else the movement may have implied, it reflected, at any rate, an intense dissatisfaction with things as they were. This can be traced from the closing years of the eighteenth century, and may be referred to two main causes-the first, a general feeling of injustice in the exclusive predominance of a privileged class; the second, a yet keener sense of immediate practical grievances.

The jealousy and mistrust on the part of those who are excluded from power, which is the nemesis of all class government, was exaggerated in the particular case with which we are concerned by the belief that the government was also a usurpation. It was a fixed and ineradicable idea of the middle-class reformers that the House of Commons had once been a popular assembly. They knew that every freeholder, previous to the year 1430, had been entitled to vote for the members of the shires; this they interpreted as equivalent to manhood (or, at least, to household) franchise, and they regarded the Act which confined the vote to 40s. freeholders as a deliberate and arbitrary limitation of a constitutional right. Their interpretation was erroneous, but it gave them an effective argument; it lifted every grievance into exaggerated relief, and, taken along with the notorious fact that the government was based upon corruption, it goaded the whole movement for reform into an almost ludicrous excess. The result was an indictment, which may be briefly

summarised as follows:-The aristocracy are a sort of joint-stock company, exploiting the nation for their own ends by the most questionable and discreditable means; the House of Commons is their instrument, stocked with the creatures of their will-'idle schoolboys, insignificant coxcombs, ledcaptains and toad-eaters, profligates, gamblers, bankrupts, beggars, contractors, commissaries, public plunderers, ministerial dependents, hirelings and wretches that would sell their country or deny their God for a guinea.'1 Working through such tools as these, the aristocraty have absolute control of the finance and the policy of the nation. Of this finance, the whole end and aim is to extort money from the poor in order to distribute it among the rich-'to draw money,' as Bentham puts it, 'out of the pockets of the blinded, deluded, unsuspicious, uninquisitive, and even too patient people,'' and to bestow it in the form of pensions and sinecures upon their own dependents and relatives. Parliament may, therefore, appropriately be styled the taxing thing,' and its members the 'tax-eating crew.'3 In the performance of this important function the one

1 Cartwright (Major John), Legislative Rights of the Commonalty Vindicated, introd., p. xii. ed. 1777.

2 Bentham's Works, vol. iii., p. 439. Cf. Paine's Rights of Man. · That all public men are corrupt,' says Romilly, writing in 1807, ‘and that the true interests of the country are disregarded in an unceasing struggle between contending factions for power and emolument, is an opinion spreading very fast through the country.'-Romilly, Memoirs, vol. ii., p. 211.

3 Cobbett, passim.

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object they keep in view is the maximum oppression of the people and the minimum inconvenience to the governing class. Land is, therefore, tenderly treated, for land is the property of the aristocracy; so are country mansions, for in them the aristocracy live; an income-tax is avoided, for to it the aristocracy must contribute, or, if it is imposed, it is abolished again on the first opportunity. Meantime, for the starving labourer not a single necessity is spared; he pays on his beer, his shoes, his candles, his soap, his tea, and his meat; his bread is raised to a famine price by the protective duties on corn, whose only object is to increase the rent that goes into the landlord's pocket; and if, in his distress, he is driven to kill a pheasant or a hare, he is hauled before a magistrate, who is also the owner of the game, and at a third offence may be transported for seven years.1

While such was the typical reformer's view of the domestic operations of the government, he was not less severe on their foreign policy. Here, too, he detected the same sordid ends and the same discreditable means. Did the aristocracy make war, it was to find pay for the army chiefs, or to suppress liberty abroad for fear it should assert itself at home. Did they found colonies, it was for the sake of the lucrative governorships. Did they

1 The case against the aristocracy is set out in full, more conveniently than elsewhere, in a work entitled The Extraordinary Black Book (1831). It does not fall within the scope of the present work to discuss the truth of the indictment there drawn up.

maintain a peace establishment, it was to secure and perpetuate their own ascendency. Why, for example, had they engaged in the great French war, that added five hundred millions to the debt? To protect the country against aggression? Το restore to France her king? Believe it if you will,' says Cobbett; it is not so that I am to be deceived! What they wanted was to prevent the landing, not of Frenchmen, but of French principles, that is to say, to prevent the example of the French from being alluring to the people of England. The devil a bit they care for the Bourbons. They rejoiced at the killing of the king. They rejoiced at the atheistical decree. They rejoiced at everything calculated to alarm the timid, and to excite horror in the people of England in general. They wanted to keep out of England those principles which had a natural tendency to destroy boroughmongering, and to put an end to peculation and plunder. Simply their object was this: to make the French people miserable, to force back the Bourbons upon them as a means of making them miserable; to degrade France, to make the people wretched, and then to have to say to the people of England: "Look there; see what they have got by their attempts to obtain liberty."" And why did they maintain a peace establishment after the war was done? To secure the defence of the nation? To guarantee

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1 Cobbett, Rural Rides, vol. i., p. 314, ed. 1885.

the peace of Europe? Not at all! But 'to enable them to return to all plans of reform, to all groans, to all complaints, to all cries for mercy, the proper and properly and already proposed answer-the bayonet! Yes, by the blessing of God, the bayonet!'1 And so with all their wars, with all their conquests and colonisations-one end, and one alone, has directed the whole conspiracy, to secure the position of the governing class, and to fill their pockets with gold. National honour? National duty? National necessity? Pshaw ! These are the cloaks and disguises, the cunning machinery of fraud ! The genuine principle was, and is, and will be, one and the same-the principle of Iago, 'Put money in thy purse!'

Enough has been said to indicate the general point of view from which the aristocracy was regarded by reformers of the middle class, and to account for the fierceness and vigour of the agitation. of 1832. But to hate an aristocracy is not the same thing as to love a democracy; and it still remains for us to inquire whether this revolt against the governing class was prompted exclusively by practical grievances, or whether it had also a theoretic basis in a democratic conception of the State.

The democratic theory had, in fact, been advanced from the very beginning of the movement for reform. As early as 1776 it was announced by Major Cartwright that 'freedom is the immediate

1 Bentham's Works, vol. iii., p. 437.