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BOOK III

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

I

ENGLISH HISTORY SINCE 1800

IN 1800 King George III., who had been forty years on the throne, was lapsing into that melancholy madness in which his sixty years of royalty closed. The last ten years of his reign were virtually part of his successor's, the Prince Regent, afterward George IV. In 1830 King William IV. succeeded his brother; his reign lasted only seven years. Since 1837 the sovereign of England has been Queen Victoria. During the nineteenth century, then, only three English sovereigns came to the throne. It chances that each of these represents a distinct phase of English history.

The Regency, under which general name we may for the moment include also the reign of George IV., was the time when the insular isolation of England was most pronounced. In 1798 Nelson won the battle of the Nile. No incident more definitely marks the international position of England as the chief conservative defender of such traditions as for a while seemed fatally threatened by the French Revolution becoming incarnate in Napoleon. During the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century the conflict persisted, more and more isolating England and emphasising English conservatism. In 1805, Trafalgar, which finally destroyed the sea power of Napoleon, made the English Channel more than ever a frontier separating England from the rest of Europe.

It was not until ten years later, in 1815, that Waterloo, finally overthrowing Napoleon, made room for the reaction which overran continental Europe for thirty years to come; and only then could England begin to relax that insularity which the Napoleonic wars had so developed in English temper. England is the only country of civilised Europe where Napoleon never succeeded in planting his power; only English soil remained free from his invasion; and during the first part of the nineteenth century the price which England paid for this freedom was an unprecedented concentration of her own life within her own bounds. This era of dogged resistance to the French Revolution finally developed the traditional type of John Bull.

To suppose that England remained unmoved by revolutionary fervour, however, would be a complete mistake. Two years after William IV. ascended the throne, there occurred in English politics an incident as revolutionary as any which ever took place in France. The results of it have long since altered the whole nature of English life, social and political. Although revolutionary in purpose, however, and in ultimate effect rather more successfully revolutionary than any convulsion of continental Europe, the Reform Bill of 1832 was carried through in England by formally constitutional means. This Bill permanently altered the theory and practice of suffrage in England, establishing the broadly democratic principle that representation in the House of Commons shall be apportioned to the population. To the conservative temper of the time nothing could have been more abhorrent than parliamentary reform. The fact that under the old system the House of Commons had worked admirably seemed reason enough why there should be no change; the principles on which reform was urged involved something like recognition of those abstract rights which even to the present day remain foreign to the most characteristic temper of England. Undoubtedly the consequent opposition of the better classes was

blindly prejudiced. The reformed Parliaments, newly reformed more than once since 1832, have worked far better than the opponents of reform expected; but in the minds of many competent judges it is still an open question whether as agents of government they have worked so well as the Parliaments which came before. The old system, where a great gentleman often carried half a dozen boroughs in his pocket, made it easy to find a seat in the House for any young man of promise; to go no further, it was to this system that we owe the parliamentary career of Burke. There can be little doubt that with the progress of democratic temper in England the House of Commons has tended personally to deteriorate. No doubt there are aspects in which the new system seems more just than the old; but there are aspects, too, in which the old seems to have been the safer. Such speculations as this, however, are fruitless; the Reform Bill is a fact; and the thing for us to remark about it is that this virtual revolution in England was accomplished constitutionally. In brief, what happened was this. The House of Lords, the more conservative chamber of Parliament, was unprepared to pass the Reform Bill; the House of Commons, representing, it believed, the ardent conviction of the country, was determined that the Bill should be passed. Thereupon the King was persuaded to inform the Lords that in case they persisted in voting against the measure he should create new peers enough to make a majority of the House. This threat brought the conservative peers to terms. They did not vote for the measure, but under the leadership of the Duke of Wellington they walked out of the house in silent protest. A revolutionary threat on the part of the King had accomplished under constitutional forms a peaceful revolution.

Five years later King William IV. was dead. Then began the reign of the most tenderly human sovereign in English history. For sixty-two years, in the full blaze of public life, she has unfalteringly done what she has deemed her duty.

This devoted conscientiousness has strengthened English royalty beyond words. Through sixty years of growing democracy the fact that the throne of England has been filled by Queen Victoria has gone far to re-establish in popular esteem a form of government which it is the fashion to call a thing of the past.

In general this Victorian era has been peaceful, but still one which is best typified by the newest title of its sovereign. For during the last sixty years of the nineteenth century England has been quietly asserting itself no longer as an isolated kingdom, but as a world-empire. This imperialism of England seems different from any other which has declared itself since the pristine empire of Rome. It stands not for the assertion of central and despotic authority, but rather for the maintenance of those legal traditions which evince the elasticity of still unbroken vitality. For, speaking broadly, the English Common Law is a system, not of rules, but of principles. Its fundamental notion is that the world should be governed by established custom. So long as its influence was confined to the island where it was developed, to be sure, it still seemed impracticably rigid. The American Revolution, however, taught England a lesson which has been thoroughly learned, — that when English authority asserts itself in foreign regions, the true spirit of the Common Law should recognise and maintain all local customs which do not conflict with public good. In India, for example, local custom sanctioned many things essentially abominable, murder, self-immolation, and the like. Such crimes against civilisation the English power has condemned and repressed. Harmless local custom, on the other hand, freedom of worship, peculiarities of land tenure, and whatever harmonises with public order, the English government has maintained as strenuously as in England itself it has maintained the customs peculiar to the mother country. So in Canada it has maintained a hundred forms of old French law ancestral to those provinces. So in

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Australia it has maintained many new systems and customs which have grown up in a colony settled since the American Revolution. Its modern state is typified by the fact that in the judicial committee of the Privy Council - whose functions. resemble those of the Supreme Court of the United States there are now regularly members from Canada, from India, from Australia, to pronounce in this court of appeal on questions referred to the mother country from parts of the empire where the actual law differs from that of England herself.

The Victorian epoch, then, has begun to explain the true spirit of the English law: whatever the letter, this spirit maintains that throughout the empire, and all the places where the imperial influence extends, the whole force of England shall sustain the differing rights and traditions which have proved themselves, for the regions where they have grown, sound, safe, and favourable to civilised prosperity. The growing flexibility of English government has tended to make dominant in many parts of the world the language and the ideals. which we share with England. The progress of imperial England, then, frequently misrepresented, as though it were mere selfish aggression, is really a phase of a world-conflict which the acceleration of intercommunication steam travel and the electric telegraph has at last made inevitable. yond doubt war is terrible; one of our own generals in the Civil War is said to have declared that "War is Hell." At least to the traditional American mind, however, hell hardly yet presents itself as a thing which unaided human ingenuity can certainly avoid; and when war means that the progress of the moral, legal, and political ideals which we share with England either must be checked or must dominate by armed force, minds loyal to our ancestral traditions may fairly begin to question whether tame peace is not worse still.

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Historically, then, England began the century as an isolated conservative power. In the reign of King William IV. it

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