XXIII. 1832. CHAP. persons whom they influenced. The land, the colonies, the shipping interest, were, to all practical purposes, disfranchised; because, though in part still represented in Parliament, they were in a decided minority, and consequently their complaints and their votes were alike powerless and disregarded. The ruling class thus vested with supreme and uncontrolled dominion of the vast and varied British empire dependent on such various interests, was actuated by one only interest, that of buying cheap and selling dear. This thenceforward became the ruling principle of British legislation, to which every statesman, of whatever party, and whatever his principles had been, or still were, was compelled to give in his adhesion. Every one soon discovered, from the temper of the House of Commons elected by the new constituencies, that he could carry on the government in no other way. This affords the key to the whole subsequent changes in the commercial policy of the British empire, and goes far to exculpate many who have stood foremost, and been most exposed to obloquy, in bringing them about. Ever since the Reform Bill became the law of the land, if not, as Napoleon said we were, a nation of shopkeepers, we have at least been a nation governed by shopkeepers. 144. Earl Grey was not ignorant of the preponderating Mistake of strength of the boroughs in the reformed House of Commons; but he was deluded in regard to the influence which would direct these boroughs, by the same general boroughs. delusion which was then so general, and in truth was the the Whigs as to the influence in the foundation of the whole subsequent changes of the British empire. This was the blindness of an entire generation to the effects on the relative position of the different classes of society produced by the monetary bills of 1819 and 1826. As these bills added fifty per cent to the value of realised capital, and took as much from the remuneration of industry, they in effect withdrew the greater part of the boroughs from territorial, and brought them under monied or trading interests. They halved the income and doubled the debts CHAP. XXIII. 1832. of the landed proprietors, while they doubled the exchangeable value of the income of the inhabitants of towns. Thence an entire change in the ruling influences in the great majority of the boroughs. They rapidly slipped out of the hands of the burdened and impoverished landlords who had hitherto held them, and fell under the direction of the monied or trading classes, whose fortunes had been practically doubled by legislative measures. What was called the opening of these boroughs, which occurred so often before and after the Reform Bill, and was so much boasted of at the time, was in truth not an opening, but a transference of it to a different interest in the State. The borough was still governed as much as ever it was by a clique, but it was a clique of different persons, and actuated by different interests. It was no longer composed of the squire, his factor, the parson, and attorney, in the borough, but the manufacturer, the warehouseman, and two or three of the chief tradesmen in it; it no longer met in the back parlour, but the back shop. This general transference of the boroughs from the producing to the buying and selling interest, from the operation of the new monetary system, was for the first time tical disbrought into active operation when the Reform Bill gave ment of the them a real representation. When they were notoriously shipping and avowedly venal, they did not, in reality, represent interests. the inhabitants who dwelt in them, but the merchants, capitalists, or colonial interests by whom they were purchased. Gatton, with its ruined church, might represent Jamaica; Old Sarum, with its green mound, millions of our sable subjects in Hindostan. It was the effective nature of the representation, which the colonies and shipping interests thus acquired, which rendered the British constitution of such long endurance, and so generally popular, notwithstanding its obvious deviation from theoretical perfection. The colonies and shipping interest were really, though not in form, represented under the old constitution; and this was done so effectually that the 145. which led to the prac franchise colonies and XXIII. 1832. CHAP. West Indian was for long the strongest single interest in the House of Commons; it could, during the war, command eighty votes. But when the representation of the British boroughs was rendered not nominal, but real, this state of things was entirely altered. Not only was the door, which had so long let in the real representatives of the colonial and shipping interests, closed to them, but it was opened to their opponents. 146. jected to ment of ad rests. The shopkeepers in the small towns, generally from three And they to five hundred in number, turned a deaf ear to any candiwere sub- date who talked to them of colonial or maritime interests, of the govern which they knew little, and for which they cared less; but verse inte- they received with open arms any candidate who promised them cheap sugar, diminished cost of wood and freights, cheapened corn, tea, and coffee. Thus not only was the virtual representation of the colonies and shipping interest cut off by the Reform Bill, but the numerous seats they had formerly held, if not extinguished, were transferred to an adverse interest—a change which explains the whole subsequent alteration in the commercial and colonial policy of the British empire. It must therefore be regarded as the next, and perhaps the greatest error in the Reform Bill, that, while it cut off the indirect representation of the colonies and shipowners, it did not give them a direct one, and left them entirely at the mercy of a majority in the British Islands, composed, for the most part, of persons of limited and local information, and governed entirely by adverse interests. To produce cheap and sell dear was for their interest; to buy their produce cheap and sell it dear was for the interest of their new governors. 147. cies have got for Two facts, of general notoriety and decisive importance, The urban demonstrate the reality of these vast changes, and the constituen- unbounded influence which they must have on the future themselves fate of the British empire. The first of these is, that, in less than a quarter of a century after the Reform Bill from direct had given them the government of the country, the urban taxation. shopkeepers had obtained for themselves an entire exemp an entire exemption XXIII. 1832. tion from every species of direct taxation, and laid it CHAP. with increased severity upon the disfranchised classes in the State; while, at the same time, they contrived to shake off all the indirect taxes by which they were more immediately affected. They have got the window-tax taken off, and the house-tax from all houses below £20, the line where the ruling class begins; and when Lord Derby's Ministry brought forward the proposal, obviously just, to lower the duty to £10 houses, they instantly expelled them from office by a vote of the House of Commons. They kept the income-tax for long at incomes. above £150, and now they have only brought it down, under the pressure of war, to £100-a line which practically insures an exemption from that burden to nearly the whole of the ruling occupants of houses below £20; while a tax producing now above £10,000,000 a-year is saddled exclusively upon less than 250,000 persons in the empire. They have got quit entirely of the tax on grain, lowered almost to nothing those on wood and meat, and signally reduced those on tea and sugar and coffee, in which so large a part of their consumption lies; while the direct taxes on the land and higher classes, not embracing above 250,000 persons, have been increased so as now to yield above £20,000,000 a-year, or £80 BY EACH PERSON on an average, in income-tax, assessed taxes, and stamps! In a word, since they got the power, the notables of England have established a much more entire and unjust exemption, in their own favour, from taxation than the notables in France did before the Revolutiona curious and instructive circumstance, indicating how identical men are in all ranks when their interests are concerned, and they obtain power, and the futility of the idea that the extension of the number of the governors is any security whatever against the establishment of an * The persons assessed for the income-tax, under Schedule D (Trades and Professions), are only 146,000! The holders of land aud funds cannot be above 100,000 more. CHAP. arbitrary or unjust system of administration over the governed. XXIII. 148. abandon ment of our colonial 1832. The next circumstance which has demonstrated the Prospective reality of the changes now described is the ruin which has, since the Reform Bill, been brought on some of our empire. greatest colonies, and the steps evidently taking, both by Government and in the colonies themselves, to sever the connection with the rest. It is needless to say anything of the West Indies; it is universally known that, within the last twenty-five years, and from the effect of the Reform Bill, and the measures to which it led, they have been all but ruined, and that cultivation in them is only carried on at a loss by the proprietors, to avoid the desperate measure of entire abandonment of the estates. The other colonies of Great Britain, Canada, the Cape, and Australia, have either revolted, or become so discontented that they had to be disarmed, or given such unequivocal symptoms of alienation from the parent state that Government at home, foreseeing a severance which they can no longer prevent, is already giving them the constitutions which are to prepare them for independence, and withdrawing the troops that might maintain the authority of the centre of the empire. 149. defended by ment and Freetraders. As usual in such cases, the authors of a change, which Which is they see has become inevitable, maintain that it is a the Govern- benefit, and have long been preparing the country for a break-up of our transmarine empire, by diffusing the doctrine that it is only a burden, and that, by making the colonies independent, we might retain the benefits of their connection without the weight of their defence. Time will show whether this opinion is well founded or not; but, in the mean time, one thing is clear, that, for good or for evil, this great change in the policy of the empire is the result of the Reform Bill; because it took away the indirect representation of the colonies, without giving them a direct one, and delivered over |