The Political History of England – Vol XI

None of these new foundations could compare in respect of endowments with the old universities of Oxford and Cambridge, yet it was not altogether without reason that the founders of University College, London, hoped to give as good an education at a greatly reduced cost. It must be remembered that only a small fraction of the endowments of the old universities and their colleges was at this time applied to strictly educational purposes, and, until they should either be reformed or become more sensible of their opportunities, there was a fair field for an energetic rival.

The beginning of the nineteenth century witnessed a marvellous expansion of manufacturing industry, not so much caused by new discoveries as by the energetic application of those made at the end of the last century, by the growth of the factory-system, and, above all, by the monopoly of English-made goods during the great war. The innovation of machine-spinning and weaving by power-looms had an instant effect in stimulating and cheapening the production of cottons, but that of woollens, cramped by heavy duties on the raw material, languished for some time longer under traditional methods of handspinning. When stocking-frames and other forms of machinery penetrated at last into its strongholds in the West Riding of Yorkshire and in the midland counties, the demand for "hands" was inevitably reduced, and "frame-breaking" riots ensued, which lasted for several years. From this period dates the industrial revolution which gradually abolished domestic industries, separated mill-owners and mill-hands into almost hostile classes, undermined the system of apprenticeship, and brought about a large migration of manufactures from centres with abundant water-power to centres in close proximity to coal-fields.

PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE.

The progress of British agriculture during the period under review was almost as marked as that of British manufactures. Under the impulse of war prices, and of the improvements adopted at the end of the eighteenth century, the home-production of corn almost kept pace with the growing consumption, and between 1801 and 1815 little more than 500,000 quarters of imported corn were required annually to feed the population. No doubt, when the price of bread might rise to famine-point, the consumption of it fell to a minimum per head; still, the rural population continued to multiply, though not so rapidly as the urban population, and neither could have been maintained without a constant increase in the production of the soil. This result was due to a progressive extension of enclosure and drainage, as well as to wise innovations in the practice of agriculture. Not the least important of such innovations was the destruction of useless fences and straggling hedge-rows, the multitude and irregular outlines of which had long been a picturesque but wasteful feature of old-fashioned English farming. This was the age, too, in which many a small farm vanished by consolidation, and many an ancient pasture was recklessly broken up, some of which, though once more covered with green sward, have never recovered their original fertility. Happily, the use of crushed bones for manure was introduced in 1800, and the efforts of the national board of agriculture, aided by the discoveries of Sir Humphry Davy, brought about a far more general application of chemical science to agriculture, partly compensating for the exhaustion of the soil under successive wheat crops. Not less remarkable was the effect of mechanical science in the development of new agricultural implements, which, however, retained a comparatively rude form of construction. The Highland Society of Scotland took a leading part in encouraging these gradual experiments in tillage, as well as in the breeding of sheep and cattle, with a special regard to early maturity. Had the farmers of Great Britain during the great war possessed no more skill than their grandfathers, it would have been impossible for the soil of this island to have so nearly supported its inhabitants before the ports were freely thrown open.

The great triumphs of engineering in the fifteen years before the battle of Waterloo were mainly achieved in facilitating locomotion, and are specially associated with the name of Telford. It was he who, following in the footsteps of Brindley and Smeaton, constructed the Ellesmere and Caledonian Canals; he far eclipsed the fame of General Wade by opening out roads and bridges in the highlands, and first adopted sound principles of road-making both in England and Wales, afterwards to be applied with marvellous success by Macadam. It is some proof of the impulse given to land-travelling by such improvements that 1,355 public stage-coaches were assessed in 1812, and that a rate of speed little short of ten miles an hour was attained by the lighter vehicles. But Telford's labours were not confined to roads or bridges; they extended also to harbours and to canals, which continued to be the great arteries of heavy traffic until the development of railways. The new power destined to supersede both coaches and barges was first recognised practically when Bell's little steam vessel the Comet was navigated down the Clyde in 1812, to be followed not many years later by a steamship capable of crossing the Atlantic Ocean. In a few years steam packets were numerous, but it was not till well into the reign of Victoria that steam navigation was used in the royal navy.

RAILWAYS.

The most conspicuous improvement in the social and economic condition of the country between 1815 and 1837 is undoubtedly the invention of the steam locomotive engine. A few steam locomotives had been invented before the former date, but they had met with little success and were as yet more costly than horse traction. It was only in or about the year 1815 that George Stephenson, enginewright in Killingworth colliery, succeeded in inventing a locomotive engine which was cheaper than horse-power. The value of railways was by this time better understood. Short railways worked by horses were common in the neighbourhood of collieries, and a few existed elsewhere. In 1821 Edward Pease obtained parliamentary powers to construct a railway between Stockton and Darlington. A visit to Killingworth persuaded him to make use of steam-power. In 1823 an act authorising the use of steam on the proposed railway was carried, and in 1825 the railway was opened. In 1826 an act was passed for the construction of a railway between Liverpool and Manchester. Stephenson was employed as engineer to make the line, and his success as a road-making engineer proved equal to his brilliance as a mechanical inventor.

In 1829 the line was completed. The directors were at first strongly opposed to the use of steam-locomotion, but were induced by Stephenson, before finally rejecting the idea, to offer a reward of £500 for the best locomotive that could be made. Of four engines which were entered for the competition, Stephenson's Rocket was the only one that would move, and it proved able to travel at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour. The opening of the railway in 1830, and the fatal accident to Mr. Huskisson which attended it, have been noticed already. The accident did more to attract attention to the power of the locomotive than to discredit it. The opposition to railways was not, however, at an end. A proposal for a railway between London and Birmingham was carried through parliament, only after a struggle of some years' duration, but the construction of the line was at length authorised in 1833. The English railway system now developed with great rapidity, and by the end of the reign of William IV. lines had been authorised which would when complete form a system, joining London with Dover, Southampton, and Bristol, and both London and Bristol with Birmingham, whence lines were to run to the most important places in Yorkshire and Lancashire, and on to Darlington. Numerous small lines served other portions of the country, partly in connexion with these, but more often independently.

Among the more conspicuous metropolitan improvements of this age may be mentioned the introduction of gas and the incipient construction of new bridges over the Thames, in which the engineer Rennie took a leading part. Before the end of the eighteenth century the workshops of Boulton and Watt had been lit by gas, and Soho was illuminated by it to celebrate the peace of Amiens. By 1807 it was used in Golden Lane, and by 1809, if not earlier, it had reached Pall Mall, but it scarcely became general in London until somewhat later. At the beginning of the century the metropolis possessed but three bridges, old London bridge and the old bridges at Blackfriars and Westminster. The first stone of the Strand Bridge (afterwards to be called Waterloo Bridge) was laid on October 11, 1811, and Southwark Bridge was commenced in 1814, but these bridges were not completed till 1817 and 1819 respectively. The existing London Bridge, designed by Rennie, but built after his death, was completed in 1831. In 1812, the architect Nash was employed in laying out the Regent's Park, and in 1813 an act was passed for the construction of Regent Street, as a grand line of communication between it and Carlton House, the residence of the regent.

The work of geographical discovery had been well commenced before the end of the eighteenth century, and was inevitably checked during the great war. The wonderful voyages of Cook had revealed Australia and New Zealand; Flinders had carried on the survey of the Australian coast; Vancouver had explored the great island which bears his name with the adjacent shores; Rennell had produced his great map of India; Bruce had published his celebrated travels in Abyssinia; and an association had been formed to dispel the darkness that hung over the whole interior of Africa. Among its first emissaries was Mungo Park, who afterwards was employed by the British government, and died in the course of his second expedition in 1805-6. The idea of Arctic discovery was revived early in the nineteenth century, and was no longer confined to commercial aims, such as the opening of a north-east or north-west passage, but was rather directed to scientific objects, not without the hope of reaching the North Pole itself. Meanwhile, the ordnance survey of Great Britain itself was in full progress, and that of British India was commenced in 1802, while the hydrographical department of the admiralty, established in 1795, was organising the system of marine-surveying which has since yielded such valuable fruits.

The progress of philanthropy, based on religious sentiment was very marked during the later years of the war. The institution of Sunday schools between 1780 and 1790 had awakened a new sense of duty towards children in the community, and the growing use of child-labour, keeping pace with the constant increase of machinery, forced upon the public the necessity of legislative restrictions, which have been noticed in an earlier chapter. Banks of savings, the forerunners of savings banks under parliamentary regulation, had been suggested by Jeremy Bentham, and one at least was instituted in 1802. The idea of penitentiaries, for the reformation as well as for the punishment of criminals, had originated with the great philanthropist, John Howard. It was adopted and popularised by Jeremy Bentham, and might have been further developed but for the introduction of transportation, which promised the well-conducted convict the prospect of a new life in a new country. Meanwhile, prison reform became a favourite study of benevolent theorists in an age when the criminal law was still a relic of barbarism, when highway robbery was rife in the neighbourhood of London, when sanitation was hardly in its infancy, when pauperism was fostered by the poor law, and when the working classes in towns were huddled together, without legal check or moral scruple, in undrained courts and underground cellars. So capricious and shortsighted is the public conscience in its treatment of social evils.

CANADA.

At the opening of the nineteenth century the colonial empire of Great Britain was in a transitional state. The secession of thirteen American colonies had not only robbed the mother country of its proudest inheritance, but had also shattered the old colonial system of commercial monopoly for the supposed benefit of British interests. Its immediate effect was to annul the navigation act as affecting American trade, which became free to all the world, and by which Great Britain itself profited largely. Canada at once gained a new importance, and a new sense of nationality, which Pitt recognised by dividing it into two provinces, and giving each a considerable measure of independence, both political and commercial. It was troubled by the presence of a conquered race of white colonists side by side with new colonists of English blood, who were, however, united in their resistance to the revolted colonies in the war of 1812-14. After the war a steady stream of immigration poured into Canada. In 1816 the population was estimated at 450,000; between 1819 and 1829 Canada received 126,000 immigrants from England, and during the next ten years 320,000. The result was that the French element ceased to be preponderant, except in Lower Canada. The French Canadians felt that they did not enjoy their share of the confidence of government; the home government, ready enough to grant any favour that home opinion would permit, was trammelled by a public opinion, which suspected all who were of a French origin of a desire to restore the supremacy of the Roman Catholic religion and to assert political independence. A vacillating policy was the result, which only increased suspicions, and led in the first year of the reign of Victoria to a civil war.

In the Mauritius and the West Indies the one event of importance in this period is the abolition of slavery. It was found impossible to obtain from free negroes as much work as had been obtained from slaves, and their place had to be supplied by Indian coolies in the Mauritius, and by Chinese in Jamaica. At the same time the West Indies had begun to suffer from the competition of the United States.

The colony of the Cape of Good Hope was still peopled almost entirely by blacks or by the descendants of Dutch settlers, known as boers, or peasants. Four thousand British colonists went out in 1820 to Algoa Bay, but these were a mere handful compared with the Dutch. Unfortunately the government adopted a line of policy which produced great irritation in the Dutch population. They were granted no self-government, and in 1826 English judicial forms were introduced, and English was declared the sole official language. The reform administration made matters worse by defending the blacks against the boers. In 1834 it set free the slaves, offering £1,200,000, payable in London, very little of which ever reached the boers, as compensation for slaves valued at £3,000,000. A Kaffir war in 1834 had led to the conquest of Kaffraria, but in 1835 the home government restored the independence of the Kaffirs, and appointed a lieutenant-governor to defend their rights. After this the boers considered their position intolerable, and in 1835 began their first "trek" into the country now known as Natal.

AUSTRALIA.

Meanwhile, the great discoveries of Captain Cook, and the first settlement of New South Wales, brought within view a possible extension of our colonial dominion, which might go far to compensate for its losses on the North American continent. Governor Phillip had been sent out by Pitt to Botany Bay in 1787-88, but it was many years before the earliest of Australian colonies outgrew the character of a penal refuge for English convicts. The first convict establishments were at Sydney and Norfolk Island, but another settlement was founded on Van Diemen's Land in 1805, and in 1807, after this island had been circumnavigated by Flinders and Bass, it became the headquarters of that convict system, whose horrors are not yet forgotten. Between 1810 and 1822 the resources of New South Wales were vastly developed by the energetic policy of Governor Macquarie. While his efforts to utilise convict labour, and to educate convicts into free men, may have retarded the influx of genuine colonists, he prepared the way for settlement by constructing roads, promoting exploration, and raising public buildings, so that when he returned home the population of New South Wales had increased fourfold, and its settled territory in a much greater proportion. This territory comprised all English settlements on the east coast, and included large tracts of what is now known as Queensland, which did not become a separate colony until 1859.

The early history of Australia, it has been said, is chiefly a tale of convict settlements, bush-ranging, and expeditions of discovery. There is much truth in this saying, but the real basis of Australian prosperity was the introduction of sheep-farming on a large scale, after the merino-breed had been imported and acclimatised by Macarthur at the beginning of the century. Long before the region stretching northward from the later Port Phillip grew into the colony of Victoria, sheep-owners were spreading over the vast pastures of the interior, though many years elapsed before the explorer Sturt opened out the great provinces further westward.

The development of Australia made rapid progress during the generation following the great war. Though Australia itself and Van Diemen's Land, now called Tasmania, were still in the main convict settlements, free settlers had been arriving at Sydney for some time, and in 1817 they began to arrive in moderate numbers in Van Diemen's Land. In 1825 that island had sufficiently progressed to be recognised as a separate colony. The attempt to found a colony in western Australia in 1829 was, on the other hand, an almost complete failure. But in 1824 a new centre of colonisation in New South Wales had been established at Port Phillip. Meanwhile a sharp cleavage of parties had arisen. The convicts and poorer colonists were opposed to the large sheep-owners, who were endeavouring to form an aristocracy. Governor Macquarie favoured the convicts, and Governor Darling (1825-31) the sheep-owners. In 1823 a legislative council, consisting of seven officials, had been instituted; in 1828 it was developed into one of fifteen members, chosen entirely from among the wealthiest colonists.

Gibbon Wakefield's Letter from Sydney, published in 1829, marks an epoch in the history of Australian colonisation. In this work he proposed that the land should be sold in small lots at a fairly high price to settlers, and that the proceeds of the sales should be used to pay the passage of emigrants going out as labourers. This idea had hardly been published when it was adopted by the home government, and five shillings an acre was fixed as the minimum price of land. The number of emigrants increased rapidly, but the new system threatened ruin to the owners of sheep-runs. Unable to pay the stipulated price, they only moved further into the interior and occupied fresh land without seeking government permission, an unlicensed occupation which has left its mark upon the language in the word "squatter". At last in 1837 a compromise was arranged, by which the squatters were to pay a small rent for their runs, the crown retaining the freehold with the right to sell it to others at some future date. In 1834 the British government sanctioned the formation of a new colony, that of South Australia. It was to be settled from the outset on the Wakefield system, and no convicts were ever sent to it. The first lots were sold as high as twelve shillings an acre, and in 1836 a company of emigrants went out and founded Adelaide.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX I.

ON AUTHORITIES. 141

(1) General histories of England for the period 1801-1837: Massey, History of England during the Reign of George the Third (4 vols., 2nd ed., 1865), closes with the treaty of Amiens in 1802, and therefore barely touches this period. There is still room for a general history of England on an adequate scale between 1802 and 1815. After that date we have Harriet Martineau, History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace (1816-1846, 2 vols., 1849, 1850). This was begun by Charles Knight, the publisher, who brought it down to 1819. From 1820 onwards it is Miss Martineau's own work. It is too nearly contemporary to depend on any authorities except such as were published at the time, and it represents in the main the popular view of public events and public men held by liberals at the time. Sir Spencer Walpole's History of England from the Conclusion of the Great War in 1815 (6 vols., revised ed., 1890), a work of high quality and thoroughly trustworthy, full of references to the best published authorities, sympathises with the whigs and more liberal tories. Reference is sometimes made in this volume to Goldwin Smith, The United Kingdom, a Political History (2 vols., 1899), but the work is too slight to be regarded as an authority. Sir T. E. May's (Lord Farnborough) Constitutional History of England from 1760 to 1860 (3 vols., 10th ed., 1891) is also useful.

(2) The Annual Register is probably the most useful authority for this period. In addition to more general information, it contains a very full report of the more important parliamentary debates and the text of the principal public treaties and of numerous other state papers. The narrative is not often coloured by the political partisanship of the writer, but allowance must be made for the strong tory bias of the volumes dealing with the reign of William IV. The Parliamentary History closes in 1803, at which date Cobbett's Parliamentary Debates had begun to appear. After 1812 Cobbett ceased to superintend the work and his name was dropped, and in 1813 and afterwards the title-page acknowledged that the work was "published under the superintendence of T. C. Hansard," who had also been the publisher of Cobbett's series and of the Parliamentary History.

MEMOIRS AND CORRESPONDENCE.

(3) Political and other memoirs and printed correspondence. The following have been noticed among the authorities for volume x.: Pellew, Life and Correspondence of H. Addington, Viscount Sidmouth (3 vols., 1847), very full wherever Sidmouth was directly concerned, written with a strong bias in favour of the subject of the biography. Lord Stanhope, Life of Pitt (4 vols., 3rd ed., 1867). The appendix to the last volume contains Pitt's correspondence with the king in the years 1804-1806. Lord Rosebery, Pitt (Twelve English Statesmen Series, 1891), brilliant but not always sound. Lord John (Earl) Russell, Memorials and Correspondence of C. J. Fox (4 vols., 1853-1854), and Life and Times of C. J. Fox, 1859-1866. Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George III. (4 vols., 1853-1855; 1801 falls in vol. iii.), continued in Memoirs of the Court of England during the Regency (2 vols., 1856), Memoirs of the Court of George IV. (2 vols., 1859), and Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of William IV. and Victoria (2 vols., 1861; 1837 is reached in vol. i.); these volumes, edited by the Duke of Buckingham, contain the correspondence of the Grenville family. The first series alone, which contains many important letters of Lord Grenville, is of first-rate importance. The editing is often inaccurate. Diaries and Correspondence of the First Earl of Malmesbury (4 vols., 1844), edited by the third earl (vol. iv. extends from February, 1801, to July, 1809), authoritative and useful, especially for the crisis of 1807. Correspondence of Marquis Cornwallis (3 vols., 1859), edited by C. Ross, valuable for the negotiations at Amiens and for Cornwallis's brief second governor-generalship of India. The notes are full of useful biographical material concerning the persons mentioned in the correspondence. Diaries and Correspondence of George Rose (2 vols., 1860), edited by L. V. Harcourt. The Diary and Correspondence of Charles Abbot, Lord Colchester, edited by his son (3 vols., 1861, extending from 1795 to 1829), with interesting notices of Perceval, and generally useful from 1802-1817, when Abbot was Speaker. Lord Holland, Memoirs of the Whig Party (2 vols., 1852), edited by his son, Lord Holland. These memoirs do not extend beyond the year 1807. Volume ii., which covers the period during which Holland was a member of the Grenville cabinet, is of special importance. His memory is not always accurate, and he writes with a whig bias which makes him a harsh judge of George III. Holland's Further Memoirs of the Whig Party, 1807-1821, edited by Lord Stavordale, the present Lord Ilchester (1905), interesting, and, like the earlier volumes, full of personal detail, but of less value, since Holland was not in office again till 1830.