magnificent unity of the human race which is the sublime ideal of Christianity? Where is that serene atmosphere of common aspiration within which art lives and breathes, and excluded from which it perishes? It may be that a philosophy shall yet arise to minister to the imperious wants of the time, in which the restless searchings and strivings of modern thought shall be lulled into a repose far removed from apathy, which, admitting the Divine authority of revelation no less frankly than it accepts the ascertained facts of science, shall recognise in the universe a transcendent harmony equally remote from blank unity as from harsh duality, and which, seeking to learn while claiming to teach, the advance of knowledge shall modify, not destroy. But the conditions which would render possible such a renovation of intellectual life are, to all appearance, still far from realisation.

Art. VII.—A History of England from the Conclusion of the Great War in 1815. By SPENCER WALPOLE. In two volumes. London: 1878.

MR. SPENCER WALPOLE is doing for the nineteenth century

what Mr. Lecky has undertaken to do for the eighteenth. Both are marshalling political and social forces which are still in operation. Modern England, the England of these two centuries, scarcely yet perceives to what goal it is bound. It is of some use to analyse meanwhile the agencies which are propelling the nation. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cannot be dissected like the sixteenth and seventeenth. They are still living and breathing. If, however, we must watch and wait to surprise their secret, we have one supreme advantage for the search, that we are ourselves part of the organism. The history of such a period is like a drama on which the curtain has fallen, leaving the actors on the stage still engaged in rehearsing the catastrophe. But we too are among the players, though our part may not have been called yet. A century hence the seventeen years between the battle of Waterloo and the Reform Bill may be described with scientific precision. The kind of history which registers conclusions and not premisses is neither possible nor desirable in a generation which is not itself sure about the former and has not finished making the latter. No bird's-eye view can be taken of a period which existing lives more than cover. On the other hand, the historian of the nineteenth century is able to examine events almost in situ, and to cross-question his witnesses. Statesmen of the last

century could lament that no speech of Bolingbroke survived for the admiration of his contemporaries. We of this century know not only what Canning, and Peel, and Wellington, and Brougham, and Grey said, but how they said it, and how rival politicians listened to it. The partisan testimony of State papers must be scrutinised to reconstruct public life under the Stuarts. Even then we are never absolutely certain that the dry bones which have been articulated into a bird may not have been the framework of a mammal. In narrating the course of English politics since Waterloo, Mr. Walpole has by his side photographs of everything which was said, done, or even designed. The Times,' the Chronicle,' the Courier,' and the Post' were stereotyping acts and words; the makers of history were anticipating in the Edinburgh' and ' Quarterly' Reviews the campaigns of the House of Commons; Speaker Abbott was recording, night by night, how the rulers of men spoke of each other; day by day Mr. Greville was recording how they thought. To the historical value and accuracy of Mr. Greville's Journals' every page of these volumes bears a strong and independent testimony.

The end of the long struggle with Napoleon is a convenient epoch for the commencement of an historical narrative. The final triumph of Great Britain is more than an incident in the national fortunes. Its effects, however, were more negative than positive. It set the people free for the consideration of their own social and political condition. It relieved the finances from an intolerable burden. But the forces which revolutionised the country in the years which form the subject of Mr. Walpole's volumes began to work in the preceding century. The financial reforms which Huskisson, and Cobden, and Peel accomplished, were foreshadowed by Sir Robert Walpole, and might have been brought to pass by the younger Pitt. Pitt desired to emancipate the Catholics, and to extend the franchise. The war with France blurred the brighter prospect; it did not obliterate it. The writer of the history of England since the battle of Waterloo has to show how the mist gradually drew away, and the old landmarks of English liberties were revealed. It is always difficult to cut history into lengths. Lord Macaulay himself felt unable to set his readers fairly on the road along which he intended to guide them without reminding them of its starting-point. The nearer an historian approaches his own time the more impossible it becomes to assume a new departure where there was none. Mr. Walpole has found nearly four hundred pages only enough to introduce the seventeen years which are the theme of his two volumes.

Mr. Walpole begins with a survey of the state in which the downfall of Napoleon left Europe. George III. had succeeded to a magnificent throne. But a series of administrative blunders, and the young king's views of personal government, tarnished its splendours. Pitt, by his accession to power, converted a reign which threatened to make royalty odious into one of the most fortunate in our history. He abated the unconstitutional claims of a sovereign whose nominee he himself was; he projected large schemes of parliamentary and fiscal reform. Except for the dynastic league against France in which, in an evil hour for his country,' Pitt joined, he would have executed these noble plans. The Reign of Terror, and the applause bestowed by English zealots on the odious features in the French idea of popular liberty, scared the Minister from the side of political and commercial freedom. The first result was an enormous increase of debt and taxation. In 1791-2, which was the last complete year of peace, the revenue was rather more than 17,000,0007., and of this sum 9,310,0007. represented the charge of the National Debt. In 1800 a revenue had to be collected of 31,500,000l. in Great Britain, and of 3,000,000l. in Ireland. In 1815 taxation produced 78,600,0007. in Great Britain, and in Ireland 6,600,000l. But if the war imposed new burdens, its advocates might argue that it also gave new power to bear them. The plea may be admitted, though to a certain extent only. The war was of real advantage to landlords in raising rents. It was of use to farmers in securing them monopoly prices for their corn. Manufacturers and merchants gained by it also. In 1798, the first year in which an attempt was made to ascertain the value of the exports, the declared value of British and Irish exports exceeded 33,000,0007.; in 1815 it exceeded 49,000,000l. The English navy had cleared the seas of plunderers and competitors; and Manchester was beginning to clothe the world. For the true cause, however, of this commercial prosperity, we must look further back than the war. A marvellous series of inventions had already, before the war began, armed British manufacturers with means for using their monopoly to the utmost. All these inventions, of which each gave fresh importance to the others,' were enabling England to undersell the manufacturers of the rest of the world. Wellington's and Nelson's victories opened new markets to us; but men to whom, Mr. Walpole complains, custom and precedent only allowed 'inferior rewards,' had already afforded us the means of supplying them. The industrial movement which left Great Britain far the wealthiest of the nations at the close of the

contest with France was stimulated, but not produced, by the war. It had set in before the war, and was in some very important directions checked by the fiscal burdens which the war made necessary. If the war did not apparently retard the agencies which were heaping the land with riches, it was, as Mr. Walpole boasts, that a free people can triumph over the 'greatest difficulties, and prosper in a state of war which apparently made all prosperity hopeless.'

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An anti-revolutionary war did not deaden the English impulse towards material advancement. But it chilled the national aspirations after civil and moral progress. Subordinate sections of the population, or individual members of the governing classes in advance of their order, remonstrated against oppression and stolid resistance to change. But they exposed themselves to be taunted with a secret fondness for Jacobinism. This was the bugbear invoked by persons interested in supporting the existing system. The game laws were preserved in the interest of the landowners. In their interest the corn laws were maintained. They did not initiate that policy. This must be attributed to the economists of the seventeenth century, who taught that the land should be protected. But the landed interest proved an apt scholar. It insisted on a bounty upon exportation of home-grown corn, and prohibitory duties upon foreign corn, when prices fell below a certain rate. The prospects of peace consequent on the victories of 1813 lowered the value of gold, and the price of corn fell with it. Lord Liverpool was compelled to prohibit importation of all foreign corn when the price was below eighty shillings a quarter, and of all colonial corn when it was below sixty-seven shillings. The price of bread continually rose; in 1804 wheat averaged sixty shillings a quarter; in 1812 it was a hundred and twenty-six; yet agricultural wages stood at nine or ten shillings a week. Lord Byron declared in the House of Lords, in 1812, that in the most oppressed provinces of Turkey he had never beheld such squalid wretchedness as he had seen since his return in a Christian country.' The maintenance of a family at the current rate of wages was impossible, and wages had to be assisted out of the poor rate. In 1775 a million and a half was expended for the relief of the poor; in the three years from 1812-13 to 1814-15 the average sum was 6,123,1777. In 1811 1,040,000 persons received relief out of a population under ten millions. The law of settlement, which originated like most selfish measures, according to Mr. Walpole, in the reign of Charles II., chained the poor man to a particular locality. Paupers multiplied, and parishes resorted

to every imaginable shift to ease the burden. Sir Samuel Romilly wrote, in 1811, that the London parishes sent wagonloads of children at a time to Lancashire and Yorkshire cotton mills. The children began work at the age of seven, their hours of labour were fifteen, and sometimes seventeen.

With pauperism crime multiplied. The Legislature believed that society could be protected only by Draconian penalties. Sir James Mackintosh stated, in 1819, that two hundred felonies were punishable with death. He was once told by Burke that, although from his political career he was not entitled to ask any favour of the ministry, he was persuaded he had interest enough at any time to obtain their assent to a felony without ' benefit of clergy.' Hazlitt wrote: There are more people 'hanged in England than in all Europe besides.' A majority of those sentenced were reprieved; but it all depended on the temper of the judge. Lord Eldon defended the severity of the laws because it enabled judges to rid the world of hardened offenders. A natural consequence of the uncertainty of the punishment was that penalties lost much of their utility as deterrents. Transportation, the alternative of death, was inflicted more frequently, but operated as unequally. Male convicts welcomed transportation, and were accustomed to go off'shouting and rejoicing, as though some great achievement had been performed.' To a woman transportation had all the terrors of the unknown. It commonly meant ruin and degradation. During the voyage the female convicts notoriously lived in shameless intercourse with the sailors.' The law plunged multitudes of women into ruin and depravation for some offence against the revenue. Smuggling was the crime of which, as we learn incidentally from Lord Teignmouth's interesting Reminiscences,' the majority of the women who suffered transportation had been convicted. When a woman faced undaunted the terrors of a journey to the Antipodes, the law, in its beautiful uncertainty, did not always allow her the option. One wretched woman, who suffered death in 1815, was induced,' deposed Mrs. Fry before the Police Committee of 1818, to commit the offence for which she died from her great yearning to follow her husband, who had been transported for the same felony. But the judge thought it proper to make an example of the unhappy creature; and she atoned by her death on the gallows for her exceeding love.' Yet this judicial murderer was no Jeffreys, but probably a kindly gentleman who believed in a future state, and would have declaimed against the Bloody 'Assizes.'

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