The Political History of England – Vol XI

ALTHORP'S THIRD BUDGET.

Of all the ministers, no one enjoyed a greater share of confidence both in and out of parliament than Althorp. He was not a great financier, but he was an honest and prudent chancellor of the exchequer, a free-trader by conviction, and incapable of those artifices by which a plausible balance-sheet may be made out at the cost of future liabilities. Yet his budgets of 1831, 1832, and 1833 undoubtedly helped to shake the credit of the government. The first had been far too ambitious, and became almost futile, when the proposed tax on transfers was abandoned, and the timber duties left undisturbed. The second was modest enough, and was saved from damaging criticism by the absorbing interest of the reform bill. Considerable reductions were made in the estimates, the revenue yielded somewhat more than had been expected, and Althorp was enabled to present a favourable account in 1833. He anticipated a surplus of about a million and a half, out of which he was prepared to abolish certain vexatious duties and to decrease others. But the country gentlemen, headed by Ingilby, member for Lincolnshire, insisted on a reduction of the malt duty by one-half, while the borough members, headed by Sir John Key, clamoured for a repeal of the house tax and window tax. The former motion was actually carried against the government by a small majority, but its effect was annulled, and the latter motion was defeated, by a skilful manœuvre. This consisted in the proposal by Althorp of a counter-resolution, declaring that, if half of the malt tax and the whole tax on windows and houses were to be taken off, it would be necessary to meet the deficiency by a general income tax. Such a prospect was equally alarming to the landed interest and the householders, whose rival demands were mutually destructive, the result being that Althorp's amendment was carried by a large majority, and the government escaped humiliation, though not without some loss of prestige.

It was perhaps to be expected that private members in the first session of the reformed parliament should be eager to gain a hearing for their special projects of improvement. So it was, but two only of these projects deserved historical mention. One of these was the abortive attempt of Attwood, the radical member for Birmingham, to reverse the policy of 1819 by inducing parliament to initiate the return to a paper currency. Cobbett actually followed up this failure by moving for an address praying the king to dismiss Sir Robert Peel from his councils, a motion defeated by a majority of 295 to 4.

CHAPTER XVI.

RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS AND POOR LAW REFORM

The year 1833, so fruitful in legislation, may be said to have witnessed the birth of a religious movement which has profoundly affected the character of the national Church. The neo-catholic revival, which afterwards took its popular name from Pusey but drew its chief inspiration from Newman, was in a great degree the outcome of the reform act and a reaction against the more than Erastian tendencies of the reformed parliament. In the early part of the century, as we have seen, personal and practical religion was mainly represented by the evangelical or low Church party, which did admirable service in the cause of philanthropy, as well as in reclaiming the masses from heathenism. The high Church party was comparatively inactive, but co-operated with its rival in opposition to catholic emancipation. The clergy, as a body, were hostile to reform, and the bishops incurred the fiercest obloquy by voting against the first reform bill, which had unfortunately been rejected by a majority exactly corresponding with the number of their votes.117 The democratic outcry against the Church became louder and louder, as the evils of nepotism, pluralism, and sinecurism were exposed to public criticism, and a growing disposition was shown to deal with Church endowments both in England and in Ireland, if not as the property of the state, yet as under its paramount control.

THE TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT.

The recent infusion of Irish Roman catholics into the house of commons, following that of Scotch presbyterians a century earlier, rendered it less and less fit, in the opinion of high Churchmen, to legislate for the Church of England, and every concession to religious liberty shocked them as a step towards "National Apostasy". This was, in fact, the impressive title of a sermon preached by John Keble, in July, 1833, before the university of Oxford. From this sermon Newman himself dated the origin of the Oxford or "Tractarian" movement, but its inward source lay deeper. Having lost all confidence in the state and even in the Anglican hierarchy as a creature of the state, a section of the clergy had already been looking about for another basis of authority, and had found it in theories of apostolical succession and Church organisation. The university of Oxford was a natural centre for such a reaction, and it was set on foot with the deliberate purpose of defending the Church and the Christianity of England against the anti-catholic aggressions of the dominant liberalism. It was not puritanism but liberal secularism which Newman always denounced as the arch-enemy of the catholic faith. For, as Wesley's sympathies were originally with high Church doctrines, so Newman's sympathies were originally with evangelical doctrines, nor were they ever entirely stifled by his ultimate secession to the Roman Church.

The later development of this movement, which had its cradle in the common room of Oriel College, belongs rather to ecclesiastical history, and to the reign of Queen Victoria. But from the first it rallied a considerable body of support. Many who were not influenced by the movement, shared its earlier aspirations. Shortly after the formation of an association, under Newman and Keble's auspices, seven or eight thousand of the clergy signed an address to the Archbishop of Canterbury, insisting upon the necessity of restoring Church discipline, maintaining Church principles, and checking the progress of latitudinarianism. A large section of the laity ranged themselves on the side of the revival, and meetings were held throughout England. The king himself volunteered a declaration of his strong affection for the national Church now militant, and prepared to assert itself, not merely as a true branch of the catholic Church, but as a co-ordinate power with the state. In the autumn of 1833, Newman and one of his colleagues launched the first of that series of tracts from which his followers derived the familiar name of Tractarians. From that day he was their recognised leader, yet he claimed no allegiance and issued no commands. He felt himself, not the creator of a new party, but a loyal son of the old Church, at last awakened from her lethargy. The spell which he exercised over so many young minds was due to a personal influence of which he was almost unconscious, but which spread from the pulpit of St. Mary's Church and his college rooms at Oriel over a great part of the university and the Church. It was broken some years later, when he gave up the via media which he had so long been advocating, accepted the logical consequences of his own teaching, and reproached others for not discovering that Anglicanism was but a pale and deformed counterfeit of the primitive Christianity represented, in its purity, by the Church of Rome.

Looking back at this movement across an interval of seventy years, we may well feel astonished that it satisfied the aspirations of inquisitive minds in contact with the ideas of their own times. For this was the age of Benthamism in social philosophy and "German neology" in biblical criticism. Though national education was in its infancy, a new desire for knowledge, and even a free-thinking spirit, was permeating the middle classes, and had gained a hold among the more intelligent of the artisans. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, established by Brougham, circulated a mass of instructive and stimulating literature at a cheap rate; popular magazines and cyclopædias were multiplying yearly; and the British Association, which held its first meeting at Oxford in 1832, brought the results of natural science within the reach of thousands and tens of thousands incapable of scientific research. The Bridgwater Treatises, which belong to the reign of William IV., are evidence of a widespread anxiety to reconcile the claims and conclusions of science with those of the received theology. Thoughtful and religious laymen in the higher ranks of society were earnestly seeking a reason for the faith that was in them, and pondering over fundamental problems like the personality of God, the divinity of Christ, the reality of supernatural agency, and the awful mystery of the future life. Yet the tractarians passed lightly over all these problems, to exercise themselves and others with disputations on points which to most laymen of their time appeared comparatively trivial.

THE CATHOLIC APOSTOLIC CHURCH.

To them Church authority was supreme, and every catholic dogma a self-evident truth. What engrossed their reason and consciences was the discussion of questions affecting Church authority, for example, whether the Anglican Church possessed the true note of catholicity or was in a state of schism, whether its position in Christendom was not on a par with that of the monophysite heretics, whether its articles could be brought into conformity with the Roman catholic doctrines expressly condemned by them, or whether its alliance with Lutheranism in the appointment of a bishop for Jerusalem did not amount to ecclesiastical suicide. Their message, unlike that of the early Christian or methodist preachers, was for the priestly order, and not for the masses of the people; their appeals were addressed ad clerum not ad populum; still less were they suited to influence scientific intellects. But their propaganda was carried on by men of intense earnestness and holy lives, few in number but strong in well-organised combination, and they carried with them for a time many to whom any "movement" seemed better than lifeless "high and dry" conformity. Herein consisted the secret of their early success. Their subsequent failure was inevitable when they were fairly confronted with protestant sentiment and with the independent spirit of the age. How their aims were taken up and partially realised in a new form by new leaders and through new methods, is an inquiry which must be reserved for a later chapter in the history of the English Church.

The strange religious movement which resulted in the foundation of the so-called Catholic Apostolic Church was of somewhat earlier date, and its author had already been disavowed as a minister by the presbyterian Church before the Tracts for the Times began to startle the religious world. The most brilliant part of Edward Irving's career falls within the reign of George IV., when his chapel in London was crowded by the fashionable world, and even attended occasionally by statesmen like Canning. According to all contemporary testimony he was among the most remarkable of modern preachers, and his visionary speculations in the field of biblical prophecy failed to repel hearers attracted by his wonderful religious enthusiasm. Compared with the adherents of the methodist or of the neo-catholic revival, his followers were a mere handful, and his name would scarcely merit a place in history but for the impression which he made upon men of high ability and position. What brought him into discredit with his own communion and with the public was his introduction into his services of fanatics professing the gift of speaking with "unknown tongues". These extravagances led to his deposition in 1832, and probably hastened his early death in 1834. But his creed did not die with him, and a small body of earnest believers has carried on into the twentieth century a definite tradition of the gospel which he taught.

Far deeper and more lasting in its effects was the change wrought in current ideas by the almost unseen but steady advance of science in all its branches. During this epoch perhaps the most formidable enemy of orthodoxy was the rising study of geology, challenging, as it did, the traditional theories of creation. The discoveries of astronomy – the law of gravitation, the rotation of the earth, its place in the solar system, and, above all, the infinite compass of the universe – were in themselves of a nature to revolutionise theological beliefs more radically than any conclusions respecting the antiquity of the earth. But it may be doubted whether it was so in fact; at all events, theologians had slowly learned to harmonise their doctrines with the conception of immeasurable space, when they were suddenly required to admit the conception of immeasurable time, and staggered under the blow. The pioneers of English geology were careful to avoid shocking religious opinion, and Buckland devotes a chapter of his famous Treatise on Geology to showing "the consistency of geological discoveries with sacred history". His explanation is that an undefined interval may have elapsed after the creation of the heaven and the earth "in the beginning" as recorded in the first verse of Genesis; and he rejects as opposed to geological evidence "the derivation of existing systems of organic life, by an eternal succession, from preceding individuals of the same species, or by gradual transmutation of one species into another". But speculations of this order were utterly ignored by such religious leaders as Newman and Irving, whose spiritual fervour, however apostolical in its influence on the hearts of their disciples, was confined within the narrowest circle of intellectual interests.

POOR LAW.

The great event of parliamentary history in 1834, and the crowning achievement of the first reformed parliament, was the enactment of the "new poor law," as it was long called. No measure of modern times so well represents the triumph of reason over prejudice; none has been so carefully based on thorough inquiry and the deliberate acceptance of sound principles; none has so fully stood the conclusive test of experience. It is not too much to say that it was essentially a product of the reform period, and could scarcely have been carried either many years earlier or many years later. In the dark age which followed the great war, contempt for political economy, coupled with a weak sentiment of humanity, would have made it impossible for a far-sighted treatment of national pauperism and distress to obtain a fair hearing. After the introduction of household suffrage, and the growth of socialism, any resolute attempt to diminish the charge upon ratepayers for the immediate relief but ultimate degradation of the struggling masses would have met with the most desperate resistance from the new democracy. The philosophical whigs and radicals, trained in the school of Bentham, and untainted as yet by a false philanthropy, found themselves in possession of an opportunity which might never have recurred. They deserved the gratitude of posterity by using it wisely and courageously.

The irregular development of the poor laws, from the act of Elizabeth down to that of 1834, belongs to economic rather than to general history. It is enough to say here that in later years, and especially since the system of allowances adopted by the Berkshire magistrates at Speenhamland in 1795 had become general, the original policy of relieving only the destitute and helpless, and compelling able-bodied men to earn their own living, had been entirely obscured by the intrusion of other ideas. The result was admirably described in the report of a commission, appointed in 1832, with the most comprehensive powers of investigation and recommendation. The commissioners were the Bishops of London (Blomfield) and Chester (Sumner), Sturges Bourne, Edwin Chadwick, and four others less known, but well versed in the questions to be considered. A summary of the information collected by them, ranging over the whole field of poor-law management, was published in February, 1834. It astounded the benighted public of that day, and it still remains on record as a wonderful revelation of ruinous official infatuation on the largest possible scale. The evil system was found to be almost universal, but the worst examples of it were furnished by the southern counties of England. There, an actual premium was set upon improvidence, if not on vice, by the wholesale practice of giving out-door relief in aid of wages, and in proportion to the number of children in the family, legitimate or illegitimate. The excuse was that it was better to eke out scanty earnings by doles than to break up households, and bring all their inmates into the workhouse. The inevitable effect of such action was that wages fell as doles increased, that paupers so pensioned were preferred by the farmers to independent labourers because their labour was cheaper, and that independent labourers, failing to get work except at wages forced down to a minimum, were constantly falling into the ranks of pauperism.

Had some theorists of a later generation witnessed the social order then prevailing in country districts, they would have found several of their favourite objects practically attained. There was no competition between the working people; old and young, skilled and unskilled hands, the industrious and the idle, were held worthy of equal reward, the actual allowance to each being measured by his need and not by the value of his work; while the parochial authorities, figuring as an earthly providence, exercised a benevolent superintendence over the welfare and liberty of every day-labourer in the village community. The fruits of that superintendence were the decline of a race of freemen into a race of slaves, unconscious of their slavery, and the gradual ruin of the landlords and farmers upon whom the maintenance of these slaves depended.118

NEW POOR LAW.

The evidence laid before the commissioners not only showed how intolerable the evil had become in many counties, but also how purely artificial it was. While the aggregate amount of the poor rate had risen to more than eight millions and a half, while some parishes were going out of cultivation and in others the rates exceeded the rental, there were certain oases in the desert of agricultural distress where comparative prosperity still reigned. These were villages in which an enlightened squire or parson had set himself to strike at the root of pauperism, and to initiate local reforms in the poor-law system. It was clearly found that, where out-door relief was abolished or rigorously limited, where no allowances were made in aid of wages, and where a manly self-reliance was encouraged instead of a servile mendicity, wages rose, honest industry revived, and the whole character of the village population was improved. Fortified by these successful experiments, the commissioners took a firm stand on the vital distinction, previously ignored, between poverty and pauperism. They did not shrink from recommending that, after a certain date, "the workhouse test" should be enforced against all able-bodied applicants for relief, except in the form of medical attendance, and even that women should be compelled to support their illegitimate children. They also advised a liberal change in the complicated and oppressive system of "parish settlement," whereby the free circulation of labour was constricted. They further proposed a very large reform in the administrative machinery of the poor laws, by the formation of parishes into unions, the concentration of workhouses, the separation of the sexes in workhouses, and, above all, the creation of a central poor-law board, to consist of three commissioners, and to control the whole system about to be transformed.

A bill framed upon these lines, and remedying some minor abuses, was introduced by Althorp on April 17, having been foreshadowed in the speech from the throne, and carefully matured by the cabinet. So wide and deep was the conviction of the necessity for some radical treatment of an intolerable evil that party spirit was quelled for a while, and the bill met with a very favourable reception, especially as its operation was limited to five years. It passed the second reading by a majority of 299 to 20 on May 9, notwithstanding a violent protest from De Lacy Evans, an ultra-radical, who had displaced Hobhouse at Westminster. The keynote of the radical agitation which followed was given by his declaration that "the cessation of out-door relief would lead to a revolution in the country," and by Cobbett's denunciation of the "poor man robbery bill". The Times newspaper, already a great political force, took up the same cry, and had not Peel, with admirable public spirit, thrown his weight into the scale of sound economy, a formidable coalition between extremists on both sides might have been organised. He stood firm, however; radicals like Grote declined to barter principle for popularity, and the bill emerged almost unscathed from committee in the house of commons. It passed its third reading on July 2 by a majority of 157 to 50. Peel's example was followed by Wellington in the house of lords, and Brougham delivered one of his most powerful speeches in support of the measure. With some modification of the bastardy clauses and other slighter amendments it was carried by a large majority, and received the royal assent on August 4.

No other piece of legislation, except the repeal of the corn laws, has done so much to rescue the working classes of Great Britain from the misery entailed by twenty years of war. Its effect in reducing the rates was immediate; its effect in raising the character of the agricultural poor was not very long deferred. Happily for them, though not for the farmers, bread was cheap for two years after it came into force. Still, the sudden cessation of doles and pensions in aid of wages could not but work great hardship to individuals in thousands of rural parishes, and there was perhaps too little disposition on the part of the commissioners to allow any temporary relaxation of the system. The rigorous enforcement of the workhouse test, and the harsh management of workhouses, continued for years to shock the charitable sensibilities of the public, and actually produced some local riots. When the price of bread rose the clamour naturally increased, and petitions multiplied until a committee was appointed in 1837 to review the operation of the act. In the end the committee found, as might have been expected, that, however painful the state of transition, the change had permanently improved the condition of the poor in England.

QUESTION OF APPROPRIATION.

While the bill was still in the house of commons the ministry which framed it was torn by dissensions; before it came on for its second reading in the lords Grey had ceased to be premier. The disruption of his government had been foreseen for months, but it was directly caused by hopeless discord on Irish policy. Anglesey had been forced by ill-health to resign the vice-royalty, and the Marquis Wellesley, who succeeded him, was more acceptable to Irish nationalists. But the king's speech at the opening of the session contained a stern condemnation of the repeal movement. O'Connell at once declared war, and the angry feelings of his followers were inflamed by a personal and public quarrel between Althorp and Sheil. Another incident, in itself trivial, disclosed the discord prevailing in the cabinet on Irish affairs, and, though O'Connell was defeated on a motion against the union by a crushing majority of 523 to 38, the disturbed state of Ireland continued to distract the ministerial councils. The ingenious devices of Stanley and Littleton for solving the insoluble Irish tithe question had proved almost abortive; the government officials employed to collect tithe were almost as powerless to do so as the old tithe-proctors, and a new proposal to convert tithe into a land tax was naturally ridiculed by O'Connell as delusive. He made a speech so conciliatory in its tone as to startle the house, but no words, however smooth, could now conjure away the irreconcilable difference of purpose between those who regarded Church property as sacred and those who regarded it not only as at the disposal of the state, but as hitherto unjustly monopolised by a single religious communion. It was reserved for Lord John Russell to "upset the coach" by openly declaring his adhesion to "appropriation," in the sense of diverting to other objects, secular or otherwise, such revenues of the established Church as were not strictly required for the benefit of its own members. After this act of mutiny against the collective authority of the cabinet Grey's ministry was doomed.