THE WHIGS AND THE CHARTISTS, 1832-41 During the agitations attending the passage of the Reform bill some had feared and others had hoped that the character of the House of Commons would be henceforth radically different. These hopes and fears proved groundless. The new House and its suc cessors for the next forty or fifty years were much like the Houses of the years immediately before the Reform. Country gentle men predominated, and the proportion of self-made business men and lawyers increased but slowly. Cabinets, especially Whig cabinets, continued to be recruited mainly from the old aristo cratic families. The new voters proved, as Bagehot remarked 35 years later, to be "deferential" ; they preferred to be represented by their "betters." The Whigs secured a big majority in the first election on the new franchise, and Lord Grey's cabinet kept in office. Its first important measure was the Abolition of Slavery (1833), an Act which completed the good work begun by the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807. These measures are the first notable example in our history of the power of a great voluntary organi zation, the Anti-Slavery Society, working to stir public opinion and thus to secure parliamentary action. It is also remarkable as the work of the great evangelical religious movement, whose origins can be traced back to the preaching of Wesley and White field. The slave-owners received L20,000,000 in compensation, but the change inevitably produced grave complications in South Africa and the West Indies. (See WILBERFORCE, WILLIAM BRITISH EMPIRE.) The principal measure of 1834 was inspired not by philan thropy but economy, namely the Poor Law Amendment Act, which brought to an end the reckless distribution of outdoor relief which had grown up in the previous forty years. The aim of the new Act was to abolish outdoor relief entirely. It inflicted great misery on the poorest folk, and no government depending on a demo cratic franchise would have dared to introduce it ; none the less, it terminated an intolerable misuse of ratepayers' money.
In the same year Lord Melbourne, who had succeeded Grey as Prime Minister, being in difficulties with his cabinet, secured his own dismissal by King William IV. Peel took office, and dissolved parliament ; but the election gave the Whigs another, though re duced, majority, and Melbourne returned to office. The episode had enabled Peel in his "Tamworth manifesto" to proclaim that his party, henceforth not Tory but Conservative, frankly accepted the Reform bill as final, and proposed to enact its logical con sequence, namely, a reform of the system by which town councils were elected. Henceforth these were to be elected by the whole body of the ratepayers. This measure was actually carried by the Whigs on their return to office (1835). But it is remarkable that country areas remained under the government of nominated mag istrates for another half-century.
The year 1837 saw the accession of Vic toria, and Melbourne is best remembered to-day as the wise and kindly old statesman who gave the young queen her political edu cation. That education was to be continued by Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, who became the queen's husband in 184o. In
Victoria's devotion to Melbourne occasioned a somewhat ludicrous political crisis. Melbourne resigned office, having practically lost his majority in the Commons, and the queen sent for Peel, who, however, declared that he could not form a government unless the queen would consent to dismiss some of the Whig ladies of her household and receive Tory ladies in their places. The queen refused, and Melbourne consented to resume the office he had laid down. After her marriage the queen attached less importance to these ladies, and no further "Bedchamber questions" arose.
Two important innovations marked the year 1839. One was the establishment of the penny postal service, a corollary of the railway system now rapidly developing. In this matter England led the world. In the matter of elementary education, on the other hand, she took, in the words of a great French historian, "the low est place among Protestant countries." Since the early years of the century organizations affiliated to the Church of England and the nonconformist churches had been establishing elementary schools in increasing numbers. In 1838 the Government made an annual grant of £20,000 to these organizations. In 1839 the grant was increased to L30,000, and a committee and inspectors ap pointed to supervise the expenditure of the grant. Here was the beginning of what has grown into the Board of Education.
Industrial en thusiasts, such as Ure, in his Philosophy of Manufactures (1835), gloried in the strict discipline enforced by factory conditions, but the factory workers themselves took a different view. The new Poor Law was another exhibition of "discipline" and was equally unpopular. The masses whose formidable enthusiasm had helped to carry a middle-class Reform bill, were already beginning to ask themselves "what next?" In 1834 Robert Owen (q.v.), once the "model employer" of New Lanark and afterwards the evangelist of other doctrines, co-operative, socialist and secularist, organized a Grand National Copsolidated Trades Union which should secure the establishment of some vaguely defined socialistic system by means of a General Strike. A merciless government prosecution of seven Dorchester labourers pricked the bubble of Owenism, but Chartism (q.v.) stepped into its place. The "People's Char ter," published in May 1838, demanded manhood suffrage, vote by ballot, payment of members, abolition of the property qualifi cation for members, equal constituencies, and annual parliaments. But the movement behind this programme lacked capable leaders, and such leaders as it had were hopelessly divided in method. Did the Chartists intend simply to present a petition to parliament, or to overawe parliament, or to deny the legitimacy of parliament, as a non-democratic assembly? As so often happens with such movements, the extremists were the most vocal section, and in consequence both trade unionists and radical politicians drifted out of the movement. Mild riots at Birmingham and Newport ended the Chartism of the 'thirties. Chartism was the typical working-class movement of the day, and its ineffectiveness illus trates the fact that the working-classes had not discovered either a satisfactory programme or an effective method of mobilising their power. A different destiny awaited the Anti-Corn Law League, conceived in 1836 by Radical M. Ps. and Lancashire man ufacturers in conscious rivalry with Chartism, and founded in 1839. This sought to persuade the working man that his principal grievance was neither his exclusion from political life nor his inclusion in the factory system but the dearness of his food, due to Corn Laws made by landlords for the benefit of landlords.
But it would be a mistake to regard political agitation as the most characteristic feature of early Victorian England. If we had to select one such feature we should select the domination of all classes and all Protestant churches by evangelical piety. What we loosely call "Victorianism" is in fact the triumph of the evangeli cal movement.
Whigs.—Melbourne's government, like so many other British governments, was continuously embarrassed by Irish problems—Irish tithe, Irish Poor Law, and Irish local government. Canada and Jamaica were also the subjects of stormy debates. The Canadian rebellions of 1837 (See CANADA : History) led to the mission of Lord Durham (q.v.), whose famous Report led to the establishment of Canadian self-government, a system extended in due course to all the other "White" colonies. In Jamaica, on the other hand, where the population is predom inantly "Black," the Government sought to terminate the system by which a handful of British planters governed the island. They failed, and this system lasted until 1865. But the chief weak ness of the Whigs was that they lacked a bold and competent financier. Baring's Budgets of 1838-41 were all unsuccessful meas ures, and the last of these Budgets involved the fall of the Gov ernment. The election of 1841 gave the Conservatives a safe ma jority, and Sir Robert Peel became prime minister.
The Melbourne government had on the whole a poor record, but non-political England was hard at work. Railways, steam ships, factories went ahead. The ten years under review mark an important epoch in the history of banking. Joint Stock Banks had been legalized in 1826, and in 1833 were allowed to establish themselves in London, where the Bank of England had hitherto enjoyed a monopoly. The next few years saw the establishment of the Westminster, Union, and London and County Banks. It was proved that a bank could prosper even though it could not issue bank-notes; for this then much valued privilege was restricted to the Bank of England and to "provincial" banks with no branch within sixty miles of London.
This period saw the appearance of the last novel of Scott and the first novels of Dickens. Wordsworth was grow ing old and had long passed his prime, but Tennyson's early poems were beginning to attract attention, and Macready, the actor, enabled Browning to hold the stage (for a few days only) with his historical drama of Strafford. Macaulay's essays were eagerly read in the quarterly issues of the Edinburgh Review, and Carlyle's French Revolution not only showed that the French Rev olution was neither as black nor as white as enemies and friends had painted it, but also indicated what happened to governments which disregarded the aspirations of their voteless masses. Lyell's Principles of Geology opened up new views of the history of the animal creation, and prepared the way for the violent Victorian controversies between religion and science.
