of those numerous statesmen who believe the country must be saved if they receive twelve hundred a year." It is a peculiar class, Mr. Disraeli went on to say. "To receive £1200 a year is government; to try to receive £1200 a year is opposition; to wish to receive £1200 a year is ambition;" in fact, "£1200 a year, paid quarterly, is their idea of political science and human nature." Thus it happened that "the twelve hundred a year-ers were in despair about the king's death." What could the Conservatives do against the Whigs when they had "the young queen" for a cry? Something must be done. A dissolution without a cry would in the eyes of Tadpole and Taper be a world without a sun. Church and cornlaws and malt-tax together would not do. Church was "sulky" about the Commission, and everybody knew that the malt-tax was not going to be repealed. Day and night did Tadpole and Taper rack their brains for a good Conservative cry to go to the country with. One morning Taper presents Tadpole with a slip of paper, on which is written"Our young queen and our old institutions."

So far Taper and Tadpole. But this great political humorist now takes us to another scene, in which we discern the germ of Young Englandism. There is an election for Cambridge, and the Conservative candidate, who is an old Etonian, is victorious. Among the young Etonians who are at Cambridge there is naturally great throwing up of caps, and yet young Buckhurst, who has done much of the work, and is rejoicing at the triumph of "the Conservative cause," as he calls it, goes on to say, that if "any fellow" were to ask him what the Conservative cause was, he should not know what to say. Henry Sydney (who is intended for Lord John Manners) takes part in the ironical discussion which follows, and the general conclusion reached is that the Conservative government of that day was nothing particularly worth having. It must be remembered that we are quoting Mr. Disraeli sketching the state of things which existed at the king's death, and that he distinctly, speaking in his own person, claimed that "the Tory party was the natural popular political confederation of the country." All

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this must be borne in mind if we would intelligently follow the subsequent career of Mr. Disraeli, Sir Robert Peel, and Mr. Gladstone, and the manner in which "the condition-of-thepeople question" has kept itself uppermost for nearly two generations. What, then, does Mr. Disraeli at this time enumerate as the "notes" of the Conservative party? In his own words, "a crown robbed of its prerogatives" — this should be remembered "a church controlled by a Commission, and an aristocracy that does not lead." This last clause also demands special notice. "Under whose genial influence," says Henry Sydney, "the order of the peasantry, a country's pride, has vanished from the face of the land, and is succeeded by a race of serfs, who are called labourers and who burn ricks." Another of those young heroes of debate proceeds to say that the "Conservative cause" means, for one thing, that "the people are drudges. It yields everything to agitation; it does not enunciate a single principle, and it has established political infidelity throughout the land."

All this we are bound to record as matter of history, and especially on account of its connection with a noticeable movement, partly political, partly social, of which we may discern a hint in the part played by Henry Sydney (who, as has been explained, stands for Lord John Manners) in the discussion among those undergraduates nearly fresh from Eton.

But Mr. Disraeli was not the first man to discuss the "condition-of-the-people" question from the point of view that the English "aristocracy did not lead." Whether this was or is true or false, or what it should lead to if true, it is not the business of this outline of recent history to inquire; but we are for the present engaged in gathering up certain strands of influence or opinion with especial reference to the earliest years of a new reign, in which there was much vague and half-sentimental expectation of great and rapid change for the better, and much unloosing of tongues. A new voice was to be heard now; that, namely, of Mr. Carlyle, whose work entitled Chartism, published at this time, may be said to have flung bomb-shells into every camp of opinion, and to have spoken the watchword of a great

movement, universally admitted to have been beneficial, namely, the emigration movement.

It is not as a literary matter that this account

of recent progress has any immediate concern with Mr. Carlyle's book on Chartism, or any other of his writings, though as an influential man of letters he must find his place. But he was the organ outside of parliament (and indeed outside of all political action proper) of certain reactionary tendencies in public feeling, and no one has expressed them with half his force and singleness of purpose. This is admitted. In what is now to be said the point to be noted is, that the reactionary tendencies were facts, and that they have been smouldering on ever since at a slow rate of combustion, except when now and then they have broken out into flame.

Mr. Pitt and the Duke of Richmond, as is well known, attended, in no hostile spirit, meetings in favour of household suffrage and annual parliaments. These things do not, of themselves, belong either to a Tory, a Conservative, a Whig, or a Radical programmea point which will have to be remembered in estimating the political history of Mr. Disraeli from the time when he sat for Shrewsbury to the time when he introduced a reform bill which gave the right of voting to a much larger public than Earl Russell's bill had proposed to do. It is true that annual parliaments and universal suffrage became part of that Chartist demand to which we are now coming; but the point at bottom was nothing so mechanical-looking as any question of the duration of a parliament. The creed of the Tory or Conservative has always involved this, that it is the duty of the aristocracy, represented by the government, to guide and care for "the people." In its extreme form it meant, in the words of a certain nobleman, "the people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them." This is dead and gone; by universal consent it was buried in the graves of the Sidmouths and Eldons. But it will be seen that it was the direct opposite of what may be called the Whig-Radical programme which had now been in vogue for so many years, and was soon to be partially obscured in a Conservative reaction. The Chartist

wanted more power in order that " "government" might take more care of "the people." The Whig-Radical principle was laisser-faire, or let alone; that is to say, every man for himself; freedom of control not only between rich and rich, and poor and poor, but between rich and poor and all round. Labour shall have whatever wages it can get in an open market, and capital whatever interest it can get in an open market. To prevent utter anarchy (said this scheme) there must be some sort of poorlaw provision; but it is (said the Whig-Radical) only a compromise which we unwillingly come to, and we must pare down that provision to the very closest rind of help, sticking close to the labour test, and refusing, as a rule, out-door relief.

Now it is well known that this was not what "the people" wanted, and that they turned angrily on their Whig-Radical friends when they found that this was the programme. The "philosophical Radicals" vexed them even more than the mild old-fashioned Whigs, for they were ever so much more thorough-going in the application of the principle that every man is the proper guardian of his own interests; that for anybody else to attempt the care of them can lead to nothing but mischief; that government should do nothing for the citizen that the citizen can do for himself; that if he is poor, it is his own affair exclusively, and that if he has a larger family than he can help it is so much the worse for him, but no concern of any other human being.

As to this last point, however, there was sometimes an exception made. A few of the "philosophical Radicals" held - though the thing was pretty well kept under hatchesthat to have a large family was an offence against the common interest, and ought to be punished as a crime, like bankruptcy. Now we have already referred to the hatred called forth by the new poor-law in the mass of the people, but it is not easy at this distance of time to make it real to the imagination. The mass of agricultural labourers and artisans had not of themselves the requisite knowledge for following up things of this kind to first principles, but they had instructors both in

the

press

and otherwise. Speeches were made at public meetings and pamphlets published, as to which it was next to impossible to say whether the proposals were serious or not. Dean Swift's ironical scheme for killing the majority of the babies born in Ireland and using them as food,' was painfully suggested by these proceedings. Horrible as Swift's proposal seems, it was after all only a shocking jest; but now, at the very time when the young queen came to the throne, there were publicly made in print and at meetings serious proposals which, though they escaped the cannibalism, had no other superiority over Dean Swift's. All was to be done in due course of law. There was to be a public extermination of infants, or at all events a public registrar of exterminations; and there were to be public cemeteries, "adorned with trees and flowers," in which parents, particularly mothers, might take their walks abroad, and indulge a pleasing melancholy amid the memorials of the exterminated. To readers of the new generation this will perhaps appear like a bad joke, to which not even the quotations given by Mr. Carlyle in his Chartism will lend an air of gravity; but to readers of middle age it will be sufficient, if they have forgotten, to recall certain pamphlets publicly sold under such author-names as Marcus and Anti-Marcus. The effect of all this-and much more-upon the ordinary hard-headed uneducated poor man, who thought of little more than his victuals, and was always ready to use unquotable language about all government whatever, was bad enough in one way.

But

1 It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin-doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms... I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of children is, in

the present deplorable state of the kingdom, a very great additional grievance; and therefore whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, easy members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the public, as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation. therefore, humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I shall now,

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child, well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked,

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it had effects of a different kind upon men like the Rev. J. R. Stephens, a Wesleyan minister of the day. Mr. Stephens (who is only recently dead) was a man of genius and very beautiful character. As a speaker he was one of the most eloquent men that ever lived, and overcharged with most contagious fire. His violence of speech got him into the hands of the government, and this was perhaps a good thing both for him and the nation. For he was a man of the John Brown type, only more capable of making himself generally loved; and when a man of that stamp preached revolt, or something like it, in the name of God and Christ, it was time for the authorities to look about them. Under the influence of his eloquence strong men sobbed and shook, women fainted, and too often there would run through the assembly that awful sound, the hum or growl of execration. This is partly anticipating, but it is as well to show what "a dainty dish" was "set before the queen" on her accession or soon after it. It was not the fault of the baser (or sometimes the merely simpler and more earnest) class of agitators and enthusiasts, if the royal lady was not kept well posted up in the new ideas and schemes; for the current fancy in the heads of this sort of people was that everything should be sent " to the palace" in order that "the queen" might "know." How much was really sent nobody can tell, or how much was kept back by secretaries.

It was, as has been hinted, Mr. Carlyle who boldly laid bare some of the most unwelcome and startling facts of the "condition of Eng

or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasse or a ragout.

I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration, that of the hundred and twenty thousand children already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one-fourth part be males; that the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom; always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter. From A Modest Proposal for preventing the Children of the Poor People in Ireland from becoming a Burden on their Parents or Country, and for making them beneficial to the Public.

land" question, and gave, for the first time, a responsible and thoughtful utterance to the popular discontent. Great was the effect produced, not in parliament or in political organizations outside of it, but in touching the springs of social and political thought and feeling everywhere. It was he who boldly. and even savagely challenged the Radical economists to fight out their battle to the death upon the basis of what he called the Dismal Science (political economy); and whatever opinions a man might hold nobody could resist the force of the humour or pathos of the passages in Chartism and Past and Present, in which he gathered up facts well known to newspaper readers and annalists, and strung them together on a fresh thread of connection. Not many illustrations of the same order have been so frequently reproduced as the case of the poor woman who, being unable to get help, went and had typhus fever, and "proved her sisterhood" and her claim by infecting seven people. Again, his ridicule of the attempts made to prove that the distress of the people arose from over-production. "Ye miscellaneous, ignoble manufacturing individuals, ye have produced too much! We accuse you of making above two hundred thousand shirts for the bare backs of mankind. trousers too, which you have made, of fustian, of cassimere, or Scotch-plaid, of jane, nankeen and woollen broadcloth, are they not manifold? Of hats for the human head, of shoes for the human foot, of stools to sit on, spoons to eat with-Nay, what say we, hats or shoes? You produce gold-watches, jewelleries, silver-forks and epergnes, commodes, chiffoniers, stuffed sofas Heavens, the Commercial Bazaar and multitudinous Howel-and-Jameses cannot contain you. You have produced, produced; he that seeks your indictment, let him look around. Millions of shirts and empty pairs of breeches hang there in judgment against you. We accuse you of over-producing; you are criminally guilty of producing shirts, breeches, hats, shoes, and commodities in a frightful over-abundance. And now there is a glut, and your operatives cannot be fed !"

Your

What Mr. Joseph Hume, or Sir William Molesworth, or Sir Robert Peel would have

said to this in the House of Commons is not to the point, for we are not offering opinions, but listening to an exposition from a given side. But it is certain that the most intelligent men in parliament were on the side of "national education." The question was stated over and over again as part of the new programme of reform. "Captain Swing and Chartism having arisen, is there no official person who will stand up for the Alphabet,-who will say, 'Avaunt, ye gainsayers! Reconcile yourselves to the alphabet, or depart elsewhere."" This was instantly caught up as a cry, and yet it took us more than thirty years to reconcile ourselves to the alphabet.

In every direction there were now to be seen in England signs of a reversion to the old-world view of what is called "paternal government;" everywhere the masses of the people were showing that they wanted things done for them which the predominant political creed held they ought to do for themselves. It is not necessary here to do more than refer in passing to the long struggle that was now beginning, and that went on for many years, between those who were in favour of government interference with labour in factories and mines and those who were not. This is only one illustration of the ideas that really lay | underneath what was called Chartism. In the parliamentary debates the illustrations were abundant. It must not for a moment be supposed that the Chartist movement was mere Radicalism. To make this mistake would be utterly to misapprehend the course of events which it will fall to our lot to trace out more or less from this turning-point.

Two subjects now began to assume, as was natural, new colours and greater prominence, and upon these Mr. Carlyle was the first decided and unflinching speaker. One was what we call the organization of industry, and the imperative call upon manufacturers and capitalists of other kinds to become "captains of industry;" the other was the expediency of emigration upon a large scale under the guidance of "captains of emigration." One of the most striking passages in Chartism upon this subject became the key-note of much philanthropic effort, which, in connection with