Crying for the Light: or, Fifty Years Ago. Volume 1 of 3

CHAPTER VII.
THE CHARTISTS

After the war with France, which culminated in Waterloo, England enjoyed a period of rest and repose; and she needed it, after her long struggle, which had robbed her of thousands and thousands of valuable lives, and heaped upon her a national debt under the burden of which she still groans. Then came a serious problem. The war over, what was to be done with the residuum, who, in the good old times, had been marched off to the tune of ‘The Roast Beef of Old England,’ or ‘Rule, Britannia,’ or ‘God save the King,’ to be food for powder, and to whiten with their bones half the battle-fields of Europe?

At Sloville the difficulty was much felt, till one or two capitalists selected it as the site for manufactories. It was in one of the midland counties, where collieries abounded, and where canals offer a cheap means of transit for manufactures. The place grew like Jonah’s gourd. In the twinkling of an eye it became a town. All at once the sky was darkened with black clouds of smoke, vomited forth by the mills, whilst long rows of red-brick cottages, utterly barren of interest and comfort, spread themselves over all the adjacent fields. For a time all was couleur de rose. The neighbouring landlords kept up their rents, and the farmers made a lot of money by supplying the town; the tradesmen found business increase with no efforts of their own. Everyone was making money, and if the poor were badly off, it was chiefly their own fault, as what wages they earned were too frequently squandered in the public-house.

But prosperity in this world is seldom of long duration. The markets were glutted, because the foreigner, who had only corn to send us to pay for our wares, was prevented by the Corn Laws from sending us his corn. At the same time we had a succession of bad harvests, and bread was almost as dear as in time of war. It is hard to be happy when you are hungry. Discontent is the natural result of starvation, and democratic newspapers and writers, who had never shown their faces in the place before, were in great demand. It was an awful sight to see the people sulking in the streets, starving in their wretched homes, cursing – in some of the lowest of the public-houses – all who were better off than themselves. ‘They were,’ they were told, ‘a down-trodden people, the victims of a haughty aristocracy, or of a bastard plutocracy, that had fattened on the blood and sinew of the white slaves.’ ‘Down with the capitalist!’ was the universal cry; and so the mills were burnt, as if by the destruction of workshops there would be demand for work. Soldiers were quartered everywhere. On every side was a rich class, face to face with a hungry people, rendered desperate by poverty, and want, and wrong.

Undoubtedly there had been bad times in Sloville before. The farmers, according to all accounts, never had been able to make both ends meet, and the poor had to live on the rates, a fact which rather increased than diminished the evil, as the people who had the most children got more than their fair share, and a pauper had a poor chance of decent wages, unless he at once got married, and begot as many sons and daughters as the rest. But now there was a real crisis, as the mills had stopped, and the manufacturers and capitalists went about with as long faces as the farmers. Unfortunately, just at this time, the leading banker in the place failed, or rather took himself off with his family to the Continent, leaving his creditors to suffer greatly for their misplaced confidence, many poor tradesmen and windows losing their all. A good many of the chapel people took it as a dispensation of Providence, and in many a place the event was improved in that way. The Lord was angry with them on account of the general wickedness of the town. A new leaf was to be turned over. There was to be less trust in man – less pride in human intellect – less confidence in the spread of intelligence – a better observance of the Sabbath – a more frequent attendance at the means of grace. A good many of Hannah More’s good-meaning tracts were reprinted and distributed gratis. Alas! the times were out of joint, and some of the people refused the tracts. They said they should prefer something to eat, and all pious Sloville turned from them in horror and despair. It was actually whispered that there were people in the place who had been seen reading Tom Paine, and were not ashamed to talk of the Rights of Man. It is not much to be wondered at that such was the case. In the old unreformed times, it was seldom that politicians, whether Whigs or Tories, took much notice of the state of the people. There was no law then to stand between the mercenary millowner and his white victim. The rich made the laws, and all that the people had to do was to obey. Labourers were even punished for combining to get decent wages if possible. Wentworth, as a young man, was especially touched with a sense of the hardships inflicted on the factory children and women. The Church – I mean by it the religious of all sects – stood by the masters. It was natural, but awful nevertheless.

‘Give these poor people,’ said Wentworth, ‘more food and more justice, and we shall have a better chance of making them Christians.’

The deacons did not see it in that light at all. They were shopkeepers, and did not want to offend their best customers.

Out of this burning and undying sense of wrong on the part of the poor naturally arose the Chartist agitation. Men were taught to believe that all the ills of life would vanish – that every man, however idle and indifferent in character, would have a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work, if they did but have annual parliaments, vote by ballot, the payment of members, equal electoral districts, and the abolition of the property qualification for members of Parliament. Orators laid hold of the people’s hearts as they waved and shouted for the Charter.

‘If you give up your agitation for the Charter, to help the Free Traders,’ said all of them, both on the platform and in the press, ‘they will not help you to get the Charter. Don’t be deceived by the middle classes again. You helped them to get votes; you swelled the cry of “The Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill;” but where are the fine promises they made you? Gone to the winds. They make dupes of you. That is all they aim at. They want now to get the Corn Laws repealed, and that not for your benefit, but their own. They cry cheap bread, but they mean low wages. They parade the big loaf before you, but, at the same time, you will find your share in it as small as ever. Don’t listen to their cant, and claptrap, and humbug. Stick to the Charter and Feargus O’Connor. You are slaves and fools if you don’t. Have votes, and then you will be your own masters. Down with the Whigs – down with the Corn Law Repealers – down with the mill-owners!’

Such were the favourite sentiments at Sloville. Nor is it much to be wondered at that men with empty pockets and bellies were ready not only to proclaim and believe such doctrines, but to fight, in their rough and imperfect way, for them. People of property were alarmed. The Government shut up a few of the leaders of the Chartists in gaol, though that did not make matters much better.

At Sloville, the poor people, instead of going to church and chapel on a Sunday, to listen to parsons who preached obedience to their betters, met to hear Chartist speeches and to sing Chartist songs.

‘Let us be patient,’ said one of the hearers, who had not outlived the religious teaching of his youth. ‘Let us be patient a little longer, lads. Surely, God Almighty will help us soon.’

Scornfully and loudly laughed his hearers.

‘Talk no more about thy God Almighty,’ was the reply. ‘There is not one. If there was one, He would not let us suffer as we do.’

In London and in all our large cities were men who felt deeply their misery and poverty, and were labouring earnestly for the removal of their wrongs and the attaining of their rights. But there were professional agitators as well, paid agents of agitation, many of them mercenary wretches, who fattened on this state of things – men who preferred to talk rather than earn an honest living. They made the best of their opportunity. Many of them were sots, and had a fine time of it in public-houses; few of their characters would bear a very close inspection. They travelled down into the country, and sowed seed, which fell upon prepared ground. It was truly sad to see the decent, sober workman, living at his best on starvation wages, keeping his wife and family, not by work, but by pawning every bit of household furniture, every superfluous article of apparel, dressing himself in rags.

‘Sunday come again, and nothing to eat,’ said one, while the poor babe sought its mother’s breast in vain.

‘Ah,’ said another, with a frenzied air, and with language too vehemently blasphemous to be repeated, ‘I wish they would hang me. I have lived upon cold potatoes that were given me these two days, and this morning I have eaten a raw potato from sheer hunger. Give me a bit of bread or a cup of coffee, or I shall drop.’

There were riots, of course, for men in that state had little to fear. Now and then a parson’s house was burnt down, or a magistrate had to fly for his life, or the agent of some great landlord or millowner was in danger. The orators worked up the passions of the people to fever heat. Now and then appeared on the scene a stray Irishman, with a tremendous tongue, or a wandering Pole, with the latest device for blowing up houses, setting fire to mills, or destroying the attack of a hostile force. There was much talk of a chemical composition by which London was to be fired in five places, and which would burn stone itself. These schemers and dabblers assumed to speak in the name of the Chartists, and the Chartists assumed to represent the people of England. Never was a greater sham than the agitation for the Charter. It was all wind and fury, and utterly brainless; the concoction of journeymen printers, patriotic tailors, heaven-taught stonemasons, and one or two Methodist preachers and obscure journalists, eaten up by vanity, and urged on by the belief that a revolution in England was impending, and that they were to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm. How they raved – like the madmen that they were – of the terror that would give wings to British capital to fly to other climes; of the middle-class population of our country, broken down by bankruptcy and insolvency; of the destruction of our commerce; of the awful doom of farmers, manufacturers, and landlords! We hear now of the bitter cry of outcast London; that is nothing to the cry that came from all parts of the country then.

It happened that just at this time there was to be a grand Chartist demonstration in Sloville. At any rate, so it seemed good to the editor of the Trumpet of Freedom, who found the sale of his paper falling off, and subscriptions for the national testimonial to be presented to himself not coming in so abundantly as he could wish. At any rate, the demonstration would serve to keep his name before the public, and that was something. Accordingly, the proper machinery was put in motion, and he got himself invited down, coming in a post-chaise – there were few railways then – with his secretary, as hungry a looker-out for power and pelf as himself. They put up at the best hotel in the town, and took good care not to starve either in the matter of eating or drinking.

The excitement in the place was intense. There was a lean and hungry mob all day long opposite the hotel, to cheer the great man whenever he came to the door or put out his head at the window. The local leaders seemed as busy as if the nation’s welfare depended on them. Angry posters glared on you from every wall, which the police in vain tried to pull down. The great London newspapers sent down reporters; and not a little was the indignation aroused when a myrmidon of the law managed to serve the editor with a writ for debt, which was explained to be a political dodge on the part of the Government to muzzle the great man himself, whose invective on the subject it did all the people good to hear.

The Whigs were denounced as base, bloody, and brutal; the Tories were the devils in hell. The time had come for tyrants and oppressors to tremble. Sloville was to be the first to raise the standard, to strike off its fetters, to emancipate the country from the grasp of a hireling soldiery, a tithe-fed clergy, and a bloated aristocracy.

There was a good deal of brandy-and-water in the posters, and there was a good deal of the same refreshing beverage in the speeches of the orators. A Chartist tailor took the chair – a man who had at one time done well, but who, since he had taken to politics and drink, had lost all his business, and who naturally cast an envious eye on his more successful fellow-tradesmen. He hinted at a plan for the equal division of property, which was received with immense applause, and which he assured his intelligent hearers would be realized as soon as the Charter was the law of the land.

A Chartist shoemaker followed. At home he was a terrible tyrant, dreaded by his much-suffering wife and his much-to-be-pitied children: but that was no reason why he should not denounce the tyranny of Government, which he did at some length, and with much physical exaggeration and emphasis, to his own delight and that of his hearers.

You could easily detect the Chartists in the town. They were not the best workmen, but they were the best supporters of the publicans, who at that time had not ventured to raise the cry of Beer and the Bible. However, on the night of the meeting – which was in the open air – all the workmen in the place, good or bad, Chartist or not, assembled in considerable numbers. The British operative is wonderfully influenced by the gift of the gab. It always fetches him, as Artemus Ward would say. He is not, as a rule, much of an orator himself, and fluent and fervid declamation sooner makes a fool of him than it does of the rest of the community.

The editor of the Trumpet of Freedom was aware of this failing of the working-class, of whom he constituted himself the champion, and was able to supply them with any amount of the article in question. If he was poor in ideas he was rich in words, in that respect being gifted almost as much as an Irish orator. I need not give the particulars of his speech. It was one he had often made before, and of a character very common before the Corn Laws were repealed, when the Tories were playing the game of the Chartists, and contending for all the abuses which the latter pointed to as illustrations of the need of their famous remedy for all the evils to which political flesh is heir.

The speaker was particularly severe on the lazy lives of the parsons, and the way in which they humbugged the people. They were charged with every crime. They were none of them righteous, no, not one. If a profligate prince reigned, who more fulsome in his praise than the Bishops? If a profligate war was to be carried on – a war which was to slaughter thousands of honest lads, and to reduce thousands of homes to wretchedness and want – did not the Bishops consecrate the banners, and offer up the mockery of a prayer to heaven, as if God approved of such wanton slaughter? Did they not always vote against the interests of the public? Every parson was a robber of the poor. Did they not take the tithes? Did they not take the part of the rich against the poor? Did not they preach submission to the powers that be? Did they not drive the wretched voters, at election times, to vote for the Tories? ‘Down with the parsons!’ said the speaker, and the cry was repeated angrily by the mob. Some said, ‘More pigs and fewer parsons’; others hinted it would be as well to march to the Rectory, and to taste some of the Rector’s old port; others that there would be no great harm if they were to burn down his house and hunt him out of the town.

Just as the mob were on the point of being goaded to the verge of madness by the London orator, the young man from Bethesda Chapel, as he was called, claimed to be heard. At first he was received with disfavour. He was a stranger to them all. That was against him. It was still more against him that he had on a black coat and a white choker. A still further offence was it that his tone was that of a gentleman. Angry words were heard. He was a spy – a Government informer – a wolf in sheep’s clothing – and ought to be ducked in the nearest horse-pond. It was urged that he might be permitted to speak, in order that he might show what a fool he was. The London orator especially headed all these anti-sympathetic demonstrations.

‘I am a parson,’ said Mr. Wentworth – then there was a tremendous burst of indignation – ‘and I come here to show that a parson may feel for a poor man, and may aid him in his efforts to obtain political power. It is not all parsons who take tithes, but if you would abolish tithes to-morrow, the only effect would be that the landlord would be richer, that is all, as the difference would only go into the landlord’s pocket; but I come here to say, with you, that you must have political power; that it is unjust and unfair to deprive you of it; and I say so because I am a firm believer in a book which is very unpopular here, called the Bible. It is because I read that book that I wish you well. My Bible tells me that I “must love my neighbour as myself”; that I must do to others as I would have others do to me; and how can I do this so long as we have class legislation, and injustice, upheld in the name of law? I deny the right of Government to exclude you from the franchise. I agree with much that has been said. There are abuses to be remedied. There are rights to be gained. In the past you have had unjust treatment, partly owing to your own ignorance and partly to the selfishness of your rulers. You have been refused education; you have been reduced to the condition of serfs; you have been unfairly taxed; you have been denied the chance of getting an honest living; you have been sacrificed to high rents; and I think the parsons are much to blame that they have not more openly taken your part. They have been too prone rather to ask you to submit to what they call the dispensation of Providence than to assist you in your righteous efforts to get rid of bad laws and to secure better. It is to be feared that, in some respects, you have acted indiscreetly. Why turn friends into enemies by the bitterness of your invective and by the absurdity of your exaggerations?’ Here there were signs of disapproval. ‘You have been badly advised.’ (‘No, no!’) ‘You are too easily made the dupe of the designing demagogue.’ Here the London orator grew very angry, and resented the attack as personal, as perhaps it was. ‘By the violence of your attacks on those who are ready to help you, you make the gulf between you and your true friends, the Liberals, greater than it really is. Especially do you made a terrible blunder,’ continued the orator, ‘when you assume that Christianity and priestcraft are the same, and that in this respect all parsons are alike, whether they be of the Church of Rome, or of the Church of England, or Wesleyans, or Baptists, or Independents. The Master whom I serve, and whose Gospel I preach, was as poor as most of you; was the son of a carpenter; was born in a manger; had not where to lay His head; lived a life of poverty; died a death of shame. In His life and death I see the Charter of your Freedom and my own. In His promises you have solace and support in the bitterest of your sufferings, under the most grievous of your wrongs. You can have no truer friend, no nobler guide. He can make sorrow and suffering such as yours light as no one else can.’

Then the attention of the hearers relaxed. ‘They had not come there to hear a sermon,’ they said. One Freethinker went so far as to shake his fist at the speaker, while another enlightened hearer tried to make a grab at the orator’s coat-tail, in the hope to pull him down. Nevertheless, the speaker continued:

‘To a great extent I, and most Dissenting parsons, at any rate, sympathize with you. We are quite ready to go with you at any rate part of the way; but you frighten us when you talk of physical force. “They that use the sword shall perish by the sword.” What could they do against a disciplined military force? Mightier far is the force of an enlightened public opinion. You can gain nothing by violence. You can’t master the soldiers and the constables, and you will array against yourselves a public opinion which would otherwise be compelled to listen to your claims, and to treat them with the attention they deserve. Many of the leaders in politics admit them; many members of the House of Commons admit them; many of the aristocracy are coming to your side. We have on the throne a young Queen, who has a woman’s heart of tenderness for all that suffer. By rashness, by injudicious action, by unwise invective, you may play into the hands of your enemies, and thus put back the hour of your triumph for another generation at least.’

Then there was a howl which rendered further speaking impossible. The crowd was split into two parties, those who admired the young parson’s sense and pluck, and those who followed the Chartist agitators, who had their own ends to serve, and their own ways of attaining them. The speech had, to a certain extent, damaged them, inasmuch as it was clear many of the respectable operatives present sided with the speaker. The chairman, the committee, the editor from London, were as angry as they could well be. The effect of what was to have been a mighty demonstration was destroyed. It was feared the subscriptions would fall off. It was true, in the next week’s list, ‘Junius Brutus’ was down for a shilling, and ‘A Hater of Tyrants’ for eighteenpence, and others for a few sums equally small; but these were a poor response to the chairman’s appeal. In that same number of the Trumpet of Freedom was a very scorching article on the jackanapes of an Independent parson. There is a great advantage in being an editor. An editor has always the last word.

‘There goes the scorpiant,’ said the chairman, as Mr. Wentworth passed him, at the end of the meeting. ‘There goes the scorpiant.’

‘Scorpion, I presume you mean,’ said the individual alluded to.

‘No, I don’t,’ repeated the chairman angrily. ‘You are a scorpiant; that’s what I said, and that I’ll stick to.’

Said another, whose few wits had been lost in beer, he’d ‘as soon put the parson in the horse-pond as look at him.’

The gathering storm Wentworth took as a signal to retire. At the outside women were weeping and shivering in the cold. They were the wives of the Chartist committee-men, who sat nightly in the public-house, spending money which the poor deserted wives and mothers sorely needed at home. It was a grievous sight, and the young parson grieved to think how little he could do to remove the evil which existed all round. Suddenly he found himself addressed by a young woman, whose fresh, girlish face of beauty was a contrast to the weary and despairing faces that met him on every side.

‘Oh, sir,’ said she enthusiastically, ‘if you could but get the men to listen to you, how much better it would be for them! The poor fellows need a friend.’

It seemed to Wentworth as if a ray of sunlight had suddenly appeared. Naturally the young parson turned round to look at the speaker; but, startled at her audacity, the beautiful girl had suddenly disappeared, and the next face that met him wore a very different expression. If one face was a sunbeam the other was a thundercloud. It was the face of the senior deacon. For a long time after, however, the memory of that fair girl’s face haunted Wentworth as a dream. Seeing that a storm was rising, he asked the senior deacon, in his blandest tones, how he was. Harshly as a nutmeg-grater, the senior deacon replied that he was as well as could be expected, considering the state that the town was in. Severely looking at the parson, he added:

‘We missed you to-night, sir.’

‘Oh yes, at the prayer meeting. I had intended to be present, though. I find I made a sad mistake on the last occasion. You know I called on Mr. B.’ – naming one of the richest supporters of the chapel – ‘to engage in prayer, and what an unpleasant silence there was till the pew-opener, coming up, whispered in my ear, “Sir, Mr. B. never prays,” and I had to pray myself?’

‘Well, sir,’ said the senior deacon, ‘we have not all the same gifts; some can pray in public, others can’t. But you need not have kept away from the meetin’ on that account.’

‘Well,’ said Wentworth, ‘the truth was, I had intended to be there, but I went to the Chartist meeting instead.’

‘So it seems, sir. You had not been there long before we all heard of it. The news was over the town in a very little while. I own it quite took away my breath.’

‘Which I am glad to find you have recovered by this time,’ said the minister gaily. ‘I was not only there, but I made a speech.’

‘So I heard, sir,’ said the deacon. ‘I suppose you think human applause more precious than seeking a blessing on the means of grace. We, however, who did go, had a blessed opportunity. We remembered you, sir, thought it seems you forgot us.’

‘Well, I think I was in the path of duty, nevertheless.’

‘Indeed, sir,’ said the deacon in a very unpleasant tone of voice. ‘How do you make that out?’

‘Well, according to my idea. Chartism means something, good or bad, and I thought I would go and see what it meant. It seemed to me that the poor fellows had a good deal of bad advice given them, and I thought I would try and give them a little better. Their grievances are many, and so are the wrongs which they have to bear. You know that it is in consequence of the little sympathy that is shown them by the Churches of all denominations these people are getting not only to disbelieve Christianity, but to hate its very name. It seemed to me that it was right that I should tell them as best I could how they were mistaken in thus judging the Church. We are losing the people, and then we call them infidels, and all that is bad. I say, instead of doing this, we should seek to win them by showing them how the Church is with them in their struggle for their rights. If we are Christians, our Christianity should display itself in our political life.’

‘Well,’ said the deacon with pride, ‘all I can say is that our late minister never attended a political meeting in his life.’

‘I am sorry to hear it,’ said Mr. Wentworth.

‘Yes, sir,’ continued the deacon, not noticing the interruption, ‘and he died universally respected. He never made an enemy. He was all things to all men. Every Christmas morning and Good Friday he went to church, and it was quite beautiful to see how humble and happy he looked. “I never interfere in politics,” said he. “I am come here to preach the Gospel. I am not going to impair my usefulness by becoming a political partisan.” I am sure,’ continued the deacon, ‘if he had forgotten this, and attended a Chartist meeting, we should never have got the money from the gentry we did, when we had the old meeting-house done up.’

‘But,’ said Wentworth, ‘he might have made some of the Chartists Christians, and that would have been better. It’s no use to get the meeting-house done up if the people don’t come into it. It seems to me such conduct as you praise is the way to create the evils we deplore. In the Saviour’s time the common people heard the Gospel gladly, and why should they not do so now?’

‘Because they won’t, sir,’ said the deacon angrily. ‘Because they are dead in trespasses and sins; because they’re regular heathens – a drinking, swearing lot. Why, I should be ashamed to go near them, and if some of them were to come to chapel, I believe the members would leave the place at once. I am sure I should.’

The senior deacon was a good man, but he had his foibles. One of them was a due regard to his own worldly good. Most of the neighbouring gentry came to his shop. It was the best and the largest of the kind in the town. What would become of his customers if his minister went to a Chartist meeting? The thought was too horrible for words. Hence the interview with the parson, and his disappearance from the streets of Sloville for many a long day; not, however, till he gave a farewell address, which added fuel to the fire, or, in other words, made his deacons more implacable than ever.