V. towards the reform of patent ecclesiastical abuses. Lecture in 1725, or even in 1800. 1689. If the course of trade and the growth of manufactures altered the position without altering the arrangements of the Established Church, it also revolutionised, without in any way improving, the relation of masters and workmen. This fact was visible to observers who detested Jacobinical principles. "The unhappy dislocation," writes Sir Walter Scott, "which has taken place betwixt the employer "and those in his employment has been attended with very fatal consequences. Much of this is owing to "the steam-engine. When the machinery was driven "by water, the manufacturer had to seek out some 66 66 sequestered spot where he could obtain a suitable fall "of water, and then his workmen formed the inhabi"tants of a village around him, and he necessarily "bestowed some attention, less or more, on their "morals and on their necessities, had knowledge of "their persons and characters, and exercised over "them a salutary influence as over men depending on "and intimately connected with him and his prospects. This is now quite changed; the manufacturers are transferred to great towns, where a man may assemble five hundred workmen one week and "dismiss them next, without having any further connection with them than to receive a week's work for a week's wages, nor any further solicitude about "their future fate than if they were so many old "shuttles. A superintendence of the workers con"sidered as moral and rational beings is thus a matter totally unconnected with the employer's "usual thoughts and cares. They have now seen "the danger of suffering a great population to be thus entirely separated from the influence of their 'employers, and given over to the management of "their own societies, in which the cleverest and most 'impudent fellows always get the management of the others, and become bell-wethers in every sort of "mischief. Some resolutions have been adopted 'respecting the employing only such men as have 66 66 66 66 66 been either uniformly of loyal character or acknow'ledge their errors and withdraw from all treasonable "meetings, associations, and committees. "The banks and monied men should use their "influence, which is omnipotent with the manufac"turers, to enforce the observance of these resolutions, 66 66 V. "so necessary for the general quiet. That such Lecture regulations would secure tranquillity is quite certain, for notwithstanding the general influence of example, the workmen in some of the greatest manufactures did not furnish a single recruit to Radicalism."1 66 This want of harmony between the needs and the institutions of the time reappears in matters which, though of less importance than the condition of the working-classes, affected the comfort of thousands of Englishmen. Nothing can be more necessary for the happiness of ordinary citizens than protection against robbery and physical violence. Yet even in London the protection was not adequately supplied. Until 1829 the capital of England did not possess a regular body of police.2 The welfare, again, of a mercantile community is dependent on the existence of a fair and effective law of bankruptcy, yet the state of the bankruptcy law 1 Scott's Familiar Letters, vol. ii., Letter to Morritt, 19th May 1820. 2 The slowness with which necessary reforms have been carried out in England is curiously illustrated by the history of the police force during the nineteenth century. The creation of the Metropolitan police in 1829 (10 Geo. IV. c. 44) is due to Peel's administrative genius; it was a stroke of intensely unpopular but very beneficent statesmanship; but even in the metropolis the police force was not put on a satisfactory basis till 1839 (2 & 3 Vict. c. 47). In the boroughs reform went on slowly, and was not anything like complete until 1839. In the counties reform progressed at even a slower pace. The so-called Permissive Act of 1839 (2 & 3 Vict. c. 93) made the organisation of a good county police possible. In 1842 an attempt was made to infuse new life into the decrepit system of parish constables. Fourteen years later the County and Borough Police Act, 1856 (19 & 20 Vict. c. 69), known as the Obligatory Act, for the first time provided every part of England with stipendiary police, and thus completed a police system for the whole country. See Melville, History of Police in England, chaps. xiii.-xv. V. Lecture shocked every man versed in business. There was an absolute opposition on this matter between the law of the land and the feelings of the mercantile world. The state of things as late as the beginning of the reign of Victoria (1837) is thus described by Lord Bowen : "The great commercial world, alienated and scared by the divergence of the English bankruptcy law "from their own habits and notions of right and wrong, avoided the court of bankruptcy as they "would the plague. The important insolvencies which have been brought about by pure mercantile "misfortune were administered to a large extent "under private deeds and voluntary compositions, which, since they might be disturbed by the 66 66 66 caprice or malice of a single outstanding creditor, were always liable to be made the instruments of "extortion. "To the honest insolvent the bankruptcy 66 court was a terror.' To the evil-doer it afforded means of endlessly delaying his creditors, while the "enormous expenses of bankruptcy administrations "rendered it the interest of few to resort to the remedy, except with the object of punishing the "fraudulent or vexing the unfortunate." 1 From whatever direction then we examine the condition of England between 1800 and 1830, and especially between 1815 and 1830, we can perceive the discord between a changing social condition and unchanging laws. (3) As to the lapse of time.-Before the outbreak of the French Revolution intelligent Englishmen of all classes were prepared to welcome natural and 1 Bowen, Reign of Queen Victoria, i. p. 315. V. gradual reforms. Blackstone, though an optimist, Lecture was not opposed to reasonable changes; Pitt, Burke, and Fox were all of them in different ways reformers; and the men we have named are representatives of that large class of Englishmen who at most times have been quite willing to abolish abuses or grievances of a practical character. In the ordinary course of things the law of England would have been amended before the end of the eighteenth, or soon after the beginning of the nineteenth century. The obstacle to reasonable reform is to be found in the revolutionary excesses of France. In In England the French Revolution worked nothing but evil; it delayed salutary changes for forty years, and rendered reforms, when at last they came, less beneficial than they might have been if gradually carried out as the natural result of the undisturbed development of ideas suggested by English good sense and English love of justice. But to the men who began to take part in public life, or to take an interest in national affairs, between 1815 and 1830, the horrors of the Reign of Terror were mere traditions. They knew by experience the narrow-mindedness of the Tories who had governed England since the beginning of the century, and toryism had by a strange fatality grown less reasonable and more reactionary from the very time when Waterloo, and the permanent peace which it established, had deprived the resistance to all innovation and restrictions on individual liberty of such justification as was afforded by a life and death struggle for national independence. In 1819 or 1820 the Six Acts, the so-called Manchester massacre, the sordid scandals of the quarrel between |