Bygones Worth Remembering Volume Ii Part 15

CHAPTER XLVI. EXPERIENCES ON THE WARPATH

The late Archbishop of Canterbury spoke derisively of agitators. The Rev. Stewart Headlam asked whether "Paul, and even our Lord Himself, were not agitators." Mr. Headlam might have asked, where would the Archbishop be but for that superb, irrepressible agitator Luther? The agitator is a public advocate who speaks when others are silent. Mr.

C. D. Collet, of whom I here write, was an agitator who understood his business.

Agitation for the public welfare is a feature of civilisation. In a despotic land it works by what means it can. In a free country it seeks its ends by agencies within the limits of law. The mastery of the means left open for procuring needful change, the right use, and the full use of these facilities, const.i.tute the business of an agitator.

For more than fifty years I was a.s.sociated with Mr. Collet in public affairs, and I never knew any one more discerning than he in choosing a public cause, or on promoting it with greater plenitude of resource.

Many a time he has come to my house at midnight to discuss some new point he thought important. A good secretary is the inspirer of the movement he represents. Mr. Collet habitually sought the opinion of those for whom he acted. Every letter and every doc.u.ment was laid before them. On points of policy or terms of expression he deferred to the views of others, not only with acquiescence, but willingness. During the more than twenty-four years in which I was chairman of the Travelling Tax Abolition Committee and he was secretary, I remember no instance to the contrary of his ready deference. His fertility of suggestion was a constant advantage. Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden (who had an instinct of fitness) would select the most suitable for the purpose in hand. In early life Mr. Collet had studied for the law, and retained a pa.s.sion for it which proved very useful where Acts of Parliament were the barricades which had to be stormed.

Mr. Collet was educated at Bruce Castle School, conducted by the father of Sir Rowland Hill. Collet's political convictions were shown by his becoming secretary for the People's Charter Union, intended to restore the Chartist movement (then mainly under Irish influence) to English hands. In 1848, he and W. J. Linton were sent as deputies to Paris, as bearers of English congratulations on the establishment of the Republic.

Afterwards he fell himself under the fascination of an Oriental-minded diplomat, David Urquhart, and became a romantic Privy Council loyalist.

Mr. Urquhart was Irish, eloquent, dogmatic, and infallible--at least, he put down with ostentatious insolence any one who ventured to demur to anything he said. If the astounded questioner pleaded that he was ignorant of the facts adduced, he was told his ignorance was a crime.

Mr. Urquhart believed that all wisdom lay in treaties and Blue Books, and that the first duty of every politician was to insist on beheading Lord Palmerston, who had betrayed England to Russia. How Mr. Collet--a lover of freedom and inquiry--could be subjugated by doctrines which, if not conceived in madness, were commanded by arts akin to madness, is the greatest mystery of conversion I have known. I have seen Mr. Bright come out of the House of Commons, and observing Mr. Collet, would advance and offer his hand, when Mr. Collet would put his hands behind him, saying "he could not take the hand of a man who knew Lord Palmerston was an impostor and ought to know he was a traitor, and still maintained political relations with him." Yet Mr. Collet had great and well-founded regard for Mr. Bright.

It was an intrepid undertaking to attempt a repeal of taxes which for 143 years had fettered, as they were designed to do, knowledge from reaching the people. The history of this achievement was given in the _Weekly Times and Echo_, While these taxes were in force, neither cheap newspapers nor cheap books could exist. Since their repeal great newspapers and great publishing houses have arisen. While these Acts were in force every newspaper proprietor was treated as a blasphemer and a writer of sedition, and compelled to give securities of 300 against the exercise of his infamous tendencies; every paper-maker was regarded as a thief, and the officers of the Excise dogged every step of his business with hampering, exacting, and humiliating suspicion. Every reader found with an unstamped paper in his possession was liable to a fine of 20. The policy of our agitation was to observe scrupulous fairness to every Government with which we came in contact, and to heads of departments with whom unceasing war was waged. Their personal honour was never confused with the mischievous Acts they were compelled to enforce. Our rule was steadfastness in fairness and courtesy. The cardinal principle of agitation Collet maintained was that the most effectual way to obtain the repeal of a bad law was to insist upon it being carried out, when its effect would soon be resented by those who maintain its application to others. Charles d.i.c.kens' "Household Narrative of Current Events," published weekly, was a violation of the Act which required news to be a month old when published on unstamped paper. d.i.c.kens was not selected from malice, for he was friendly to the freedom of the press, but from policy, as an Act carried out which would ruin a popular favourite like d.i.c.kens, would excite indignation against it. A clamour was raised by friends in Parliament against the supineness of the Inland Revenue Board, for tolerating a wealthy metropolitan offender, while it prosecuted and relentlessly ruined small men in the provinces for doing the same thing. Bright called attention in the House to the Electric Telegraph Company, who were advertising every night in the lobbies news, not an hour old, on unstamped paper, in violation of the law.

It took thirty years of supplication to get art galleries open on Sunday, when the application of the law to the privilege of the rich would have opened them in ten years. The rich are allowed to violate the law against working on Sundays, for which the poor man is fined and imprisoned. An intelligent committee on the Balfour-Chamberlain principle of Retaliation would soon put an end to the laws which hamper the progress.

Professor Alexander Bain, remarkable for his fruitfulness in philosophic device, asked my opinion on a project of constructing a barometer of personal character, which varies by time and event. Everybody is aware of somebody who has changed, but few notice that every one is changing daily, for better or for worse. What Bain wanted was to contrive some instrument by which these variations could be denoted.

No doubt men must be judged on the balance of their ascertained merits.

Bishop Butler's maxim that "Probability is the guide of life," implies proportion, and is the rule whereby character is to be judged. For years I conceived a strong dislike of Sir Robert Peel, because, as Secretary of State, he refused the pet.i.tion of Mrs. Carlile to be allowed to leave the prison (where she ought never to have been sent) before the time of her accouchement Peel's refusal was unfeeling and brutal. Yet in after life it was seen that Sir Robert possessed great qualities, and made great sacrifices in promoting the public good; and I learned to hold in honour one whom I had hated for half a century.

For many years I entertained an indifferent estimate of Sir William Harcourt. It began when my friend Mr. E. J. H. Craufurd, M.P., challenged him to a duel, which he declined--justifiably it might be, as he was a larger man than his antagonist, and offered a wider surface for bullets. Declining was meritorious in my eyes, as duels had then a political prestige, and there was courage in refusing. The cause of the challenge I thought well founded. In the earlier years of Sir William's Parliamentary life I had many opportunities of observing him, and thought he appeared as more contented with himself than any man is ent.i.tled to be on this side of the Millennium. When member for Oxford as a Liberal, he declared against payment of members of Parliament on the ground of expense. The expense would have been one halfpenny a year to each elector. This seemed to me so insincere that I ceased to count him as a Liberal who could be trusted. Yet all the while he had great qualities as a combatant of the highest order, in the battles of Liberalism, who sacrificed himself, lost all prospect of higher distinction, and incurred the undying rage of the rich (who have Canning's "ignorant impatience" of taxation) by inst.i.tuting death duties, services which ent.i.tled him to honour and regard.

I heard Lord Salisbury's acrid, sneering, insulting, contemptuous speeches in the House of Commons against working men seeking the franchise. What gave this man the right to speak with bitterness and scorn of the people whose industry kept him in the opulence he so little deserved? Some friends of mine, who had personal intercourse with him, described him as a fair-spoken gentleman. All the while, and to the end of his days, he had the cantankerous tongue in diplomacy which brought contempt and distrust upon Englishmen abroad, while his jests at Irish members of Parliament, whom his Government had subjected to humiliation in prison, denoted, thought many, the innate savagery of his order, when secure from public retribution--which people should remember who continue its impunity. Difference of opinion is to be respected, but it is difficult even for philosophy to condone scorn. If recklessness in language be the mark of inferiority in workmen, what is it in those of high position who compromise a nation by their ungoverned tongues?

Among things bygone are certain ideas of popular influence which have had their day--some too long a day, judging from their effects. The general misconceptions in them still linger in some minds, and it may be useful to recall a prominent one.

The madness of thoroughness are two words I have never seen brought together, yet they are allied oftener than most persons suppose.

Thoroughness, in things which concern others, has limits. Justness is greater than thoroughness. There is great fascination in being thorough.

A man should be thorough as far as he can. This implies that he must have regard to the rights and reasonable convenience of others, which is the natural limit of all the virtues. Sometimes a politician will adopt the word "thorough" as his motto, forgetful that it was the motto of Strafford, who was a despot on principle, and who perished through the terror which his success inspired. Cromwell was thorough in merciless ma.s.sacres, which have made his name hateful in Irish memory for three centuries, perpetuating the distrust of English rule. Vigour is a notable attribute, but unless it stops short of rigour, it jeopardises itself.

Thorough means the entire carrying out of a principle to its end. This can rarely be done in human affairs. When a person finds he cannot do all he would, he commonly does nothing, whereas his duty is to do what he can--to continue to a.s.sert and maintain the principle he thinks right, and persist in its application to the extent of his power. To suspend endeavour at the point where persistence would imperil the just right of others, is the true compromise in which there is no shame, as Mr. John Morley, in his wise book on "Compromise," has shown.

Temperance--a word of infinite wholesomeness in every department of life, because it means use and restraint--has been r.e.t.a.r.ded and rendered repellent to thousands by the "thorough" partisans who have put prohibition into it Can absolute prohibition be enforced universally where conviction is opposed, without omnipresent tyranny, which makes it hateful instead of welcome? Even truth itself, the golden element of trust and progress, has to be limited by relevance, timeliness and utility. He who would speak everything he knows or believes to be true, to all persons, at all times, in every place, would soon become the most intolerable person in every society, and make lying itself a relief. A man should stand by the truth and act upon it, wherever he can, and he should be known by his fidelity to it But that is a very different thing from obtruding it in unseemly ways, in season and out of season, which has ruined many a n.o.ble cause. The law limits its exaction of truth to evidence necessary for justice. There are cases, such as occurred during the Civil War of emanc.i.p.ation in America, where slave-hunters would demand of the man, who had seen a fugitive slave, pa.s.s by, "which way he had run." The humane bystander questioned, would point in the opposite direction. Had he pointed truly, it would have cost the slave his life.

This was lying for humanity, and it would be lying to call it by any other name, for it _was_ lying. Thoroughness would have murdered the fugitive.

The thoroughness of the Puritans brought upon the English nation the calamities of the Restoration. Richelieu, in France, was thorough in his policy of centralisation. He was a butcher on principle, and his name became a symbol of murder. He circ.u.mvented everything, and pursued every one with implacable ferocity, who was likely to withstand him. He put to death persons high and low, he destroyed munic.i.p.alism in France, and changed the character of political society for the worse. The French Revolutionists did but tread in the footsteps of the political priest.

They were all thorough, and as a consequence they died by each other's hands, and ruined liberty in France and in Europe. The gospel of thoroughness was preached by Carlyle and demoralised Continental Liberals. In the revolution of 1848 they spared lives all round. They even abolished the punishment of death.

But when Louis Napoleon applied the doctrine of "thorough" to the greatest citizens of Paris, and shot, imprisoned, or exiled statesmen, philosophers and poets, Madame Pulzsky said to me, the "Republicans thought their leniency a mistake, and if they had power again they would cut everybody's throat who stood in the way of liberty." As usual, thoroughness had begotten ferocity.

Carlyle's eminent disciples of thoroughness justified the ma.s.sacre and torture of the blacks in Jamaica, for which Tennyson, Kingsley, and others defended Governor Eyre. Lord Cardwell, in the House of Commons, admitted in my hearing that there had been "unnecessary executions."

"Unnecessary executions" are murders--but in thoroughness unnecessary executions are not counted. Wherever we have heard of pitilessness in military policy, or in speeches in our Parliament, we see exemplifications of the gospel of Thoroughness, which is madness if not limited by justice and forbearance.

Conventional thoroughness dwells in extremes. If political economy was thoroughly carried out, there might be great wealth, but no happiness.

Enjoyment is waste, since it involves expenditure. The Inquisition, which made religion a name of terror, was but thoroughness in piety.

Pope, himself a Catholic, warned us that--

"For virtue's self may too much zeal be had.

The worst of madness is a saint run mad."

Fanatics forget (they would not be fanatics if they remembered) that in public affairs, true thoroughness is limited by the rights of others.

There is no permanent progress without this consideration. The best of eggs will harden if boiled too much. The mariner who takes no account of the rocks, wrecks his ship--which it is not profitable to forget.

It is natural that those who crave practical knowledge of the unseen world should look about the universe for some c.h.i.n.k, through which they can see what goes on there, and believe they have met with truants who have made disclosures to them. I have no commerce of that kind to relate. It is hard to think that when Jupiter is silent--when the Head of the G.o.ds speaketh not--that He allows angels with traitor tongues to betray to men the mysteries of the world He has Himself concealed.

Can it be that He permits wayward ghosts to creep over the boundary of another world and babble His secrets at will? This would imply great lack of discipline at the outposts of paradise. There is great fascination in clandestine communication with the kingdom of the dead.

I own that noises of the night, not heard in the day, seem supernatural.

The wind sounds like the rush of the disembodied--hinges creak with human emotion--winds moan against window panes like persons in pain.

Creatures of the air and earth flit or leap in pursuit of prey, like the shadows of ghosts or the furtive steps of murdered souls. Are they more than

"The sounds sent down at night By birds of pa.s.sage in their flight"?

For believing less where others believe more, for expressing decision of opinion which the reader may resent, I do but follow in the footsteps of Confucius, who, as stated by Allen Upward, "declared that a principle of belief or even a rule of morality binding on himself need not bind a disciple whose own conscience did not enjoin it on him." Confucius, says his expositor, thus "reached a height to which mankind have hardly yet lifted their eyes, and announced a freedom compared with which ours is an empty name."

CHAPTER XLVII. LOOKING BACKWARDS

It seems to me that I cannot more appropriately conclude these chapters of bygone events within my own experience, than by a summary of those of the past condition of industry which suggest a tone of manly cheerfulness and confidence in the future, not yet common among the people. Changes of condition are not estimated as they pa.s.s, and when they have pa.s.sed, many never look back to calculate their magnificence or insignificance. This chapter is an attempt to show the change of the environment of a great cla.s.s of a character to decrease apprehension and augment hope. The question answered herein is: "Did things go better before our time?"

When this question is put to me I answer "No." Things did not go better before my time--nor that of the working cla.s.s who were contemporaries of my earlier years. My answer is given from the working cla.s.s point of view, founded on a personal experience extending as far back as 1824, when I first became familiar with workshops. Many are still under the impression that things are as bad as they well can be, whereas they have been much worse than they are now. When I first took an interest in public affairs, agitators among the people were as despondent as frogs who were supposed to croak because they were neglected.

They spoke in weeping tones. There were tears even in the songs of Ebenezer Elliot, the Corn-Law Rhymer,* and not without cause, for the angels would have been pessimists, had they been in the condition of the people in those days. I myself worked among men who had Unitarian masters--who were above the average of employers--even they were as sheep-dogs who kept the wolf away, but bit the sheep if they turned aside. But Trades Unions have changed this now, and sometimes bite their masters (employers they are called now), which is not more commendable.

Still, mult.i.tudes of working people, who ought to be in the front ranks as claimants for redress still needed, yet hang back with handkerchief to their eyes, oppressed with a feeling of hopelessness, because they are unaware of what has been won for them, of what has been conceded to them, and what the trend of progress is bringing nearer to them.

* Thomas Cooper--himself a Chartist poet--published (1841) in Elliot's days a hymn by William Jones--a Leicester poet-- of which the first verse began thus:

"Come my fellow-slaves of Britain.

Rest, awhile, the weary limb; Pour your plaints, ye bosom-smitten, In a sad and solemn hymn."

Of course if there has been no betterment in the condition of the people, despair is excusable--but if there has, despair is as unseemly as unnecessary. Every age has its needs and its improvements to make, but a knowledge of what has been accomplished should take despair out of workmen's minds. To this end I write of changes which have taken place in my time.

I was born in tinder-box days. I remember having to strike a light in my grandfather's garden for his early pipe, when we arrived there at five o'clock in the morning. At times my fingers bled as I missed the steel with the jagged flint. Then the timber proved damp where the futile spark fell, and when ignition came a brimstone match filled the air with satanic fumes. He would have been thought as much a visionary as Joanna Southcott, who said the time would come when small, quick-lighting lucifers would be as plentiful and as cheap as blades of gra.s.s. How tardy was change in olden time! Flint and steel had been in use four hundred years. Philip the Good put it into the collar of the Golden Fleece (1429). It was not till 1833 that phosphorus matches were introduced. The safety match of the present day did not appear until 1845. The consumption of matches is now about eight per day for each person. To produce eight lights, by a tinder-box, would take a quarter of an hour With the lucifer match eight lights can be had in two minutes, occupying only twelve hours a year, while the tinder box process consumes ninety hours. Thus the lucifer saves nearly eighty hours annually, which, to the workman, would mean an addition of nearly eight working days to the year.

In tinder-box days the nimble night burglar heard the flint and steel going, and had time to pack up his booty and reach the next parish, before the owner descended the stairs with his flickering candle. Does any one now fully appreciate the morality of light? Extinguish the gas in the streets of London and a thousand extra policemen would do less to prevent outrage and robbery than the ever-burning, order-keeping street light. Light is a police force--neither ghosts nor burglars like it.

Thieves flee before it as errors flee the mind when the light of truth bursts on the understanding of the ignorant.

Seventy years ago the evenings were wasted in a million houses of the poor. After sundown the household lived in gloom. Children who could read, read, as I did, by the flickering light of the fire, which often limited for life the power of seeing. Now the pauper reads by a better light than the squire did in days when squires were county G.o.ds. Now old men see years after the period when their forefathers were blind.

Then a social tyranny prevailed, unpleasant to the rich and costly to the poor, which regarded the beard as an outrage. I remember when only four men in Birmingham had courage to wear beards. They were followers of Joanna Southcott. They did it in imitation of the apostles, and were jeered at in the streets by ignorant Christians. George Frederick Muntz, one of the two first members elected in Birmingham, was the first member who ventured to wear a beard in the House of Commons; and he would have been insulted had not he been a powerful man and carried a heavy Malacca cane, which he was known to apply to any one who offered him a personal affront. Only military officers were allowed to wear a moustache; among them--no one, not even Wellington, was hero enough to wear a beard. The Rev. Edmund R. Larken, of Burton Rectory, near Lincoln, was the first clergyman (that was as late as 1852) who appeared in the pulpit with a beard, but he shaved the upper lip as an apology for the audacity of his chin; George Dawson was the first Nonconformist preacher who delivered a sermon in a full-blown moustache and beard, which was taken in both cases as an unmistakable sign of lat.i.tudinarianism in doctrine. In the bank clerk or the workman it was worse. It was flat insubordination not to shave. The penalty was prompt dismissal. As though there were not fetters about hard to bear, people made fetters for themselves. Such was the daintiness of ignorance that a man could not eat, dress, nor even think as he pleased. He was even compelled to shave by public opinion.

When Mr. Joseph Cowen was first a candidate for Parliament, he wore, as was his custom, a felt hat (then called a "wide-awake"). He was believed to be an Italian conspirator, and suspected of holding opinions lacking in orthodox requirements. Yet all his reputed heresies of acts and tenets put together did not cost him so many votes as the form and texture of his hat. He was elected--but his headgear would have ruined utterly a less brilliant candidate than he This social intolerance now shows its silly and shameless head no more. A wise Tolerance is the Angel, which stands at the portal of Progress, and opens the door of the Temple.

Dr. Church, of Birmingham, was the first person who, in my youth, contrived a bicycle, and rode upon it in the town, which excited more consternation than a Southcottean with his beard. He was an able physician, but his harmless innovation cost him his practice. Patients refused to be cured by a doctor who rode a horse which had no head, and ate no oats. Now a parson may ride to church on a bicycle and people think none the worse of his sermon; and, scandal of scandals, women are permitted to cycle, although it involves a new convenience of dress formerly sharply resented.

In these days of public wash-houses, public laundries, and water supply, few know the discomfort of a washing day in a workman's home, or of the feuds of a party pump. One pump in a yard had to serve several families.

Quarrels arose as to who should first have the use of it. Sir Edwin Chadwick told me that more dissensions arose over party pumps in a day than a dozen preachers could reconcile in a week. Now the poorest house has a water tap, which might be called moral, seeing the ill-feeling it prevents. So long as washing had to be done at home, it took place in the kitchen, which was also the dining-room of a poor family. When the husband came home to his meals, damp clothes were hanging on lines over his head, and dripping on to his plate. The children were in the way, and sometimes the wrong child had its ears boxed because, in the steam, the mother could not see which was which. This would give rise to further expressions which kept the Recording Angel, of whom Sterne tells us, very busy, whom the public wash-houses set free for other, though scarcely less repugnant duty.