CHAPTER XIV. L'Envoy. FTER an absence of nearly thirty years, I have come again to dwell at Hampstead. There are here, as everywhere else in the suburbs of London, houses innumerable, where there were once green pastures. But the old village, and the old heath, are little changed, since Henry Brooke made them the scene of his "Fool of Quality;" since Fanny Burney took Evelina to the Assembly at "The Long Room;" and since George Steevens, the mischievous "Puck" of black letter, had the happiness to live here in his bachelorquiet, unvexed by legions of donkey-drivers. During my residence at Hampstead from 1830 to 1835, I was a hard-worker; but I was not so indefatigable a corrector of proofs as Steevens, "Whom late, from Hampstead journeying to his book, What time he brush'd her dews with hasty pace, Those five years of my residence here were the great turning-point of our modern history. Hampstead is not greatly changed; but what a change has come over England since the days of George the Fourth! * "Pursuits of Literature." Let me endeavour to take a coup d'œil of those moral causes which have created an era so essentially different from its predecessor. * In 1783, Charles Fox propounded in Parliament a doctrine which could then scarcely be called practical: What is the end of all government? Certainly, the happiness of the governed." He added—“Others may hold different opinions; but this is mine, and I proclaim it." In the early part of the next half century, Bentham's axiom, that "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" is the true object of all legislation, was a text for speakers and writers who were a little before their age. This was an idea -as certain to influence the future of society as the idea of liberty or the idea of equality. But the English, it is said, are slow to adopt ideas. Step by step the principle of the happiness of the governed made a slow and timid advance. It is faintly to be traced in the slight mitigations of the sanguinary criminal code by Romilly, and the insertion of the wedge into the old barrier of Protection by Huskisson. But the idea never got completely hold of the national mind, as the rule of public and private conduct towards "the greatest number," till the times which followed the bloodless revolution of 1832. I will attempt, in this retrospective chapter, to consider the various modes in which the idea has worked, in changing many of the former relations of our social life. Such changes in the condition of the people essentially belong to the science of politics. But with politics, in the ordinary sense of the term, I have no intention of meddling. It is scarcely forty years since that, in my rambles around Windsor, I was often deterred from striking into a by-path by the announcement-" Steel-traps and spring-guns are set in these preserves." I had no desire to trespass on the sacred places in which the hare and the pheasant were enshrined. I sometimes thought of Quentin Durward and of the thickets of Plessis-les-Tours "surrounded with every species of hidden pitfall, snare, and gin to entrap the wretch who should venture thither without a guide." The spirit of the fifteenth century seemed, in this one characteristic, to have survived in the nineteenth —the spirit of small respect for human life. It may in the present day be scarcely deemed credible, that in 1820, the Chief-Justice of the King's Bench to a certain extent justified the practice of setting springguns, by using the following words: "I cannot say that repeated and increasing acts of aggression may not reasonably call for increased means of defence and protection." He thought that no person, having notice given him, would be weak and foolish enough to expose himself to the perilous consequences of his trespass. Lord Suffield, who was mainly instrumental in procuring, in 1827, the abolition of this barbarous remnant of the feudal unconcern for the safety of life and limb, told a story in Parliament, which probably had as much effect in procuring this result, as if he had circumstantially related the injuries inflicted by these engines upon a dozen peasants or yeomen. "I have heard," he said, " of a judge on the circuit, who not very long ago wishing to take air and exercise before the business in court commenced, or after it had concluded, was on the point of entering a wood where he would almost inevitably have been shot, had he not received accidental intimation that spring-guns were set there." I have selected this instance of the extravagant notions which once prevailed as to the rights of property, to point to one of the main causes of the alienation of classes, which, more than any other cause, prevented the general reception of the idea, that to promote the happiness of the greatest number was the duty of all, and especially of the rich and powerful. The true rights of property have not been weakened because public opinion utters the most decisive "No" when a great man asks "May I not do what I like with my own?" That interpretation of the rights of property, which admits the majority into a moral partnership with the minority, was the foundation of all the first great political changes that have given a new character to the present age. This interpretation gave us the Reform Bill, which swept away the vested interests in Nomination Boroughs. Corporation Reform took away the administration of large funds from self-elected and irresponsible bodies, to place them in the hands of those who would account to their fellow-citizens for their righteous employment for the public good. The abolition of the Corn Laws destroyed the tenacious hold of the landed interest upon their prescriptive claim to tax the food of the community, in the mistaken belief that dear corn and good rents were necessarily associated, and that the power of the rich to expend largely was the main support of the industrious, and the essential condition of the welfare of the poor. The overthrow of Negro Slavery in our West India Colonies recognized the principle that no rights of property could be main tained which were based upon injustice as between man and man. These changes were essentially revolutionary, but different from all other revolutions in bringing with them no civil war; no damage to the throne and the altar; no subversion of an ancient aristocracy; no abatement of the proper influence of the modern capitalist. I pass them by, to proceed to those social improvements which have grown out of them, evidencing the altered spirit in which we have come to regard "the greatest number." And first let me glance at those Fiscal changes which, one after another, have lightened the pressure of indirect taxation upon articles of necessity, and have thus not only lessened the cost of food, of clothing, of dwellings, of furniture, by the entire abolition or reduction of Customs and Excise duties, but have left industry free to do its proper work without supervision and restriction. In my "Companion to the Almanac " I shall find the necessary data for tracing the course of administrative and financial improvements, and all the other results of a principle of legislation which alone can maintain the harmony of a State :— "For Government, through high, and low, and lower, Like music." This is "the harmonic power of political justice," which Shakspere, by some means, derived from Plato.* In 1820, the "Edinburgh Review," in an elaborate *See "Knight's Pictorial Shakspere." Illustrations to Henry V., Act 1 |