Part 44

But it was not only in its political position that England had developed with extraordinary rapidity after the American War. The whole condition of those industrial arts which give work to the lower orders was changed, and an enormous impulse given to the employment of industry. In spite of the constant complaints of those who were bent upon asserting the decline of the nation, the population had been gradually increasing ever since the Revolution of 1688; the rate of increase in the thirty years preceding 1780 was about 400,000 a year. This increase of population had already begun to call fresh land into cultivation; between 1760 and 1770 no less than a thousand enclosure Bills were passed. The improved processes of husbandry did even more than the mere extent of cultivable area to increase the productive power of agriculture. But this agricultural production could never have increased at the rate it did had it not been that the proportion between consumers and producers of food was rapidly being altered; for it was this period which changed England from an agricultural to a manufacturing country, and placed the weight of population, which had hitherto been greater in the South, entirely in the North. By successive steps all the great improvements in spinning and weaving were introduced; the discovery that iron could be worked as well with pit coal as with charcoal gave an immense impetus to the second great branch of industry; and the improvement in the steam engine, which enabled machinery to be worked irrespective of local peculiarities, spread the manufactures, which had hitherto nestled among the hills for the sake of obtaining water-power, into all parts of the coal-producing districts. This burst of industry of necessity produced great economic changes. The employment of labour in manufactories tended to increase the population rapidly. The increase of numbers, the growth of wealth among the manufacturers, called into activity more skill in agriculture, and demanded the occupation of more land. Land to which recourse is had under this pressure is naturally the worse land; it therefore requires more labour to produce its crop, and the most laboriously produced crop sets the value of the whole; the prices of the necessaries of life began rapidly to rise. Though the use of machinery made many things cheaper, and improved methods of husbandry prevented prices from rising as they would otherwise have done, as a general rule, while the price of luxuries decreased, the price of necessaries rose. Wages did not rise with a proportionate rapidity, and it was still a question whether, if the French war had not intervened, the relation between food and consumption, between prices and wages, would have been satisfactorily arranged. It was however evident that all these improvements, while they created great wealth for the middle and mercantile classes, by no means rendered the position of the mechanic and artisan easier, while, at the same time, higher and more intelligent employment, and the more sedentary life led by the mechanic, were well suited to foster habits of thought, and to make the half-educated man a shallow reasoner, ready to accept crude ideas as to the measures best fitted to produce improvement in the social position of himself and his class; and such ideas, emanating from France, had been for some time widely spread among the people.

[Sidenote: Active condition of England abroad and at home.]

Thus, while England had gradually resumed her commanding position abroad, and was ready with allies to join in any external movement, and while the growing wealth of the mercantile world was rendering it daily more certain that any such movement would be in a conservative direction, the people--increased in numbers and intelligence, but not bettered in their general condition--were becoming ready to lend a willing ear to any measures which promised to improve the political position of their class. And it was just at this time that the French Revolution broke out.

[Sidenote: Causes of the French Revolution.]

On the 5th of May 1789 the States-General of France was assembled for the first time since the year 1614. The causes of this momentous event, which produced nothing less than a complete change in the history of the world, were of ancient growth; the explosion had been slowly preparing ever since Louis XIV. had completed the mistaken policy of centralization, and had been able to say that the King and the State were one. The power and importance of the Crown had been secured at the cost of the destruction or degradation of all the conservative elements of society. The nobility, deprived of their local power, had been summoned to the capital to swell the splendour of the Court; without duties they still continued to enjoy privileges, while the administrative power was practically centred in the hands of the royal intendants; they were exempt from direct taxation, and known to their tenantry and dependants only by the feudal dues which they exacted, and by certain remnants of feudal services they could still claim. The judicial body, the "nobility of the robe," held their position, not by merit or by legal knowledge, but by purchase. The upper clergy were drawn to the Court like the nobles, and lived in splendour, while the village curé had hardly the means of livelihood. The people, oppressed by unjust taxation, excluded from all hope of bettering their condition, saw themselves deserted by their natural guardians and leaders, who seemed to enjoy wealth wrung from their toil, and honours earned by no merit of their own, but solely on the ground of birth. The misery of their position was aggravated by the constant recurrence of famines, and they saw with rage the corn trade so manipulated by men in the highest position as to all appearance to increase the scarcity. But an oppressed people will suffer long in silence unless the temper of the class above them be such as to favour the expression of their discontent. Such a temper had been called into existence among the thinking middle classes by the growth of scepticism and materialistic philosophy. Drawn originally from English sources, from the writings of the philosophers of the English Revolution, this form of thought had found its exponent in Voltaire, from the keen shafts of whose wit no abuse and no institution was secure. Montesquieu had pushed the same spirit of inquiry into political and constitutional questions, and Rousseau, more sentimental and spiritual in his views, had supplied a firmer but no less revolutionary basis to society than was afforded by the purely negative teaching of Voltaire. The literary power of these men make them the best known exponents of the spirit of the time, but the spirit itself was prevalent everywhere. Thus, while the institutions of the country were radically bad, they were exposed to the fiercest and most destructive criticism, and ideas of the possibility and rightfulness of a happier state of things were suggested to the public mind. The conduct of the Court and Government was not of a character to blunt the criticisms directed against them; the finances were in a state of hopeless disorder. The accession of Louis XVI. had for a moment raised hopes of a change of system; Turgot, an honest and able man of reforming views, was summoned to the ministry. But as his plan included of necessity retrenchment on the part of the Court and the taxation of the privileged classes, Court, nobles, and magistracy made common cause against him, and he found their opposition too strong for him. The same fate attended every effort at reform. Minister after minister was called to office, content either to follow the old course, which was inevitably leading to bankruptcy, or obliged to yield before the selfish opposition of the privileged classes. In turn, Clugny, Necker, and Calonne withdrew discomfited. At length, in 1787, the Cardinal Lomenie de Brienne accepted the difficult post. Like his predecessors, he soon found that there was no resource but the extension of taxation. This brought him into collision with the Parlement, the chief court of justice, whose members were drawn from among the privileged class. They contrived for a while to give their opposition the appearance of a popular movement against the power of the Crown; they even went so far as to declare that the right of extending taxation resided in the States-General alone. It was in vain that the King superseded the Parlement, and produced a new and by no means injudicious constitution; the mention of the States-General had seemed to open a new view to the people; nothing short of them would now be accepted. The new constitution fell hopelessly to the ground; the King found it necessary to recall Necker, the only minister who had enjoyed any popular confidence, and his triumphant return was speedily followed by the meeting of the States.

[Sidenote: Assembly of the States-General. May 5, 1789.]

[Sidenote: The King brought to Paris. Oct. 6.]

The assembling of the States-General, which was by many regarded with hope as the close of the difficulties of France, proved but the beginning of troubles. The unprivileged classes had at length obtained the means of expressing their wants, and would be satisfied with nothing short of complete revolution. Unfortunately, the King, a well-meaning man, with a real love for his people, was of a slow intellect, and easily guided by those around him. He fell into the hands of the princes and courtiers, and was induced to make common cause with the privileged classes, which were at first the real object of attack. When the Commons, or Tiers Etat, declared themselves the real representation of the nation, and changed the States-General into a National Assembly, he attempted to check them by a royal sitting, only to find his authority disregarded. The Commons assembled in the Tennis Court at Versailles (June 20), swore to perfect the constitution, and became the dominant power in the nation. An attempt to check their further advance by force of arms, the collection of troops around Paris, the removal of the popular minister Necker and the appointment of the Marshal de Broglie to the command of the army, drove Paris to insurrection. The thorough untrustworthiness of the army was proved; the Bastille fell (July 14); the National Guard sprang into existence; and a revolutionary Commune at the Hôtel de Ville governed the capital. The power of the sword passed into the hands of the people. Though the Assembly continued the work of the constitution, though, on the 4th of August, the aristocracy, in a moment of wild enthusiasm, surrendered all its old feudal rights, the mistrust of the Parisians, aggravated by the famine and the difficulty of subsistence, continued to increase. The Court imprudently gave colour to its mistrust, Lafayette, at the head of the National Guard, desired to get the management of the Revolution more entirely in his own hands. On the 6th of October a crowd of National Guards and starving women marched to Versailles and brought the King in triumph to Paris. He was followed by the National Assembly, which henceforward worked under the eyes of the Parisian Commune and people. The prestige of royalty disappeared, the King was in fact a prisoner in his own capital; the power had passed even from the National Assembly, and was centred in the people of Paris.

[Sidenote: Excitement produced in England.]

Such scenes, marked by acts of sanguinary vengeance on the part of the people, and showing the absolute powerlessness of the old system of Louis XIV., could not fail to excite the strongest interest in Europe. Nowhere was this more the case than in England. To some it appeared that our great enemy was perishing before our eyes of its own natural decay; while from another point of view, to lovers of liberty, there was a whole world of hope in the vigorous life exhibited by a people, downtrodden as the French lower orders were believed to be; to another party the hurried and irregular vehemence which had marked the changes in France seemed proof only of an anarchy shocking to all respect for form or antiquity, and sad evidence against the possibility of an orderly growth of reform. "The French have shown themselves," said Burke, "the ablest architects of ruin that have hitherto existed in the world. They have done their business for us as rivals in a way which twenty Ramillies or Blenheims could never have done." "How much is it the greatest event that ever happened in the world and how much the best," said Fox after the taking of the Bastille. While a third view, and this at first was Pitt's, rested complacently on the possible approximation of the Government of France to a constitutional monarchy similar to that of England.

[Sidenote: First reactionary movement.]

[Sidenote: Rejection of the Abolition of Tests and of the Reform Bill.]

[Sidenote: Burke's "Reflections on the French Revolution."]

The three years which elapsed between 1789 and the end of 1792 drew more distinctly the line which separated the two first of these opinions, and proved that the third was untenable. It was clear from the first which of them would ultimately gain the upper hand among the governing classes in England. Already, as early as March 1790, a proposition for the relief of Protestant Dissenters, and for the abolition of Test and Corporation Acts, which had been lost by only a small majority the preceding year, was thrown out by overwhelming numbers. A Bill for the reform of the representation, introduced by Flood, though Pitt had several times himself brought the subject forward, met with a similar fate; and shortly after the meeting of the new Parliament on November 25th, Burke issued what may be regarded as the manifesto of his party in his work entitled "Reflections on the French Revolution." It was called forth by signs of the sympathy which the French Revolution was meeting in England. Its more enthusiastic admirers had determined to reap what advantages they could from the present state of excitement, and two societies--the Constitutional Society, founded a few years before, and the Revolution Society, an old established body connected with the Dissenting interest, and intended to support the principle of the Revolution of 1688--had entered upon a course of renewed activity. On its anniversary, in November 1789, the Revolution Society had not only listened to an inflammatory and revolutionary discourse by Dr. Price, a Unitarian minister, but had also sent an address of sympathy, signed by Lord Stanhope, their President, to the National Assembly, by whom it had been rapturously received. It was upon this text chiefly that Burke wrote. His book had a wonderful success, 30,000 copies were speedily sold, and writers have been found bold enough to imply that the safety of Europe was owing to this work. In truth, Burke saw more clearly than those around him the inevitable course of the Revolution; he foresaw its excesses and its miserable end in a military despotism; he saw, too, that it must of necessity become proselytizing. Terrified by these dangers, and unable to conceive the excellence of any government unlike our own, which was at that time a highly aristocratic limited monarchy, he did not see the truths which the French Revolution embodied, and which, had they been wisely directed and not rudely assailed, would have allowed Europe to pass into the new and inevitable phase of progress for which it is still struggling, without the constant outbreaks of passion on one side or the other which have marked the last seventy years. This work drew forth many replies, the most important of which were Macintosh's "Vindiciæ Gallicæ" and Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man,"--the first a temperate and excellent work of the man who was afterwards to be one of the greatest philosophical statesmen in England, the other the rough but sensible production of a revolutionist by profession.

[Sidenote: The Canada Bill. 1791.]

[Sidenote: Breach between Fox and Burke. May 6, 1791.]

The sentiments which Burke had declared in his essay he soon took an opportunity of declaring in Parliament. The question before the House was a new constitution for Canada. This was called for by the extremely antagonistic character of the inhabitants of the two parts of the colony. The inhabitants of Lower Canada were French, and used to French habits, those of Upper Canada entirely English. The province was in future to be divided, and the constitution of the Upper Province assimilated as nearly as possible to the English model. Hereditary peerages even were to be established. The Bill, granting as it did a sort of self-government to the colony, was a wise one, but Fox opposed it, and took the opportunity of speaking in high praise of the new constitution of France. Some days afterwards, upon the same measure, Burke arose and proceeded to reply, inveighing strongly against the Revolution. His own side vociferously called him to order; he persisted in his speech, deploring that he should be obliged to break with his friends, but ready, as he said, to risk all, and with his last words to exclaim, "Fly from the French constitution." Fox whispered there was no loss of friends, but Burke rejoined, "I have done my duty at the price of my friend; our friendship is at an end." Fox rose afterwards, and with tears in his eyes repeated that he regarded Burke as his master and teacher in politics, but he could not withdraw what he had said in praise of the French constitution; and thus the friendship of years was severed, and Burke was ranked with the ministerialists.

[Sidenote: The Birmingham riots. July 1791.]

But it was not only in Parliament that the strong division of opinion caused by the Revolution was beginning to be evident. The conservative temper of the upper and middle classes was shown clearly in the riots at Birmingham. The friends of the Revolution had determined to have a public dinner to celebrate the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille. The dinner was chiefly planned by Dr. Priestley, a Unitarian minister, a man of much scientific repute. Hearing that his movement was unpopular, he attempted to postpone the dinner, from which he was himself absent; some eighty persons however met, and in the evening a fierce riot broke out against them; from Thursday till Sunday the riots continued, Dr. Priestley's house and library were destroyed, and much wanton mischief done. It was constantly reported, though never proved, that the magistrates of the district, far from trying to check the rioters, had been seen urging them on.

[Sidenote: Pitt's policy as yet unchanged.]

Up till this point Pitt had certainly shown no sign of yielding to the conservative feeling of the country. He had declared distinctly that he intended to pursue a policy of neutrality, to hold carefully aloof from any interference in the domestic affairs of France, and had even entirely neutralized the effect of the Convention of Pilnitz (Aug. 1791) by refusing to accede to the project of concerted action on the part of European powers which had there been broached. He even felt so certain of the continuance of peace, that his Budget, in the spring of the year 1792, was framed entirely upon a peace footing. He suggested the diminution of the number of sailors by 2000; he allowed the subsidiary treaty with Hesse to come to an end, and drew up a plan for the reduction of the interest of the Funds from 4 to 3½ or 3 per cent. He even continued his measures of improvement; he again supported, in a speech of unusual excellence, the immediate abolition of the slave trade, although without success; while, in conjunction with his great opponent, he carried through a Bill for a change in the libel law known as Fox's Libel Bill, which placed in the hands of juries the right of determining not only the fact of the publication of a libel, but the more important question whether the matter published was in its character libellous or not. The opposition offered to this Bill by Lord Chancellor Thurlow cost him his position; the Great Seal was put into commission. But the crisis had in fact arrived. The events which had taken place in France, and which continued to take place during the year 1792, and the corresponding excitement aroused in England, were gradually driving the minister to the persuasion that his peaceful policy of non-intervention was no longer tenable.

[Sidenote: Progress of the French Revolution.]

[Sidenote: The King's flight to Varennes. June 1791.]

[Sidenote: The Girondin ministry declares war. April 1792.]

[Sidenote: The King suspended. Aug. 10.]

[Sidenote: Massacres of September.]

[Sidenote: Declaration of the Republic. Sept. 21, 1792.]