When Birmingham was a town it had a national reputation for Liberalism. At present I prefer to call myself a "townsman" rather than a "citizen." The old pride of owning to being a Birmingham man is merged into the admission of being born in Warwickshire. Some of the political scenes in its town days may be instructive to its present-day citizens.
The famous Birmingham Political Union of 1832 was "hung up like a clean gun" on G. F. Muntz's suggestion and never taken down. Many years later a new Union was projected. Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was in the chair. I was on the platform, and the only person present who was a member of the former Union. I had no opportunity of speaking—nor indeed had anybody, save movers and seconders of motions. There was nothing radical about the proceedings. Nobody's opinion was asked. No opportunity of discussion was given. The meeting was a mere instrument for registering the business of the chair. The impression that afternoon made upon me has never left me. Nothing afterwards surprised me in the performances of the "quick-change artiste" of the Parliamentary music-hall.
Mr. John Morley wrote an article in the Fortnightly on Mr. Chamberlain, which first gave him a position before the public. Not even in Birmingham could any one see adequate justification for it. But Mr. Morley proved right, and had discerned a capacity which had not then unfolded itself.
About that time Mr. Chamberlain made some remark on Mr. Disraeli in the Birmingham Town Council, which did not amount to much. Mr. Disraeli did the municipal speaker the honour to call him to account. Had any one in like case called Mr. Disraeli to account he would have said in his airy and evasive way: "Every public speaker is liable to the misconstruction of unheeding and ill-hearing reporters, and he could not be expected to answer for them." Mr. Chamberlain gave no sign of any such adroitness which was ready to his hand, but wrote what read like an abject apology. He did not dare to say to Mr. Disraeli "What I have said I have said."
Mr. Jesse Collings was one of the minor merchants of Birmingham. He came originally from Exeter, and was held in great respect for his earnest Liberalism, and for promoting the education of the people—though he was himself a sectarian pure and simple, with little, if any, secularity in him. When he came to be Mayor, the Tories of Birmingham—who had not then and never had any man of mark or genius among them—were capable of outrage. It was the only art they knew. When Mr. Collings presided one day at a public meeting in the town hall, they drew an ass's head on a large sheet of pasteboard, and hung it over the clock in front of the chair labelled—the "Portrait of the Mayor." For two hours they made all business impossible by shouting "Mr. Mayor, look at your portrait." At length the Mayor took courage and ordered the Chief Constable—Major Bond—to remove the picture placard and the ringleader of the disturbance. This was construed as an insult, which Mr. Kynersley, the principal Tory magistrate, supported. I was one who urged Mr. Collings to apply to the bench for a case, that it might be determined in the higher courts whether a mayor had legal power to preserve order at a public meeting. The case was refused by Mr. Kynersley. This was the treatment of the Right Honourable Jesse Collings for being a Liberal. Is there a stranger sight in England than seeing this Liberal mayor dressed in Tory livery, fetching and carrying in Parliament for the intolerant party which treated him with such ostentatious indignity? What must be his sense of humiliation under his new convictions? Equally tragic and unforeseen must be the humiliation of the Tory party in Parliament who used to boast of their pride, their dignity, and self-respect at having to accept as a leader the great "caucus-monger," as they called Mr. Chamberlain, who was the object of their epithets and hatred during so many sessions. The tragedy of political convictions can no further go. Far be it from me to deny that Mr. Collings and Mr. Chamberlain have not honest reasons for their strange professions, though I do not understand them. Like gravitation, I admit the fact, though its cause is inscrutable. In politics motives are as though they were not. They cannot be taken into account. If alleged, they admit of no proof. Resentment rages among the partisans of the accused and the tendency of their principles, which it is alone instructive to discuss, is lost sight of. It is common for partisans to disparage those who have left their ranks—forgetting that conviction depends upon evidence. Those who leave a party may be as honest as those who remain. Whoever has rendered aid to liberty and gone over to the other side should be honoured for what he has done. He who has once stood upon the side of humanity deserves more respectful treatment than he who never took the part of the right. Mr. Collings and Mr. Chamberlain rendered important service to the cause of public progress, and their abandonment of it was a loss. For the rest, the career of Joseph Chamberlain, like that of Joseph Cowen, has its explanation in the passion for paramountcy.
It is not easy to determine which of many historic incidents of interest should take precedence. The 10th of April, known as the day of Chartist Terror—still spoken of in hysterical accents—will do, as it shows the wild way with which sober, staid men can write history. I was out that day with the Chartists, and well know how different the facts were from what is believed to be the peril of the metropolis on that day. I have long regarded it as one of the "bygones" having instruction in them.
The French have their 9th Thermidor (July 27, 1794), when the Reign of Terror ended, and their 18th Brumaire (November 9, 1799), when the Napoleonic Terror began, and the English have their 10th of April, 1848, when a million special constables were out staff in hand, to prevent a National Petition of the people being presented to the House of Commons. Yet no conspiracy existed—nor even had the police fabricated a plot (as they often did in those days)—no disorder had been threatened, not a man was armed; the only imaginable enemy was the Chartist Convention of less than two hundred persons. The most distinguished of the Special Constables was Louis Napoleon, who four years later became known as the assassin of French liberty, and whose career is one of the infamies of Imperialism.
The 10th of April, 1848, has for more than half a century held a place in public memory. The extraordinary hallucination concerning it has become historic, and passes as authentic. Canon Charles Kingsley was the chief illusionist in this matter. He wrote: "On the 10th of April, the Government had to fill London with troops, and put the Duke of Wellington in command, who barricaded the bridges and Downing Street, and other public buildings."* Nobody "had" to do what Kings-ley relates. Nine years had elapsed since any one had taken the field against the Government, and that was in a Welsh town 147 miles away. John Frost and his tiny band of followers were the insurgents. All were put down in twenty minutes by a few soldiers. Frost came to London in 1839 to consult James Watson, Henry Hetherington, Richard Moore, William Lovett, and other responsible Chartists, whom he most trusted. They besought Frost to abandon his idea of an attack upon Newport, as no one would support him. There were no arms in London on April, 1848, no persons were drilled, no war organisation existed, and no intention of rising anywhere. The Government knew it, for they had spies everywhere. They knew it as well or better in 1848 than in 1839. For nine years John Frost had then been in penal servitude, and no one had attempted to imitate him. Nor had he any followers in London in 1848. At his trial no noblemen, no aristocratic ladies, crowded the court to cheer him by their sympathy, or mitigate his sentence by their influence—as they did when Dr. Jameson and others were on trial for their wanton and murderous raid on the Government of South Africa. Such is the difference between the insurgency of poverty seeking redress, and the insurgency of wealthy insolence seeking its further aggrandisement There was absolutely nothing in the field against the Duke of Wellington in London but a waggon, on which a monster petition was piled.
Politically speaking, London has seen no tamer day than the 10th of April, 1848. There was less ground for alarm than when a Lord Mayor s procession passes through the city. The procession of actual Chartists, able to leave their work to join it, could never have amounted to four thousand. There was not a single weapon among them, nor any intention of using it had they possessed it. There was only one weapon known to be in London, in the hands of the Chartists, and that was a Colonel Macerone's spear, fabricated in 1830, to assist in carrying the first Reform Bill. That was hidden up a chimney in 3, Queen's Head Passage, Paternoster Row. It came into my possession, and I have often shown it to members of the Government to convince them what risks Society ran in Wellington's days—and are exposed to still.
The Chartists had held a Convention in London the week before the 10th, and were unable to obtain any place of meeting except a small social institution in John Street, Tottenham Court Road, which could not seat 150 persons at the Convention table. The hall was lent to them by the most pacific body of politicians in London—the followers of Robert Owen. Yet Mr. Thomas Hughes adopted and authenticated Kingsley's incredible belief, that the country was in danger of these earnest but entirely impotent Chartist petitioners; and Mr. Hughes actually quotes believingly in his introduction to "Alton Locke" a statement that: "The Duke of Wellington declared in the House of Lords that no great society had ever suffered as London had during the proceeding, while the Home Secretary telegraphed to all the chief magistrates of the kingdom the joyful news that the peace had been kept in London."*
Never did the craziest despotic Government in Europe engage in such a political imposture. It was pitiable that the Duke of Wellington should have had no more self-respect than to compromise his great career by fortifying London against an imaginary enemy. The Government had plentiful information and must have known the truth—the contrary of what they alleged.
It may be said in extenuation of these affected Ministerial terrors, that the Parisian revolution of that year had communicated unrest to the people of England. It had inspired them with pleasure, but not with insurgency, for which they were as uninclined as they were unprepared, and none knew this better than the Duke of Wellington. The Parisian population had seen military service. They understood the use of arms, had them, and knew how to settle their differences at the barricade. London had never seen a barricade. The people were all unused to arms, and were without the means or the knowledge to storm a police station. Yet, according to Canon Kingsley, Wellington told the Government "that no capital had gone through such days as England had on the 10th of April," when no man was struck—no man was killed—no riot took place anywhere. It would seem that ignorance, rashness, wildness, and irresponsible language are by no means peculiar to the working classes. We must cease to wonder at the Duke of Wellington when an accredited publicist like Judge Thomas Hughes, who was educated at Rugby, could tell the world himself that "It is only by an effort that one can realise the strain to which the nation was subjected."
On that awful day, nobody was reported as found looking into a shop window with a predatory glare in his eyes, and no account came up from the provinces that a single Chartist was observed to peep over a hedge in a menacing manner.
I was out on the 10th of April. On Sunday, the night before, I was the lecturer at John Street The audience was composed largely of delegates to the dreadful Convention that so perturbed the "Iron Duke."
My advice to them, published at the time, was to "Beware of the police," and not to strike again if they were struck. Many of them, I knew, were willing to die for their country, if that would save it. They would serve it much better by dying without resistance, than dying with it. If any were killed whilst walking in the procession their comrades should move quietly on. Nothing would tell more strongly on public opinion than such heroic observance of order. Hetherington, one of the bravest who walked in the ranks, told me he would do it. The Government, by their ostentatious provocation, in garrisoning the Bank with soldiers, crowding Somerset House with them, parading troops on Clerkenwell Green, had brought, it is computed, more than two millions of persons into the streets. The conclusion to which the Chartist leaders came, was that the Government wanted to create a conflict, shoot down a number of the people, and then proclaim to Europe that they had "saved Society," by murder, as one of their chief special constables did soon after in Paris.
As I had been personally associated with all the chief Chartists, in prison and out, from the beginning of the movement, I can speak with some knowledge of them on that day.
On the morning of the 10th of April, Mr. C. D. Collet, the well-informed Secretary of the People's Charter Union, myself, Richard Moore, and others, organised a band of forty persons, who were to distribute themselves over London, note-book and pencil in hand, in the character of reporters. The police took kindly to us, and gave us good positions of advantage, where we could see everything that took place thereabouts, and even protected us from being incommoded. We were there to watch the police, not the people, as the disorder, if there were any, would come from them. My station was in Bridge Street, Blackfriars, where a row of constables was drawn up. I found a coarse, plethoric alderman, going from man to man, saying only three words: "Strike hard to-day."
The people behaved admirably. Not a blow was struck which gave a colourable ground for outrage on the part of the police. In justice to the police, it ought to be said, neither did they incite disorder.
At night the Home Secretary spent the money of the State, in telegraphing to all the mayors in the land "the day had passed off quietly," thus creating a false terror everywhere that London had been in danger—danger of the Government's creating.
The Bull Ring Riots in Birmingham in 1839, when I was resident there, were created entirely by the magistrates, who introduced a hundred London policemen into the town, which led to the loss of life and property.
I and others on the deputation to Mr. Walpole told him at the time, when the railings were broken down in Hyde Park, that if he made a show of soldiers and policemen, people were sure to be killed. At the peril of his own reputation, he kept them out of sight, and no disorder took place, though violent members of the Government tried to destroy Mr. Walpole for his wise and noble forbearance. Dean Stubbs, in his interesting book on Charles Kingsley, says (p. 97): "On the 10th of April, 1848, a revolution was threatened in England. One hundred thousand armed men were to meet on Kennington Common and thence to march on Westminster, and there to compel, by physical force, if necessary, the acceptance of the People's Charter by the Houses of Parliament." Could such a lunatical statement be written by any one, and his friends not procure a magistrate's order for his removal to the nearest asylum? How were the "hundred thousand" to get the arms into London—if they had them. Whence were they to procure them? Where could they store them, seeing that at that time there was not a single place of Chartist meeting that was not known to be in debt, unless its rent was paid by the charity of some well-to-do sympathiser? What were muskets or pikes to do against the stone walls of the Houses of Parliament or the Bank? How were cannon to be drawn from the centre of London to Kennington Common with ample service of powder and shot? Marvellous is the history which Churchmen can write!
The utterly groundless and incredible representations of the "10th April," which Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes published, as we have seen, were to my amazement resuscitated as late as 1902 for the historic instruction of the students of the Working Mens College in Great Ormond Street, London, by Mr. R. P. Lichfield, vice-principal of the college, who for forty-seven years has rendered it important service, for which all friends of education for workmen are grateful. Yet in his address to the students (October 1, 1902), he tells them that in 1848 "the wave of democracy which swept over Europe gave fresh impetus to the Chartist agitation. On the memorable 10th of April it looked as if we were to have a revolutionary outbreak on the Parisian pattern. This we were saved from, partly by an army of volunteers, special constables, partly by the Duke of Wellington's discreet placing of his troops.... The attempt to overawe Parliament by a 'physical force' demonstration was a fiasco." The world knows a good deal of historians who draw upon their imagination for their facts, but here is a responsible teacher, drawing upon his terrors of fifty years ago, for statements which nobody believes now or believed then, who knew the facts. The Duke of Wellington's great name in war imposed upon amateur politicians. The Duke—contrary to his reputation for military veracity—readily lent himself to the Government of that day, that they might figure before the country as the deliverers of England, from the nation-shaking assault of a miscellaneous crowd of penniless and unarmed combatants, who had neither cannon nor commissariat. Everybody was aware that the knowledge of the Iron Duke, outside war, was very limited, and his political credulity was unbounded. At the end of the Peninsular War he wrote to the Government of that day, informing them "the bankers of Paris were furnishing large sums to Revolutionists in England." Only old residents in Bedlam would believe that. There were no leaders of Revolutionists in England, to whom the money could be assigned or consigned, and bankers were the last persons in the world to subscribe money for a wild, speculative, and uncertain enterprise. No spy of Pitt, or Sid-mouth, would have sent home so insane a report, from fear of instant dismissal from their sinister employment.
This is but a sample of the airy, false, and fictionary foundation on which the Legend of the Tenth of April was built. These incidents of historic perversion, though bygones of half a century ago, are worth remembering.
The Chartists have made as much noise in the world as they knew how—yet to the generation of to-day they are ambiguous. They have had no historian. Carlyle went to look at them in prison, and defamed them with that bitterness and contempt he had for partisans who lacked the sense of submission to the dictates of those superior persons who knew what was best for everybody, of whose aspirations they knew nothing, and for whose needs they had no sympathy. Chartism, however, has won conspicuous treatment in fiction. What it was in fact, is a very different thing. There is the Church Chartist by Canon Kingsley, and the Positivist Chartist by George Eliot, drawn by two famous artists. The pictures are hung upon the line in the great gallery of literature. So brilliant is the work of Kingsley that it has imposed on so accomplished a connoisseur as Dean Stubbs, who, in his life of the fervid Rector of Eversley, has taken it for a painting from real life. I present the Church Chartist first.
In my time I have seen much good done by Christians with a view to extend their faith. Some few, like Samuel Morley, who excelled all lay Dissenters I have known in the manly sense of the dignity and independence of Nonconformity, would do generous things from the humaneness of their own minds alone. Some Quakers and Unitarians have had this quality. Others, Churchmen, Roman Catholics, and orthodox Christians, I have known to mitigate privation for the "Lord's sake," not for humanity's sake. This was to some extent the case of the Rev. Frederick Denison Maurice, Canon Kingsley, and their noble colleagues, Edward Vansittart Neale, Judge Thomas Hughes, and J. M. Ludlow. They became Christian Socialists not so much because they cared for Socialism, as Maurice owned his "object was not to Socialise society, but to Christianise Socialism." Startled by the dislike and even resentment against Christianity expressed by men of poverty and intelligence at being asked to adopt a belief which brought them no relief, Maurice, Kingsley, and their associates concluded that privation was the cause of alienation from the Church. In like manner Dissenters thought that it was the bad condition of industrial life which kept working people from chapel. None realised that alienation from Christianity had its seat in the understanding—in intellectual dissatisfaction with the tenets of Theology. The absentees from church and chapel alleged that no relief came of belief, and never had since the days when manna fell in the Jewish wilderness, and loaves and fishes were miraculously plentiful on the hills of Galilee. There was no sense or profit in adopting a faith which had been unproductive for nearly 2,000 years. It had taken the slave, the serf, and the hired worker a long time to see this. But at last experience had told upon the thoughtful. But the theologians neither in the dominant, nor dominated camps perceived it.
Very generous is Kingsley's sympathy, in "Alton Locke," with the lot of working people, but he believed that when the rebellious shoemaker fully realises that good priests would mitigate the lot of those who labour in workshops or in fields and mines, he will become reconciled to the Thirty-nine Articles. Alton Locke is a Church Chartist—not one of the Chartists of real life whom I knew, who were current in Kingsley's days, who signed the famous document which Place drew and Roebuck revised. They had principles. They did not seek paternal government of friendly Churchmen, nor of Positivists, nor that nobly organised kind of passive competence which Mr. Ruskin meditated for the people. The real Chartists—like the Co-operators—sought self-government for the people by the people. The alienation of the people from church and chapel was not founded on lack of spiritual patronage, or thirst for it, but from intellectual dissatisfaction with theological tenets.
Christians, from the Vatican to the Primitive Methodist conventicle, are all so persuaded of the infallibility of their interpretation of the Scriptures, and are so convinced of the perfect sufficiency of their tenets for the needs of all the world, that they regard difference of opinion as springing from wilful misunderstanding, or from the "evil heart at enmity with God"—a mad doctrine beneath the notice of the average lunatic. Natural variety of intellect, the infinite hosts of personal views, and the infinitude of individual experience—which silently create new convictions—are not taken into account, and conscientious dissent seems to the antediluvian theologian an impossibility. Even the most liberal of eminent Unitarians in England, W. J. Fox, regarded, what we now know as the Agnostic—hesitation to declare as true that which the declarer does not know to be so—as a species of mental disease.
That Kingsley lived in a refracting medium, in which the straightest facts appeared bent when placed in it, was evident when he wrote: "Heaven defend us from the Manchester School, for of all narrow, conceited, hypocritical, and atheistic schemes of the universe the Cobden and Bright one is exactly the worst." There was no reason why Kingsley should be a Chartist, since he had all he wanted secured, and had contempt in his heart for Chartist tenets. He wrote: "The Bible gives the dawn of the glorious future, such as no universal suffrage, free trade, communism, organisation of labour, or any other Morrison pill measure can give." He exulted in the existence of the forces which made against the people. He exclaimed: "As long as the Throne, the House of Lords, and the Press are what I thank God they are!" he was grateful. The state of things which existed, it was the object of Chartism to change.
These rampant ideas of Kingsley were far from being Chartist sentiments. At a meeting in Castle Street, London, the Rev. Charles Kingsley and Mr. Thomas Hughes were present, working men comprising the audience, an old grey-headed Chartist, of a Republican way of thinking, whose experience of monarchy was limited to his share of taxation for its support, hissed at the introduction of the Queen's name. Mr. Hughes, then a young athlete, turned upon the old Six Points politician and said: "Any one who hissed at the Queen's name would have to reckon with him"—meaning that he would knock him down, or put him out of the meeting. If, at a Chartist meeting, one athletic leader had similarly threatened an old grey-headed Royalist who hissed some Republican name, it would have been described, in all respectable papers, as "a ruffianly proceeding." The Hughes incident showed Christian Socialist sympathy with Chartism was not of an enthusiastic character. At other times Mr. Hughes had nobler moods, but he, like Kingsley, had few qualifications for delineating Chartists.
Judge Hughes, like Canon Kingsley and his Christian Socialist colleagues, saw everything in the light of Theology. He saw nothing else by itself. He relates "the appearance of a little grey, shrivelled man at the grave of Mr. Maurice at the cemetery at Hampstead, one of the staff of the leading Chartist newspaper," as a proof of his conversion. This was gratitude, not conversion. Had I not been at the Bolton Co-operative Congress at the time, I should have been at the same grave. When the news came of Maurice's death, it did not occur to his friend, Mr. Neale, that the Congress would pass a resolution in honour of Maurice. I suggested it to him, and he said to me, "You had better draw up the resolution," which I did, and moved it. It was unanimously and gratefully passed. Though I was foremost to express the respect of working men, and the sense of obligation they were under, for Maurice's great services to Co-operation, and his establishment of the Working Men's College, it did not imply that I had come to accept the Thirty-nine Articles. Relevant appreciation, real gratitude, and admiration, do not imply coincidence of opinion on other and alien questions.
How little the creator of Alton Locke was a Chartist, or a sympathiser with Chartism, was seen when he described "Mr. Julian Harney and Feargus O'Connor and the rest of the smoke of the pit." Kingsley said "his only quarrel with the Charter was that it did not go far enough." All his meaning was that it should have comprised social, instead of political reform, which was what all who were opposed to political freedom said. This only meant that he wanted Chartists to take up social, and drop political reform. This appears in the passage in which he said, "The Charter disappointed me bitterly when I read it. It seemed a harmless cry enough, but a poor, bald, constitution-mongering cry as ever I heard. The French cry of organisation of labour is worth a thousand of it."* Organisation of labour is a great thing, but it is not political equality or liberty. Kingsley's Chartist had no political soul.
There is noble sympathy with labour, and there are passages which should always be read with honour in "Alton Locke." But the book is written in derision of Chartism and Liberal politics. Alton Locke himself was like his creator. Kingsley's acts were the acts of a friend, his arguments the arguments of an enemy; and Alton Locke, despite the noble personal qualities with which he is endowed, was a confused political traitor, who bartered the Kingdom of Man for the Kingdom of Heaven, when he might have stood by both.
So much for the Church Chartist. Now turn to the Positivist Chartist, and see whether there be any backbone of political emancipation in him, or whether his vertebra is of jelly, like Alton Locke's. To the Positivist Chartist is given the stronger name of "Radical."
One of the remarkable volumes George Eliot gave to the world bears the name of "Felix Holt, the Radical." But when she comes to delineate the Radical, he turns out to be a Positivist—of good quality of his kind, but still not a Radical.
As Canon Kingsley drew the Church Chartist, so George Eliot drew the Positivist Radical. Neither drew the selected hero as he was, but as each thought he ought to be.
A Radical is one who goes to the root of things. He deals with evils having a political origin, which he intends to remove by political means. Radicals were far older than the Chartists. Radicalism was a force in reform before Chartism began. The Radical more or less evolves his creed by observation of the condition of things surrounding him; the Chartist had his creed ready made for him. The Chartist may be said to begin with political effects, the Radical with political causes. Anyhow, the Radical was always supposed to know what he was, and why he was what he was. Felix Holt was not built that way. George Eliot had greater power of penetrating into character than Kingsley, but she made the same mistake in Felix Holt that Kingsley made in Alton Locke. Felix Holt is a revolutionist from indignation. His social insurgency is based on resentment at injustice. Very noble is that form of dissatisfaction, but political independence is not his inspiration. Freedom, equality of public rights, are not in his mind. His disquiet is not owing to the political inability of his fellows to control their own fortunes. Content comes to Felix when the compassion of others ameliorates or extinguishes the social evils from which his fellows suffer. He is the Chartist of Positivism without a throb of indignation at political subjection. That may be Positivism, but it is not Radicalism.
Felix Holt discloses his character in his remark that "the Radical question was how to give every man a man's share in life. But I think that is to expect voting to do more towards it than I do."
"A man's share in life" was the Baboeuf doctrine of Communism, which English Radicals never had. Holt's depreciation of the power of voting was the argument of the benevolent but beguiling Tory. It was part of the Carlylean contempt of a ten-thousandth part of a voice in the "national palava." This meant distrust, not only of the suffrage, but of Parliament itself. When both are gone, despotism becomes supreme. When Felix Holt talked so, he had ceased to be a Radical—if he ever was one.
The power of voting has changed the status and dignity of working men—not much yet, but more will come. Hampered and incomplete as the suffrage is, it has put the workers on the way to obtain what they want, though they are a little puzzled which turning to take now they are on the road.
Felix Holt continues: "I want the working men to have power.... and I can see plainly enough that our all having power will do little towards it at present.... If we have false expectations about men's characters, we are very much like the idiot who thinks he can carry milk in a can without a bottom. In my opinion the notions about what mere voting will do, are very much that sort" Felix declares that all the "scheme about voting and districts and annual parliaments [all points of the Charter] will not give working men what they want."*
Felix has much more to say in disparagement of political aspiration which is like reading one of Lord Salisbury's speeches when he was Lord Cranborne, but without the bitterness and contempt by which we knew the genuine Salisbury mind. The Eliot spirit is better—the argument more sympathetic, but the purport is the same. It means: "Leave politics alone. You will find all the redress that is good for you elsewhere."
This, if true, is not Radicalism which sought to help itself, and not rise by compassion. Radicals may have expected too much from political reform—they may have thought political power to be an end instead of a means whereby better public conditions can be obtained, by which social effort could better be compassed, and its projects carried out. It is true that social condition can be improved by men of purpose and character under despotism, but this does not prove that despotism is desirable, since it can make itself at will an effectual obstacle to progress, and as a rule does so. The policy of seeking the best political condition in which social progress can be made, is Radicalism. The policy of contentment with things as they are, seeking social condition apart from politics, is Socialism, as it has been understood in England. "Felix Holt," like "Alton Locke," abounds in noble sentiments, exalts the character of working men, vindicates their social claims with eloquence. But Felix Holt was no more a Radical than Alton Locke was a Chartist. Alton Locke is against Chartism. Felix Holt is against Radicalism. Sir Leslie Stephen has written the most fascinating estimate of the writings and genius of George Eliot that has been produced. He has interesting things to say of Felix Holt, but it does not occur to him to say what he was so well able to say, whether he was a Radical or not—or if one, of what species. Therefore it has been necessary to place before the reader the evidence which will enable him to decide the question for himself.
In reference to this chapter, Mr. J. M. Ludlow wrote to me, saying:
["That you above all men should find fault with Kingsley or any one else for setting social above political reform, I own, amazes me. But it is not true in any sense of the words that Kingsley wanted Chartists to 'take up social and drop political reform.' In his first letter to Thomas Cooper (Life, vol. i. p. 182), he expressly says: 'I would shed the last drop of my blood for the social and political emancipation of the people.' [The italics are mine.] Again, you misquote General Maurice's (not Mr. Maurice's) words, when you say that 'Maurice owned that his object was not to socialise society, but to Christianise Socialism.' General Maurice's words are: 'Beyond all doubt he dreaded becoming the head of a party of Christian Socialists. His great wish was to Christianise Socialism, not to Christian-socialise the universe' (Life, vol. ii. p. 47).
"Your story about the 'old grey-headed Chartist' and T. Hughes does not tally altogether with the statement in Mr. Maurice's Life (vol. ii. p. 13), but as I do not recollect being present (nor, I believe, were you) on the occasion, I cannot say which is right. I should have thought that an 'old greyheaded Chartist' would have had more courtesy as well as more sense than to hiss the Queen."
Mr. Ludlow's letter throws a flood of light on the mistakes of Canon Kingsley and his colleagues. Mr. Ludlow "is amazed that I above all men should blame any man for setting social above political reform." It is now some fifty years since Mr. Ludlow first did me the honour to notice what I wrote or said. Yet I think he never knew me to subordinate political to social reform. I always thought it base to teach men to barter political freedom for social benefits. The leaders of early co-operation in the days before Mr. Ludlow knew it—being like Robert Owen, mostly of a Tory way of thinking—deprecated political reform, and thought its pursuit unnecessary, as their social remedy would do everything for the people. I always dissented from this doctrine and resented it, as the politician, if you do not watch him, will come some day and throw the savings of a century into a sea of imperial blood. Mr. Ludlow quotes a letter from Kingsley to Thomas Cooper, in which he says he "would shed the last drop of his blood for the social and political emancipation of the people." What! for the "smoke of the pit"? as he described the agitation for the Charter. What! "shed his blood" for a "Morrison pill measure"—shed the last drop of his blood" for a poor, bald, constitution-mongering cry as ever he heard"? I agree that this is extraordinary political enthusiasm. Still it was no proof that Kingsley was a Chartist, and that was my point. General Maurice's version of his father's saying that "his object was not to socialise society," shows that Maurice cared no more for Socialism (which at that time meant co-operative communism) than Kingsley cared for Chartism. Both meant well to the people in a theological—not a political way. The old grey-headed Chartist hissed the Queen's office, not herself. Republicans ever made that distinction.]
Besides Church Chartists and Positivist Chartists, there were Tory Chartists, of whom I add an account, and a list of those among them who were paid in the days of their hired activity. But the business of this chapter is with the Old Postillion, the founder of the real Chartists, who taught them and who knew them all.
Of course I mean Francis Place, who was always ready to mount and drive the coach of the leaders of the people. Though he took that modest and useful position, it was he who determined the route, made the map of the country, and fixed the destination of the journey. Joseph Parkes himself, known as "The People's Attorney-General," first addressed Place as the "Old Postillion."* James Watson, a working-class politician (whom Place could always trust), wrote of him at his death as the "English Franklin,"** a very good title, having regard to the strength of the common-sense characteristics of Place.
One advantage (there were not many) of my imprisonment which I have never ceased to value, was that it led to my acquaintance with Place. From him I learned many things of great use to me in after life. One thing he said to me was: "A man who is always running after his character seldom has a character worth the chase." Some far-seeing qualification was generally present in what he said. For a man who is "always" vindicating himself becomes tiresome and ineffectual. Yet now and then, sooner or later, and often better later then sooner, a personal explanation may be useful. Printed actionable imputations were made against Cobbett of which no notice was taken—so far as I knew—which created in many minds an ineffaceable personal prejudice against him.
Once imputations were published concerning me which justified contradiction. It came to pass that they were certified as true by a person of mark. Then I proposed to show that the allegations were untrue. Whereupon I was assured it would be to my disadvantage with many with whom I stood well, which meant that should I prove I was not a rascal I should lose many of my best friends, which shows the curious perplexities of personal explanation. Nevertheless, I made it.* Mr. Place told me that in the course of his career as defender of the people, "he had been charged with every crime known to the Newgate Calendar save wilful murder." A needless reservation, for that would have been believed. He let them pass, merely keeping a record of the accusations to see if their variety included any originality. There was one charge brought against him which to this day prejudices many against him. The one thought to be most overwhelming was that he was a "tailor" at Charing Cross. After that, argument against the principles he maintained was deemed superfluous; as though following a trade of utility disqualified a man's opinions on public affairs; while one who did nothing, and whose life and ideas were useless to mankind, might be listened to with deference.
In 1849 Chambers's Journal published an article on the "Reaction of Philanthropy," against which I made vehement objection in an article in the Spirit of the Age, of which Chambers's Journal took, for them, the unusual course of replying. The Spirit of the Age coming under Place's notice, he sent me the following letter, which I cite exactly as it was expressed, in his quaint, vigorous and candid way:—
"Brompton Square,
"March 3, 1849.
"Master Holyoake,—I have read your paper of observations on a paper written by Chambers, and dislike it very much. You assume an evil disposition in Chambers, and have laid yourself open to the same imputation. This dispute now consists of three of us, you and I and Chambers—all three of us, in vulgar parlance, being philanthropists. I have not read Chambers, but expect to find, from what you have said and quoted, that he, like yourself, has been led by his feelings, and not by his understanding, and has therefore written a mischievous paper. I will read this paper and decide for myself. Knowledge is not wisdom. The most conspicuous proof of this is the conduct of Lord Brougham. He knows many things, more, indeed, than most men, but is altogether incapable of combining all that relates to any one case, i.e., understanding it thoroughly, and he therefore never exhausts any subject, as a man of a more enlarged understanding would do. This, too, is your case. I think I may say that not any one of your reasonings is as perfect as it ought to be, and if I were in a condition to do so, I would make this quite plain to you by carrying out your defective notions—reasonings, if you like the term better.
"It will, I am sure, be admitted, at least as far as your thinking can go, that neither yourself, nor Chambers, nor myself, would intentionally write a word for the purpose of misleading, much less injuring the working people; yet your paper must, as far as it may be known to them, not only have that tendency, but a much worse one; that of depraving them, by teaching them, in their public capacity, to seek revenge, to an extent which, could it pervade the whole mass, must lead to slaughter among the human race—the beasts of prey called mankind; for such they have ever been since they have had existence, and such as they must remain for an indefinite time, if not for ever. Their ever being anything else is with me a forlorn hope, while yet, as I can do no better, I continue in my course of life to act as if I really had a strong hope of immense improvement for the good of all.—Yours, really and truly,
"Francis Place."
There was value in Mr. Place's friendship. He was able to measure the minds of those with whom he came in contact, and for those for whom he cared he would do the service of showing to them the limits within which they were working. It was thus he took trouble to be useful to those who could never requite him, by putting strong, wise thoughts before them.
Elsewhere* I have related how Place on one occasion—when all London was excited, and the Duke of Wellington indignant and repellant—went on a deputation to him, and was dismissed with the ominous words: