and the political system which placed legislation and the administration of justice in the hands of a class who were thereby enabled to appropriate to themselves the profits of the labourer's toil. The capitalists, with very rare exceptions, had not begun to realise the existence of any relation between efficiency, on the one side, and on the other an adequate living-wage standard, hours of labour, or sanitary conditions. Many of them did, in fact, spend a good deal more than the minimum possible for the benefit of their hands; but they did so from motives of humanity, and usually with the belief that they were diminishing their own profits. When the capitalist did not realise that his own interests were advanced by the prosperity of the men working under him, but believed that the interests of the men were economically opposed to those of the employer, it was scarcely surprising that the men on their side should have acquired an almost ineradicable conviction that employers and employed are naturally enemies with antagonistic interests. So whenever the depression became particularly acute there were outbreaks of machine-smashing; and the working-men became more and more convinced that the remedy for their grievances lay in changing the centre of political power, and that all would be well when the working-man was political master.

man.

Operation

But among the more skilled trades there were men who were looking to the power of combination as the real panacea; who saw in the combination laws the most serious obstacle to the amelioration of the lot of the working- of the comThose laws operated in what can only be bination laws. called an extremely iniquitous manner. They forbade combination not only for purposes of aggression but also for purposes of defence. A typical instance occurred in the case of the Scottish weavers in 1812. Weaving was one of the trades which still came under the old laws which authorised the regulation of wages by the magistrates. The magistrates, in view of the depressed state of trade, laid down the minimum wage which was to be paid. The employers ignored the regulation. Individual action. on the part of the weavers would have been perfectly useless, and they struck in a body to demand nothing more than the

actual rate of wages to which they were by law entitled. But because the strike was organised, they were treated as guilty of forming an illegal combination; and actually at the instance of the government the leaders were arrested and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.

In skilled trades, on the other hand, the supply of labour was not in excess of the demand; the men belonged to a higher class —that is, they were better off and were better educated. They 1825. Repeal were not open to any suspicion of Jacobinism. The of the Com- masters did not find their own interests threatened

bination Acts. by combinations amongst them; the relations were mutually friendly, and they were found helpful in the adjustment of differences. It appeared then that an extension of the principle of combination ought to have an entirely salutary effect, and to remove instead of fostering antagonisms. The repeal of the combination laws was really the work of Francis Place, a master-tailor, who found a parliamentary ally in Joseph Hume. By exceedingly skilful management he succeeded in 1824 in procuring the introduction and passage of a bill in effect repealing the obnoxious Acts. The thing was done so quietly that it went through almost unnoticed; and when in the next year, 1825, the adherents of the Combination Acts introduced another bill which was intended to reinstate them, the ingenious management of Place and Hume amended it into an Act which only made rather more complete the enactment of 1824. Associations ceased to be illegal; men could thenceforth bargain collectively and strike collectively without incurring the penalties of illegal combinations. They were even so far protected that associations formed for the regulation of wages and hours of labour were expressly exempted from the common law against conspiracy, though the ingenuity of lawyers often found means of evading the exemption.

The repeal was passed at the end of the five years in which trade had recovered from the depression which followed upon Combination the peace. The unrest among the working classes discredited. had quieted down more for that reason than as a consequence of the government's repressive measures. Trade

was flourishing, and at the moment there seemed to be every prospect that a demand for increased wages would meet with a ready and easy response. Trade unions were promptly formed all over the country. But the hope was delusive. The revival

of trade had been accompanied by a fit of wild speculation. The next four years were again years of depression. The unions entirely failed to procure a rise in wages when half the masters were living in perpetual dread of financial disaster. Employment fell off and wages dropped. The panacea failed to act, the movement was discredited, and the workers returned to their faith in the political cure for the economic disease.

III. LITERATURE, 1798-1830

In 1796 died Robert Burns, almost the only man who, belonging entirely to the eighteenth century, claims beyond all possibility of dispute to rank as a great poet, a master-singer; The since poetry may be defined in terms which forbid precursor. us to include among its high priests the consummate masters of literary form who in the eighteenth century used verse as the medium of literary expression. Burns discarded the eighteenthcentury convention, not because he was a conscious exponent of a new critical theory, but because in Scotland lyrical expression, not consciously cultivated as an art, but spontaneous, had never died out. Yet because he stands alone among the eighteenth-century men, and stands also on the threshold of the new era, in which the eighteenth-century convention had no part nor lot, and because his spirit was the spirit of the new era, he is in a sense to be accounted its herald.

In the year of his death appeared without attracting attention the first published verses of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The arrival of the new era was definitely announced two The new years later with the publication of William Words- poets. worth's Lyrical Ballads, with contributions from Coleridge which included the immortal Ancient Mariner. The fact that the old

convention was being deliberately challenged was emphasised two years later by Wordsworth's preface to his second volume of Lyrical Ballads. The thirty years following 1798 witnessed in the British Isles an output of poetry more amazing than had ever been seen in an equally short period in any country in the world save the England of Shakespeare's day, and the Athens of Pericles. Six names stand out most prominently: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Scott. Any one of the six would have sufficed to make the era in which he lived a notable one. All the poetical work of five out of the six was done during that one period of thirty years; and if Wordsworth sustained his reputation he did not effectively add to it by what he wrote at a later date.

The new poetry.

The new poetry was not the work of a school of men who took a common view of the function of poetry or of the laws of poetic form or diction. The thing common to them all was the revolt of individualism against artificial restrictive canons. Accidents caused one group of them to be designated the Lake School, because it happened that Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were intimate friends who for a time resided in close neighbourhood to each other in the Lake country, and because two of them published a joint volume. By a curious irony, the one of their number who was emphatically a distinguished man of letters, but has long ceased to be counted a great poet, was the first to obtain public recognition as a poet, and was appointed to the laureateship-Robert Southey. Southey's theory of the poetic art is of no great consequence. Wordsworth's, set forth in the preface to the second volume of Lyrical Ballads, was demolished critically not by the reviewers, who gibed at the 'Lake school,' but by Coleridge himself, who demonstrated that whenever his friend rose to poetic heights he discarded his own doctrine of poetic diction, whereas the very considerable mass of poor pedestrian stuff with which he did not succeed in burying his great work was the unhappy outcome of his theory.

As the literary movement at the close of the sixteenth century in England was one aspect of the revolution, which in the course

Character

movement.

of that century broke free from the intellectual and moral conventions of the Middle Ages, effected the Protestant Reformation and the Reformation within the Roman Church, and liberated scientific inquiry, so this literary movement of the was one aspect of the intellectual and political revolution which shattered the eighteenth-century conventions, created the French republic and the French empire, and set in motion the forces of democracy and nationalism. Both the revolutions were essentially individualist: the first primarily an assertion of the right of the individual to follow his own conscience in matters of religion-to liberty of conscience; the second primarily of his right to a voice in the government, to political liberty. The basis of both was the refusal to be tied by conventions which had served their turn in the history of progress; conventions which, from having been conditions of the suppression of anarchy, had been gradually transformed into instruments for the maintenance of privilege. For progress, control and development are both necessary; the eternal problem is that of confining control to its true function of protecting development; since the regulations which have served as a bulwark against anarchy in one generation, when they become stereotyped change their character, and turn into the conventions which check the free development of a later generation. Unless they are removed by degrees, the time arrives when they are challenged en masse by a general revolt.

The literary movement then was a revolt against the literary convention of the eighteenth century, the canons which artificially restricted the subject-matter and the methods Rejection of of literary, and chiefly of poetic, expression. The conventions. new spirit refused to be bound by those canons. It was determined to express its most intense emotions, to recognise beauty wherever it saw it. The canons virtually forbade the expression of the deeper emotions, and ruled that no beauty was to be found except within an arbitrarily restricted field, limiting the poet's vocabulary with an artificial pedantry. Wordsworth carried his revolutionary doctrine to the point of declaring that the proper language of poetry was nothing more or less than the language of everyday life, and almost implying that a subject was approInnes's Eng. Hist.-Vol. IV.

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