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"Workmen are to be contented with the current Lecture

rate of wages, and are on no account to do anything which has a tendency to compel their employers to raise it. Practically, they could go "where they pleased individually and make the best "bargains they could for themselves, but under no "circumstances and by no means, direct or indirect, "must they bring the pressure of numbers to bear on "their employers or on each other."1

To a reader of the twentieth century this state of the law seems no less incomprehensible than intolerable, and indeed within twenty-five years after the passing of the Combination Act, appeared utterly indefensible to so rigid an economist as McCulloch, a man whose good sense and genuine humanity have been concealed from a later generation by the heavy and brutal satire of Carlyle. Who, we ask, were the tyrants who deprived working-men of all freedom, and what was the state of opinion which sanctioned this tyranny? The answer is that the men who passed the great Combination Act were not despots, and that the Act precisely corresponded with the predominant beliefs of the time.

The Parliament of 1800 acted under the guidance of Pitt. It contained among its members Fox and Wilberforce; it was certainly not an assembly insensible to feelings of humanity. The ideas of the working classes were, it may be said, not represented. This is roughly true, but artisans were no better represented in the Parliament of 1824 than in the Parliament of 1800, yet the Parliament of 1824

1 Stephen, Hist. iii. 209.

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Lecture repealed the Combination Act and freed trade combinations from the operation of the law of conspiracy. The mere fact that the Combination Act of 1799 and the Combination Act of 1800, which re-enacted its provisions, passed through Parliament without any discussion of which a report remains, is all but decisive. The law represented in 1800 the predominant opinion of the day.

The public opinion which sanctioned the Combination Act (which was to a great extent a Consolidation Act)' consisted of two elements.

The first element, though not in the long run the more important, was a dread of combinations, due in the main to the then recent memories of the Reign of Terror. Nor are we justified in asserting that this fear was nothing better than unfounded panic. Englishmen who, though from a distance, had witnessed the despotism of the Jacobin Club, which towards the close of its tyranny sent weekly, in Paris alone, an average of nearly 2002 citizens to the guillotine, may be excused for some jealousy of clubs or unions. The existence, at any rate, of this fear of combinations is certain; it is proved by a body of Acts-37 Geo. III. c. 123 (1797); 39 Geo. III. c. 79 (1799); 57 Geo. III. c. 19 (1817)—which were directed against any treasonable or seditious society, or against any society which might possibly foster treason or

1 i.e. the Combination Act generalised provisions which had been long enforced under special Acts in respect of workmen engaged in particular kinds of manufacture. See Stephen, Hist. iii. 206.

2 During a period of seven weeks, between June 10 and July 27 (9 Thermidor), 1794, at least 1376 individuals were sent by the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris to the guillotine. This gives an average for that period of more than 196 victims a week. See Morse Stephens,

French Revolution, ii. p. 548.

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sedition. The presence in one at least of these enact- Lecture ments of exceptions in favour of meetings of Quakers, and of meetings assembled for the purposes of a religious or charitable nature only,' betrays the width of their operation and the fears of their authors. Clubs of all kinds were objects of terror.

The second element of public opinion in 1800 was the tradition of paternal government which had been inherited from an earlier age, and was specially congenial to the toryism of the day. This tradition had two sides. The one was the conviction that it was the duty of labourers to work for reasonable, that is to say, for customary, wages. The other side of the same tradition was the provision by the State (at the cost, be it noted, of the well-to-do classes, and especially of the landowners) of subsistence for workmen who could not find work. The so-called Speenhamland Act of Parliament," by which the Justices of Berkshire granted to working-men relief in proportion to the number of their families, or, to use the political slang of to-day, tried to provide for them a "living wage," is the fruit of the same policy which gave birth to the Combination Act, 1800. The sentiment of the day was indeed curiously tolerant of a crude socialism. Whitbread introduced a bill authorising justices to fix a minimum of wages, and complained of the absence of any law to compel farmers to do their duty. Fox thought that magistrates should protect the poor from the injustice of grasping employers. Pitt introduced a bill for authorising allowances out of the public rates, in

1 57 Geo. III. c. 19, s. 27; Wright, 23, 24.

Lecture cluding the present of a cow.

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Burke approved a

plan for enabling the "poor" to purchase terminable annuities on the security of the rates.1

The Combination Act, then, of 1800 represented the public opinion of 1800.2

The Six Acts of 18193 were certainly the work of Tories who, filled with dread of sedition and rebellion, wished to curtail the right of public discussion, and these enactments which aimed, among other objects, at the prevention and punishment of blasphemous and seditious libels, and at effectually preventing seditious meetings and assemblies out of doors, aroused grave fears among all friends of freedom. But the Six Acts were not, after all, quite so reactionary as they appeared to Liberals who anticipated an attack upon the liberties of Englishmen. Some of these famous Acts, such, for example, as the Act to prevent delay in the administration of justice in cases of mis1 Fowle, Poor Law (2nd ed.), 66, 67.

2 Oddly enough the Code Napoleon of 1804, which, as regards the right of association, embodies the ideas of French revolutionists or reformers, is at least as strongly opposed to trade combinations, whether among employers or workmen, as the Combination Act, 1800.

8 The Six Acts were :

(1) An Act to prevent the training of persons to the use of arms and to the practice of military evolutions and exercise (60 Geo. III. & 1 Geo. IV. c. 1).

(2) An Act to authorise justices of the peace to seize arms, etc., to continue in force only till 1822 (c. 2).

(3) An Act to prevent delay in the administration of justice in cases of misdemeanour (c. 4).

(4) An Act for more effectually preventing seditious meetings, etc. [out of doors], to continue in force for only a limited time (c. 6).

(5) An Act for the effectual prevention and punishment of blasphemous and seditious libels (c. 8).

(6) An Act to subject certain publications to duties of stamps upon newspapers, and to restrain abuses arising from the publication of blasphemous and seditious libels (c. 9).

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demeanour, or the Act, still in force, to prevent the Lecture training of persons to the use of arms and to the practice of military evolutions, were salutary; one at least was never intended to be more than temporary. The attempt-known as the Cato Street conspiracy— of a few democratic desperadoes to assassinate the whole of the Cabinet marks the prevalent discontent of the time, and proves that the Six Acts were not the result of absolutely groundless panic.

The repressive legislation of 1819 may have been unwise, but it was an attempt to meet a serious crisis and was the natural outcome of the public opinion which in 1819 and 1820 determined the action of Parliament. The Six Acts, however, and other enactments of the same class, in so far as they were reactionary, produced little permanent result.

Reforms.-Innovations which were, or were intended to be reforms, such, for example, as the Act of Union with Ireland, or the Health and Morals Act, 1802, are exceptions to the immutability of the law which characterised the period of quiescence, but they are exceptions which, though they need, admit of explanation; these Acts will indeed be found on careful consideration to be striking confirmations of the dependence of legislation upon opinion.

The Union with Ireland Act, 1800, was carried, as regards England at any rate, without any great difficulty; it was the work of a Tory Government; it was opposed, though not very vigorously, by a certain number of Whigs; the Act, moreover, as experience has proved, made a change in the constitution of Parliament not less fundamental and important than the alteration effected by the Reform