To us, reflecting on the causes to which this extraordinary and unprecedented conduct on the part of government is to be imputed, it appears that it can only be accounted for from two causes, to the combined operation of which the present distressed condition and recent danger of the British empire are entirely to be ascribed.
The first of these is the fatal and still undiminished influence of the political economists in the legislature. So great and disastrous has it been, that we do not hesitate to say, that we regard that sect as the worst enemies the empire ever had. What has made them so disastrous to the best interests of their country is, that they have introduced the custom of looking upon the science of government, not as a matter to be based upon experience, modified by its lessons, but as consisting of theories to be determined entirely by general reasonings, and considered to depend solely on the conclusions of philosophers, in works of abstract thought. They have thus come to disregard altogether the sufferings of nations or classes of society under their systems, and to adhere to them obstinately in the midst of general ruin and lamentation, as Dr Sangrado did to his bleedings and hot-water cure, though they had occasioned more funerals than the siege of Troy? They look upon a nation as the surgeon does upon a patient who is held down on the marble table to undergo an operations. This was just the case with Turgot – one of the first and most eminent of the economists, and who began the French Revolution by introducing their doctrines into French legislation. "He regarded," says Senac de Meilhan, "the body corporate not as a living and sentient, but as a lifeless and insensible substance, and operated upon it with as little hesitation as an anatomist does on a dead body." Beyond all doubt it was the suffering produced by the contraction of the currency from 1826 to 1830 that brought about the storm of discontent which issued in the Reform Bill. And if the empire is to be further revolutionised, and the Chartist agitation is to end in household or five-pound suffrage, it will unquestionably be owing to the wide-spread misery which the combined operation of free-trade and a fettered currency have extended through the empire.
The second cause to which this strange insensibility of government to the evidence of facts, and the sufferings of the empire, is to be ascribed, is the influence in the legislature of that very class which was installed in power by the revolution of 1832. The movement in that year was essentially democratic – it was by the effort of the masses, joined to that of the middle classes and the Whig aristocracy, that the crown was overawed, and the change forced upon the country. But the change actually made was in the interest and for the benefit of one of these parties only. The shopkeepers, by the framing of the Reform Act, got the government into their own hands. By schedules A and B, the colonies and shipping interest were at once disfranchised; by the ten-pound clause, the majority of votes in the urban constituencies was vested in the shopkeepers; by the places enfranchised, two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons were for towns and boroughs. Thus the majority, both of the seats and the constituents, was put into the hands of the trading classes. Thence all the changes which have since taken place in our national policy. The practised leaders of parliament soon discovered where power was now practically vested, – they are as quick at finding out that as courtiers are at finding out who are the favourites that influence the sovereign. Thence the free-trade measures, and the obstinate retention of a contracted currency. It is for the interest of capitalists to lower the price of every thing except money, and render it as dear as possible; it is for the interest of the retailer and merchant to buy cheap and sell dear. Thence the free-trade system and contracted currency, which have now spread such unheard-of devastation throughout the empire. When a class obtains the ascendency in government, it becomes wholly inexorable, and deaf to every consideration of justice or expedience urged by any other class. Of such class government may be said, what Thurlow, with his usual wit and sagacity, said to a suitor who was complaining of the denial of justice he had experienced from an incorporation, – "Justice, Sir! did you ever expect justice from an incorporation? which has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked."
It is no doubt true that a large proportion of the persons who have suffered under the system introduced into our colonies, have been the very commercial and manufacturing class who have imposed it upon government. The manufacturing operatives joined the shopkeepers in the cry for free-trade, – and where has it left numbers of them? – in the workhouse and the Gazette. But that is no uncommon thing in human affairs; perhaps the greatest evils which befall both nations and individuals are those which they bring upon themselves by their own folly or grasping disposition. Providence has a sure mode of punishing the selfishness of man, which is to let it work out its natural fruits. If the deserved retribution to selfish and interested conduct were to be taken out of human affairs, how much misery would be avoided here below, but what impunity would exist to crime!
The working classes in the manufacturing districts, who now see how entirely they have been deluded on this subject, and how completely free-trade has turned to their own ruin, have a very simple remedy for the evils under which they labour. They say, "Extend the suffrage; give us a due sway in the legislature, and we will soon protect our own interests. The revolution of 1832 in Great Britain, and that of 1830 in France, has turned entirely to the advantage of the bourgeoisie; and we must have another Reform Bill to give us the blessings which Louis Blanc, Ledru Rollin, and the Socialists promise to France." This idea has taken a great hold of the public mind in a certain class of society. It is the natural reaction of experience against the innumerable evils which free-trade and a contracted currency have brought upon the country. The manufacturing and working classes, who joined the trading interest in raising the cry for these measures, finding themselves now crushed, or deriving no benefit from their effects, see no remedy but in taking the matter entirely into their own hands, and putting an end at once, by obtaining the command of the House of Commons, to all those measures which gratuitously, and for no conceivable purpose but the interest of the trades, spread ruin and desolation through the nation.
We object strenuously to any such change; and that from no attachment to the free-trade and fettered currency system, to which we have always given the most determined resistance, but from a firm desire for, and clear perception of, the interests of the great body of the people, to which, though often in opposition to their blind and mistaken wishes, we have uniformly given the most undeviating support.
A uniform system of voting, such as a £5 or household suffrage, which is now proposed as a remedy for all the evils of society, is of necessity a class representation, and the class to which it gives the ascendency is the lowest in whom the suffrage is vested. It must be so, because the poor being always and in every country much more numerous than the rich, the humblest class of voters under every uniform system must always be incomparably the most numerous. It is this circumstance which has given the ten-pounders the command of the House of Commons under the new constitution; they are the humblest and therefore the most numerous class enfranchised by the Reform Act, and consequently, under the uniform household suffrage, they have the majority. They have so for the same reason that, under a similar uniform system, the privates in an army would outnumber the whole officers, commissioned and non-commissioned. But if the suffrage is reduced so low as to admit the representatives of the operatives and "proletaires," or those whom they influence, (which household or a £5 suffrage would undoubtedly do,) what measures in the present state of society in this country, and feeling throughout the world, would they immediately adopt? We have only to look at the newly formed republic of France, where such a system is established, to receive the answer. Repudiation of state engagements, (as in the case of the railways;) confiscation of property under the name of a graduated income tax; the abolition of primogeniture, in order to ruin the landed interest; the issue of assignats, in order to sustain the state under the shock to credit which such measures would necessarily occasion, might with confidence be looked for. And the question to be considered is, would these measures in the end benefit any class of society, or, least of all, the operative, in a country such as Great Britain, containing, in proportion to its population, a greater number of persons dependent on daily wages for their existence than any other that ever existed?
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