 
 men they would postpone the second of these objects to 
 the first, though they would not willingly lose sight of 
 either. I do not advocate this postponement, because I 
 think that the opinion of a society is worth more than the 
 opinion of an individual. That may not be true; the 
 reverse of it may be true. But I mean that the individual 
 man never has play for his thoughts and faculties except 
 he is in a society ; that he is most of an individual when 
 he is most in association and communion with other men —
 
 WORKERS AND THINKERS. 233 
 
 when he feels most his dependence upon them and his 
 obligations to them. For the sake, then, of obtaining as 
 much as ever we can of individual manhood, I would first 
 turn to bodies of men, I would seek for the expression 
 of their beliefs in the legislature. It is for this reason that 
 I have spoken in this chapter of co-operative societies and 
 Volunteer corps. It is for this reason that I have wished 
 to turn the thoughts of those who are occupied with the 
 reform of the House of Commons especially in this direc- 
 tion. Then their skill in devising franchises merely to 
 counteract the pressure of a majority will not be called 
 for. If they seek for the organic portion of the work- 
 ing classes, in these they will find the best and most 
 effectual guarantees against any mere mob dictation ; much 
 more effectual than we can get from a pecuniary limita- 
 tion of the franchise. The working classes themselves will 
 find their belief on the subjects which most specially con- 
 cern them, far more thoroughly and satisfactorily expressed 
 through these agencies than they could be if ever so 
 many loose and floating units were added to their number. 
 A whole set of questions which are now most imperfectly 
 handled in the House of Commons — handled by men look- 
 ing at them from a distance — seeing them from their own 
 points of view — unable to sympathise with the labourers if 
 they wish it ever so much — would then be submitted to fair 
 and reasonable discussion. These representatives of the 
 workers would have no preponderance, but they would have
 
 234 THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 a fair hearing — a power of stating their wishes and originat- 
 ing measures which they have felt to be desirable. And Mr 
 Lowe's testimony to the benefits which the country at 
 large has derived from the special middle class influence 
 during the last thirty years, in adjusting the strife between 
 land and trade — between the dogmas of economists and 
 the interests of both — may be expanded thirty years hence 
 into a testimony to the immense blessings which the work- 
 ing class power has procured in the adjustment of that quar- 
 rel between labour and capital which is still besetting us. 
 
 But to attain this blessing, I believe the working classes 
 ought to strive, and that we ought to strive, with them, for 
 a higher one. They may not only help to adjust claims 
 in which they are themselves interested ; they may give a 
 more national, more unselfish tone to the rest of society if 
 only the better thoughts which are struggling in them can 
 be evoked against the lower, debasing, grovelling tenden- 
 cies which are assuredly struggling in them also. If we 
 consider what kind of effort must have gone to the forma- 
 tion of the co-operative societies, what amount of endurance 
 to the Lancashire distress, what national sympathy to the 
 Volunteer movement, what freedom from the narrowness of 
 John Bullism to the reception of Garibaldi last year — we 
 may understand that there is in this portion of our country- 
 men something from which we may all derive a wholesome 
 example and a manly impulse. If we remember how much 
 more faith they showed than any of us showed, in the
 
 EDUCATION IN PHYSICAL FACTS. 235 
 
 result of the American struggle, only because they believed 
 it was the struggle of right against wrong, of freedom 
 against slavery; though they had much greater cause than 
 any of us to complain of its effects, and to be angry with 
 those who persevered in it ; we may feel some humiliation 
 when we assume to be their teachers or prophets. And 
 yet, there is no doubt that it would be sheer cowardice and 
 base affectation to pretend that we have not a knowledge 
 which we can impart to them and for which they would be 
 the better. To find what it is and how it is to be im- 
 parted, is extremely difficult. A series of mistakes may 
 be the only way of learning the secret; yet, assuredly, it 
 is to be learned in that way or some other. 
 
 This at least we may conclude, that no education which 
 overlooks facts, however grand may be its designs — how- 
 ever well selected its instruments — can be good for any- 
 thing. Those who undertook the task of teaching the 
 working classes in our day started from this conviction. 
 They began with the facts about the world which had been 
 ascertained by science ; these they set forth in careful 
 treatises or able lectures. It was a wholesome course, I 
 think. Their readers were beset with a number of notions 
 upon a variety of subjects ; to be assured that there were 
 truths which had been discovered, and in which they might 
 fully believe, was a great strength to the minds of those 
 who were awake to receive the assurance. It was a noble 
 thing to claim the universe in which we dwell as a common
 
 23 G THE WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 possession for the poor and the rich man ; to affirm that 
 its laws bind both, and may be made known to both. If 
 some of the experiments by which these facts and laws 
 have been ascertained could be added to the bare statement 
 of them, what a training was this to the perception of the 
 method which our minds follow in arriving at knowledge ! 
 What a revelation must Euclid's Elements be to many 
 a man who is busy with rules and measures, that there is a 
 measure for the earth as well as for every chair and table 
 within it, that the same principles apply to both ! What 
 an illumination it may be to find that the numbers with 
 which he deals in his common transactions have a relation 
 to each other and obey eternal laws ! 
 
 Such studies may be exceedingly profitable. Can it be 
 less profitable that a man's eyes should be opened by the 
 practice of Drawing to the sense of the objects themselves 
 which the lines confine, that his ears and heart should be 
 opened by Music to an apprehension of the harmonies which 
 are all about us for the peasant and the peer % 
 
 But there are in addition certain facts implied in the 
 co-operative movement, the Volunteer corps, the visit 
 of Garibaldi; the fact of men being linked by certain 
 bonds to each other, the fact of our having a common 
 country, which has a past as well as a present ; the fact 
 of our being bound to other countries as well as our 
 own. We cannot pass these things by if our education is to 
 be in facts and laws. There must be a study of the laws of
 
 ASSOCIATION AND SEPARATION. 237 
 
 association. There must be a history of the land in which 
 we dwell ; there must be some intimation of the way in 
 which it has become interested in the wellbeing of foreign 
 lands. 
 
 Then this fact of association reveals other facts less 
 agreeable, equally needing explanation. There is a ten- 
 dency to dissociate, to separate, of which each man becomes 
 very conscious, in whatever circle he finds himself. There 
 is a tendency in the citizens of a nation to break loose from 
 the obligations of citizens. There is a tendency in nations 
 to quarrel with each other. Such facts as these involve us 
 in questions which we might be glad to avoid, but which 
 we cannot avoid. Our experience forces them upon us. 
 History is a comment upon that experience. 
 
 The excellent men who began the work of mechanics' 
 institutes thought that they might leave the moral pro- 
 blems unconsidered and unsolved. They equally avoided 
 political problems. If we grapple with the one we must 
 grapple with the other. If they confront us in our own 
 lives, they must confront the men of the working class in 
 their lives. But especially if education has anything to do 
 with representation — if it is desirable that men should be 
 educated in order that they may be represented — it would 
 be strange indeed if we confined our education to subjects 
 of physical science, however highly we may prize it, how- 
 ever great the blessings may be which it confers on one 
 class or on all classes.
 
 238 THE "WORKING MAN AND THE FRANCHISE. 
 
 The reason for that limitation we all know was this : 
 There are various convictions — strong living convictions — 
 in this country upon every question beyond the physical 
 region. They clash with each other. It seemed most 
 desirable, if it were possible, to find some subjects 
 suggesting the thought of common fixed truths which 
 could not be affected by the opinions of any set of men. 
 I feel the advantage. I do not wonder at any degree of 
 importance that was attached to it. A sense of unity and 
 universality seems to be imparted by such an education, 
 and what sense can be so precious as this ? 
 
 But can education produce this result, or any results, by 
 merely ignoring obvious and notorious difficulties 1 I be- 
 lieve the price which is paid for such silence is a very high 
 one. We have seen that organisation has had much to do 
 with the history of our people and of its representatives. 
 Great convictions have had still more to do with it. The 
 strength in which they have existed at any given time has 
 been the measure of the nation's strength. Their feeble- 
 ness in the last century was the main cause of the feeble- 
 ness of the House of Commons under the first princes of 
 the Brunswick dynasty. They were rekindled in the heart 
 of the people. The representative body almost uncon- 
 sciously exhibited a renovated life. All the various con- 
 victions of the land have succeeded in getting themselves 
 represented ; no one has been able to stifle the other. I 
 thank God that it is so. If interests were represented
 
 CONCLUSION. 239 
 
 and convictions were silent, I should think the hour 
 of our dissolution was at hand. May they all be 
 heard ; may the utterance make them more genuine 
 and more vital ! It may be true — perhaps it is — that 
 they will not be genuine, not vital, unless there is some- 
 thing to bind them together ; that they will become 
 merely negative and destructive of each other. If so, the 
 education of the workmen should be directed not to extin- 
 guish any one of the convictions which are stirring among 
 us now, but to find some centre for them all. As a 
 clergyman I may venture to say that I should seek that 
 centre where President Lincoln sought it ; that I should 
 have no hope for the education of Englishmen if I did not 
 believe that God had been educating them, and is educating 
 them still — educating them to be in the highest sense free 
 Englishmen and free men. I have been endeavouring in 
 these chapters to trace the footsteps of His education. If 
 I shall lead any man to recognise it in his own life, in the 
 life of his country, of Christendom, of the world, he 
 will forgive and forget the weakness of my words in the 
 worth of lessons which every day's experience and sorrow 
 will make more precious and wonderful to him. 
 
 THE END.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 THE WORKING MEN'S COLLEGE, 
 
 FOUNDED. 185*. 
 45 GREAT ORMOND STREET, BLOOMSBURY, W.C. 
 
 principal— REV. F. D. MAURICE, M.A. 
 
 <JTounci{ of (3TcacI)cr£. 
 
 It. BAR WELL, Esq., F.R.C.S. 
 
 T. R BENNETT, Esq., M.A., Christ Church, Oxford. 
 
 T. BODLEY, Esq., M.A., Cambridge. 
 
 Rev. J. S. BREWER, M.A., Queen's College, Oxford. 
 
 :\I r BROCK, C.S. 
 
 Rev. W. J. BRODRIBB, II. A., Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. 
 
 Mr J. BUNNEY, Landscape Painter. 
 
 ARTHUR COHEN, Esq., Magdalen College, Cambridge. 
 
 Rev. J. LI. DAVIES, M.A., Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 
 LuWES DICKINSON, Esq., Painter. 
 
 E. S. FORD, Esq., M.A., Oxford. 
 
 F. J. FURNIVALL, Esq., M.A., Trinity Hall, Cambridge. 
 
 Mr GRUGEON, Certificated Teacher of Botany, (Science and Art De- 
 partment of Privy Council.) 
 J. W. HALES, Esq., B.A., Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. 
 Rev. S. C. HANSARD, M.A., University College. Oxford. 
 THOMAS HUGHES, Esq., M.P., B.A., Oriel College, Oxford. 
 Mr W. JEFFREY. 
 
 D. C. LATHBURY, Esq., M.A., Brasenose College, Oxford. 
 J. LEE, Esq. 
 
 * R. B. LITCHFIELD, Esq., B.A., Trinity Col., Cambridge, (Treasurer.) 
 J. M. LUDLOW, Esq., Lincoln's Inn. 
 
 GODFREY LUSHINGTON, Esq., M. A., late Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, 
 VERNON LUSHINGTON, Esq., B.C.L., Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 JOHN MARTINEAU, Esq., B.A., Trinity Hall, Cambridge. 
 N. S. MASKELYNE, Esq., M.A., Wadham College, Oxford. 
 A. J. MUNBY, Esq., M.A., Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 
 * These Members of Council form the Executive Committee.
 
 242 APPENDIX. 
 
 ALEXANDER MUNRO, Esq., Sculptor. 
 
 EUG. OSWALD, Esq., Professor of French. 
 
 J. Y. PATERSON, Esq., B.A. 
 
 W. P. PATTISON, Esq., Actuary. 
 
 G. J. PEARSE, Esq., M.A., Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 
 P. C. PENROSE, Esq., M.A., Magdalen College, Cambridge. 
 
 VAL. C. PRINSEP, Esq. 
 
 * Mr HENRY RAWLINS. 
 
 Mr JOHN ROEBUCK, OS., Fellow of the College. 
 DANTE G. ROSSETTI, Esq., Painter. 
 Mr W. ROSSITER, OS., Fellow of the College. 
 JOHN RUSKIN, Esq., M.A., Christ Church, Oxford. 
 J. R. SEELEY, Esq., M.A., Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, Pro- 
 fessor of Latin in University College. 
 J. SLADE, Esq. 
 A. SONNENSCHEIN, Esq. 
 MrW. T. SUTTON, C.S. 
 
 * Mr GEORGE TANSLEY, C.S., Fellow of the College. 
 W. CAVE THOMAS, Esq. 
 
 Mr W. WARD, Drawing Master. 
 
 J. WESTLAKE, Esq., M.A., late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 
 Mr S. WILKINS. 
 
 THOMAS WOOLNER, Esq., Cculptor. 
 
 MltMti of tfc Cortege. 
 
 Mr WILLIAM ROSSITER, Mr J. ROEBUCK, Mr G. TANSLEY. 
 
 3t#jociate. 
 
 Mr D. LEGGATT, LL.B. 
 
 OBJECTS OF THE COLLEGE. 
 The College was founded in 1854. The students are, for the 
 most part, working men ; and the teachers are, in general, members 
 of the Universities and of different professions, or those who have 
 themselves been students in the College. Its purpose is to unite 
 these classes together, by associating them in the common .work of 
 teaching and learning. It provides instruction at the smallest pos- 
 sible cost (the teaching being almost wholly unpaid) in the subjects 
 with which it most concerns English citizens to be acquainted, and 
 thus tries to place a liberal education within the reach of working 
 men. 
 
 CONSTITUTION OF THE COLLEGE. 
 The College is divided into six Classes : — 
 
 (1.) The general body of Matriculated Students. 
 (2.) Certificated Students, that is, those to whom at the end 
 of any course shall be awarded a Certificate of Compe- 
 tency in the subject of the course.
 
 APPENDIX. 243 
 
 (3.) Scholars, that is, those who prove themselves competent 
 in any one department of the College studies. 
 
 (4.) Associates, or permanent members of the College, being 
 such students as have shown by examination that they 
 have attained the degree of liberal education which the 
 Council believes to be within the reach of members of a 
 Working Men's College. 
 
 (5.) Fellows : these will be chosen out of the Associates. The 
 Fellows will take part in the education of this College, 
 and may assist in establishing and carrying on other 
 Colleges. They will be chosen by the Council, after due 
 consideration of what they have done in the Associate 
 Examination, and of what they have been since they 
 entered the College. Moral qualities, a capacity for 
 teaching, and a willingness to tench, will be at least as 
 indispensable as proficiency in any study. 
 
 (6.) The Council of Teachers : it is intended that the Council 
 be recruitd from the Fellows, to the extent of at least a 
 third of its members. The Council will be prepared to 
 assist in the formation of new Colleges, in London or 
 other parts of England. 
 
 GENERAL SYLLABUS OF COLLEGE STUDIES. 
 
 \* For details see Special Syllabus of each Department. 
 
 MATHEMATICS. 
 
 1st Year. — Preparatory : Arithmetic ; Preparatory Geometry and 
 
 Mensuration ; Book-keeping. 
 2d Tear. — Pure Mathematics, Geometry, (Euclid, Books 1 to 4 ;) 
 
 Algebra, to Quadratic Equations. 
 3d Year. — Pure Mathematics : Geometry and Conic Sections ; 
 
 Algebra and Trigonometry. 
 4th Year. — Applied Mathematics: Statics; Dynamics; Hydrostatics; 
 Optics. 
 
 Fee, 3s. each Term. 
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. 
 English : — 1st Tear. — Parts of Speech : Etymology, Analysis of 
 Sentences. 
 2d Tear. — Advanced Grammar: History of the English 
 
 Language. 
 3d Tear. — Literature.
 
 244 APrENDix. 
 
 French : — 1st Year.- — Elementary Grammar : Accidence, Syntax, 
 Etymology. 
 2d and 3d Years. — Literature. 
 German : — 1st Year. — Grammar. 
 2d Year. — Literature. 
 Lattn : — 1st Year. — Grammar. 
 
 2d and 3d Years. — Literature. 
 Greek : — 1st Year. — Grammar. 
 
 2d and 3d Years. — Literature. 
 
 Fees, one hour a Week, 2s. each Term. 
 ,, two hours a Week, 3s. „ 
 
 PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 
 
 The Subjects taught in this Department are : — 
 Natural Philosophy. 
 Botany. 
 
 Zoolo i0l ° gy ' 1 No order strictl Y, definable. (See Speck 
 
 Physical Geography ' 
 
 and Geology. 
 Chemistry. 
 
 Fees, one hour a Week, 2s. each Term. 
 „ two hours a Week, 3s. „ 
 
 HISTORY, INCLUDING GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 , , r { Preparatory English : two terms. 
 s ' \ General English : two terms. 
 
 . „ ( Constitutional History of England : two terms. 
 ' \ General History of Europe : two terms. 
 General Lectures on Literary and Social History, Ancient and Modern 
 History. 
 
 Fees, one hour a Week, 2s. each Term. 
 „ two hours a Week, 3s. „ 
 
 Bible Class Free to all Members. 
 
 The subject of Bible History is considered in a separate set of 
 lessons, which are delivered on Sunday evenings, and are free to all 
 Members. 
 
 DRAWING. 
 
 Elementary — Light and Shade. 
 
 From Casts of Natural Objects. 
 From Leaves, Birds, &c.
 
 APPENDIX. 245 
 
 Colour — Studies from Still Life. 
 Drawing from the Antique. 
 Drawing from the Life, without colour. 
 Paiuting from the Life. 
 
 Fees, 4s. each Term. 
 
 MUSIC. 
 Singing Classes. Three Sections, viz. : — 
 
 III. — Learning to read by the Scale, and from the " Tonic 
 Sol-fa" notation. 
 II. — Part Singing, Choruses, Glees, &c; (common notation.) 
 I. — Advanced Part Singing ; music of Handel, Mozart, Men- 
 delssohn, the Madrigal writers, &c. 
 Fees: Section L, Is. Qd. the half year. 
 „ Sections II. and III., 2s. „ 
 
 ADULT SCHOOL. 
 Junior Section. — Easy Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. 
 Senior Section. — Reading, Writing from Dictation, Practical 
 Arithmetic, Rudiments of General Knowledge. 
 Fee, Qd. a week. 
 
 GENERAL LECTURES. 
 General Lectures on the College Studies are given every Satur- 
 day at S.30 P.M. During the first term of each College year these 
 lectures are by the teacher upon the special work of their respective 
 
 EXAMINATION REGULATIONS. 
 
 The Examinations are held in the last week of December. Ex- 
 aminations for Certificates are also held at the end of each course 
 of study. 
 
 Candidates for a Certificate must have attended the College for 
 at least four terms, and for a Scholarship or an Associateship at 
 least eight terms. 
 
 Certificates. — Every class is examined at the end of its course, 
 and Certificates are adjudged to those students who show a compe- 
 tent knowledge of the subject. The names of those who, though 
 not obtaining Certificates, pass the Examination with credit, are 
 posted on the walls of the College. Every member of the class is 
 expected to submit himself for this Examination.
 
 246 APPENDIX. 
 
 Associateshtp. — To become Associates, Students must pass an 
 examination in the following subjects, viz.: — 
 
 (1.) Bible History; (2.) English History; (3.) English Grammar; 
 (.4.) Arithmetic up to Fractions and Proportion. 
 
 They must also either obtain, or have obtained, Certificates in 
 any two of the following subjects, viz. : Algebra and Advanced 
 Arithmetic; Geometry; Conic Sections; Botany; Physiology; 
 Geology and Physical Geography ; Mechanics ; Hydrostatics ; 
 Optics; English History, with questions in General Geography; 
 English Language ; Logic ; Music ; Drawing ; French ; Latin ; 
 German ; Greek. (If Mathematical Subjects only are taken, how- 
 ever, three certificates will be required.) 
 
 Scholarship. — Candidates for a Scholarship in any Department 
 will be examined in the subjects specified under the corresponding 
 head in the following list ; — 
 
 Art. — 
 
 History. — General knowledge of English History; a particular 
 knowledge of either Constitutional, Literary, or Social History of 
 England ; Outlines of Ancient History or of Modern History. 
 
 Languages. — English, (including Grammar;) French or German; 
 Elements of Latin. 
 
 Mathematics. — Algebra ; Geometry ; Trigonometry ; Mecha- 
 nics; Conic Sections; Astronomy. 
 
 Physical Science. — Natural Philosophy ; Botany ; Physiology ; 
 Zoology ; Geology ; Chemistry. Any three of these subjects. 
 
 For further details as to Examinations, inquire of the Secretary 
 at the College. 
 
 The COLLEGE YEAR begins about the end of October, and 
 consists of four regular Terms of eight weeks each, and a Vaca- 
 tion Term of from eight to ten weeks. A Programme of Studies 
 for each term is printed before its commencement. 
 
 The LIBRARY is open to students every day (except Sunday) 
 from 7 till 10 p.m. Books can be borrowed for the Vacation. 
 
 The COFFEE and CONVERSATION-ROOM adjoin the Library, 
 and is open from 7 till 10.30 p.m. Tea, Coffee, &c, is provided at 
 reasonable prices. 
 
 A CONVERZAZIONE is held in January and in July of each 
 year. A Benefit Society has been formed in connexion with the 
 College. Strangers are admitted. Tickets Is. each. 
 
 The COLLEGE RIFLE CORPS (consisting only of Members of 
 the College) forms the first three Companies of the 19th Middlesex, 
 v;hich is commanded by Lieut.-Col. Thos. Hughes. The sub- 
 scription is four shillings per year, to efficient members, which 
 covers the cost of Membership of the College; to non-efficient
 
 APPENDIX. 247 
 
 members, fourteen shillings. Subscriptions may be paid quarterly 
 or otherwise. Applications should be made to Captains Martineau, 
 Bailey, or Furnivall, at the College. 
 
 GIRLS' SCHOOL. 
 A School for Girls under fourteen years of age is taught by Ladies 
 at 45 Great Ormond Street, every day of the week, except Satur- 
 day and Sunday. — Charge 6d. per week, for Girls under ten ; 9d. a 
 week for Girls under fourteen years of age. Hours, 10 to 1, and 
 from 2 to 3. 
 
 PLAN OF COLLEGE STUDIES. 
 The plan of study which the Council desire the students to fol- 
 low may be best gathered from the scheme of the examination for 
 Associateship. The intention of that examination, and of the exa- 
 mination for Certificates of Competency, is to give coherence and 
 method to the class-work of the College, by keeping within the 
 view of both teachers and students a plan of study variable accord- 
 ing to diversities of circumstances and tastes, but representing, as 
 well as a formal scheme can, the kind and degree of " liberal educa- 
 tion " which the Council believe to be within the reach of the 
 students of a Working Men's College. 
 
 The peculiar circumstances under which the work of such a 
 College is carried on forbid any attempt to require all students to 
 follow certain prescribed courses of reading, as has hitherto been 
 done in other Colleges. The choice of subjects of study is there- 
 fore left to each student's discretion ; but the Council are anxious 
 to impress upon those whom they have to teach the necessity of 
 attending to the following recommendations, which they give as the 
 result of several years' actual experience. They would earnestly 
 advise the students — 
 
 (1.) Not to join any class unless they have a reasonable pros- 
 pect of being able to attend regularly, and to find time 
 for study out of the class. Without this last condition, 
 it is nearly impossible that they can make any good use 
 of the class teaching. 
 (2.) To consider before they undertake any subject the amount 
 of work it will probably involve, as compared with the 
 amount of leisure they have to devote to it. 
 (3.) To inform themselves on these and other points by con- 
 sulting the detailed syllabus of studies, and by per- 
 sonal inquiry of the Teachers. 
 To assist in making the work of the classes as systematic as pos- 
 sible, the following Rules and arrangements are adopted : —
 
 248 APPENDIX. 
 
 (1.) Admission to any class is given only by the teacher of the 
 class. 
 
 (2.) On the first class night of every course the teacher will 
 explain the subject and method of study, answer in- 
 quiries of intending students, and ascertain if students 
 desiring to enter the class are sufficiently advanced 
 to do so with advantage. 
 
 (3.) Practice classes are attached to the regular classes ; and it 
 is expected that students will attend these as part of the 
 regular College work. 
 
 (4.) A class may be suspended at the option of the teacher 
 when the number of students attending it falls below 
 six. 
 
 (5.) Students should, if possible, join their class the first 
 night ; but it is left to the teacher's discretion to admit 
 them later. 
 
 ADMISSION OF STUDENTS. 
 
 Students must be above sixteen years of age. They must be 
 able to read and write, or must go to the Adult School in the 
 College to qualify themselves for the College Classes. 
 
 Students can join the College at any time, but the regular time 
 of entering the Classes is the beginning of the College year — about 
 the end of October. In some subjects elementary classes are also 
 formed at the beginning of the third term — early in March. 
 
 At entrance, each student pays a Fee of Is. 6d. ; also a Term 
 Fee of Is. for every Term he attends the College. Each class is 
 entered and paid for separately. 
 
 November 1865.
 
 WORKING MEN'S COLLEGE BUILDING FUND. 
 
 STATEMENT BY THE COUNCIL. 
 
 45 Great Ormond Street, 
 December 1865. 
 
 " This College was founded in 1854. The students are, for the 
 most part, working men ; and the teachers are, in general, members 
 of the Universities and of different professions, or those who have 
 themselves been students in the College. Its purpose was and is 
 to unite these classes together, by associating them in the common 
 work of teaching and learning. It provides instruction at the 
 smallest possible cost (the teaching being almost wholly unpaid) 
 in the subjects with which it most concerns English citizens to 
 be acquainted, and thus tries to place a liberal education within the 
 reach of working men." * 
 
 In carrying out these objects, we have had some measure of suc- 
 cess. The number of students was, at the end of the first term, 
 145 ; it is now 509. In the year 1857, finding the hired house in 
 which we had begun our work too small, we purchased, for £1500, 
 the large freehold house and ground which we now occupy. This 
 was effected by means of a loan of £1000, and a gift of the remain- 
 ing £500 from the Principal. The debt so created has since been 
 reduced to £400 by savings from the current income, aided by the 
 unsolicited donations of friends. With the increase in the number 
 of students has come an increase in the number of classes and sub- 
 divisionsof classes ; and for some time past we have been sorely 
 pressed for space. This pressure has been and is a serious hin- 
 drance to the progress of the work of the College — a hindrance 
 daily and hourly felt. Further removal being for many reasons out 
 of the question, we have no option but to build. 
 
 We want chiefly these things — 
 
 (1.) A room or rooms for the Art Department, the rooms now 
 occupied by the Drawing Classes being entirely unfit for the special 
 purposes of an Art School. [No department of our College has 
 been more successful than our Art Classes, carried on from the first 
 under the general supervision of Mr Ruskin. We may say that at 
 no period of the existence of the College have we ever had space 
 enough to admit all who would have wished to join these classes.] 
 
 (2.) A moderate-sized hall or room for General Meetings, Lectures, 
 
 * The " General Prospectus," from which this paragraph is extracted, and 
 the Programme of Classes for the current term, will show in detail the 
 nature of the work done in the College.
 
 250 APPENDIX. 
 
 and social purposes, capable of containing some 300 or 400 persons. 
 [Such meetings have now to be held in the " drawing-rooms " of 
 our present house, to the great inconvenience and discomfort of all 
 who take part in them.] 
 
 (3.) A better room or rooms than we have now got for the 
 Adult School. [The School serves at once as a feeder to the Col- 
 lege and as a field for the exercise in tuition of our students, by 
 whom exclusively it has always been carried on. It has an average 
 attendance of about 35 per week, and is now held in a kitchen and 
 back kitchen.] 
 
 (4.) A room to contain a Museum, and serve as a Natural His- 
 tory class-room. [We have considerable geological and other col- 
 lections, chiefly accumulated by the members of the Physical 
 Science Classes ; but for lack of space they cannot be properly ar- 
 ranged or effectively used. The only room which can now be spared 
 for a " museum " is one not much larger than a closet, and the 
 Physical Science Department of the College is from this cause 
 debarred the possibility of progress or expansion.] 
 
 (5.) More small rooms for classes and general purposes. [We not 
 only have a difficulty in accommodating the classes, but have also 
 to make the Library serve as a Secretary's Office, and have no 
 room available during class hours for committees or other business.] 
 
 The site of the proposed building is already provided. The free- 
 hold ground on which the College stands runs about "160 feet back 
 in the rear of the house. The College also owns (subject to a mort- 
 gage) the freehold of the adjoining house and a similar plot of gar- 
 den in its rear; the two together form a quadrangular plot 18,000 
 square feet in area, of which a space containing 12,000 square feet 
 is now available as a building site.* 
 
 The Building, we consider, should comprise on the ground floor 
 the required Hall, separable into divisions for the purposes of the 
 Adult School, and above this a room or rooms specially adapted for 
 the Studio of the Art Department. One or two small rooms may 
 be added as funds allow on the ground floor, with the possibility of 
 continuing the buildings along the sides of the quadrangular space 
 at some future day, if necessary. The space set free in our present 
 building by the removal of the Art Department and the Adult 
 School will provide the required " Museum " and class-room accom- 
 modation. 
 
 We are advised that such a building as this can be well and sub- 
 
 * This adjoining property we acquired six years ago (with a view to secur- 
 ing space for such an extension as is now desired) by purchase, applying 
 thereto a suni of money which two friends of the College placed at our dis- 
 posal for a time. The house, with a part of the ground behind it, is now let 
 on a lease for 21 years, at a rent which exceeds by £64 the annual interest of 
 its mortgage debt. We have thus a sinking fund by which, in 17 years, that 
 debt will be extinguished.
 
 APPENDIX. 251 
 
 taotially built in a plain but good style for about £3000 to £3500. 
 A cheaper building might possibly answer the end immediately 
 in view, but we are anxious that whatever is put upon the ground 
 shall be not unworthy of the purpose which it is to serve. The 
 College will, we hope, outlast the present generation, and we must 
 therefore make our buildings worthy to range with any others which 
 our successors may erect when the present houses are taken 
 down. 
 
 As a proof that the College has taken root in a congenial soil, and 
 has borne ripe fruit already, we need only refer to the fact that by 
 this time it has trained a large proportion of its own teachers. Of 
 the thirty-two whose names figure on our programme for the first 
 term of the twelfth year, (1865-6,) no less than twelve are Fellows 
 and certificated or other students of the College ; they carry on, for 
 instance, the whole of the Mathematical teaching of the first year's 
 course, and take part in that of the second. We are thus, in an 
 educational point of view, to a great extent self-supporting. 
 
 Financially we are so likewise. For several years, thanks to the 
 excellent administration of our funds by a Students' Finance Com- 
 mittee, the income from Student's fees has met our current expen- 
 diture, leaving a margin available for the reduction of our mortgage 
 debt. But the sum now wanted would fall heavily on a few contri- 
 butors, such as those friends who from time to time have kindly 
 assisted us with donations or subscriptions. We have never yet 
 asked money of the general public — we think we are justified in 
 doing so now. 
 
 Considering the vast endowments which the benefactions of for- 
 mer ages have provided for the education of the people, endow- 
 ments to which the wealthiest of us are the most indebted, it 
 would be a disgrace to a wealthy metropolis like this if it were 
 necessary to beg long at the present day for the inconsiderable sum 
 we are now asking for. We should be sorry to say that our Col- 
 lege is as good as it might be made, or even that is as good as we 
 might have made it. But we can say honestly that it is doing, and 
 has been doing for eleven years past, genuine work. Its present 
 need goes far to testify to this. And the amount of labour and 
 thought which is being voluntarily devoted to the undertaking, and 
 by none more freely than by our students, affords, we think, some 
 guarantee that we shall not misspend what may be given us. 
 Finally, though many a single purse might well defray our needs, 
 we may perhaps especially commend them to those who would be 
 willing to take part in the teaching of this and other Colleges if they 
 were not prevented by professional and other avocations. Will 
 they not share our work by helping us to develop it ? 
 
 Signed, on behalf of the Council of Teachers, 
 
 F. D. MAURICE, Principal.
 
 252 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 Contributions may be sent to the London and County Bank, 
 Oxford Street Branch, (" Working Men's College Account,") to the 
 Secretary, at the College, (P. 0. Orders to be payable to Thomas 
 Shorter,) or by cheques payable to the order of the Treasurer, 
 R. B. Litchfield, Esq., 4 Hare Court, Temple, or to any member 
 of the Council of Teachers. 
 
 The following donations have already been received or promised : 
 
 His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. . . . £26 5 
 
 Rev. F. D. Maurice, Principal, from publication of Lectures 
 on the Suffrage. 
 
 Ditto (proceeds of delivery of the same Lectures at the College,) 12 7 
 
 Conrad Wilkinson, Esq., . . . . . 52 10 
 
 John Stuart Mill, Esq., M.P., ..... 50 
 
 'Vernon Lushineton, Esq., . . . . . 50 
 
 Samuel Morley, Esq., M. P., . . . . . 21 
 
 A Friend, per Rev. F. D. Maurice, . . . . 10 10 
 
 ♦Arthur Cohen, Esq., . . . . . . 10 
 
 W. Powell, Esq., 10 
 
 Sir Charles Bunbury, ...... 50 
 
 Francis Turner Palgrave, Esq., . . . . 5 
 
 Andrew Johnston, Esq. . . . . . 5 
 
 Hensleigh Wedgwood, Esq., ..... 50 
 
 Sir Thomas Phillips, ...... 55 
 
 Miss Caroline Fox, ...... 11 
 
 *J. Lee, Esq., 11 
 
 G. Dornbusch, Esq., ' . . . . . . 11 
 
 George Godwin, Esq., F.R.S., . . . . . 11 
 
 Rev. Henry Sandford, ...... 10 
 
 Frank Crisp, Esq., ...... 010 
 
 *The Rev. J. LI. Davies, 10 
 
 *D. C. Lathbury, Esq., 5 
 
 *R. B. Litchfield, Esq., 25 
 
 ♦John Westlake, Esq., 20 
 
 Mrs F. J. Fumivall, ...... 2 
 
 *Mr W. Jeffrev, 5 
 
 C. D., per Rev. F. D. Maurice, .... 50 
 
 *W. P. Pattison.Esq., ...... 10 
 
 The Duke of Argyll, ...... 5 
 
 Mr Sergeant Manning, ...... 5 
 
 John Vincent, Esq., ...... 5 
 
 Richard H. Hutton, Esq., ..... 2 
 
 * Thomas Woolner, Esq., . . . . . '2 
 
 Henry Footman, Esq., ..... 5 
 
 Shadworth H. Hodson, Esq., .... 25 
 
 Vincent S. Sean, Esq., ..... 5 
 
 Somerset Beaumont, Esq., M. P., .... 10 
 
 Sir T. Powell Buxton, Bart., M.P., .... 30 
 
 *Mr John Roebuck, New York, (certificated Student, and 
 
 Fellow of the Working Men's College,) ... 10 
 
 ♦Godfrey Lushington, Esq., ..... 20 
 
 Sir John Lubbock, Bart., ..... 5 
 
 Andrew Johnston, Esq., (2d donation.) ... 20 
 
 " Heavy Dragoon," ...... 3 
 
 Alexander Macmillan, Esq., . . . . . 10 10 
 
 C. B. Loeock, Esq., . . . . . . 15 
 
 Miss Irby, . 3 
 
 Miss Swanwick, ...... 50 
 
 Howard W. Elphinstone, Esq., M.P., . . 5 
 
 Miss E. R. Allport, 10 
 
 * Members of the Council of Teachers. 
 
 100 
 
 
 
 7 10
 
 148 Strand, 
 
 January 1866. 
 
 A LIST OF BOOKS 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 ALEXANDEE STBAHAN. 
 
 MILLAIS'S ILLUSTRATIONS. A Collection of Drawings on 
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