Such a change was on every ground most desirable. It was clearly in accordance with our parliamentary constitution that grants of money made by the Parliament should express distinctly and unmistakably the objects to which they were really to be applied; and that the charges of departments connected with the government, the administration of justice, or the foreign service of the country, should not be mixed up with others of a wholly different character, so as to make what was, in fact, the expenditure of the nation wear the appearance of being the expenditure of the sovereign. Moreover, the assignment of many of the charges to the Civil List even gave a false character to the appointments themselves. If a sovereign was to pay ambassadors and judges out of what seemed to be his private income, the logical conclusion could hardly be avoided that he had a right to lower those salaries, or even to diminish the number of those appointments. And it may even be said that the less any real danger of such a right being so exercised was to be apprehended, the more unadvisable was it to retain an arrangement which in theory could be described as liable to such an abuse.
Notes:
[Footnote 216: But it may be remarked that till very recently the people out-of-doors had ceased to show any great anxiety about Reform. Two or three years before, Lord Althorp, who, in Lord Grey's ministry, was Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons, told Peel that the people had become so indifferent to it, that he never meant to bring forward the question again, and in the last seven years only fourteen petitions had been presented to Parliament in favor of it. In reality, such a feeling in the people would have been eminently favorable to a calm framing of a Moderate measure; but this indifference was soon changed into a more violent and widely diffused excitement than there was any record of since the days of the Popish Plot; that excitement, however, according to the confession of the historian of the Whig ministry and the Reform Bill, himself an ardent reformer, being "no spontaneous result of popular feeling, but being brought about by the incessant labors of a few shrewd and industrious partisans forming a secret, but very active and efficient, committee in London."-Roebuck's History of the Whig Ministry, etc., ii., 309.]
[Footnote 217: In 1835 the two days were reduced to one.]
[Footnote 218: The creation of twelve peers, in the reign of Queen Anne, to secure a majority in favor of the Peace of Utrecht.]
[Footnote 219: "Constitutional History," iii., 331. See the whole passage.]
[Footnote 220: Lord John Russell had publicly described the language of the Tory Peers in the debate on Lord Lyndhurst's amendment as "the whisper of a faction." And many articles of most extreme violence which appeared in the Times about the same time were generally believed to have been written (in part at least) by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham.]
[Footnote 221: "Constitutional History of England," by Sir J.E. May, 1., 262.]
[Footnote 222: Elizabeth enfranchised no fewer than sixty-two in the course of her reign, "a very large proportion of them petty boroughs, evidently under the influence of the crown or the peerage."-Hallam, Constitutional History i., 360.]
[Footnote 223: Sir A. Alison, "History of Europe," xxiii., 55, quotes a paragraph from the Examiner newspaper, which says: "The ground, limited as it is, which it is proposed to clear and open to the popular influence, will suffice as the spot desired by Archimedes for the plant of the power which must ultimately govern the whole system. Without reform, convulsion is inevitable. Upon any reform farther reform is inevitably consequent, and the settlement of the constitution on the democratic basis certain."]
[Footnote 224: Hallam, "Constitutional History," c. xvi., in fin. ]
[Footnote 225: "Semper in republica timendum est ne plurimum valeant plurinn."-Cicero.]
CHAPTER X. Abolition of Slavery.-Abridgment of the Apprenticeship.-The East India Company's Trade is Thrown Open.-Commencement of Ecclesiastical Reforms.-The New Poor-law.-State of Ireland.-Agitation against Tithes.-Coercion Bill.-Beginning of Church Reform.-Sir Robert Peel becomes Prime-minister.-Variety of Offices held Provisionally by the Duke of Wellington.-Sir Robert Peel Retires, and Lord Melbourne Resumes the Government.-Sir Robert Peel Proposes a Measure of Church Reform.-Municipal Reform.-Measures of Ecclesiastical Reform.
Apart from the consideration of the abstract principle, on which the advocates of Parliamentary Reform had insisted, of the light of many classes hitherto unrepresented to representation, they had also dwelt on the practical advantage which might be expected to ensue from the greater degree in which public opinion would henceforth be brought to bear on the action of the Houses, and, by a natural consequence, on the administrative government also. And the bill had hardly passed when this result began to show itself, not only in transactions of domestic legislation, but in others which affected our most remote dependencies, both in the East and West. We have seen in a previous chapter how Wilberforce, after twenty years of labor and anxiety, reaped the reward of his virtuous exertions in the abolition of the slave-trade. But he had not ventured to grapple with the institution which gave birth to that trade, the employment of slaves in our West India Islands. Yet it was an evil indefensible on every ground that could possibly be alleged. It was not only a crime and an injustice, but it was an anomaly, and a glaring inconsistency, in any British settlement. The law, as we have seen, had been laid down as absolutely settled, that no man within the precincts of the United Kingdom could be a slave; that, even had such been his previous condition, the moment his foot touched English soil he became a free man. By what process of reasoning, then, could it be contended that his right to liberty according to English law depended on what portion of the British dominion he was in-that what was incompatible with his claims as a human being in Kent ceased to be so in Jamaica? The sentiment that what was just or unjust in one place was just or unjust in every place; that a man's right to freedom did not depend on the country of his birth or the color of his skin, had naturally and logically been widely diffused and fostered by the abolition of the slave-trade. It was but a small step from admitting that there could be no justification for making a man a slave, to asserting that there was an equal violation of all justice in keeping one in slavery; and this conclusion was strengthened by tales, which were continually reaching those most interested in the subject, of oppression and cruelty practised by the masters, or oftener by their agents and overseers, on the unfortunate beings over whom they claimed power and right as absolute as any owner could pretend to over any description of property. They made so general an impression that, ten years before the time at which we have now arrived, a society had been formed in London whose object was the immediate extinction of slavery in every British settlement; and Canning, then Secretary of State, had entered warmly into the general object of the society; not, indeed, thinking the instant abolition practicable, but inducing Parliament to pass a body of resolutions in favor of at once improving the condition of the slaves, as the best and necessary preparation for their entire enfranchisement;[226] and the next year, 1824, the subject was recommended to the attention of the Houses in the King's speech, and an Order in Council was issued enjoining the adoption of a series of measures conceived in the spirit of those resolutions, among which one was evidently meant as a precursor of the slaves' entire emancipation, since it gave the "negro who had acquired sufficient property" a title "to purchase his own freedom and that of his wife and family." And it was, probably, from regarding it in this light that the planters (as the owners of estates in the West Indies were generally called) selected that provision as the object of their most vehement remonstrances. But, though they were not so open in their remonstrances against the other clauses of the order, they did worse, they disregarded them; and the stories of the ill-treatment of the slaves were neither less frequent nor less revolting than before.