A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume I Part 15

They fought the "Court," or Ministerial, party on a variety of issues.

They supported motions for the reduction of the numbers of the army, and they declaimed against the whole principle of a standing army with patriotic pa.s.sion, which sometimes appeared for the time quite genuine.

They brought ill.u.s.trations of all kinds, applicable and inapplicable, from Greek and Roman, from French and Spanish history, even from Eastern history, to show that a standing army was invariably the instrument of despotism and the forerunner of doom to the liberties of a people. The financial policy of the Government gave them frequent opportunities for using the sword of the partisan behind the fluttering cloak of the patriot. On both sides of the House there was considerable confusion of ideas on the subject of political economy {310} and the incidence of taxation. Walpole was ahead of his own party as well as of his opponents on such subjects; his followers were little more enlightened than his antagonists.

[Sidenote: 1732--The American colonies]

In 1732 there was presented to the House of Commons an interesting report from the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations on "the state of his Majesty's colonies and plantations in America, with respect to any laws made, manufactures set up, and trade carried on there, which may affect the trade, navigation, and manufactures of this kingdom."

From this report we learn that at the time there were three different systems of government prevailing in the American colonies. Some provinces were immediately under the administration of the Crown: these were Nova Scotia, New Hampshire, the Jerseys, New York, Virginia, the two Carolinas, Bermuda, Bahama Islands, Jamaica, Barbadoes, and the Leeward Islands. Others were vested in proprietors--Pennsylvania, for example, and Maryland--and the Bahamas and the two Carolinas had not long before been in the same condition. There were three Charter Governments, Ma.s.sachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, in which the power was divided between the Crown and the population, where the people chose their representative a.s.semblies, and the Governor was dependent upon the a.s.sembly for his annual support, "which," as the report observed ingenuously, "has so frequently laid the Governor of such a province under temptations of giving up the prerogative of the Crown and the interest of Great Britain." The report contains a very full account of the state of manufactures in all the provinces. New York, for example, had no manufactures "that deserved mentioning;" the trade there "consisted chiefly in furs, whalebone, oil, pitch, tar, and provisions." In Ma.s.sachusetts "the inhabitants worked up their wool and flax, and made an ordinary coa.r.s.e cloth for their own use, but did not export any." In Pennsylvania the "chief trade lay in the exportation of provisions and lumber," and there were {311} "no manufactures established, their clothing and utensils for their houses being all imported from Great Britain." For the object of the whole report was not to discover how far the energy of the colonists was developing the resources of the colonies, in order that the Government and the people of England might be gratified with a knowledge of the progress made, and give their best encouragement to further progress.

The inquiry was set on foot in order to find out whether the colonists were presuming to manufacture for themselves any goods which they ought by right to buy from English makers, and to recommend steps by which such audacious enterprises might be rebuked and prevented. This is the avowed object of the report, and we find governor after governor a.s.suring the Commissioners earnestly and plaintively that the population of his province really manufacture nothing, or at all events nothing that could possibly interfere with the sacred privileges of the English monopolists. The report significantly recommends the House of Commons to take into consideration the question "whether it might not be expedient to give these colonies proper encouragements for turning their industry to such manufactures and products as might be of service to Great Britain, and more particularly to the production of all kinds of naval stores." The proper encouragement given to this sort of productiveness would imply, of course, proper discouragement given to anything else. The colonies were to exist merely for the convenience and benefit of the so-called mother country, a phrase surely of sardonic impressiveness. Such, however, was the common feeling of that day in England. It was so with regard to India; it was so with regard to Ireland. The story of the pelican was reversed. The pelican did not in this case feed her young with her blood; the young were expected to give their blood to feed the pelican.

The real strain was to come when Walpole should introduce his famous and long-expected scheme for a reform in the customs and excise laws.

Walpole's scheme {312} was inspired by two central ideas. One of these was to diminish the amount of taxation imposed on the land of the country, and make up the deficiency by indirect taxation; the other was to reduce the customs duties by subst.i.tuting as far as possible an excise duty. Walpole would have desired something like free-trade as regarded the introduction of food and the raw materials of manufacture.

Let these be got into the country as easily and freely as possible was his principle, and then let us see afterwards how we can adjust the excise duties so as to produce the largest amount of revenue with the smallest injury to the interest of the consumer, and with the minimum of waste. His design was that the necessaries of life and the raw materials of manufacture should remain as nearly as possible untaxed, and that the revenue of the country should be collected from land and from luxuries. We do not mean to say that the plans which Walpole presented to the country were faithful in all their details to these central ideas. One scheme at least which he laid before Parliament was positively at variance with the main principles which he had long been trying to establish. But in considering the whole controversy between him and his opponents, the reader may take it for granted that such were the principles by which his financial policy was inspired. He had been moving quietly in this direction for some time. He had removed the import duties from tea, coffee, and chocolate, and made them subject to inland or excise duties. In 1732 he revived the salt tax.

The Bill which was introduced on February 9, 1732, to accomplish this object, met with a strong opposition in both Houses of Parliament.

Walpole's speech in introducing the motion for the revival of the tax contained a very clear statement of his financial creed. "Where every man contributes a small share, a great sum may be raised for the public service without any man's being sensible of what he pays; whereas a small sum raised upon a few, lies heavy upon each particular man, and is the more grievous in that it is unjust; for where {313} the benefit is mutual, the expense ought to be in common." [Sidenote: 1732--Opposition alarm] The general principle is una.s.sailable; but Walpole seems to us to have been quite wrong in his application of it to such an impost as the salt tax. "Of all the taxes I ever could think of," he argued, "there is not one more general, nor one less felt, than that of the duty upon salt." He described it as a "tax that every man in the nation contributes to according to his circ.u.mstances and condition in life." This is exactly what every man does not do.

The family of the rich man does not by any means consume more salt than the family of the poor man in proportion to their respective incomes.

Pulteney knocked Walpole's argument all to pieces in a speech of remarkable force and ingenuity even for him. There was something honestly pathetic in his appeal on behalf of the poor man, whom the duty on salt would touch most nearly. The tax, he said, would be at least one shilling a head for every man or woman able to work; to a man with a family it would average four shillings and sixpence a year.

Such a yearly sum "may be looked upon as a trifle by a gentleman of a large estate and easy circ.u.mstances, but a poor man feels sometimes severely the want of a shilling; many a poor man has for want of a shilling been obliged to p.a.w.n the only whole coat he had to his back, and has never been able to redeem it again. Even a farthing to a poor man is a considerable sum; what shifts do the frugal among them make to save even a farthing!"

Had all Pulteney's speech been animated by this spirit he would have made out an unanswerable case. The objection to a salt tax in England then was not so great as in India at a later period; but the principle of the tax was undoubtedly bad, while the general principle of Walpole's finance was undoubtedly good. The question, however, was not argued out by Pulteney or any other speaker on his side upon such a ground as the hardship to the poor man. The tyranny of an excise system, of any excise system, its unconst.i.tutional, despotic, and inquisitorial nature--this was the chief ground of attack. Sir {314} William Wyndham sounded the alarm which was soon to be followed by a tremendous echo. He declared the proposed tax "not only destructive to the trade, but inconsistent with the liberties of this nation." The very number of the officers who would have to be appointed to collect this one tax, who would be named by the Crown and scattered all over the country, would have immense influence on the elections; and this fact alone would give a power into the hands of the Crown greater than was consistent with the liberties of the people, and "of the most dangerous consequence to our happy const.i.tution." The Bill pa.s.sed the House of Commons, and was read a first time in the House of Lords on March 22d. The second reading was moved on March 27th, and a long debate took place. Not the least interesting fact concerning this debate was that the leading part in opposition to the Bill was taken by Lord Carteret, who had returned from his Irish Government, and was beginning to show himself a pertinacious and a formidable enemy of Walpole and his administration. Carteret outshone even Pulteney and Wyndham in wholesale and extravagant denunciation of the measure. He likened it to the domestic policy of Cardinal Richelieu, by which the estates of the n.o.bility and gentry were virtually confiscated to the Crown, and the liberties of the people were lost. It would place it in the power of a wicked administration to reduce the English people to the same condition as the people in Turkey; "their only resource will be in mobs and tumults, and the prevailing party will administer justice by general ma.s.sacres and proscriptions." All this may now seem sheer absurdity; but for the purposes of Carteret and Pulteney it was by no means absurd. The salt tax was carried through the House of Lords; but the public out-of-doors were taught to believe that the Minister's financial policy was merely a series of artifices for the destruction of popular rights, and for robbing England of her political liberty.

[Sidenote: 1733--"A very terrible affair"]

Walpole had long had in his mind a measure of a different {315} nature--a measure to readjust the duties on tobacco and wine. It was known that he was preparing some bill on the subject, and the excitement which was beginning to show itself at the time of the salt tax debates was turned to account by the Opposition to forestall the popular reception of the expected measure. The cry was got up that the administration were planning a scheme for a general excise, and the bare idea of a general excise was then odious and terrible to the public. Whatever Walpole's final purposes may have been, there was nothing to alarm any one in the scheme which he was presently to introduce. n.o.body now would think of impugning the soundness of the economical principles on which his moderate, limited, and tentative scheme of fiscal reform was founded.

The coming event threw its shadow before it, and the shadow became marvellously distorted. Pulteney, speaking on February 23, 1733, with regard to the Sinking Fund proposal, talked of the expected excise scheme in language of such exaggeration that it is impossible to believe the orator could have felt anything like the alarm and horror he expressed. There is "a very terrible affair impending," Pulteney said, "a monstrous project--yea, more monstrous than has ever yet been represented. It is such a project as has struck terror into the minds of most gentlemen within this House, and into the minds of all men without-doors who have any regard to the happiness or to the const.i.tution of their country. I mean that monster the excise; that plan of arbitrary power which is expected to be laid before this House in the present session of Parliament." Sir John Barnard, one of the members for the City of London, a man of great respectability, capacity, and influence, ventured to predict that Walpole's scheme would "turn out to be his eternal shame and dishonor, and that the more the project is examined, and the consequences thereof considered, the more the projector will be hated and despised."

Of all this strong language Walpole took little account. {316} He meant to propose his scheme, he said, when the proper time should come, and he did not doubt but that honorable members would find it something very different from the vague and monstrous project of which they had been told. In any case he meant to propose it. [Sidenote: 1733--Walpole's scheme] Accordingly, on Wednesday, March 7, 1733, Walpole moved that the House should on that day week resolve itself into a committee "to consider of the most proper methods for the better security and improvement of the duties and revenues already charged upon and payable from tobacco and wines." On the day appointed, Wednesday, March 14th, the House went into committee accordingly, and Walpole expounded his scheme. It was simply a plan to deal with the duties on wines and tobacco, and Walpole protested that his views and purposes were confined altogether to these two branches of the revenue, and that such a thing as a scheme for a general excise had never entered into his head, "nor, for what I know, into the head of any man I am acquainted with." There was in the mind of the English people then a vague horror of all excise laws and excise officers, and the whole opposition to Walpole's scheme in and out of the House of Commons was maintained by an appeal to that common feeling. Walpole's resolutions with regard to the tobacco trade were taken first and separately. It will soon be seen that the resolutions concerning the duties on wine were destined never to be discussed at all. What Walpole proposed to do in regard to tobacco was to make the customs duty very small and to increase the excise duty; to establish bonded warehouses for the storing of the tobacco imported into this country and meant to be exported again or sold here for home consumption; thus to encourage and facilitate the importation; to get rid of many of the dishonest practices which injured the fair dealer and defrauded the revenue; to put a stop to smuggling; to benefit at once the grower, the manufacturer, the consumer, and the revenue. We need not relate at great length and in minute detail the history of these resolutions {317} and of the debates on them in the House of Commons. But it may be pointed out that, wild and absurd as were the outcries of the Patriots, there yet was good reason for their apprehension of a growing scheme to subst.i.tute excise for land-tax or poll-tax or customs.

Walpole was, as we know, a firm believer in the advantages of indirect taxation, and of the introduction, as freely as possible, of all raw materials for manufacture, and all articles useful for the food of a nation. He was a free-trader before his time, and he saw that in certain cases there was immense advantage to the consumer and to the revenue in allowing articles to be imported under as light a duty as possible, and then putting an excise duty on their distribution here.

Walpole was perfectly right in all this, but his enemies were none the less justified in proclaiming that the proposals he was introducing could not end in a mere readjustment of the tobacco and wine duties.

Walpole's first resolution was carried by 206 votes against 205. The Government had won a victory, but it was such a victory as Walpole did not care to win. He had been used of late to bear down all before him, and he saw with eyes of clear foreboding the ominous significance of his present majority. He knew well that the Opposition had got the most telling cry they could possibly have sought or found against him.

He knew that popular tumult would grow from day to day. He knew that his enemies were unscrupulous, and that they were banded together against him on many grounds and with many different purposes. Every section of the nation which had any hostile feeling to the House of Hanover, to the existing administration, or to the Prime-minister himself, made common cause against, not his Excise Bill, but him. The tobacco resolutions were pa.s.sed, and a bill to put them into execution was ordered to be prepared. On April 4th the Bill was introduced to the House of Commons, and a motion was made that it be read a first time. Much, however, had happened out-of-doors since the day when Walpole introduced his {318} resolutions. Even at that time there was a great excitement abroad, which, brought crowds of more or less tumultuous persons round the entrances of the House of Commons. The troops had to be kept in readiness for any emergency that might arise.

The least thing feared was that they might have to be employed to keep the access to the House clear for its members. [Sidenote: 1733--The Bill abandoned] By the time the first division had taken place, the tide of popular pa.s.sion had swollen still higher. As Walpole was quitting the House a furious rush was made at him, and but that some of his colleagues surrounded, protected, and bore him off, he would have been in serious personal danger. But the interval between that event and the introduction of the Bill had been turned to very practical account by those who were agitating against him, and the country was now in a flame of excitement. The _Craftsman_ and the pamphleteers had done their work well. The most extravagant consequences were described as certain to follow from the adoption of Walpole's excise scheme. A minister once allowed to impose his excise duty upon wine and tobacco, and--thus shrieked the mouths of a hundred pamphleteers and verse-mongers--he will go on imposing excise on every article of food and dress and household use. Nothing will be able to resist the inquisitorial exciseman. It was positively a.s.serted in ballad and in pamphlet that before long the exciseman would everywhere practise on the daughters of England the atrociously insulting test which was attempted on Wat Tyler's daughter, and which brought about Wat Tyler's insurrection. The memories of Wat Tyler and of Jack Straw were invoked to arouse popular panic and fury. Strange as it may now seem, these appeals were successful in their object; they did create a popular panic, and stir up popular pa.s.sion and fury to the uttermost height.

Not even Walpole attempted any longer to argue down the monstrous misrepresentations of his policy. The fury against him and his excise scheme grew hotter every day, and at one time it was positively thought that his life {319} was in danger. Tumultuous crowds of people gathered in and around all the approaches to the House of Commons.

Several members of the House who were known to be in favor of the Ministerial scheme complained that they had been menaced, insulted, and even a.s.saulted; and the House had for the security of its own debates, and the personal safety of its own members, to pa.s.s resolutions declaring that this riotous behavior was destructive of the freedom and const.i.tution of Parliament, and a high crime and misdemeanor. In the House itself certain tactics, with which Parliament has been very familiar at a later period, were tried with some effect. Various motions for adjournment and other such delay to the progress of the Bill were made and pressed to a division. It was becoming evident to every one that the measure was doomed, and the hearts of the leaders of Opposition rose with each hour that pa.s.sed, while the spirits of the Ministerialists fell.

Walpole never lost his head, although he well knew that a certain and a damaging failure was now awaiting him. He still proclaimed that his measure could be hurtful to none but smugglers and unfair traders, that it would be of great benefit to the revenue and the nation, that it would tend "to make London a free port, and by consequence the market of the world." He spoke with scorn of the riotous crowds whom some had declared to be merely respectful pet.i.tioners. "Gentlemen may give them what name they think fit; it may be said that they came hither as humble suppliants, but I know whom the law calls st.u.r.dy beggars." The Common Council of London, spirited on by a Jacobite Lord Mayor, pet.i.tioned against the excise scheme, and its example was followed by various munic.i.p.alities in the kingdom. Walpole acted at last according to the principle which always governed him at such a crisis. He had the courage to abandon the ground which he had taken up, and which he would have been well ent.i.tled to maintain if argument could prevail over misrepresentation and pa.s.sion. With that {320} cool contempt for the extravagance and the ignorance of the sentiment which thwarted him, he abandoned his scheme and let the mob have its way. On Wednesday, April 11, 1733, it was made known that the Government did not intend to go any farther with the Bill. Exultation all over the island was unbounded. Church bells rang, windows were illumined, bonfires blazed, mult.i.tudes shouted everywhere. If England had gained some splendid victory over a combination of foreign enemies, there could not have been a greater display of frantic national enthusiasm than that which broke out when it was found that hostile clamor had prevailed against the Minister, and that his excise scheme was abandoned.

Frederick the Great has enriched the curiosities of history with an account which he gives of the abandonment of the Bill. According to him, George the Second had devised the measure as a means of making himself absolute sovereign of England. The Excise Bill was intended to put him in possession of a revenue fixed and a.s.sured, a revenue large enough to allow him to increase his military power to any strength he pleased. It only needed a word of command and a chief for revolution to break out. Walpole escaped from Parliament covered with an old cloak, and shouting with all his might, "Liberty, liberty! no excise!"

Thus disguised, he managed to get to the King in St. James's Palace.

He found the King preparing for the worst, arming himself at all points, having put on the hat he wore at Malplaquet, and trying the temper of the sword he carried at Oudenarde. George desired to put himself at once at the head of his guards, and try conclusions with his enemies. Walpole had all the trouble in the world to moderate his sovereign's impetuosity, and at length represented to him, "with the generous hardihood of an Englishman attached to his master," that it was only a choice between abandoning the Excise Bill and losing the crown. Whereupon George at last gave way; the Bill was abandoned, and the crown preserved.

{321}

[Sidenote: 1733--Romance and reality]

This scene is, of course, a piece of the purest romance. But it is certain that the pa.s.sions of the people were so thoroughly aroused that a man less cool and in the true sense courageous than Walpole might have provoked a popular outbreak, and no one can say whether the crown of the Brunswicks might not have gone down in a popular outbreak just then. Time and education have long since vindicated Walpole's financial principles; but the pa.s.sion, the ignorance, and the partisanship of his own day were too strong, and prevailed against him.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.