The burden of debt hung like a millstone round the neck of the nation for the next gen eration. In place of an income tax (then viewed as essentially a war tax) imposts were in and after 1815 placed on all possible articles, including foreign corn. Demonstrations and riots were the result; repressive measures, such as the Six Acts of 1819, were of no avail; and the unpopularity of George IV (1820-30) brought the monarchy itself into danger. Yet this time of malaise and political reaction was not fruitless. Canning, as Foreign Secretary, did much to thwart the reactionary policy of the monarchs who had framed the Holy Alliance, and his encouragement of the Liberals of Spain and of the Greek patriots led to notable results in the lives of those peoples, as also in the attitude of the United States toward Europe. (See MONROE DOCTRINE). The aboli tion of civil disabilities affecting Nonconform ists in 1828, and the emancipation of Roman Catholics in 1829 with the reluctant assent of the Wellington ministry, showed that the days of privilege were over.
The event of the next year ushered in a new era. The death of George IV brought to the throne his• far more popular brother Wil liam IV; and the general election, held during the excitement caused by the deposition of the elder House of Bourbon in the revolution of July 1830, in Paris, led to the return of a Majority favorable to electoral reform at West minster. After a long and acrid struggle the Refotm Bill of 1832 was passed. It enfran chised in all parliamentary boroughs house holders paying a rental of DO, also copyholders in the counties. It disfranchised a number of very small boroughs and transferred their vot ing power to the new manufacturing towns and districts. Thus the influence exerted by the second French Revolution on English democracy was far more favorable than that of the first revolution. The anarchy and the wars result ing from that great upheaval put back the cause of parliamentary reform in England for 50 years. The seeming success of the second revolutidn (July 1830) now added vigor to the English movement which had meanwhile been strengthened by the silent yet potent changes in the distribution of population and modes of life resulting from the industrial revolution. That change, ever working with accelerated energy, necessitated the transference of power from the old rural England to the new manu facturing England; and thanks to the accession of William IV in 1830, and of Victoria in 1837, this momentous revolution took place peace fully. While breaking the power of the old Tory party, it rooted the monarchy more firmly in the hearts of the people.
The ensuing decades were times of great strain and stress, but they were met firmly and on the whole successfully. The wider sym pathies and business aptitudes of the new Parliament showed themselves in the Factory Act (1833) of Lord Ashley—afterward Lord Shaftesbury; in the emancipation of slaves in British colonies, for which a sum of 120,000,000 was voted as compensation to the owners; and in the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 which cut at the roots of the growing evil of pau perism. Nevertheless the working classes of the great towns were in a state sometimes bordering on sedition, partly owing to resent ment against the Whigs for refusing to extend the franchise laid down in 1832, and still more owing to the harsh administration of the new Poor Law. Trade depression, low wages, high taxes and dear corn swelled the volume of dis content. It took form in two well defined
movements, Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law 'League, which, beginning in the year 1837, ran a parallel and competitive course, and ended in the year 1848, the former in failure, the lat ter amidst almost complete success. This differ ence in the fortunes of the two movements may be ascribed to the following causes. The Chartists, (q.v.) sought to cure evils, which sprang mainly from economic causes, by purely political means. The six points of their Char ter were (1) annual Parliaments, (2) manhood suffrage, (3) equal electoral districts, (4) pay ment of members of Parliament, (5) abolition of the property qualification for members of Parliament and (6) vote by ballot. This pro gram (a revival of the advanced Whig pro gram of 1780) aimed at benefiting the work ing classes through Parliament. The Free Traders sought to benefit them by altering tax ation so as to let in free, or nearly free, the necessaries and small comforts of life. Further, Chartism suffered from the unwise means used by the physical force wing of the party whose leaders fell out with one another. The Free Traders on the other hand had excellent leaders, Cobden and Bright, whose arguments finally brought over to their side large numbers of the Workingmen and the Prime Minister hiniself, Sir Robert Peel.
This able man had pieced together the Con servative party from the more malleable of the fragments of the old Tory faction; and, largely owing to the failures of the Whigs in finance, he came back to power after the general elec tion of 1841 with a strong and apparently homo geneous following. His openness of mind soon brought him into collision with very many of his followers. He became a Free Trader, while they remained Protectionists. He soon came to see that the long series - of deficits could be ended only rby recourse to direct taxation; and in his budgets of 1842 and 1845 he abolished or greatly lessened duties on large numbers of articles, making good the temporary loss by an Income Tax of 7d in the L He also lessened the sliding 'scale duties on foreign corn. The -result was seen in improved trade and in a decline of pauperism and misery. In 1845-46 the Irish famine brough him to sacrifice the corn duties—a measure which earned him un measured abuse from Disraeli and Lord George Bentinck and the gratitude of the poor through out the whole kingdom. Thus the working classes gained their chief aims through the efforts of the Free Traders and the legislation of Peel. Consequently , when the continental revolutions of the spring of 1848 induced the physical force Chartists to cony the methods which had been successful in Paris, Berlin and Vienna, the result was a ludicrous fiasco, which brought Chartism as an organized movement to an end. The spirit that had animated its best leaders, namely a burning love of freedom and a passionate desire for the moral and mental up lifting of the working classes, lived on in those Radical parsons, F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, in the second founders of the Co operative and Friendly Society movements, and in the later Radicals, who by wise methods soon gained four of the six points of the Charter. The same yearnings after ideals far other than those realisable by mere party strifes and sor did commercialism permeated much of the best work of Carlyle and of his young disciple Ruskin, and throbbed in the youthful poems of Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne.