Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 392, June, 1848

HOW TO DISARM THE CHARTISTS

The tempest which has lately passed over the moral world has begun to subside, – we no longer hear of empires revolutionised, monarchies overturned, by every post. The states which were to be prostrated by the blast have already fallen; those which have withstood the shock, like a cannon which has borne a double-shotted discharge, are only the more firm from having escaped uninjured from such a trial. France has been utterly revolutionised: Prussia, to all appearance, scarcely less thoroughly convulsed: Italy has been thrown into transports: the smaller states of Germany have, more or less, become republican: Austria has been violently shaken: the seeds of another bootless democratic convulsion sown in Poland. This is enough for three months. Even M. Ledru Rollin and Louis Blanc could scarcely, in their wildest imaginations, have figured a more rapid consummation of their wishes. But other states have stood firm. England, the firstborn of freedom, has shown herself worthy of her glorious inheritance: – she has repelled tyranny in the form of democracy, as she has repelled tyranny in the hands of kings. Russia is yet unshaken; – her people have responded to the call of the Czar, and are preparing on the Vistula for a crusade into western Europe. Belgium, contrary to all expectation, has withstood the tempter; the hordes sent down from Paris to carry desolation into its beautiful plains have been repelled with disgrace. Denmark has boldly thrown down the gauntlet to revolutionised and spoliating Prussia, and is striving to maintain its comparatively inconsiderable dominions against its gigantic aggressor; and even the rickety and half-revolutionised monarchy of Spain has survived the shock, and the streets of Madrid have witnessed the overthrow of a power which the arms of France proved unable to combat.

The worst, therefore, is over, considering the convulsion as one affecting the internal government and social concerns of nations. The wild-beast has made his spring: he has cruelly lacerated some of the party, but many have repelled his claws, and against others he has missed his blow. But, even more than that, we derive consolation from this reflection, that the force of the cosmopolitan and general transports has been weakened, and they are rapidly turning into their ordinary and comparatively regulated evils of war, conquest, and military devastation. The polyglot fervour, for the present at least, is stilled: the national are fast resuming the ascendency over the social passions. Prussia is at open war with Denmark, in the hope of wresting from it the German possessions of the Danish crown: Piedmont, Tuscany, and Lombardy are combating Austria on the Adige: Naples has declared war against Sicily, and Russia is only waiting till its gigantic strength is collected in Poland to crush the efforts of revolution in the Grand-duchy of Warsaw and Duchy of Posen. Thus revolution is leading every where to its natural and oft predicted result of universal hostility. The robbery of the weak by the strong, as in a nation where the authority of law is at an end, has become general. Spoliation is the order of the day. Nation is rising up against nation – people against people; civil war has already broken out in many parts of France – in others it is threatened: Paris is openly preparing for the conflict: and the reign of liberty, equality, and fraternity in France is, to all appearance, about to deluge the world with a stream of blood; second, perhaps, only to that which followed and punished the first revolution.

God forbid that we should speak lightly of the calamities which such general warfare must bring in its train. None know them better, or deplore them more deeply than ourselves. But they are light in comparison of the evils of successful revolution. War, even in its bloodiest form, is under some control; it is conducted according to fixed usages, and by men subject to discipline. But revolutions have no customs: happily they have not been so frequent in history as to have induced any consuetudinary usage. They are subject to no discipline; the principle on which they proceed is the negation of all authority. They are preceded by the destruction of all those barriers which experience had erected, and found necessary to restrain vice's baneful influence. If they bear any resemblance to war, it is to the universal burst of passion which follows the storming of a fortress or sack of a city. The murder, rape, and conflagration which then invariably ensue, are but faint images of the wide-spread ruin which never fails to follow even the least bloody successful revolution. The evils of pillage, massacre, or storm affect only the immediate sufferers under the soldiers' violence: even the dread of plunder by a victorious host extends only as far as the arm of the marauder can reach. But the shock to credit, the destruction of capital, the wasting of industry by a successful revolution, are confined to no such limits; it devastates like a conflagration every thing within its reach, and spreads its baneful influence over the whole extent of the civilised world. There are few operatives in Britain who are not suffering at this moment under the effects of the French revolution. Who ever heard of a war which, in two months, destroyed two-thirds of the capital of a nation, and subjected thirty-four millions of men to the despotism of two hundred thousand armed janizaries in the capital, as the recent revolution has done in France?

Delivered by the firmness of our government, and the spirit of our people – by the wisdom which centuries of freedom has diffused, and the habits which wide-spread and long-continued prosperity have rendered general – from the immediate dangers of a similar convulsion, it well becomes us to take advantage of the breathing time thus afforded, to consider how we may lessen the danger in future times, and remove those causes which rendered it serious in the crisis through which we have passed. It is in vain to conceal that the danger was very great. For the first time for a hundred and sixty years, Revolution walked our streets; a large portion of our manufacturing population looked only for the telegraph from London on the 10th April to commence the work of insurrection. That such insane attempts would have been defeated is indeed certain; but what unutterable misery to the persons engaged in them, and the whole industrious population in the realm, awaited the successful issue of treason, even for a brief period, and in a single city? If Glasgow had been three days in the hands of the mob after the 6th March; if a portion even of London had remained in the possession of the Chartists on the night of the 10th April; if Dublin had become the theatre of a second rebellion on the 17th March, and Sackville Street had witnessed the throwing of rockets and storming of barricades, as Elbœuf and Rouen have lately done, who can estimate the shock which would have been given to industry, the ruin to capital, the destruction of employment, that must inevitably have ensued throughout the empire? It would not have been – as was said of the failure of the potatoes in Ireland – a famine of the thirteenth, with the population of the nineteenth century; it would have been the horrors of the Jacquerie, decimating the myriads of ancient Babylon.

The democratic party throughout the empire have a very simple remedy for the evils which we have suffered and those we have escaped. They say, "Extend the suffrage." It has already become evident that it is to this point that all their efforts will be directed, and in a way more likely in the end to be successful than by the coarse weapons, false declamation, and monster meetings of the Chartists. Already an "Extension of the Suffrage League" has been formed in Manchester with Mr Cobden at its head; and its ramifications and efforts may be seen in simultaneous meetings called on the subject in Glasgow, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, and other manufacturing towns. There is the more reason to apprehend serious consequences from such a league from the habit which government, following Sir R. Peel's example, has got into of late years of yielding to any clamour soever, provided it is sufficiently loud and lasting. There is reason to fear, from some ominous hints that have been dropped in several influential Journals, particularly the Times, that it may be in the contemplation of government, by some concession in regard to the national representation, to allay, as they conceive, the discontent which has fostered Chartism in the manufacturing districts, and establish the legislature in a way more adapted "to the spirit of the age, and the growing intelligence of the people." It becomes of the last importance, therefore, to consider what it is of which the Chartists and discontented operatives really complain; what are the evils which have rendered their discontent general and alarming on the present occasion; and what effect an extension of the suffrage would have on the actual, and, we fear, deep-rooted seats of evil, which at present disturb the tranquillity and interrupt the industry, and may, in the end, endanger the existence of the British empire.

The grand practical object of complaint, on the part of the working classes at present, is want of employment. This is so general, at least in the manufacturing districts, that it may be regarded as all but universal in those who depend on the chief branches of paid industry. Statistical facts of unquestionable accuracy demonstrate that this complaint is too well-founded, and in no situations more so than in the chief marts of our manufacturing industry. The weekly returns, made with so much accuracy by the police in Manchester, have exhibited an average, for the last six months, of about 9000 operatives out of employment, and 11,000 working at short time;1 which, supposing there are only two persons on an average dependent on each, will imply above 27,000 persons out of employment, and 30,000 working short time. At Glasgow, matters are still worse. From inquiries made by the magistrates of that city, at the principal manufacturing establishments, with a view to furnish with information the deputation which was sent up to endeavour to procure some aid from government to restore credit and relieve the unemployed, it was ascertained that there are in that city above 11,000 persons out of employment, and 7000 working on short time, and 14,000 railway labourers on the railways connected with that city, who have been dismissed. Taking the ascertained and known unemployed at 25,000, and their dependents at 2 each, which is below the average of 2½, it is certain there are 75,000 unemployed persons in Glasgow and its vicinity. And if the unascertained poor, casual labourers, and Irish are taken into account, it is much within the mark to say, that there are A HUNDRED THOUSAND PERSONS IN GLASGOW AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD OUT OF EMPLOYMENT, besides at least twenty thousand working short time! So great and lamentable a prostration of industry is probably unparalleled in Great Britain.

What is in a peculiar manner worthy of observation in this deplorable prospect, is the universality of the depression. It is not confined to one branch of industry, or one employment; it spreads alike over all the urban population in the empire. Doubtless it is more severely felt in the manufacturing districts than elsewhere, from the entire dependence of industry in commercial localities on credit, and the fearful sensitiveness with which any shock to the monetary system is felt throughout the remotest ramifications of the mercantile world. But distress, more or less, in towns at least, is now universal. In Edinburgh the unemployed are increasing to such a degree, as to excite serious alarm in the better class of citizens. In Dublin, between general distress and repeal agitation, business is entirely at a stand; rents cannot be recovered, sales have ended; and the universal prostration resembles nothing known in recent times but the still more general and poignant distress which in Paris has followed the triumph of the revolutionists. London has suffered, as yet, much less than any other part of the empire from the general depression, because it is the seat of all the realised wealth and durable fortune of the empire: it is the place where money is spent, fully more than where it is made. But even in London, distress, wide-spread and serious, is beginning to be felt: the diminished expenditure of the West End is loudly complained of, and the incessant introduction of foreign manufactures is a standing subject of irritation to the operative classes. The revenue is collected slowly and with difficulty; and its diminished amount, showing a falling off of above two millions a-year, demonstrates that the permanent sources of our strength have at length come to be affected.

It is extremely remarkable, too – and to this point we in an especial manner request the attention of our readers – that the distress is felt much more strongly in the commercial than the agricultural classes. Indeed, were it not for the increased weight of poor-rates, owing to the manufacturing distress, the multitude of railway labourers thrown idle by the stoppage of their lines, and the number of land-holders who have had their finances crippled by the universal fall of railway and other shares, it may be doubted whether there would now be any agricultural distress in the empire at all. Where it exists, it is entirely the reflexion or re-echo, as it were, of commercial ruin. This is the more remarkable, that the only serious and real disaster which has affected the country since the depression began, has been the failure of the potato crop in 1846, which of course blasted, in the first instance at least, the labours of the cultivators only; and that the distress now felt as so poignant has been continued only, not created, by the French and German revolutions. Down to February last, no class had suffered by real external calamity but the farmers: and yet the distress which has become so extreme, has arisen not among them, but among the merchants and manufacturers. This, too, has occurred at a time when a great change has been made for the interest, and at the desire, of the commercial classes, in our foreign mercantile policy, – when free trade has been introduced, to cheapen bread, lessen the cost of production, and facilitate exchanges; and when the ruin which was anticipated from the measure was not to the commercial but the landed interest. This is one of the most remarkable circumstances in our present condition, and one on which it most behoves both our legislators, and all interested in their country's welfare, to ponder.

While this deplorable prostration of the interests of industry in all its manufacturing branches has taken place, no corresponding general decline in prices has occurred. The producer has in too many cases been ruined, but the consumers have not as yet at least been benefited. In some branches of manufacture, indeed, a most frightful depreciation of value has taken place. Silks, muslins, and ladies' dresses are now selling for half of what they were a year and a half ago. But that is the effect of the French revolution, which has thrown such an immense quantity of articles of this description into the British market, and of the unparalleled number of failures amongst ourselves, which have forced such prodigious masses of stock, belonging to sequestered estates, to sale. These bankruptcies, and the ruinous contraction of the currency which has occasioned them, afford too satisfactory an explanation of the depressed prices in most of the staple articles of British manufacture. But in those articles which are not so dependent on the maintenance of commercial credit, and in which the good effects of free-trade might have been expected to appear, unmitigated by its attendant disasters, no diminution of price is perceptible.

The last harvest was so fine, that a public thanksgiving was offered for the blessing; and it came on the back of the importation of £31,000,000 worth of foreign grain, or above 12,000,000 quarters in the preceding fifteen months: but the price of wheat is still 51s. a quarter, and that of oats and barley yet higher in proportion. Oxen and sheep, as well as all kinds of provisions, have been imported to an enormous extent during last year;2 so great, indeed, as to make the able writers in the Times apprehend that they had drained away the whole currency of the country in exchange; but butcher meat is still 7d. a pound. The West Indies are irrecoverably and finally ruined, but we are paying 5d. and 6d. a pound for our slave-grown Cuba and Brazil sugar. The Banker's Circular of May 2, 1848, asks whether there was ever heard of before a monetary crisis which "had lasted a year?" but no man, during that year of fine harvest, general peace, and universal suffering, has found that his household expenses have experienced the least diminution from what they were during the previous years of protected industry, wide-spread contentment, and unbroken prosperity. Free-trade is evidently driving some of the staple branches of British industry out of the field; one is expiring in the West Indies, another languishing in Manchester, a third tottering in Glasgow; and the diminution of home production keeping pace with the increase of foreign supply, prices remain what they were – domestic is superseded by foreign industry; and we shall have the satisfaction of finding that we have ruined many staple branches of our own manufacture without benefiting any class of our people.

It must be evident to every rational observer that this extraordinary and universal depression must have been owing to some cause within the control of the government of this country, and that neither external calamities, nor the inclemencies of nature have had any material share in producing it. Within the short period of three years not only was there no deficiency of employment in any part of the empire, but labour bore a high, in general an extravagantly high price in every part of the empire. Sir R. Peel in an especial manner dwelt on this general flood of prosperity which had set in upon the country in spring 1845, and ascribed it, and the diminution of crime with which it was accompanied, to the measures for liberating commerce from fiscal restraint, which he had introduced on his first coming into power. Since that time no external disaster or warfare has arisen, till the French Revolution broke out in February last, to account for the stoppage of employment, or the general misery into which the lower classes have fallen. We were at peace with all the world: our exports in the year 1845 had reached the unprecedented amount, including the colonial productions, of £150,000,000;3 and railways, penetrating the country in all directions, gave an extraordinary degree of employment to the working classes. In autumn 1846, it is true, Ireland and the West Highlands of Scotland were visited by a failure, amounting in many places to a total ruin, of the potato crop, which is said to have destroyed agricultural produce to the amount of £15,000,000 sterling. But though this great defalcation was the source of extreme distress to the cultivators who suffered by it, and to a certain degree diminished the general supplies of the empire, yet it could not be considered as the cause, by itself, of the wide-spread ruin which has since overtaken every interest in the empire. The agricultural productions of Great Britain are estimated by statistical writers at above £300,000,000 sterling annually, and the manufacturing and mining certainly exceed £200,000,000.4 What is a failure of £15,000,000 of potatoes in such a mass? Such as it was, the gap was more than supplied by the importation, in a year after it occurred, of £31,000,000, or double the amount in value, of foreign grain. The harvest of 1847 was so fine that a solemn thanksgiving was, with the general approbation of the nation, offered to Almighty God for its blessings. Prices have since been not excessive, wheat being at an average about 51s. a quarter – yet still, in May 1848, we are in universal distress; and the want of employment is felt much more strongly by the manufacturing classes, who have been affected by no disaster whatever, than the agricultural, who have suffered one which has now passed away.

While these are the social evils which the working classes every where experience, and which have alone rendered the Chartist movement general or serious in the country, the great complaint, in a political point, which they every where make is, that the legislature and the government are alike indifferent to their representations; that they turn a deaf ear to their complaints, show themselves insensible, to their tales of woe, and refuse even to give that moderate relief to them which is easily within their power, which a paternal government is bound to extend to its distressed subjects, and which, in former days, under Tory administrations, was never withheld from the people, when suffering under dispensations not approaching to the present in duration or intensity. To give an idea of the feeling now universal in the commercial and manufacturing districts, we subjoin an extract from a journal conducted with much ability, the Daily Mail of Glasgow.

"The household suffrage movement originates in a deep-seated conviction that the present legislature works ill. There are practical measures offered for its acceptance, which it rejects; and yet the feeling of the country is in their favour. Means of employing the idle are suggested; but by the government and by the parliament they are heedlessly neglected. Some crotchet in political economy is introduced into a plain matter of accounting; and meanwhile the people starve, because their sustenance, in the way proposed, is inconsistent with something that somebody has written in a book. There is an obvious insufficiency of food, of employment, and of investment in the country, while land languishes for lack of tillage; and when the plain remedy for these great deficiencies is pressed, there arises the ghost of long-past folly, waving its parchment before the legislature, and so the living are starved, in strict accordance not with the meaning but with the mistake of the dead. Free-trade is proclaimed to be the rule of our political practice by the same men who enact and maintain laws to fetter and reduce the circulation of the country, which is the life of its trade. We hear of free-trade with foreign countries, in which duties equal to twenty, thirty, and forty per cent are charged upon our products, although the existence of freedom of trade under these circumstances is absolutely impossible.

"The nation holds colonies in all quarters of the world, purchased and maintained at a costly rate, embracing every characteristic of soil and climate on the earth, competent to provide homes and sustenance for nearly the whole population of the world; and the legislature voluntarily casts away all interest to be derived from their progress, except its cost. The national affairs are managed on some kind of rule altogether different from any thing that a prudent man would adopt in the guidance of his private business; and so employment becomes scarce, and food dear together; while the natural and necessary results are, popular irritation, and a desire for change, which have led to the associations for extending the suffrage, now general throughout the great cities of the empire." —Glasgow Daily Mail, May 2, 1848.

There is too much foundation, all must admit, for these complaints. On occasion of the dreadful monetary crisis of October 1847, when ministers were compelled to break through the Bank Charter Act, and nearly all railway labour and mercantile industry in the country was suspended from the impossibility of finding funds to carry them on, the government were besieged with the most earnest memorials from the chambers of commerce in nearly all the commercial cities of the empire, and especially London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Edinburgh, pointing out the ruinous effects of the Bank Restriction Act of 1844; but still they did nothing. They contented themselves with appointing a committee, in which the bullionists were understood to have the majority, in parliament, which, after sitting long, and examining a host of witnesses, and burying the question under heaps of blue folios, will probably end by reporting a year hence in favour of the present system. The most vigorous remonstrances have been made by the same commercial bodies against the threatened abrogation of the Navigation Laws; but that has not in the slightest degree shaken the avowed determination of government, to carry the principle of free-trade without limitation into that vital branch of our national industry.