never before questioned, and which cannot be questioned with the smallest show of reason. “If,” they say, “free competition is a good thing in trade, it must surely be a good thing in education. The supply of other commodities, of sugar, for example, is left to adjust itself to the demand; and the consequence is, that we are better supplied with sugar than if the Government undertook to supply us. Why then should we doubt that the supply of instruction will, without the intervention of the Government, be found equal to the demand?”
Never was there a more false analogy. Whether a man is well supplied with sugar is a matter which concerns himself alone. But whether he is well supplied with instruction is a matter which concerns his neighbours and the State. If he cannot afford to pay for sugar, he must go without sugar. But it is by no means fit that, because he cannot afford to pay for education, he should go without education. Between the rich and their instructors there may, as Adam Smith says, be free trade. The supply of music masters and Italian masters may be left to adjust itself to the demand. But what is to become of the millions who are too poor to procure without assistance the services of a decent schoolmaster? We have indeed heard it said that even these millions will be supplied with teachers by the free competition of benevolent individuals who will vie with each other in rendering this service to mankind. No doubt there are many benevolent individuals who spend their time and money most laudably in setting up and supporting schools; and you may say, if you please, that there is, among these respectable persons, a competition to do good. But do not be imposed upon by words. Do not believe that this competition resembles the competition which is produced by the desire of wealth and by the fear of ruin. There is a great difference, be assured, between the rivalry of philanthropists and the rivalry of grocers. The grocer knows that, if his wares are worse than those of other grocers, he shall soon go before the Bankrupt Court, and his wife and children will have no refuge but the workhouse: he knows that, if his shop obtains an honourable celebrity, he shall be able to set up a carriage and buy a villa: and this knowledge impels him to exertions compared with which the exertions of even very charitable people to serve the poor are but languid. It would be strange infatuation indeed to legislate on the supposition that a man cares for his fellow creatures as much as he cares for himself.
Unless, Sir, I greatly deceive myself, those arguments, which show that the Government ought not to leave to private people the task of providing for the national defence, will equally show that the Government ought not to leave to private people the task of providing for national education. On this subject, Mr Hume has laid down the general law with admirable good sense and perspicuity. I mean David Hume, not the Member for Montrose, though that honourable gentleman will, I am confident, assent to the doctrine propounded by his illustrious namesake. David Hume, Sir, justly says that most of the arts and trades which exist in the world produce so much advantage and pleasure to individuals, that the magistrate may safely leave it to individuals to encourage those arts and trades. But he adds that there are callings which, though they are highly useful, nay, absolutely necessary to society, yet do not administer to the peculiar pleasure or profit of any individual. The military calling is an instance. Here, says Hume, the Government must interfere. It must take on itself to regulate these callings, and to stimulate the industry of the persons who follow these callings by pecuniary and honorary rewards.
Now, Sir, it seems to me that, on the same principle on which Government ought to superintend and to reward the soldier, Government ought to superintend and to reward the schoolmaster. I mean, of course, the schoolmaster of the common people. That his calling is useful, that his calling is necessary, will hardly be denied. Yet it is clear that his services will not be adequately remunerated if he is left to be remunerated by those whom he teaches, or by the voluntary contributions of the charitable. Is this disputed? Look at the facts. You tell us that schools will multiply and flourish exceedingly, if the Government will only abstain from interfering with them. Has not the Government long abstained from interfering with them? Has not everything been left, through many years, to individual exertion? If it were true that education, like trade, thrives most where the magistrate meddles least, the common people of England would now be the best educated in the world. Our schools would be model schools. Every one would have a well chosen little library, excellent maps, a small but neat apparatus for experiments in natural philosophy. A grown person unable to read and write would be pointed at like Giant O’Brien or the Polish Count. Our schoolmasters would be as eminently expert in all that relates to teaching as our cutlers, our cotton-spinners, our engineers are allowed to be in their respective callings. They would, as a class, be held in high consideration; and their gains would be such that it would be easy to find men of respectable character and attainments to fill up vacancies.
Now, is this the case? Look at the charges of the judges, at the resolutions of the grand juries, at the reports of public officers, at the reports of voluntary associations. All tell the same sad and ignominious story. Take the reports of the Inspectors of Prisons. In the House of Correction at Hertford, of seven hundred prisoners one half could not read at all; only eight could read and write well. Of eight thousand prisoners who had passed through Maidstone Gaol only fifty could read and write well. In Coldbath Fields Prison, the proportion that could read and write well seems to have been still smaller. Turn from the registers of prisoners to the registers of marriages. You will find that about a hundred and thirty thousand couples were married in the year 1844. More than forty thousand of the bridegrooms and more than sixty thousand of the brides did not sign their names, but made their marks. Nearly one third of the men and nearly one half of the women, who are in the prime of life, who are to be the parents of the Englishmen of the next generation, who are to bear a chief part in forming the minds of the Englishmen of the next generation, cannot write their own names. Remember, too, that, though people who cannot write their own names must be grossly ignorant, people may write their own names and yet have very little knowledge. Tens of thousands who were able to write their names had in all probability received only the wretched education of a common day school. We know what such a school too often is; a room crusted with filth, without light, without air, with a heap of fuel in one corner and a brood of chickens in another; the only machinery of instruction a dogeared spelling-book and a broken slate; the masters the refuse of all other callings, discarded footmen, ruined pedlars, men who cannot work a sum in the rule of three, men who cannot write a common letter without blunders, men who do not know whether the earth is a sphere or a cube, men who do not know whether Jerusalem is in Asia or America. And to such men, men to whom none of us would entrust the key of his cellar, we have entrusted the mind of the rising generation, and, with the mind of the rising generation the freedom, the happiness, the glory of our country.
Do you question the accuracy of this description? I will produce evidence to which I am sure that you will not venture to take an exception. Every gentleman here knows, I suppose, how important a place the Congregational Union holds among the Nonconformists, and how prominent a part Mr Edward Baines has taken in opposition to State education. A Committee of the Congregational Union drew up last year a report on the subject of education. That report was received by the Union; and the person who moved that it should be received was Mr Edward Baines. That report contains the following passage: “If it were necessary to disclose facts to such an assembly as this, as to the ignorance and debasement of the neglected portions of our population in towns and rural districts, both adult and juvenile, it could easily be done. Private information communicated to the Board, personal observation and investigation of the various localities, with the published documents of the Registrar General, and the reports of the state of prisons in England and Wales, published by order of the House of Commons, would furnish enough to make us modest in speaking of what has been done for the humbler classes, and make us ashamed that the sons of the soil of England should have been so long neglected, and should present to the enlightened traveller from other shores such a sad spectacle of neglected cultivation, lost mental power, and spiritual degradation.” Nothing can be more just. All the information which I have been able to obtain bears out the statements of the Congregational Union. I do believe that the ignorance and degradation of a large part of the community to which we belong ought to make us ashamed of ourselves. I do believe that an enlightened traveller from New York, from Geneva, or from Berlin, would be shocked to see so much barbarism in the close neighbourhood of so much wealth and civilisation. But is it not strange that the very gentlemen who tell us in such emphatic language that the people are shamefully ill-educated, should yet persist in telling us that under a system of free competition the people are certain to be excellently educated? Only this morning the opponents of our plan circulated a paper in which they confidently predict that free competition will do all that is necessary, if we will only wait with patience. Wait with patience! Why, we have been waiting ever since the Heptarchy. How much longer are we to wait? Till the year 2847? Or till the year 3847? That the experiment has as yet failed you do not deny. And why should it have failed? Has it been tried in unfavourable circumstances? Not so: it has been tried in the richest and in the freest, and in the most charitable country in all Europe. Has it been tried on too small a scale? Not so: millions have been subjected to it. Has it been tried during too short a time? Not so: it has been going on during ages. The cause of the failure then is plain. Our whole system has been unsound. We have applied the principle of free competition to a case to which that principle is not applicable.
But, Sir, if the state of the southern part of our island has furnished me with one strong argument, the state of the northern part furnishes me with another argument, which is, if possible, still more decisive. A hundred and fifty years ago England was one of the best governed and most prosperous countries in the world: Scotland was perhaps the rudest and poorest country that could lay any claim to civilisation. The name of Scotchman was then uttered in this part of the island with contempt. The ablest Scotch statesmen contemplated the degraded state of their poorer countrymen with a feeling approaching to despair. It is well-known that Fletcher of Saltoun, a brave and accomplished man, a man who had drawn his sword for liberty, who had suffered proscription and exile for liberty, was so much disgusted and dismayed by the misery, the ignorance, the idleness, the lawlessness of the common people, that he proposed to make many thousands of them slaves. Nothing, he thought, but the discipline which kept order and enforced exertion among the negroes of a sugar colony, nothing but the lash and the stocks, could reclaim the vagabonds who infested every part of Scotland from their indolent and predatory habits, and compel them to support themselves by steady labour. He therefore, soon after the Revolution, published a pamphlet, in which he earnestly, and, as I believe, from the mere impulse of humanity and patriotism, recommended to the Estates of the Realm this sharp remedy, which alone, as he conceived, could remove the evil. Within a few months after the publication of that pamphlet a very different remedy was applied. The Parliament which sate at Edinburgh passed an act for the establishment of parochial schools. What followed? An improvement such as the world had never seen took place in the moral and intellectual character of the people. Soon, in spite of the rigour of the climate, in spite of the sterility of the earth, Scotland became a country which had no reason to envy the fairest portions of the globe. Wherever the Scotchman went,–and there were few parts of the world to which he did not go,–he carried his superiority with him. If he was admitted into a public office, he worked his way up to the highest post. If he got employment in a brewery or a factory, he was soon the foreman. If he took a shop, his trade was the best in the street. If he enlisted in the army, he became a colour- sergeant. If he went to a colony, he was the most thriving planter there. The Scotchman of the seventeenth century had been spoken of in London as we speak of the Esquimaux. The Scotchman of the eighteenth century was an object, not of scorn, but of envy. The cry was that, wherever he came, he got more than his share; that, mixed with Englishmen or mixed with Irishmen, he rose to the top as surely as oil rises to the top of water. And what had produced this great revolution? The Scotch air was still as cold, the Scotch rocks were still as bare as ever. All the natural qualities of the Scotchman were still what they had been when learned and benevolent men advised that he should be flogged, like a beast of burden, to his daily task. But the State had given him an education. That education was not, it is true, in all respects what it should have been. But such as it was, it had done more for the bleak and dreary shores of the Forth and the Clyde than the richest of soils and the most genial of climates had done for Capua and Tarentum. Is there one member of this House, however strongly he may hold the doctrine that the Government ought not to interfere with the education of the people, who will stand up and say that, in his opinion, the Scotch would now have been a happier and a more enlightened people if they had been left, during the last five generations, to find instruction for themselves?
I say then, Sir, that, if the science of Government be an experimental science, this question is decided. We are in a condition to perform the inductive process according to the rules laid down in the Novum Organum. We have two nations closely connected, inhabiting the same island, sprung from the same blood, speaking the same language, governed by the same Sovereign and the same Legislature, holding essentially the same religious faith, having the same allies and the same enemies. Of these two nations one was, a hundred and fifty years ago, as respects opulence and civilisation, in the highest rank among European communities, the other in the lowest rank. The opulent and highly civilised nation leaves the education of the people to free competition. In the poor and half barbarous nation the education of the people is undertaken by the State. The result is that the first are last and the last first. The common people of Scotland,–it is vain to disguise the truth,–have passed the common people of England. Free competition, tried with every advantage, has produced effects of which, as the Congregational Union tells us, we ought to be ashamed, and which must lower us in the opinion of every intelligent foreigner. State education, tried under every disadvantage, has produced an improvement to which it would be difficult to find a parallel in any age or country. Such an experiment as this would be regarded as conclusive in surgery or chemistry, and ought, I think, to be regarded as equally conclusive in politics.
These, Sir, are the reasons which have satisfied me that it is the duty of the State to educate the people. Being firmly convinced of that truth, I shall not shrink from proclaiming it here and elsewhere, in defiance of the loudest clamour that agitators can raise. The remainder of my task is easy. For, if the great principle for which I have been contending is admitted, the objections which have been made to the details of our plan will vanish fast. I will deal with those objections in the order in which they stand in the amendment moved by the honourable Member for Finsbury.
First among his objections he places the cost. Surely, Sir, no person who admits that it is our duty to train the minds of the rising generation can think a hundred thousand pounds too large a sum for that purpose. If we look at the matter in the lowest point of view, if we consider human beings merely as producers of wealth, the difference between an intelligent and a stupid population, estimated in pounds, shillings, and pence, exceeds a hundredfold the proposed outlay. Nor is this all. For every pound that you save in education, you will spend five in prosecutions, in prisons, in penal settlements. I cannot believe that the House, having never grudged anything that was asked for the purpose of maintaining order and protecting property by means of pain and fear, will begin to be niggardly as soon as it is proposed to effect the same objects by making the people wiser and better.
The next objection made by the honourable Member to our plan is that it will increase the influence of the Crown. This sum of a hundred thousand pounds may, he apprehends, be employed in corruption and jobbing. Those schoolmasters who vote for ministerial candidates will obtain a share of the grant: those schoolmasters who vote for opponents of the ministry will apply for assistance in vain. Sir, the honourable Member never would have made this objection if he had taken the trouble to understand the minutes which he has condemned. We propose to place this part of the public expenditure under checks which must make such abuses as the honourable Member anticipates morally impossible. Not only will there be those ordinary checks which are thought sufficient to prevent the misapplication of the many millions annually granted for the army, the navy, the ordnance, the civil government: not only must the Ministers of the Crown come every year to this House for a vote, and be prepared to render an account of the manner in which they have laid out what had been voted in the preceding year, but, when they have satisfied the House, when they have got their vote, they will still be unable to distribute the money at their discretion. Whatever they may do for any schoolmaster must be done in concert with those persons who, in the district where the schoolmaster lives, take an interest in education, and contribute out of their private means to the expense of education. When the honourable gentleman is afraid that we shall corrupt the schoolmasters, he forgets, first, that we do not appoint the schoolmasters; secondly, that we cannot dismiss the schoolmasters; thirdly, that managers who are altogether independent of us can, without our consent, dismiss the schoolmasters; and, fourthly, that without the recommendation of those managers we can give nothing to the schoolmasters. Observe, too, that such a recommendation will not be one of those recommendations which goodnatured easy people are too apt to give to everybody who asks; nor will it at all resemble those recommendations which the Secretary of the Treasury is in the habit of receiving. For every pound which we pay on the recommendation of the managers, the managers themselves must pay two pounds. They must also provide the schoolmaster with a house out of their own funds before they can obtain for him a grant from the public funds. What chance of jobbing is there here? It is common enough, no doubt, for a Member of Parliament who votes with Government to ask that one of those who zealously supported him at the last election may have a place in the Excise or the Customs. But such a member would soon cease to solicit if the answer were, “Your friend shall have a place of fifty pounds a year, if you will give him a house and settle on him an income of a hundred a year.” What chance then, I again ask, is there of jobbing? What, say some of the dissenters of Leeds, is to prevent a Tory Government, a High Church Government, from using this parliamentary grant to corrupt the schoolmasters of our borough, and to induce them to use all their influence in favour of a Tory and High Church candidate? Why, Sir, the dissenters of Leeds themselves have the power to prevent it. Let them subscribe to the schools: let them take a share in the management of the schools: let them refuse to recommend to the committee of Council any schoolmaster whom they suspect of having voted at any election from corrupt motives: and the thing is done. Our plan, in truth, is made up of checks. My only doubt is whether the checks may not be found too numerous and too stringent. On our general conduct there is the ordinary check, the parliamentary check. And, as respects those minute details which it is impossible that this House can investigate, we shall be checked, in every town and in every rural district, by boards consisting of independent men zealous in the cause of education.
The truth is, Sir, that those who clamour most loudly against our plan, have never thought of ascertaining what it is. I see that a gentleman, who ought to have known better, has not been ashamed publicly to tell the world that our plan will cost the nation two millions a year, and will paralyse all the exertions of individuals to educate the people. These two assertions are uttered in one breath. And yet, if he who made them had read our minutes before he railed at them, he would have seen that his predictions are contradictory; that they cannot both be fulfilled; that, if individuals do not exert themselves, the country will have to pay nothing; and that, if the country has to pay two millions, it will be because individuals have exerted themselves with such wonderful, such incredible vigour, as to raise four millions by voluntary contributions.
The next objection made by the honourable Member for Finsbury is that we have acted unconstitutionally, and have encroached on the functions of Parliament. The Committee of Council he seems to consider as an unlawful assembly. He calls it sometimes a self- elected body and sometimes a self-appointed body. Sir, these are words without meaning. The Committee is no more a self-elected body than the Board of Trade. It is a body appointed by the Queen; and in appointing it Her Majesty has exercised, under the advice of her responsible Ministers, a prerogative as old as the monarchy. But, says the honourable Member, the constitutional course would have been to apply for an Act of Parliament. On what ground? Nothing but an Act of Parliament can legalise that which is illegal. But whoever heard of an Act of Parliament to legalise what was already beyond all dispute legal? Of course, if we wished to send aliens out of the country, or to retain disaffected persons in custody without bringing them to trial, we must obtain an Act of Parliament empowering us to do so. But why should we ask for an Act of Parliament to empower us to do what anybody may do, what the honourable Member for Finsbury may do? Is there any doubt that he or anybody else may subscribe to a school, give a stipend to a monitor, or settle a retiring pension on a preceptor who has done good service? What any of the Queen’s subjects may do the Queen may do. Suppose that her privy purse were so large that she could afford to employ a hundred thousand pounds in this beneficent manner; would an Act of Parliament be necessary to enable her to do so? Every part of our plan may lawfully be carried into execution by any person, Sovereign or subject, who has the inclination and the money. We have not the money; and for the money we come, in a strictly constitutional manner, to the House of Commons. The course which we have taken is in conformity with all precedent, as well as with all principle. There are military schools. No Act of Parliament was necessary to authorise the establishing of such schools. All that was necessary was a grant of money to defray the charge. When I was Secretary at War it was my duty to bring under Her Majesty’s notice the situation of the female children of her soldiers. Many such children accompanied every regiment, and their education was grievously neglected. Her Majesty was graciously pleased to sign a warrant by which a girls’ school was attached to each corps. No Act of Parliament was necessary. For to set up a school where girls might be taught to read, and write, and sew, and cook, was perfectly legal already. I might have set it up myself, if I had been rich enough. All that I had to ask from Parliament was the money. But I ought to beg pardon for arguing a point so clear.
The next objection to our plans is that they interfere with the religious convictions of Her Majesty’s subjects. It has been sometimes insinuated, but it has never been proved, that the Committee of Council has shown undue favour to the Established Church. Sir, I have carefully read and considered the minutes; and I wish that every man who has exerted his eloquence against them had done the same. I say that I have carefully read and considered them, and that they seem to me to have been drawn up with exemplary impartiality. The benefits which we offer we offer to people of all religious persuasions alike. The dissenting managers of schools will have equal authority with the managers who belong to the Church. A boy who goes to meeting will be just as eligible to be a monitor, and will receive just as large a stipend, as if he went to the cathedral. The schoolmaster who is a nonconformist and the schoolmaster who is a conformist will enjoy the same emoluments, and will, after the same term of service, obtain, on the same conditions, the same retiring pension. I wish that some gentleman would, instead of using vague phrases about religious liberty and the rights of conscience, answer this plain question. Suppose that in one of our large towns there are four schools, a school connected with the Church, a school connected with the Independents, a Baptist school, and a Wesleyan school; what encouragement, pecuniary or honorary, will, by our plan, be given to the school connected with the Church, and withheld from any of the other three schools? Is it not indeed plain that, if by neglect or maladministration the Church school should get into a bad state, while the dissenting schools flourish, the dissenting schools will receive public money and the Church school will receive none?
It is true, I admit, that in rural districts which are too poor to support more than one school, the religious community to which the majority belongs will have an advantage over other religious communities. But this is not our fault. If we are as impartial as it is possible to be, you surely do not expect more. If there should be a parish containing nine hundred churchmen and a hundred dissenters, if there should, in that parish, be a school connected with the Church, if the dissenters in that parish should be too poor to set up another school, undoubtedly the school connected with the Church will, in that parish, get all that we give; and the dissenters will get nothing. But observe that there is no partiality to the Church, as the Church, in this arrangement. The churchmen get public money, not because they are churchmen, but because they are the majority. The dissenters get nothing, not because they are dissenters, but because they are a small minority. There are districts where the case will be reversed, where there will be dissenting schools, and no Church schools. In such cases the dissenters will get what we have to give, and the churchmen will get nothing.
But, Sir, I ought not to say that a churchman gets nothing by a system which gives a good education to dissenters, or that a dissenter gets nothing by a system which gives a good education to churchmen. We are not, I hope, so much conformists, or so much nonconformists, as to forget that we are Englishmen and Christians. We all, Churchmen, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, Methodists, have an interest in this, that the great body of the people should be rescued from ignorance and barbarism. I mentioned Lord George Gordon’s mob. That mob began, it is true, with the Roman Catholics: but, long before the tumults were over, there was not a respectable Protestant in London who was not in fear for his house, for his limbs, for his life, for the lives of those who were dearest to him. The honourable Member for Finsbury says that we call on men to pay for an education from which they derive no benefit. I deny that there is one honest and industrious man in the country who derives no benefit from living among honest and industrious neighbours rather than among rioters and vagabonds. This matter is as much a matter of common concern as the defence of our coast. Suppose that I were to say, “Why do you tax me to fortify Portsmouth? If the people of Portsmouth think that they cannot be safe without bastions and ravelins, let the people of Portsmouth pay the engineers and masons. Why am I to bear the charge of works from which I derive no advantage?” You would answer, and most justly, that there is no man in the island who does not derive advantage from these works, whether he resides within them or not. And, as every man, in whatever part of the island he may live, is bound to contribute to the support of those arsenals which are necessary for our common security, so is every man, to whatever sect he may belong, bound to contribute to the support of those schools on which, not less than on our arsenals, our common security depends.
I now come to the last words of the amendment. The honourable Member for Finsbury is apprehensive that our plan may interfere with the civil rights of Her Majesty’s subjects. How a man’s civil rights can be prejudiced by his learning to read and write, to multiply and divide, or even by his obtaining some knowledge of history and geography, I do not very well apprehend. One thing is clear, that persons sunk in that ignorance in which, as we are assured by the Congregational Union, great numbers of our countrymen are sunk, can be free only in name. It is hardly necessary for us to appoint a Select Committee for the purpose of inquiring whether knowledge be the ally or the enemy of liberty. He is, I must say, but a short-sighted friend of the common people who is eager to bestow on them a franchise which would make them all-powerful, and yet would withhold from them that instruction without which their power must be a curse to themselves and to the State.
This, Sir, is my defence. From the clamour of our accusers I appeal with confidence to the country to which we must, in no long time, render an account of our stewardship. I appeal with still more confidence to future generations, which, while enjoying all the blessings of an impartial and efficient system of public instruction, will find it difficult to believe that the authors of that system should have had to struggle with a vehement and pertinacious opposition, and still more difficult to believe that such an opposition was offered in the name of civil and religious freedom.
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INAUGURAL SPEECH AT GLASGOW COLLEGE. (MARCH 21, 1849)
A SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE COLLEGE OF GLASGOW ON THE 21ST OF MARCH, 1849.
At the election of Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, in November, 1848, the votes stood thus: Mr Macaulay, 255; Colonel Mure, 203. The installation took place on the twenty-first of March, 1849; and after that ceremony had been performed, the following Speech was delivered.
My first duty, Gentlemen, is to return you my thanks for the honour which you have conferred on me. You well know that it was wholly unsolicited; and I can assure you that it was wholly unexpected. I may add that, if I had been invited to become a candidate for your suffrages, I should respectfully have declined the invitation. My predecessor, whom I am so happy as to be able to call my friend, declared from this place last year in language which well became him, that he would not have come forward to displace so eminent a statesman as Lord John Russell. I can with equal truth affirm that I would not have come forward to displace so estimable a gentleman and so accomplished a scholar as Colonel Mure. But Colonel Mure felt last year that it was not for him, and I now feel that it is not for me, to question the propriety of your decision on a point of which, by the constitution of your body, you are the judges. I therefore gratefully accept the office to which I have been called, fully purposing to use whatever powers belong to it with a single view to the welfare and credit of your society.
I am not using a mere phrase of course, when I say that the feelings with which I bear apart in the ceremony of this day are such as I find it difficult to utter in words. I do not think it strange that, when that great master of eloquence, Edmund Burke, stood where I now stand, he faltered and remained mute. Doubtless the multitude of thoughts which rushed into his mind was such as even he could not easily arrange or express. In truth there are few spectacles more striking or affecting than that which a great historical place of education presents on a solemn public day. There is something strangely interesting in the contrast between the venerable antiquity of the body and the fresh and ardent youth of the great majority of the members. Recollections and hopes crowd upon us together. The past and the future are at once brought close to us. Our thoughts wander back to the time when the foundations of this ancient building were laid, and forward to the time when those whom it is our office to guide and to teach will be the guides and teachers of our posterity. On the present occasion we may, with peculiar propriety, give such thoughts their course. For it has chanced that my magistracy has fallen on a great secular epoch. This is the four hundredth year of the existence of your University. At such jubilees, jubilees of which no individual sees more than one, it is natural, and it is good, that a society like this, a society which survives all the transitory parts of which it is composed, a society which has a corporate existence and a perpetual succession, should review its annals, should retrace the stages of its growth from infancy to maturity, and should try to find, in the experience of generations which have passed away, lessons which may be profitable to generations yet unborn.
The retrospect is full of interest and instruction. Perhaps it may be doubted whether, since the Christian era, there has been any point of time more important to the highest interests of mankind than that at which the existence of your University commenced. It was at the moment of a great destruction and of a great creation. Your society was instituted just before the empire of the East perished; that strange empire which, dragging on a languid life through the great age of darkness, connected together the two great ages of light; that empire which, adding nothing to our stores of knowledge, and producing not one man great in letters, in science, or in art, yet preserved, in the midst of barbarism, those masterpieces of Attic genius, which the highest minds still contemplate, and long will contemplate, with admiring despair. And at that very time, while the fanatical Moslem were plundering the churches and palaces of Constantinople, breaking in pieces Grecian sculptures, and giving to the flames piles of Grecian eloquence, a few humble German artisans, who little knew that they were calling into existence a power far mightier than that of the victorious Sultan, were busied in cutting and setting the first types. The University came into existence just in time to witness the disappearance of the last trace of the Roman empire, and to witness the publication of the earliest printed book.
At this conjuncture, a conjuncture of unrivalled interest in the history of letters, a man, never to be mentioned without reverence by every lover of letters, held the highest place in Europe. Our just attachment to that Protestant faith to which our country owes so much must not prevent us from paying the tribute which, on this occasion, and in this place, justice and gratitude demand, to the founder of the University of Glasgow, the greatest of the restorers of learning, Pope Nicholas the Fifth. He had sprung from the common people; but his abilities and his erudition had early attracted the notice of the great. He had studied much and travelled far. He had visited Britain, which, in wealth and refinement, was to his native Tuscany what the back settlements of America now are to Britain. He had lived with the merchant princes of Florence, those men who first ennobled trade by making trade the ally of philosophy, of eloquence, and of taste. It was he who, under the protection of the munificent and discerning Cosmo, arranged the first public library that Modern Europe possessed. From privacy your founder rose to a throne; but on the throne he never forgot the studies which had been his delight in privacy. He was the centre of an illustrious group, composed partly of the last great scholars of Greece, and partly of the first great scholars of Italy, Theodore Gaza and George of Trebizond, Bessarion and Filelfo, Marsilio Ficino and Poggio Bracciolini. By him was founded the Vatican library, then and long after the most precious and the most extensive collection of books in the world. By him were carefully preserved the most valuable intellectual treasures which had been snatched from the wreck of the Byzantine empire. His agents were to be found everywhere, in the bazaars of the farthest East, in the monasteries of the farthest West, purchasing or copying worm-eaten parchments, on which were traced words worthy of immortality. Under his patronage were prepared accurate Latin versions of many precious remains of Greek poets and philosophers. But no department of literature owes so much to him as history. By him were introduced to the knowledge of Western Europe two great and unrivalled models of historical composition, the work of Herodotus and the work of Thucydides. By him, too, our ancestors were first made acquainted with the graceful and lucid simplicity of Xenophon and with the manly good sense of Polybius.
It was while he was occupied with cares like these that his attention was called to the intellectual wants of this region, a region now swarming with population, rich with culture, and resounding with the clang of machinery, a region which now sends forth fleets laden with its admirable fabrics to the lands of which, in his days, no geographer had ever heard, then a wild, a poor, a half barbarous tract, lying on the utmost verge of the known world. He gave his sanction to the plan of establishing a University at Glasgow, and bestowed on the new seat of learning all the privileges which belonged to the University of Bologna. I can conceive that a pitying smile passed over his face as he named Bologna and Glasgow together. At Bologna he had long studied. No spot in the world had been more favoured by nature or by art. The surrounding country was a fruitful and sunny country, a country of cornfields and vineyards. In the city, the house of Bentivoglo bore rule, a house which vied with the house of Medici in taste and magnificence, which has left to posterity noble palaces and temples, and which gave a splendid patronage to arts and letters. Glasgow your founder just knew to be a poor, a small, a rude town, a town, as he would have thought, not likely ever to be great and opulent; for the soil, compared with the rich country at the foot of the Apennines, was barren, and the climate was such that an Italian shuddered at the thought of it. But it is not on the fertility of the soil, it is not on the mildness of the atmosphere, that the prosperity of nations chiefly depends. Slavery and superstition can make Campania a land of beggars, and can change the plain of Enna into a desert. Nor is it beyond the power of human intelligence and energy, developed by civil and spiritual freedom, to turn sterile rocks and pestilential marshes into cities and gardens. Enlightened as your founder was, he little knew that he was himself a chief agent in a great revolution, physical and moral, political and religious, in a revolution destined to make the last first and the first last, in a revolution destined to invert the relative positions of Glasgow and Bologna. We cannot, I think, better employ a few minutes than in reviewing the stages of this great change in human affairs.
The review shall be short. Indeed I cannot do better than pass rapidly from century to century. Look at the world, then, a hundred years after the seal of Nicholas had been affixed to the instrument which called your College into existence. We find Europe, we find Scotland especially, in the agonies of that great revolution which we emphatically call the Reformation. The liberal patronage which Nicholas, and men like Nicholas, had given to learning, and of which the establishment of this seat of learning is not the least remarkable instance, had produced an effect which they had never contemplated. Ignorance was the talisman on which their power depended; and that talisman they had themselves broken. They had called in Knowledge as a handmaid to decorate Superstition, and their error produced its natural effect. I need not tell you what a part the votaries of classical learning, and especially the votaries of Greek learning, the Humanists, as they were then called, bore in the great movement against spiritual tyranny. They formed, in fact, the vanguard of that movement. Every one of the chief Reformers –I do not at this moment remember a single exception–was a Humanist. Almost every eminent Humanist in the north of Europe was, according to the measure of his uprightness and courage, a Reformer. In a Scottish University I need hardly mention the names of Knox, of Buchanan, of Melville, of Secretary Maitland. In truth, minds daily nourished with the best literature of Greece and Rome necessarily grew too strong to be trammelled by the cobwebs of the scholastic divinity; and the influence of such minds was now rapidly felt by the whole community; for the invention of printing had brought books within the reach even of yeomen and of artisans. From the Mediterranean to the Frozen Sea, therefore, the public mind was everywhere in a ferment; and nowhere was the ferment greater than in Scotland. It was in the midst of martyrdoms and proscriptions, in the midst of a war between power and truth, that the first century of the existence of your University closed.
Pass another hundred years; and we are in the midst of another revolution. The war between Popery and Protestantism had, in this island, been terminated by the victory of Protestantism. But from that war another war had sprung, the war between Prelacy and Puritanism. The hostile religious sects were allied, intermingled, confounded with hostile political parties. The monarchical element of the constitution was an object of almost exclusive devotion to the Prelatist. The popular element of the constitution was especially dear to the Puritan. At length an appeal was made to the sword. Puritanism triumphed; but Puritanism was already divided against itself. Independency and Republicanism were on one side, Presbyterianism and limited Monarchy on the other. It was in the very darkest part of that dark time, it was in the midst of battles, sieges, and executions, it was when the whole world was still aghast at the awful spectacle of a British King standing before a judgment seat, and laying his neck on a block, it was when the mangled remains of the Duke of Hamilton had just been laid in the tomb of his house, it was when the head of the Marquess of Montrose had just been fixed on the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, that your University completed her second century.
A hundred years more; and we have at length reached the beginning of a happier period. Our civil and religious liberties had indeed been bought with a fearful price. But they had been bought. The price had been paid. The last battle had been fought on British ground. The last black scaffold had been set up on Tower Hill. The evil days were over. A bright and tranquil century, a century of religious toleration, of domestic peace, of temperate freedom, of equal justice, was beginning. That century is now closing. When we compare it with any equally long period in the history of any other great society, we shall find abundant cause for thankfulness to the Giver of all good. Nor is there any place in the whole kingdom better fitted to excite this feeling than the place where we are now assembled. For in the whole kingdom we shall find no district in which the progress of trade, of manufactures, of wealth, and of the arts of life, has been more rapid than in Clydesdale. Your University has partaken largely of the prosperity of this city and of the surrounding region. The security, the tranquillity, the liberty, which have been propitious to the industry of the merchant and of the manufacturer, have been also propitious to the industry of the scholar. To the last century belong most of the names of which you justly boast. The time would fail me if I attempted to do justice to the memory of all the illustrious men who, during that period, taught or learned wisdom within these ancient walls; geometricians, anatomists, jurists, philologists, metaphysicians, poets: Simpson and Hunter, Millar and Young, Reid and Stewart; Campbell, whose coffin was lately borne to a grave in that renowned transept which contains the dust of Chaucer, of Spenser, and of Dryden; Black, whose discoveries form an era in the history of chemical science; Adam Smith, the greatest of all the masters of political science; James Watt, who perhaps did more than any single man has done, since the New Atlantis of Bacon was written, to accomplish that glorious prophecy. We now speak the language of humility when we say that the University of Glasgow need not fear a comparison with the University of Bologna.
A fifth secular period is about to commence. There is no lack of alarmists who will tell you that it is about to commence under evil auspices. But from me you must expect no such gloomy prognostications. I have heard them too long and too constantly to be scared by them. Ever since I began to make observations on the state of my country, I have been seeing nothing but growth, and hearing of nothing but decay. The more I contemplate our noble institutions, the more convinced I am that they are sound at heart, that they have nothing of age but its dignity, and that their strength is still the strength of youth. The hurricane, which has recently overthrown so much that was great and that seemed durable, has only proved their solidity. They still stand, august and immovable, while dynasties and churches are lying in heaps of ruin all around us. I see no reason to doubt that, by the blessing of God on a wise and temperate policy, on a policy of which the principle is to preserve what is good by reforming in time what is evil, our civil institutions may be preserved unimpaired to a late posterity, and that, under the shade of our civil institutions, our academical institutions may long continue to flourish.
I trust, therefore, that, when a hundred years more have run out, this ancient College will still continue to deserve well of our country and of mankind. I trust that the installation of 1949 will be attended by a still greater assembly of students than I have the happiness now to see before me. That assemblage, indeed, may not meet in the place where we have met. These venerable halls may have disappeared. My successor may speak to your successors in a more stately edifice, in a edifice which, even among the magnificent buildings of the future Glasgow, will still be admired as a fine specimen of the architecture which flourished in the days of the good Queen Victoria. But, though the site and the walls may be new, the spirit of the institution will, I hope, be still the same. My successor will, I hope, be able to boast that the fifth century of the University has even been more glorious than the fourth. He will be able to vindicate that boast by citing a long list of eminent men, great masters of experimental science, of ancient learning, of our native eloquence, ornaments of the senate, the pulpit and the bar. He will, I hope, mention with high honour some of my young friends who now hear me; and he will, I also hope, be able to add that their talents and learning were not wasted on selfish or ignoble objects, but were employed to promote the physical and moral good of their species, to extend the empire of man over the material world, to defend the cause of civil and religious liberty against tyrants and bigots, and to defend the cause of virtue and order against the enemies of all divine and human laws.
I have now given utterance to a part, and to a part only, of the recollections and anticipations of which, on this solemn occasion, my mind is full. I again thank you for the honour which you have bestowed on me; and I assure you that, while I live, I shall never cease to take a deep interest in the welfare and fame of the body with which, by your kindness, I have this day become connected.
…
RE-ELECTION TO PARLIAMENT. (NOVEMBER 2, 1852)
A SPEECH DELIVERED AT EDINBURGH ON THE 2D OF NOVEMBER, 1852.
At the General Election of 1852 the votes for the City of Edinburgh stood thus:
Mr Macaulay……..1872
Mr Cowan………..1754
The Lord Provost…1559
Mr Bruce………..1066
Mr Campbell………686
On the second of November the Electors assembled in the Music Hall to meet the representative whom they had, without any solicitation on his part, placed at the head of the poll. On this occasion the following Speech was delivered.
Gentlemen,–I thank you from my heart for this kind reception. In truth, it has almost overcome me. Your good opinion and your good will were always very valuable to me, far more valuable than any vulgar object of ambition, far more valuable than any office, however lucrative or dignified. In truth, no office, however lucrative or dignified, would have tempted me to do what I have done at your summons, to leave again the happiest and most tranquil of all retreats for the bustle of political life. But the honour which you have conferred upon me, an honour of which the greatest men might well be proud, an honour which it is in the power only of a free people to bestow, has laid on me such an obligation that I should have thought it ingratitude, I should have thought it pusillanimity, not to make at least an effort to serve you.
And here, Gentlemen, we meet again in kindness after a long separation. It is more than five years since I last stood in this very place; a large part of human life. There are few of us on whom those five years have not set their mark, few circles from which those five years have not taken away what can never be replaced. Even in this multitude of friendly faces I look in vain for some which would on this day have been lighted up with joy and kindness. I miss one venerable man, who, before I was born, in evil times, in times of oppression and of corruption, had adhered, with almost solitary fidelity, to the cause of freedom, and whom I knew in advanced age, but still in the full vigour of mind and body, enjoying the respect and gratitude of his fellow citizens. I should, indeed, be most ungrateful if I could, on this day, forget Sir James Craig, his public spirit, his judicious counsel, his fatherly kindness to myself. And Jeffrey–with what an effusion of generous affection he would on this day, have welcomed me back to Edinburgh! He too is gone; but the remembrance of him is one of the many ties which bind me to the city once dear to his heart, and still inseparably associated with his fame.
But, Gentlemen, it is not only here that, on entering again, at your call, a path of life which I believed that I had quitted forever, I shall be painfully reminded of the changes which the last five years have produced. In Parliament I shall look in vain for virtues which I loved, and for abilities which I admired. Often in debate, and never more than when we discuss those questions of colonial policy which are every day acquiring a new interest, I shall remember with regret how much eloquence and wit, how much acuteness and knowledge, how many engaging qualities, how many fair hopes, are buried in the grave of poor Charles Buller. There were other men, men with whom I had no political connection and little personal connection, men to whom I was, during a great part of my public life, honestly opposed, but of whom I cannot now think without grieving that their wisdom, their experience, and the weight of their great names can never more, in the hour of need, bring help to the nation or to the throne. Such were those two eminent men whom I left at the height, one of civil, the other of military fame; one the oracle of the House of Commons, the other the oracle of the House of Lords. There were parts of their long public life which they would themselves, I am persuaded, on a calm retrospect, have allowed to be justly censurable. But it is impossible to deny that each in his own department saved the State; that one brought to a triumphant close the most formidable conflict in which this country was ever engaged with a foreign enemy; and that the other, at an immense sacrifice of personal feeling and personal ambition, freed us from an odious monopoly, which could not have existed many years longer without producing fearful intestine discords. I regret them both: but I peculiarly regret him who is associated in my mind with the place to which you have sent me. I shall hardly know the House of Commons without Sir Robert Peel. On the first evening on which I took my seat in that House, more than two and twenty years ago, he held the highest position among the Ministers of the Crown who sate there. During all the subsequent years of my parliamentary service I scarcely remember one important discussion in which he did not bear a part with conspicuous ability. His figure is now before me: all the tones of his voice are in my ears; and the pain with which I think that I shall never hear them again would be embittered by the recollection of some sharp encounters which took place between us, were it not that at last there was an entire and cordial reconciliation, and that, only a very few days before his death, I had the pleasure of receiving from him marks of kindness and esteem of which I shall always cherish the recollection.
But, Gentlemen, it is not only by those changes which the natural law of mortality produces, it is not only by the successive disappearances of eminent men that the face of the world has been changed during the five years which have elapsed since we met here last. Never since the origin of our race have there been five years more fertile of great events, five years which have left behind them a more awful lesson. We have lived many lives in that time. The revolutions of ages have been compressed into a few months. France, Germany, Hungary, Italy,–what a history has theirs been! When we met here last, there was in all of those countries an outward show of tranquillity; and there were few, even of the wisest among us, who imagined what wild passions, what wild theories, were fermenting under that peaceful exterior. An obstinate resistance to a reasonable reform, a resistance prolonged but for one day beyond the time, gave the signal for the explosion; and in an instant, from the borders of Russia to the Atlantic Ocean, everything was confusion and terror. The streets of the greatest capitals of Europe were piled up with barricades, and were streaming with civil blood. The house of Orleans fled from France: the Pope fled from Rome: the Emperor of Austria was not safe at Vienna. There were popular institutions in Florence; popular institutions at Naples. One democratic convention sat at Berlin; another democratic convention at Frankfort. You remember, I am sure, but too well, how some of the wisest and most honest friends of liberty, though inclined to look with great indulgence on the excesses inseparable from revolutions, began first to doubt and then to despair of the prospects of mankind. You remember how all sorts of animosity, national, religious, and social, broke forth together. You remember how with the hatred of discontented subjects to their governments was mingled the hatred of race to race and of class to class. For myself, I stood aghast; and though naturally of a sanguine disposition, I did for one moment doubt whether the progress of society was not about to be arrested, nay, to be suddenly and violently turned back; whether we were not doomed to pass in one generation from the civilisation of the nineteenth century to the barbarism of the fifth. I remembered that Adam Smith and Gibbon had told us that the dark ages were gone, never more to return, that modern Europe was in no danger of the fate which had befallen the Roman empire. That flood, they said, would no more return to cover the earth: and they seemed to reason justly: for they compared the immense strength of the enlightened part of the world with the weakness of the part which remained savage; and they asked whence were to come the Huns and the Vandals, who should again destroy civilisation? It had not occurred to them that civilisation itself might engender the barbarians who should destroy it. It had not occurred to them that in the very heart of great capitals, in the neighbourhood of splendid palaces, and churches, and theatres, and libraries, and museums, vice and ignorance might produce a race of Huns fiercer than those who marched under Attila, and of Vandals more bent on destruction than those who followed Genseric. Such was the danger. It passed by. Civilisation was saved, but at what a price! The tide of popular feeling turned and ebbed almost as fast as it had risen. Imprudent and obstinate opposition to reasonable demands had brought on anarchy; and as soon as men had a near view of anarchy they fled in terror to crouch at the feet of despotism. To the dominion of mobs armed with pikes succeeded the sterner and more lasting dominion of disciplined armies. The Papacy rose from its debasement; rose more intolerant and insolent than before; intolerant and insolent as in the days of Hildebrand; intolerant and insolent to a degree which dismayed and disappointed those who had fondly cherished the hope that the spirit which had animated the Crusaders and the Inquisitors had been mitigated by the lapse of years and by the progress of knowledge. Through all that vast region, where little more than four years ago we looked in vain for any stable authority, we now look in vain for any trace of constitutional freedom. And we, Gentlemen, in the meantime, have been exempt from both those calamities which have wrought ruin all around us. The madness of 1848 did not subvert the British throne. The reaction which followed has not destroyed British liberty.
And why is this? Why has our country, with all the ten plagues raging around her, been a land of Goshen? Everywhere else was the thunder and the fire running along the ground,–a very grievous storm,–a storm such as there was none like it since man was on the earth; yet everything tranquil here; and then again thick night, darkness that might be felt; and yet light in all our dwellings. We owe this singular happiness, under the blessing of God, to a wise and noble constitution, the work of many generations of great men. Let us profit by experience; and let us be thankful that we profit by the experience of others, and not by our own. Let us prize our constitution: let us purify it: let us amend it; but let us not destroy it. Let us shun extremes, not only because each extreme is in itself a positive evil, but also because each extreme necessarily engenders its opposite. If we love civil and religious freedom, let us in the day of danger uphold law and order. If we are zealous for law and order, let us prize, as the best safeguard of law and order, civil and religious freedom.
Yes, Gentlemen; if I am asked why we are free with servitude all around us, why our Habeas Corpus Act has not been suspended, why our press is still subject to no censor, why we still have the liberty of association, why our representative institutions still abide in all their strength, I answer, It is because in the year of revolutions we stood firmly by our Government in its peril; and, if I am asked why we stood by our Government in its peril, when men all around us were engaged in pulling Governments down, I answer, It was because we knew that though our Government was not a perfect Government, it was a good Government, that its faults admitted of peaceable and legal remedies, that it had never inflexibly opposed just demands, that we had obtained concessions of inestimable value, not by beating the drum, not by ringing the tocsin, not by tearing up the pavement, not by running to the gunsmiths’ shops to search for arms, but by the mere force of reason and public opinion. And, Gentlemen, pre- eminent among those pacific victories of reason and public opinion, the recollection of which chiefly, I believe, carried us safely through the year of revolutions and through the year of counter-revolutions, I would place two great reforms, inseparably associated, one with the memory of an illustrious man, who is now beyond the reach of envy, the other with the name of another illustrious man, who is still, and, I hope, long will be, a living mark for distinction. I speak of the great commercial reform of 1846, the work of Sir Robert Peel, and of the great parliamentary reform of 1832, the work of many eminent statesmen, among whom none was more conspicuous than Lord John Russell. I particularly call your attention to those two great reforms, because it will, in my opinion, be the especial duty of that House of Commons in which, by your distinguished favour, I have a seat, to defend the commercial reform of Sir Robert Peel, and to perfect and extend the parliamentary reform of Lord John Russell.
With respect to the commercial reform, though I say it will be a sacred duty to defend it, I do not apprehend that we shall find the task very difficult. Indeed, I doubt whether we have any reason to apprehend a direct attack upon the system now established. From the expressions used during the last session, and during the late elections, by the Ministers and their adherents, I should, I confess, find it utterly impossible to draw any inference whatever. They have contradicted each other; and they have contradicted themselves. Nothing would be easier than to select from their speeches passages which would prove them to be Freetraders, and passages which would prove them to be protectionists. But, in truth, the only inference which can properly be drawn from a speech of one of these gentlemen in favour of Free Trade is, that, when he spoke, he was standing for a town; and the only inference which can be drawn from the speech of another in favour of Protection is, that, when he spoke, he was standing for a county. I quitted London in the heat of the elections. I left behind me a Tory candidate for Westminster and a Tory candidate for Middlesex, loudly proclaiming themselves Derbyites and Freetraders. All along my journey through Berkshire and Wiltshire I heard nothing but the cry of Derby and Protection; but when I got to Bristol, the cry was Derby and Free Trade again. On one side of the Wash, Lord Stanley, the Under- Secretary of State for the Foreign Department, a young nobleman of great promise, a young nobleman who appears to me to inherit a large portion of his father’s ability and energy, held language which was universally understood to indicate that the Government had altogether abandoned all thought of Protection. Lord Stanley was addressing the inhabitants of a town. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Wash, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster was haranguing the farmers of Lincolnshire; and, when somebody took it upon him to ask, “What will you do, Mr Christopher, if Lord Derby abandons Protection?” the Chancellor of the Duchy refused to answer a question so monstrous, so insulting to Lord Derby. “I will stand by Lord Derby,” he said, “because I know that Lord Derby will stand by Protection.” Well, these opposite declarations of two eminent persons, both likely to know the mind of Lord Derby on the subject, go forth, and are taken up by less distinguished adherents of the party. The Tory candidate for Leicestershire says, “I put faith in Mr Christopher: while you see Mr Christopher in the Government, you may be assured that agriculture will be protected.” But, in East Surrey, which is really a suburb of London, I find the Tory candidate saying, “Never mind Mr Christopher. I trust to Lord Stanley. What should Mr Christopher know on the subject? He is not in the Cabinet: he can tell you nothing about it. Nay, these tactics were carried so far that Tories who had formerly been for Free Trade, turned Protectionists if they stood for counties; and Tories, who had always been furious Protectionists, declared for Free Trade, without scruple or shame, if they stood for large towns. Take for example Lord Maidstone. He was once one of the most vehement Protectionists in England, and put forth a small volume, which, as I am an elector of Westminster, and as he was a candidate for Westminster, I thought it my duty to buy, in order to understand his opinions. It is entitled Free Trade Hexameters. Of the poetical merits of Lord Maidstone’s hexameters I shall not presume to give an opinion. You may all form an opinion for yourselves by ordering copies. They may easily be procured: for I was assured, when I bought mine in Bond Street, that the supply on hand was still considerable. But of the political merits of Lord Maidstone’s hexameters I can speak with confidence; and it is impossible to conceive a fiercer attack, according to the measure of the power of the assailant, than that which his lordship made on Sir Robert Peel’s policy. On the other hand, Sir Fitzroy Kelly, who is now Solicitor General, and who was Solicitor General under Sir Robert Peel, voted steadily with Sir Robert Peel, doubtless from a regard to the public interest, which would have suffered greatly by the retirement of so able a lawyer from the service of the Crown. Sir Fitzroy did not think it necessary to lay down his office even when Sir Robert Peel brought in the bill which established a free trade in corn. But unfortunately, Lord Maidstone becomes a candidate for the City of Westminster, and Sir Fitzroy Kelly stands for an agricultural county. Instantly, therefore, Lord Maidstone forgets his verses, and Sir Fitzroy Kelly forgets his votes. Lord Maidstone declares himself a convert to the opinions of Sir Robert Peel; and Sir Robert Peel’s own Solicitor General lifts up his head intrepidly, and makes a speech, apparently composed out of Lord Maidstone’s hexameters.
It is therefore, Gentlemen, utterly impossible for me to pretend to infer, from the language held by the members of the Government, and their adherents, what course they will take on the subject of Protection. Nevertheless, I confidently say that the system established by Sir Robert Peel is perfectly safe. The law which repealed the Corn Laws stands now on a much firmer foundation than when it was first passed. We are stronger than ever in reason; and we are stronger than ever in numbers. We are stronger than ever in reason, because what was only prophecy is now history. No person can now question the salutary effect which the repeal of the Corn Laws has had on our trade and industry. We are stronger than ever in numbers. You, I am sure, recollect the time when a formidable opposition to the repeal of the Corn Laws was made by a class which was most deeply interested in that repeal; I mean the labouring classes. You recollect that, in many large towns, ten years ago, the friends of Free Trade could not venture to call meetings for the purpose of petitioning against the Corn Laws, for fear of being interrupted by a crowd of working people, who had been taught by a certain class of demagogues to say that the question was one in which working people had no interest, that it was purely a capitalist’s question, that, if the poor man got a large loaf instead of a small one, he would get from the capitalist only a sixpence instead of a shilling. I never had the slightest faith in those doctrines. Experience even then seemed to me completely to confute them. I compared place with place; and I found that, though bread was dearer in England than in Ohio, wages were higher in Ohio than in England. I compared time with time; and I saw that those times when bread was cheapest in England, within my own memory, were also the times in which the condition of the labouring classes was the happiest. But now the experiment has been tried in a manner which admits of no dispute. I should be glad to know, if there were now an attempt made to impose a tax on corn, what demagogue would be able to bring a crowd of working men to hold up their hands in favour of such a tax. Thus strong, Gentlemen, in reason, and thus strong in numbers, we need, I believe, apprehend no direct attack on the principles of Free Trade. It will, however, be one of the first duties of your representatives to be vigilant that no indirect attack shall be made on these principles; and to take care that in our financial arrangements no undue favour shall be shown to any class.
With regard to the other question which I have mentioned, the question of Parliamentary Reform, I think that the time is at hand when that question will require the gravest consideration, when it will be necessary to reconsider the Reform Act of 1832, and to amend it temperately and cautiously, but in a large and liberal spirit. I confess that, in my opinion, this revision cannot be made with advantage, except by the Ministers of the Crown. I greatly doubt whether it will be found possible to carry through any plan of improvement if we have not the Government heartily with us; and I must say that from the present Administration I can, as to that matter, expect nothing good. What precisely I am to expect from them I do not know, whether the most obstinate opposition to every change, or the most insanely violent change. If I look to their conduct, I find the gravest reasons for apprehending that they may at one time resist the most just demands, and at another time, from the merest caprice, propose the wildest innovations. And I will tell you why I entertain this opinion. I am sorry that, in doing so, I must mention the name of a gentleman for whom, personally, I have the highest respect; I mean Mr Walpole, the Secretary of State for the Home Department. My own acquaintance with him is slight; but I know him well by character; and I believe him to be an honourable, an excellent, an able man. No man is more esteemed in private life: but of his public conduct I must claim the right to speak with freedom; and I do so with the less scruple because he has himself set me an example of that freedom, and because I am really now standing on the defensive. Mr Walpole lately made a speech to the electors of Midhurst; and in that speech he spoke personally of Lord John Russell as one honourable man should speak of another, and as, I am sure, I wish always to speak of Mr Walpole. But in Lord John’s public conduct Mr Walpole found many faults. Chief among those faults was this, that his lordship had re-opened the question of reform. Mr Walpole declared himself to be opposed on principle to organic change. He justly said that if, unfortunately, organic change should be necessary, whatever was done ought to be done with much deliberation and with caution almost timorous; and he charged Lord John with having neglected these plain rules of prudence. I was perfectly thunderstruck when I read the speech: for I could not but recollect that the most violent and democratic change that ever was proposed within the memory of the oldest man had been proposed but a few weeks before by this same Mr Walpole, as the organ of the present Government. Do you remember the history of the Militia Bill? In general, when a great change in our institutions is to be proposed from the Treasury Bench, the Minister announces his intention some weeks before. There is a great attendance: there is the most painful anxiety to know what he is going to recommend. I well remember,–for I was present,– with what breathless suspense six hundred persons waited, on the first of March, 1831, to hear Lord John Russell explain the principles of his Reform Bill. But what was his Reform Bill to the Reform Bill of the Derby Administration? At the end of a night, in the coolest way possible, without the smallest notice, Mr Walpole proposed to add to the tail of the Militia Bill a clause to the effect, that every man who had served in the militia for two years should have a vote for the county. What is the number of those voters who were to be entitled to vote in this way for counties? The militia of England is to consist of eighty thousand men; and the term of service is to be five years. In ten years the number will be one hundred and sixty thousand; in twenty years, three hundred and twenty thousand; and in twenty-five years, four hundred thousand. Some of these new electors will, of course, die off in twenty-five years, though the lives are picked lives, remarkably good lives. What the mortality is likely to be I do not accurately know; but any actuary will easily calculate it for you. I should say, in round numbers, that you will have, when the system has been in operation for a generation, an addition of about three hundred thousand to the county constituent bodies; that is to say, six thousand voters on the average will be added to every county in England and Wales. That is surely an immense addition. And what is the qualification? Why, the first qualification is youth. These electors are not to be above a certain age; but the nearer you can get them to eighteen the better. The second qualification is poverty. The elector is to be a person to whom a shilling a-day is an object. The third qualification is ignorance; for I venture to say that, if you take the trouble to observe the appearance of those young fellows who follow the recruiting sergeant in the streets, you will at once say that, among our labouring classes, they are not the most educated, they are not the most intelligent. That they are brave, stout lads, I fully believe. Lord Hardinge tells me that he never saw a finer set of young men; and I have not the slightest doubt that, if necessary, after a few weeks’ training, they will be found standing up for our firesides against the best disciplined soldiers that the Continent can produce. But these are not the qualifications which fit men to choose legislators. A young man who goes from the ploughtail into the army is generally rather thoughtless and disposed to idleness. Oh! but there is another qualification which I had forgotten: the voter must be five feet two. There is a qualification for you! Only think of measuring a man for the franchise! And this is the work of a Conservative Government, this plan which would swamp all the counties in England with electors who possess the Derby-Walpole qualifications; that is to say, youth, poverty, ignorance, a roving disposition, and five feet two. Why, what right have people who have proposed such a change as this to talk about–I do not say Lord John Russell’s imprudence–but the imprudence of Ernest Jones or of any other Chartist? The Chartists, to do them justice, would give the franchise to wealth as well as to poverty, to knowledge as well as to ignorance, to mature age as well as to youth. But to make a qualification compounded of disqualifications is a feat of which the whole glory belongs to our Conservative rulers. This astounding proposition was made, I believe, in a very thin House: but the next day the House was full enough, everybody having come down to know what was going to happen. One asked, why not this? and another, why not that? Are all the regular troops to have the franchise? all the policemen? all the sailors? for, if you give the franchise to ploughboys of twenty-one, what class of honest Englishmen and Scotchmen can you with decency exclude? But up gets the Home Secretary, and informs the House that the plan had not been sufficiently considered, that some of his colleagues were not satisfied, and that he would not press his proposition. Now, if it had happened to me to propose such a reform at one sitting of the House, and at the next sitting to withdraw it, because it had not been well considered, I do think that, to the end of my life, I never should have talked about the exceeding imprudence of reopening the question of reform; I should never have ventured to read any other man a lecture about the caution with which all plans of organic change ought to be framed. I repeat that, if I am to judge from the language of the present Ministers, taken in connection with this solitary instance of their legislative skill in the way of reform, I am utterly at a loss what to expect. On the whole, what I do expect is that they will offer a pertinacious, vehement, provoking opposition to safe and reasonable change, and that then, in some moment of fear or caprice, they will bring in, and fling on the table, in a fit of desperation or levity, some plan which will loosen the very foundations of society.
For my own part, I think that the question of Parliamentary Reform is one which must soon be taken up; but it ought to be taken up by the Government; and I hope, before long, to see in office a Ministry which will take it up in earnest. I dare say that you will not suspect me of saying so from any interested feeling. In no case whatever shall I again be a member of any Ministry. During what may remain of my public life, I shall be the servant of none but you. I have nothing to ask of any government, except that protection which every government owes to a faithful and loyal subject of the Queen. But I do hope to see in office before long a Ministry which will treat this great question as it should be treated. It will be the duty of that Ministry to revise the distribution of power. It will be the duty of that Ministry to consider whether small constituent bodies, notoriously corrupt, and proved to be corrupt, such, for example, as Harwich, ought to retain the power of sending members to Parliament. It will be the duty of such a Ministry to consider whether small constituent bodies, even less notoriously corrupt, ought to have, in the counsels of the empire, a share as great as that of the West Riding of York, and twice as great as that of the county of Perth. It will be the duty of such a Ministry to consider whether it may not be possible, without the smallest danger to peace, law, and order, to extend the elective franchise to classes of the community which do not now possess it. As to universal suffrage, on that subject you already know my opinions; and I now come before you with those opinions strengthened by everything which, since I last professed them, has passed in Europe. We now know, by the clearest of all proofs, that universal suffrage, even united with secret voting, is no security against the establishment of arbitrary power. But, Gentlemen, I do look forward, and at no very remote period, to an extension of the franchise, such as I once thought unsafe. I believe that such an extension will, by the course of events, be brought about in the very best and happiest way. Perhaps I may be sanguine: but I think that good times are coming for the labouring classes of this country. I do not entertain that hope because I expect that Fourierism, or Saint Simonianism, or Socialism, or any of those other “isms” for which the plain English word is “robbery,” will prevail. I know that such schemes only aggravate the misery which they pretend to relieve. I know that it is possible, by legislation, to make the rich poor, but that it is utterly impossible to make the poor rich. But I believe that the progress of experimental science, the free intercourse of nation with nation, the unrestricted influx of commodities from countries where they are cheap, and the unrestricted efflux of labour towards countries where it is dear, will soon produce, nay, I believe that they are beginning to produce, a great and most blessed social revolution. I need not tell you, Gentlemen, that in those colonies which have been planted by our race,–and, when I speak of our colonies I speak as well of those which have separated from us as of those which still remain united to us,–I need not tell you that in our colonies the condition of the labouring man has long been far more prosperous than in any part of the Old World. And why is this? Some people tell you that the inhabitants of Pennsylvania and New England are better off than the inhabitants of the Old World, because the United States have a republican form of government. But we know that the inhabitants of Pennsylvania and New England were more prosperous than the inhabitants of the Old World when Pennsylvania and New England were as loyal as any part of the dominions of George the First, George the Second, and George the Third; and we know that in Van Diemen’s Land, in New Zealand, in Australasia, in New Brunswick, in Canada, the subjects of Her Majesty are as prosperous as they could be under the government of a President. The real cause is that, in these new countries, where there is a boundless extent of fertile land, nothing is easier than for the labourer to pass from the place which is overstocked with labour to the place which is understocked; and that thus both he who moves and he who stays always have enough. This it is which keeps up the prosperity of the Atlantic States of the Union. They pour their population back to the Ohio, across the Ohio to the Mississippi, and beyond the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. Everywhere the desert is receding before the advancing flood of human life and civilisation; and, in the meantime, those who are left behind enjoy abundance, and never endure such privations as in old countries too often befall the labouring classes. And why has not the condition of our labourers been equally fortunate? Simply, as I believe, on account of the great distance which separates our country from the new and unoccupied part of the world, and on account of the expense of traversing that distance. Science, however, has abridged, and is abridging, that distance: science has diminished, and is diminishing, that expense. Already New Zealand is, for all practical purposes, nearer to us than New England was to the Puritans who fled thither from the tyranny of Laud. Already the ports of North America, Halifax, Boston, and New York, are nearer to us than, within the memory of persons now living, the Island of Skye and the county of Donegal were to London. Already emigration is beginning to produce the same effect here which it has produced on the Atlantic States of the Union. And do not imagine that our countryman who goes abroad is altogether lost to us. Even if he goes from under the dominion of the British Queen and the protection of the British flag he will still, under the benignant system of free trade, continue to be bound to us by close ties. If he ceases to be a neighbour, he is still a benefactor and a customer. Go where he may, if you will but maintain that system inviolate, it is for us that he is turning the forests into cornfields on the banks of the Mississippi; it is for us that he is tending his sheep and preparing his fleeces in the heart of Australasia; and in the meantime it is from us that he receives those commodities which are produced with most advantage in old societies, where great masses of capital have been accumulated. His candlesticks and his pots and his pans come from Birmingham; his knives from Sheffield; the light cotton jacket which he wears in summer from Manchester; the good cloth coat which he wears in winter from Leeds; and in return he sends us back, from what was lately a wilderness, the good flour out of which is made the large loaf which the British labourer divides among his children. I believe that it is in these changes that we shall see the best solution of the question of the franchise. We shall make our institutions more democratic than they are, not by lowering the franchise to the level of the great mass of the community, but by raising, in a time which will be very short when compared with the existence of a nation, the great mass up to the level of the franchise.
I feel that I must stop. I had meant to advert to some other subjects. I had meant to say something about the ballot, to which, as you know, I have always been favourable; something about triennial parliaments, to which, as you know, I have always been honestly opposed; something about your university tests; something about the cry for religious equality which has lately been raised in Ireland; but I feel that I cannot well proceed. I have only strength to thank you again, from the very bottom of my heart, for the great honour which you have done me in choosing me, without solicitation, to represent you in Parliament. I am proud of our connection; and I shall try to act in such a manner that you may not be ashamed of it.
…
EXCLUSION OF JUDGES FROM THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. (JUNE 1, 1853)
A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON THE 1ST OF JUNE 1853.
On the first of June 1853, Lord Hotham, Member for Kent, moved the third reading of a bill of which the chief object was to make the Master of the Rolls incapable of sitting in the House of Commons. Mr Henry Drummond, Member for Surrey, moved that the bill should be read a third time that day six months. In support of Mr Drummond’s amendment the following Speech was made.
The amendment was carried by 224 votes to 123.
I cannot, Sir, suffer the House to proceed to a division without expressing the very strong opinion which I have formed on this subject. I shall give my vote, with all my heart and soul, for the amendment moved by my honourable friend the Member for Surrey. I never gave a vote in my life with a more entire confidence that I was in the right; and I cannot but think it discreditable to us that a bill for which there is so little to be said, and against which there is so much to be said, should have been permitted to pass through so many stages without a division.
On what grounds, Sir, does the noble lord, the Member for Kent, ask us to make this change in the law? The only ground, surely, on which a Conservative legislator ought ever to propose a change in the law is this, that the law, as it stands, has produced some evil. Is it then pretended that the law, as it stands, has produced any evil? The noble lord himself tells you that it has produced no evil whatever. Nor can it be said that the experiment has not been fairly tried. This House and the office of Master of the Rolls began to exist, probably in the same generation, certainly in the same century. During six hundred years this House has been open to Masters of the Rolls. Many Masters of the Rolls have sate here, and have taken part, with great ability and authority, in our deliberations. To go no further back than the accession of the House of Hanover, Jekyll was a member of this House, and Strange, and Kenyon, and Pepper Arden, and Sir William Grant, and Sir John Copley, and Sir Charles Pepys, and finally Sir John Romilly. It is not even pretended that any one of these eminent persons was ever, on any single occasion, found to be the worse member of this House for being Master of the Rolls, or the worse Master of the Rolls for being a member of this House. And if so, is it, I ask, the part of a wise statesman, is it, I ask still more emphatically, the part of a Conservative statesman, to alter a system which has lasted six centuries, and which has never once, during all those centuries, produced any but good effects, merely because it is not in harmony with an abstract principle?
And what is the abstract principle for the sake of which we are asked to innovate in reckless defiance of all the teaching of experience? It is this; that political functions ought to be kept distinct from judicial functions. So sacred, it seems, is this principle, that the union of the political and judicial characters ought not to be suffered to continue even in a case in which that union has lasted through many ages without producing the smallest practical inconvenience. “Nothing is so hateful,” I quote the words of the noble lord who brought in this bill, “nothing is so hateful as a political judge.”
Now, Sir, if I assent to the principle laid down by the noble lord, I must pronounce his bill the most imbecile, the most pitiful, attempt at reform that ever was made. The noble lord is a homoeopathist in state medicine. His remedies are administered in infinitesimal doses. If he will, for a moment, consider how our tribunals are constituted, and how our parliament is constituted, he will perceive that the judicial and political character are, through all grades, everywhere combined, everywhere interwoven, and that therefore the evil which he proposes to remove vanishes, as the mathematicians say, when compared with the immense mass of evil which he leaves behind.
It has been asked, and very sensibly asked, why, if you exclude the Master of the Rolls from the House, you should not also exclude the Recorder of the City of London. I should be very sorry to see the Recorder of the City of London excluded. But I must say that the reasons for excluding him are ten times as strong as the reasons for excluding the Master of the Rolls. For it is well-known that political cases of the highest importance have been tried by Recorders of the City of London. But why not exclude all Recorders, and all Chairmen of Quarter Sessions? I venture to say that there are far stronger reasons for excluding a Chairman of Quarter Sessions than for excluding a Master of the Rolls. I long ago attended, during two or three years, the Quarter Sessions of a great county. There I constantly saw in the chair an eminent member of this House. An excellent criminal judge he was. Had he been a veteran lawyer, he could hardly have tried causes more satisfactorily or more expeditiously. But he was a keen politician: he had made a motion which had turned out a Government; and when he died he was a Cabinet Minister. Yet this gentleman, the head of the Blue interest, as it was called, in his county, might have had to try men of the Orange party for rioting at a contested election. He voted for the corn laws; and he might have had to try men for breaches of the peace which had originated in the discontent caused by the corn laws. He was, as I well remember, hooted, and, I rather think, pelted too, by the mob of London for his conduct towards Queen Caroline; and, when he went down to his county, he might have had to sit in judgment on people for breaking windows which had not been illuminated in honour of Her Majesty’s victory. This is not a solitary instance. There are, I dare say, in this House, fifty Chairmen of Quarter Sessions. And this is an union of judicial and political functions against which there is really much to be said. For it is important, not only that the administration of justice should be pure, but that it should be unsuspected. Now I am willing to believe that the administration of justice by the unpaid magistrates in political cases is pure: but unsuspected it certainly is not. It is notorious that, in times of political excitement, the cry of the whole democratic press always is that a poor man, who has been driven by distress to outrage, has far harder measure at the Quarter Sessions than at the Assizes. So loud was this cry in 1819 that Mr Canning, in one of his most eloquent speeches, pronounced it the most alarming of all the signs of the times. See then how extravagantly, how ludicrously inconsistent your legislation is. You lay down the principle that the union of political functions and judicial functions is a hateful abuse. That abuse you determine to remove. You accordingly leave in this House a crowd of judges who, in troubled times, have to try persons charged with political offences; of judges who have often been accused, truly or falsely, of carrying to the judgment seat their political sympathies and antipathies; and you shut out of the house a single judge, whose duties are of such a nature that it has never once, since the time of Edward the First, been even suspected that he or any of his predecessors has, in the administration of justice, favoured a political ally, or wronged a political opponent.
But even if I were to admit, what I altogether deny, that there is something in the functions of the Master of the Rolls which makes it peculiarly desirable that he should not take any part in politics, I should still vote against this bill, as most inconsistent and inefficient. If you think that he ought to be excluded from political assemblies, why do not you exclude him? You do no such thing. You exclude him from the House of Commons, but you leave the House of Lords open to him. Is not the House of Lords a political assembly? And is it not certain that, during several generations, judges have generally had a great ascendency in the House of Lords? A hundred years ago a great judge, Lord Hardwicke, possessed an immense influence there. He bequeathed his power to another great judge, Lord Mansfield. When age had impaired the vigour of Lord Mansfield, the authority which he had, during many years, enjoyed, passed to a third judge, Lord Thurlow. Everybody knows what a dominion that eminent judge, Lord Eldon, exercised over the peers, what a share he took in making and unmaking ministries, with what idolatrous veneration he was regarded by one great party in the State, with what dread and aversion he was regarded by the other. When the long reign of Lord Eldon had terminated, other judges, Whig and Tory, appeared at the head of contending factions. Some of us can well remember the first ten days of October, 1831. Who, indeed, that lived through those days can ever forget them? It was the most exciting, the most alarming political conjuncture of my time. On the morning of the eighth of October, the Reform Bill, after a discussion which had lasted through many nights, was rejected by the Lords. God forbid that I should again see such a crisis! I can never hope again to hear such a debate. It was indeed a splendid display of various talents and acquirements. There are, I dare say, some here who, like myself, watched through the last night of that conflict till the late autumnal dawn, sometimes walking up and down the long gallery, sometimes squeezing ourselves in behind the throne, or below the bar, to catch the eloquence of the great orators who, on that great occasion, surpassed themselves. There I saw, in the foremost ranks, confronting each other, two judges, on one side Lord Brougham, Chancellor of the realm, on the other Lord Lyndhurst, Chief Baron of the Exchequer. How eagerly we hung on their words! How eagerly those words were read before noon by hundreds of thousands in the capital, and within forty-eight hours, by millions in every part of the kingdom! With what a burst of popular fury the decision of the House was received by the nation! The ruins of Nottingham Castle, the ruins of whole streets and squares at Bristol, proved but too well to what a point the public feeling had been wound up. If it be true that nothing is so hateful to the noble lord, the Member for Kent, as a judge who takes part in political contentions, why does he not bring in a bill to prevent judges from entering those lists in which Lord Brougham and Lord Lyndhurst then encountered each other? But no: the noble lord is perfectly willing to leave those lists open to the Master of the Rolls. The noble lord’s objection is not to the union of the judicial character and the political character. He is quite willing that anywhere but here judges should be politicians. The Master of the Rolls may be the soul of a great party, the head of a great party, the favourite tribune of a stormy democracy, the chief spokesman of a haughty aristocracy. He may do all that declamation and sophistry can do to inflame the passions or mislead the judgment of a senate. But it must not be in this room. He must go a hundred and fifty yards hence. He must sit on a red bench, and not on a green one. He must say, “My Lords,” and not “Mr Speaker.” He must say, “Content,” and not “Aye.” And then he may, without at all shocking the noble lord, be the most stirring politician in the kingdom.
But I am understating my case. I am greatly understating it. For, Sir, this union of the judicial character and the political character, in Members of the other House of Parliament, is not a merely accidental union. Not only may judges be made peers; but all the peers are necessarily judges. Surely when the noble lord told us that the union of political functions and of judicial functions was the most hateful of all things, he must have forgotten that, by the fundamental laws of the realm, a political assembly is the supreme court of appeal, the court which finally confirms or annuls the judgments of the courts, both of common law and of equity, at Westminster, of the courts of Scotland, of the courts of Ireland, of this very Master of the Rolls about whom we are debating. Surely, if the noble lord’s principle be a sound one, it is not with the Master of the Rolls but with the House of Peers that we ought to begin. For, beyond all dispute, it is more important that the court above should be constituted on sound principles than that the court below should be so constituted. If the Master of the Rolls goes wrong, the House of Peers may correct his errors. But who is to correct the errors of the House of Peers? All these considerations the noble lord overlooks. He is quite willing that the peers shall sit in the morning as judges, shall determine questions affecting the property, the liberty, the character of the Queen’s subjects, shall determine those questions in the last resort, shall overrule the decisions of all the other tribunals in the country; and that then, in the afternoon, these same noble persons shall meet as politicians, and shall debate, sometimes rather sharply, sometimes in a style which we dare not imitate for fear that you, Sir, should call us to order, about the Canadian Clergy Reserves, the Irish National Schools, the Disabilities of the Jews, the Government of India. I do not blame the noble lord for not attempting to alter this state of things. We cannot alter it, I know, without taking up the foundations of our constitution. But is it not absurd, while we live under such a constitution, while, throughout our whole system from top to bottom, political functions and judicial functions are combined, to single out, not on any special ground, but merely at random, one judge from a crowd of judges, and to exclude him, not from all political assemblies, but merely from one political assembly? Was there ever such a mummery as the carrying of this bill to the other House will be, if, unfortunately, it should be carried thither. The noble lord, himself, I have no doubt, a magistrate, himself at once a judge and a politician, accompanied by several gentlemen who are at once judges and politicians, will go to the bar of the Lords, who are all at once judges and politicians, will deliver the bill into the hands of the Chancellor, who is at once the chief judge of the realm and a Cabinet Minister, and will return hither proud of having purified the administration of justice from the taint of politics.
No, Sir, no; for the purpose of purifying the administration of justice this bill is utterly impotent. It will be effectual for one purpose, and for one purpose only, for the purpose of weakening and degrading the House of Commons. This is not the first time that an attempt has been made, under specious pretexts, to lower the character and impair the efficiency of the assembly which represents the great body of the nation. More than a hundred and fifty years ago there was a general cry that the number of placemen in Parliament was too great. No doubt, Sir, the number was too great: the evil required a remedy: but some rash and short-sighted though probably well meaning men, proposed a remedy which would have produced far more evil than it would have removed. They inserted in the Act of Settlement a clause providing that no person who held any office under the Crown should sit in this House. The clause was not to take effect till the House of Hanover should come to the throne; and, happily for the country, before the House of Hanover came to the throne, the clause was repealed. Had it not been repealed, the Act of Settlement would have been, not a blessing, but a curse to the country. There was no want, indeed, of plausible and popular commonplaces in favour of this clause. No man, it was said, can serve two masters. A courtier cannot be a good guardian of public liberty. A man who derives his subsistence from the taxes cannot be trusted to check the public expenditure. You will never have purity, you will never have economy, till the stewards of the nation are independent of the Crown, and dependent only on their constituents. Yes; all this sounded well: but what man of sense now doubts that the effect of a law excluding all official men from this House would have been to depress that branch of the legislature which springs from the people, and to increase the power and consideration of the hereditary aristocracy? The whole administration would have been in the hands of peers. The chief object of every eminent Commoner would have been to obtain a peerage. As soon as any man had gained such distinction here by his eloquence and knowledge that he was selected to fill the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Secretary of State, or First Lord of the Admiralty, he would instantly have turned his back on what would then indeed have been emphatically the Lower House, and would have gone to that chamber in which alone it would have been possible for him fully to display his abilities and fully to gratify his ambition. Walpole and Pulteney, the first Pitt and the second Pitt, Fox, Windham, Canning, Peel, all the men whose memory is inseparably associated with this House, all the men of whose names we think with pride as we pass through St Stephen’s Hall, the place of their contentions and their triumphs, would, in the vigour and prime of life, have become Barons and Viscounts. The great conflict of parties would have been transferred from the Commons to the Lords. It would have been impossible for an assembly, in which not a single statesman of great fame, authority, and experience in important affairs would have been found, to hold its own against an assembly in which all our eminent politicians and orators would have been collected. All England, all Europe, would have been reading with breathless interest the debates of the peers, and looking with anxiety for the divisions of the peers, while we, instead of discussing high questions of state, and giving a general direction to the whole domestic and foreign policy of the realm, should have been settling the details of canal bills and turnpike bills.
The noble lord, the Member for Kent does not, it is true, propose so extensive and important a change as that which the authors of the Act of Settlement wished to make. But the tendency of this bill is, beyond all doubt, to make this House less capable than it once was, and less capable than the other House now is, of discharging some of the most important duties of a legislative assembly.
Of the duties of a legislative assembly, the noble lord, and some of those gentlemen who support his bill, seem to me to have formed a very imperfect notion. They argue as if the only business of the House of Commons was to turn one set of men out of place, and to bring another set into place; as if a judge could find no employment here but factious wrangling. Sir, it is not so. There are extensive and peaceful provinces of parliamentary business far removed from the fields of battle where hostile parties encounter each other. A great jurist, seated among us, might, without taking any prominent part in the strife between the Ministry and the Opposition, render to his country most valuable service, and earn for himself an imperishable name. Nor was there ever a time when the assistance of such a jurist was more needed, or was more likely to be justly appreciated, than at present. No observant man can fail to perceive that there is in the public mind a general, a growing, an earnest, and at the same time, I must say, a most sober and reasonable desire for extensive law reform. I hope and believe that, for some time to come, no year will pass without progress in law reform; and I hold that of all law reformers the best is a learned, upright, and large-minded judge. At such a time it is that we are called upon to shut the door of this House against the last great judicial functionary to whom the unwise legislation of former parliaments has left it open. In the meantime the other House is open to him. It is open to all the other judges who are not suffered to sit here. It is open to the Judge of the Admiralty Court, whom the noble lord, twelve or thirteen years ago, prevailed on us, in an unlucky hour, to exclude. In the other House is the Lord Chancellor, and several retired Chancellors, a Lord Chief Justice, in several retired Chief Justices. The Queen may place there to-morrow the Chief Baron, the two Lords Justices, the three Vice Chancellors, the very Master of the Rolls about whom we are debating: and we, as if we were not already too weak for the discharge of our functions, are trying to weaken ourselves still more. I harbour no unfriendly feeling towards the Lords. I anticipate no conflict with them. But it is not fit that we should be unable to bear an equal part with them in the great work of improving and digesting the law. It is not fit that we should be under the necessity of placing implicit confidence in their superior wisdom, and of registering without amendment, any bill which they may send us. To that humiliating situation we are, I grieve to say, fast approaching. I was much struck by a circumstance which occurred a few days ago. I heard the honourable Member for Montrose, who, by the by, is one of the supporters of this bill, urge the House to pass the Combination Bill, for a most extraordinary reason. “We really,” he said, “cannot tell how the law about combinations of workmen at present stands; and, not knowing how the law at present stands, we are quite incompetent to decide whether it ought to be altered. Let us send the bill up to the Lords. They understand these things. We do not. There are Chancellors, and ex-Chancellors, and Judges among them. No doubt they will do what is proper; and I shall acquiesce in their decision.” Why, Sir, did ever any legislative assembly abdicate its functions in so humiliating a manner? Is it not strange that a gentleman, distinguished by his love of popular institutions, and by the jealousy with which he regards the aristocracy, should gravely propose that, on a subject which interests and excites hundreds of thousands of our constituents, we should declare ourselves incompetent to form an opinion, and beg the Lords to tell us what we ought to do? And is it not stranger still that, while he admits the incompetence of the House to discharge some of its most important functions, and while he attributes that incompetence to the want of judicial assistance, he should yet wish to shut out of the House the only high judicial functionary who is now permitted to come into it?
But, says the honourable Member for Montrose, the Master of the Rolls has duties to perform which, if properly performed, will leave him no leisure for attendance in this House: it is important that there should be a division of labour: no man can do two things well; and, if we suffer a judge to be a member of Parliament, we shall have both a bad member of Parliament and a bad judge.
Now, Sir, if this argument proves anything, it proves that the Master of the Rolls, and indeed all the other judges, ought to be excluded from the House of Lords as well as from the House of Commons. But I deny that the argument is of any weight. The division of labour has its disadvantages as well as its advantages. In operations merely mechanical you can hardly carry the subdivision too far; but you may very easily carry it too far in operations which require the exercise of high intellectual powers. It is quite true, as Adam Smith tells us, that a pin will be best made when one man does nothing but cut the wire, when another does nothing but mould the head, when a third does nothing but sharpen the point. But it is not true that Michael Angelo would have been a greater painter if he had not been a sculptor: it is not true that Newton would have been a greater experimental philosopher if he had not been a geometrician; and it is not true that a man will be a worse lawgiver because he is a great judge. I believe that there is as close a connection between the functions of the judge and the functions of the lawgiver as between anatomy and surgery. Would it not be the height of absurdity to lay down the rule that nobody who dissected the dead should be allowed to operate on the living? The effect of such a division of labour would be that you would have nothing but bungling surgery; and the effect of the division of labour which the honourable Member for Montrose recommends will be that we shall have plenty of bungling legislation. Who can be so well qualified to make laws and to mend laws as a man whose business is to interpret laws and to administer laws? As to this point I have great pleasure in citing an authority to which the honourable Member for Montrose will, I know, be disposed to pay the greatest deference; the authority of Mr Bentham. Of Mr Bentham’s moral and political speculations, I entertain, I must own, a very mean opinion: but I hold him in high esteem as a jurist. Among all his writings there is none which I value more than the treatise on Judicial Organization. In that excellent work he discusses the question whether a person who holds a judicial office ought to be permitted to hold with it any other office. Mr Bentham argues strongly and convincingly against pluralities; but he admits that there is one exception to the general rule. A judge, he says, ought to be allowed to sit in the legislature as a representative of the people; for the best school for a legislator is the judicial bench; and the supply of legislative skill is in all societies so scanty that none of it can be spared.
My honourable friend, the Member for Surrey, has completely refuted another argument to which the noble lord, the Member for Kent, appears to attach considerable importance. The noble lord conceives that no person can enter this House without stooping to practice arts which would ill become the gravity of the judicial character. He spoke particularly of what he called the jollifications usual at elections. Undoubtedly the festivities at elections are sometimes disgraced by intemperance, and sometimes by buffoonery; and I wish from the bottom of my heart that intemperance and buffoonery were the worst means to which men, reputed upright and honourable in private life, have resorted in order to obtain seats in the legislature. I should, indeed, be sorry if any Master of the Rolls should court the favour of the populace by playing the mounttebank on the hustings or on tavern tables. Still more sorry should I be if any Master of the Rolls were to disgrace himself and his office by employing the ministry of the Frails and the Flewkers, by sending vile emissaries with false names, false addresses, and bags of sovereigns, to buy the votes of the poor. No doubt a Master of the Rolls ought to be free, not only from guilt, but from suspicion. I have not hitherto mentioned the present Master of the Rolls. I have not mentioned him because, in my opinion, this question ought to be decided by general and not by personal considerations. I cannot, however, refrain from saying, with a confidence which springs from long and intimate acquaintance, that my valued friend, Sir John Romilly, will never again sit in this House unless he can come in by means very different from those by which he was turned out. But, Sir, are we prepared to say that no person can become a representative of the English people except by some sacrifice of integrity, or at least of personal dignity? If it be so, we had indeed better think of setting our House in order. If it be so, the prospects of our country are dark indeed. How can England retain her place among the nations, if the assembly to which all her dearest interests are confided, the assembly which can, by a single vote, transfer the management of her affairs to new hands, and give a new direction to her whole policy, foreign and domestic, financial, commercial, and colonial, is closed against every man who has rigid principles and a fine sense of decorum? But it is not so. Did that great judge, Sir William Scott, lower his character by entering this House as Member for the University of Oxford? Did Sir John Copley lower his character by entering this House as Member for the University of Cambridge? But the universities, you say, are constituent bodies of a very peculiar kind. Be it so. Then, by your own admission, there are a few seats in this House which eminent judges have filled and may fill without any unseemly condescension. But it would be most unjust, and in me, especially, most ungrateful, to compliment the universities at the expense of other constituent bodies. I am one of many members who know by experience that a generosity and a delicacy of sentiment which would do honour to any seat of learning may be found among the ten pound householders of our great cities. And, Sir, as to the counties, need we look further than to your chair? It is of as much importance that you should punctiliously preserve your dignity as that the Master of the Rolls should punctiliously preserve his dignity. If you had, at the last election, done anything inconsistent with the integrity, with the gravity, with the suavity of temper which so eminently qualify you to preside over our deliberations, your public usefulness would have been seriously diminished. But the great county which does itself honour by sending you to the House required from you nothing unbecoming your character, and would have felt itself degraded by your degradation. And what reason is there to doubt that other constituent bodies would act as justly and considerately towards a judge distinguished by uprightness and ability as Hampshire has acted towards you?
One very futile argument only remains to be noticed. It is said that we ought to be consistent; and that, having turned the Judge of the Admiralty out of the House, we ought to send the Master of the Rolls after him. I admit, Sir, that our system is at present very anomalous. But it is better that a system should be anomalous than that it should be uniformly and consistently bad. You have entered on a wrong course. My advice is first that you stop, and secondly that you retrace your steps. The time is not far distant when it will be necessary for us to revise the constitution of this House. On that occasion, it will be part of our duty to reconsider the rule which determines what public functionaries shall be admitted to sit here, and what public functionaries shall be excluded. That rule is, I must say, singularly absurd. It is this, that no person who holds any office created since the twenty-fifth of October, 1705, shall be a member of the House of Commons. Nothing can be more unreasonable or more inconvenient. In 1705, there were two Secretaries of State and two Under Secretaries. Consequently, to this day, only two Secretaries of State and two Under Secretaries can sit among us. Suppose that the Home Secretary and the Colonial Secretary are members of this House, and that the office of Foreign Secretary becomes vacant. In that case, no member of this House, whatever may be his qualifications, his fame in diplomacy, his knowledge of all the politics of the Courts of Europe, can be appointed. Her Majesty must give the Admiralty to the commoner who is, of all her subjects, fittest for the Foreign Office, and the seals of the Foreign Office to some peer who would perhaps be fitter for the Admiralty. Again, the Postmaster General cannot sit in this House. Yet why not? He always comes in and goes out with the Government: he is often a member of the Cabinet; and I believe that he is, of all public functionaries, the Chancellor of the Exchequer alone excepted, the one whom it would be most convenient to have here. I earnestly hope that, before long, this whole subject will be taken into serious consideration. As to the judges, the rule which I should wish to see laid down is very simple. I would admit into this House any judge whom the people might elect, unless there were some special