CHAPTER II. HISTORY OF ENGLAND FROM THE PEACE OF PARIS, IN 1815, TO THE END OF THE YEAR 1816. 1. at the close of the war. So great had been the success, so glorious the triumphs of England, in the latter years of the war, that the least Commanding position of sanguine were led to entertain the Great Britain most unbounded hopes of the future prosperity of the empire. Prosperity unheard of, and universal, had, with a few transient periods of distress, when the contest was at the worst, pervaded every department of the state. The colonial possessions of Great Britain encircled the earth; the loss of the North American colonies had been more than compensated by the acquisition of a splendid empire in India, where sixty millions of men were already subject to our rule, and forty millions more were in a state of alliance; the whole West India islands had fallen into our hands, and were in the very highest state of prosperity; Java had been added to our Eastern possessions, and had been only relinquished from the impulse of a perhaps imprudent generosity; and the foundation had been laid, in Australia, of those flourishing colonies which are, perhaps. destined one day to rival Europe itself in numbers, riches, and splendor. How different was this prospect from that which, a few years before, the world had exhibited! There had been a time when, in the words of exalted eloquence, "the Continent lay flat before our rival; when the Spaniard, the Austrian, the Prussian, had retired; when the iron quality of Russia had dissolved; when the domination of France had come to the water's edge; and when, behold, from a misty speck in the west the avenging genius of these our countries issues forth, grasp ing ten thousand thunderbolts, breaks the spell of France, stops in his own person the flying fortunes of the world, sweeps the sea, rights the globe, and retires in a flame of glory."* Nor had the domestic prosperity of this memorable period been inferior to its external renown. Agriculture, commerce, and manufactures at home had gone on increasing, during the whole struggle, in an unparalleled ratio; the landed proprietors were in affluence, and for the most part enjoyed incomes triple of what they had possessed at its commencement; wealth to an unheard-of extent had been created among the farmers; the soil, daily increasing in fertility and breadth of cultivated land, had become adequate to the maintenance of a rapidly-increasing population; and Great Britain, as the effect of her long exclusion from the Continent, had obtained the inestimable blessing of being selfsupporting as regards the national subsistence. The exports, imports, and tonnage had more than doubled since the war began; and although severe distress, especially during the years 1810 and 1811, had pervaded the manufacturing districts, yet their condition, upon the whole, had been one of general and extraordinary prosperity. * Grattan. 2. the state. Facts proved by the parliamentary records sufficiently demonstrated that this description was not the high-flown Statistical picture of imagination, but the facts proving sober representation of truth. The the general revenue raised by taxation within prosperity of the year had risen from £19,000,000, in 1792, to £72,000,000, in 1815; the total expenditure from taxes and loans had reached, in 1814 and 1815, the enormous amount of £117,000,000 each year. In the latter years of the war, Great Britain had above 1,000,000, of men in arms in Europe and Asia; and besides paying the whole of these immense armaments, she was able to lend £11,000,000 yearly to the Continental powers; yet were these copious bleedings so far from having exhausted the capital or resources of the country, that the loan of 1814, although of the enormous amount of £35000,000, was obtained at the rate of £4 118. 1d. per cent, being a lower rate of interest than had been paid at the commencement of the war. The exports, which in 1792 were £27,000,000, had swelled in 1815 to nearly £58,000,000, official value; the imports had advanced during the same period from £19,000,000 to £32,000,000. The shipping had advanced from 1,000,000 to 2,500,000 tons. The population of England had risen from 9,400,000 in 1792, to 13,400,000 in 1815; that of Great Britain and Ireland from 14,000,000 in the former period, to 18,000,000 in the latter. Yet, notwithstanding this rapid increase, and the absorption of nearly 500,000 pairs of robust arms in the army, militia, and navy, the imports of grain had gone on continually diminishing, and had sunk in 1815 to less than 500,000 quarters. And so far was this prodigious expenditure and rapid increase of numbers from having exhausted the resources of the state, that above £6,000,000 annually was raised by the voluntary efforts of the inhabitants to mitigate the distresses and assuage the sufferings of the poor; and a noble sinking fund was in existence, and had been kept sacred during all the vicissi-See Table in History of tudes of the struggle, which already Europe, had reached £16,0000,000 a year, App. C. xcvi., and would certainty, if left to itself, where the have extinguished the whole public figures are all debt by the year 1845.1 given. Warm and general anti When such had been the prosperity and so great the progress of the empire, 3. during the continuance of a long and bloody war, in the course of which it had repeatedly been re- cipations of duced to the very greatest straits, general prosperity on the and compelled to fight for its very existence against the forces of combined Europe, there seemed to be no possible limits which could be assigned to the prosperity of the state when the contest was over, and the blessings of peace had returned to gladden our own and every other land. If the industry of peace. 5. chants. our people had been so sustained, their progress were inadequate to preserve them from abso so great, during a war in which we were for a lute starvation. The iron trade in particular was long period shut out from the Continent, and for every where suffering under great distress: a time from America also, what might be ex- large bodies of workmen, dismissed from their pected when universal peace prevailed, and the forges, paraded the country, demanding charity harbors of all nations, long famishing for the in a menacing manner; and at Merthyr-Tydvil, luxuries of British produce and manufactures, in South Wales, the disorders were not appeaswere every where thrown open for their recep-ed without military interference. To excite tion? Views of this sort were so obviously public commiseration, great numbers of these supported by the appearances of the social dismissed workmen fell upon the 1 Ann. Reg. world, that they were embraced not only by the expedient of drawing loaded wag; 1816, p. 93, 94, ardent and enthusiastic, but the prudent and the ons of coals to distant towns; and Memoirs of sagacious, in every part of the country. The a division of these wandering peti- Lord Sidlandholders borrowed, the capitalist lent money, tioners approached the metropolis, mouth, iii. on the faith of their justice. The merchant and were only turned aside by the 149, 151. embarked his fortune in the sure confidence that resistance of a powerful body of police."1 the present flattering appearances would not It was with the merchants engaged in the exprove fallacious; and the eloquent preacher port trade that the distress, which expressed no more than the general feeling soon became universal, first began; Beginning o' when he said "The mighty are fallen, and and in them it appeared even be- the distress the weapons of war have perished. The cry of fore hostilities had ceased. Pos- among the exfreedom bursts from the unfettered earth, and sessed with the idea that the inhab-port merthe standards of victory wave in all the winds of itants of the Continent were lanheaven. Again in every corner of our own land guishing for British colonial produce, from which the voice of joy and gladness is heard. The they had so long been excluded, and inflamed by cheerful sounds of labor rise again in our streets, the prospect of the sudden opening of their ports and the dark ocean again begins to whiten with to our shipping, the English merchants thought, our sails. Over this busy scene of human joy and acted upon the opinion, that no limits could the genial influences of heaven have descended. be assigned to the profitable trade which might The unclouded sun of summer has ripened for be carried on with them, especially in that arus all the riches of harvest. The God of nature ticle of merchandise. So largely was this nohath crowned the year with his tion acted upon, that the exports of foreign and goodness, and all things living are colonial produce from Great Britain and Ireland, filled with plenteousness. Even which in 1812 had been £9,533,000, rose in the infant shares in the general joy; 1814 to £19,365,000. The necessary effect of and the aged, when he recollects so prodigious an increase of the supply thrown Alison-Ser- the sufferings of former years, is into countries impoverished to the very last demons, i. 450. led to say, with the good old Simeon gree by the war, and scarcely able to pay for in the Gospel, Lord, now let thy servant de- any thing, was that the consignments were, for part in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salva- the most part, sold for little more than half the tion.' original cost, and ruin, wide-spread and universal, overtook all the persons engaged in the traffic. The eastern ports of the kingdom, in particular London, Hull, and Leith, suffered dreadfully by the extensive and disastrous shipments to the north of Europe. England then began to learn a lesson which has been sufficiently often taught since that time-namely, how fallacious a test the mere amount of exports is of the flourishing condition of the country in general, or even of the branches of trade in which the greatest increase appears in particular. That increase often arises from a failure of the home market, which renders it necessary to send the goods abroad, or from absurd and ruinous speculation, which terminates in nothing but disaster. The year 1814, during which foreign and colonial produce to the extent of £19,500,000 was exported, was far more disastrous to the persons engaged in that trade than the three succeeding years,'* in 1 Annual Reg. which the exports of that descrip- 1814, 219; tion sank to little more than a half 1815, 144 of that amount. 1 Sermon on giving, Jan. 13, 1814, by the Rev. Archibald the Thanks 4. of these hopes, and general distress. Such were the expectations and feelings of the people at the termination of the war. Universal dis- Never were hopes more cruelly disappointment appointed, never anticipations more desperately crossed. No sooner was the peace concluded than distress, wide-spread and universal, was experienced in every part of the country, and in every branch of industry. It was felt as much by the manufacturers as the agriculturists; by the merchants as the landlords; and, ere long, the general suffering rose to such a pitch that, while the table of the House of Commons groaned under petitions from the farmers, complaining of agricultural distress, the Gazette teemed with notices of the bankruptcy of traders; and disturbances became so common and alarming in the manufacturing districts, that special commissions had to be sent down, in this and the following year, to Ely, Derby, and the principal seats of the outrages, by whom the law was administered with unsparing but necessary rigor. The farmers, as usual with that class, bore their distresses with patience and resignation; but the manufacturers, always more excitable and tumultuous, were not so easily appeased. In the southern part of Staffordshire the distress was felt as peculiarly severe, and the working people in the populous village of Bilston were reduced to such a degree that they all fell upon the parish, the funds of which-ALISON's Europe, Appendix, chap. xcvi. This distress, however, was not long of spreading to the agriculturists, and among them it *Exports of foreign and colonial produce: 1817 £19,365,981 15,748,554 13,480,781 10,292,684 6. the agriculturists. ◊ 30. assumed a more formidable, because settled | fect of this, of course, was to admit foreign im. and irremediable form. Notwith-portations duty free-the prices having surIts spread to standing the protection to British mounted that of 86s., fixed by the sliding scale agriculture which had been afforded as the turning point at which free foreign imby the corn law passed in 1814, of portation was to commence. This happy circumstance had the effect of checking the rise in the price of provisions, which, but for that circumstance, would doubtless have reached the level of a famine. The importation of wheat in that year amounted to 225,000 quarters; but in the next, when the effect of the scarcity of 1816 was felt, it rose to 1,620,000 quarters, and in 1818 to 1,593,000. But from this circumstance sprang up a new cause of 1 Porter's distress to the farmers, which was Prog. of Nat. felt with the utmost severity in 137, 3d edit. this and the two succeeding years. The importation kept down prices, but it did not restore crops; it deprived the farmer of a remunerating price for what remained cf his produce, without making up to him what had been lost. And the nation, on comparing its present condition with what it had been during the last years of the war, began to feel the 2 Ann. Reg. truth of Adam Smith's remark- 1816, 144; "High prices and plenty are pros- Sidmouth's perity; low prices and want are 153. misery.2* Life, iii. 151, 8. ers, and which an account has already been given, it had 1 History of already become apparent that the Europe, c. xcii. opening the harbors of America and Northern Europe for supplies of grain, coupled with the cessation of the lavish expenditure of the war, would seriously affect the prices of every species of agricultural produce. Already, they had fallen to little more than twothirds of what they had been during the five last years of the war. Although the prices which they still fetched may seem high to us, who have been accustomed to the much greater reduction which has since taken place, yet the fall from 120s. in 1813, to 76s. in 1815, and 57s. in the spring of 1816, for the quarter of wheat, was sufficiently alarming, and struck a prodigious panic into the minds of all persons engaged in agricultural pursuits. The rise in the price of rural produce had been so steady and long-continued, and the affluence in consequence arising to all persons connected with land, or depending either on the sale of its produce or the purchases flowing from its prosperity, so great, that all classes had come to regard it as permanent, When such general distress pervaded the and they had all acted accordingly. The land- whole classes depending upon land owners had borrowed money or entered into then, as now, by far the largest Distress marriage-contracts on the faith of its continu- and most important part of the com- among the ance present expenditure, provisions to chil-munity t-it was not to be supposed manufacturdren, had been regulated by that standard. The that the manufacturing interests causes to tenantry, in those parts of the country where were not also to be laboring under which it was leases were common, had entered into lasting difficulties. The distress among owing. contracts, in the belief that the high prices would continue; and they could now anticipate nothing but ruin if they were held to their engagements. A general despondency, in consequence, seized upon the rural classes; numbers of farms were thrown up in despair; and the universal suffering among that important class not only spread a general gloom over society, but seriously affected the amount of manufac2 Ann. Reg. tured articles taken off by the home 1815, 144, 145; market, by far the most important 1816, 92, 93. vent for that species of industry. Before the close of the year 1816, these causes 7. of distress assumed a different, but Severe scare- a still more alarming form. The ity of 1816. summer of that year was uncommonly wet and stormy, insomuch, that not only was the quantity and quality of the grain every where rendered deficient, but in the higher and later parts of the country the harvest never ripened at all. So stormy, melancholy a season, had not been experienced since 1799; the consequence of course was, that the price of grain rapidly rose, and the average for the year was 828. a quarter. But it was much higher than this average in the latter months; indeed, in some places in the north of England, wheat in October was at a guinea a bushel.† The ef*Average price of wheat per Winchester bushel :Shillings. Shillings. 120 1809 1810 1811 1812 105 112 108 118 1813 -ALISON'S EUROPE, Appendix, chap. xcvi. 2 them, accordingly, was universal-and equally fallen from £180 to £80, the latter 3 Sidmouth's more than a guinea a bushel, and no old corn in store; of rain which has fallen for several weeks, and is still "If we think we are to go on smoothly without the effectual means of repressing mischief, and large means too, we shall be most grievously mistaken. I look to the winter with fear and trembling. In this island our wheat is good for nothing; barley and oats reasonably good. As a farmer I am ruined here and in Durham. So much for peace and plenty."-Lord Chancellor ELDON to Lord SIDMOUTH, 8th Oct. 1816. Sidmouth's Life, iii. 151. †The classes directly or indirectly dependent on land are now (1852), in round numbers, 18,000,000: on manufactures and towns, 10,000,000.-SPACKMAN'S Tables, 1852. rope, c. xcvi. App. Sid 9. This general suffering was not owing to the transition from war to peace. 10. metals from which were immediately connected with hos- soon demonstrated the fallacy of all hopes of a tilities. All were suffering, and apparently relief to the public suffering from these appliwith equal severity. Distress was as great ances. Retrenchment was, by the voice of the among the cotton-spinners of Manchester or country and the anguish of general suffering, Glasgow, the silk-weavers of Spitalfields, or the forced upon the Government; the income and glove-manufacturers of Nottingham, as among malt taxes, amounting to £17,000,000 a year, the hardware-men of Birmingham, or the iron- were abolished; the public expenditure was moulders of Merthyr-Tydvil. The home mar- reduced from £102,000,000 to £82,000,000 ket was soon found to be reduced to a half of nearly 300,000 men were disbanded in the army its former amount; and the manufacturers, and navy; and still the distress went on con finding their usual vents for their produce stantly increasing, and was greater than ever failing them from domestic wants, sent them in in the close of the very year 1816, in the course despair abroad; but with so little success that of which these immense reductions had been 1 Alison's Eu- the entire exports of British pro- carried into effect. It is evident, therefore, that duce and manufactures, which in some more general and lasting cause was in op1815 had risen to £42,875,000, eration than those to which the adherents of mouth's Life, sank in the succeeding year to either party at that period ascribed it; and iii. 151, 153. £35,717,000.1 without denying altogether the influence of Depression so severe and wide-spread could some of these subordinate ones, it may now not be explained by the mere trans- safely be affirmed that the main cause was the ition from a state of war to one of following: peace, to which the partisans of Government at that period, and for long after, constantly ascribed it. Every impartial and thinking person saw that, although that might explain the depression in some particular branches of industry which had been connected with hostilities, it could not account for the universal depression in all branches of industry, alike agricultural and manufacturing, for the home trade and the export sale. Still less could it explain the fact that the depression was universal in all markets, and even greatest in those connected with pacific employments, which might have been expected to have taken an extraordinary start on the termination of war expenditure. As little could the reduction be accounted for by the reduction of taxation, and diminution of the expenditure of governments in general, and that of Great Britain in particular; for that only altered the direction of expenditure, without lessening its amount; if it put less into the hands of Government to spend for the people, it left more in the hands of the people to spend for themselves. The Whigs and Radicals had a very clear solution of the question: the difficulties all arose from excessive taxation, and the measures of a corrupt oligarchy; and the remedy for them was to be found in parliamentary reform, and an unsparing retrenchment in all branches of the public expenditure. A vehement outcry, accordingly, was raised for these objects, which was supported with equal eloquence and ability both in and out of Parliament.* But experience very "From a struggle which appalled, I believe, the boldest among us, we have by the talents and firmness of our general, and the intrepid and patient courage of our troops, been blessed with glorious victory. By the act of Ministers we have, from a state of triumph and exultation, from hopes of security, justified by success, been left to contemplate the real result of all these things Let us look around us and see the state of our country; let us go forth among our fields and manufactories, and let us see what are the tokens and indications of peace. Can we trace them among a peasantry without work, and consequently without bread?-among farmers unable to pay their rents, and a fortiori unable to contribute to that parochial relief on which the peasantry is rendered dependent among landowners unable to collect their rents, and yet obliged to maintain their rank and station as gentlemen in society? Let us listen to the cry of the country--it is poverty, from the proudest castle to the meanest cottage, poverty rings in our ears; it lies in our path whichever way we turn. It is not the congratulations of the noble lord opposite, it is not the song of vic The annual supply of the precious metals for the use of the globe, derived from the South American mines, had Diminished been, for some years prior to 1808, supply of the about ten millions sterling; and of precious this, about a half was coined in South AmerSouth America, and the remainder ica. for the most part found its way to Europe in the form of bullion. The rapid rise Humboldt's in the price of commodities all over Nouv. Esp. Europe, during the latter years of iii. 398. the war, was in part owing to the increased supply of the precious metals, obtained in consequence of the great rise in their value from the necessities of the belligerent powers. Gold, in consequence of this, had in 1813 and 1814 risen to £5, 8s. an ounce, from £4, which it had been in the beginning of the century. But the long and desolating wars in which the whole Spanish provinces of South America had been involved since 1809, in consequence of their calamitous revolution, soon put an end to this auspicious state of things. The capitalists who worked the mines were ruined during these disastrous convulsions; the mines themselves ceased to be worked, the machinery in them went to destruction, and they were in many places filled with water. So complete did the ruin become, that the population of the city of Potosi, in Peru, from whence the celebrated silver mines of the same name were worked, which in 1805 contained 150,000 inhabitants, had sunk in 2 Miller's 1825 to 8000. The only supplies Mem. ii. 319; of the precious metals which were Alison's Euobtained during these disastrous rope, c. lxvii. years, were from the melting down of their gold and silver plate by the wealthy proprietors of former days, who had been reduced to ruin, and from turning over the heaps of rubbish which had been turned out of the mines in the days of their prosperity. But so diminutive and precarious were the supplies thus obtained tory that can drown this lamentable cry; it is not in the power of the noble lord, it is not in the power of this House or of Parliament, to stifle the cry of want, nor to brave the stroke of universal bankruptcy. There is but one means left to satisfy the country, to avert these evils, or to redeem the pledged faith of Parliament-Retrenchment, rigorous and severe retrenchment, in every branch and in every article of the public expenditure."-Lord NUGENT'S Speech on Lord G. CAVENDISH's motion for reduction of expenditure, April 25, 1816, Parl. Deb. xxxiiL 1222 $85. that they rapidly declined from year to year; and in the year 1816, the whole amount raised and coined in South America was only £2,500,000, 1 Alison's Eu- just a quarter of what the amount raised in all parts of the globe had been ten years before, and only a third of what had been raised Nouv. Esp.iii. and coined in South America in 1805.1* rope, c. lxvii. 09 84, 87; Humboldt's 396, 407. Britain. 2 44 Geo. III. c. 148. English market fell from £5, 8., which it had been in 1814, to £3, 19s. in 1816.* 12. The general distress and desponding feelings of the country, arising from the fearful contrast between the sad Important realities that had ensued on the re- discussions turn of peace and the sanguine ex- on the Proper pectations of felicity which had so ty Tax and other topics. generally been formed, naturally This great diminution in the supply of the led, as might have been expected, to important 11. precious metals for the use of the discussions in Parliament, and material modificaSimultaneous globe was necessarily attended by tions on our military and naval establishment, and rapid cona general fall of prices over the and the whole system of British finance. These traction of the whole world, and was one great discussions and measures are the more importpaper currency of Great cause of the poverty and sulleringant, that they form the basis, as it were, of the which every where prevailed. But whole subsequent monetary and financial policy its effect was most seriously aggravated, in the of the empire, and all the incalculable conseparticular case of Great Britain, by the simulta-quences which have flowed from it. The year neous and still more serious contraction in its 1816, the first year of peace, marks the transipaper circulation, and the credit afforded to its tion from the old to the new system in these merchants, by the declared intentions of Govern- respects, and therefore its legislative measures ment in regard to the resumption of cash pay-are in an especial manner worthy of attention. ments by the Bank of England. By the existing Four subjects, each of paramount importance, law under which that establishment acted, it were brought under discussion-the continuance was provided that the restriction on cash pay-of the Bank Restriction Act, the continuance of ments should continue "for six months after the the Property Tax, Agricultural Distress, and the conclusion of a general peace, and Army and Navy Establishment. The priority, no longer." As the time had now in point of time, belongs to the debate on the arrived when it was necessary to property tax; but it is difficult to fix upon any come to some resolution on the subject, because particular occasion on which the discussion on it the six months was on the point of expiring, was brought to a point, as it was renewed Ministers proposed that the restriction should be almost every night, during two months, on the continued till the 5th July, 1818, and the Oppo- presentation of successive petitions from all sition strenuously contended for its being con- parts of the country on the subject. But, withtinued only to 5th July, 1817. The former reso-out asserting that they were contained in any lution was adopted; but the discussion of the one debate, the principal arguments on the subsubject, and the difficulty Government had inject will be found to be contained in the followcarrying the prolonged period, spread such a ing summary: panic among bankers, that the commercial paper under discount at the Bank of England, which in 1810 had been, on an average, £20,070,000, sank in 1816 to £11,416,400, and in 1817 to £3,960,600; and the country bankers' notes in circulation, which in 1814 had amounted to £22,700,000, had sunk in 1816 to £15,096,000. Nothing in so prodigious a contraction at once of the precious metals for the use of the globe, and of the paper accommodation and circulation of Great Britain in particular, saved the country from absolute ruin, but the continuation of the restriction on cash payments by the Bank of England, which enabled it to continue its circulation of £27,000,000 of notes undiminished, and the rapid return of the precious metals from the Continent, which, in defiance of all the predictions of the Bullion Committee, flowed back in such quantities to the centre of commerce, on the termination of the demand for them on the Continent for the operations of war, xxxiv. 573, that the Earl of Liverpool said, in 579; Alison's his place in Parliament,3 that it had Europe, exceeded his most sanguine expectexcvi. App. ations; and the price of gold in the 3 Parl. Deb. 13. On the one hand, it was contended against the continuance of the tax, by Mr. Ponsonby, Mr. Baring, and Mr. Brough- Argument am-" The petitions against this tax against the are innumerable, and all couched Property Tax in the strongest possible language. tion. by the Opposi They state facts which are undeniable, they advance arguments which are unan. swerable. They do not come from any one class or section in the community; they come from all sections and all classes, and complain of an oppression from the operation of this tax, which is universal and intolerable. The farmers complain that they are assessed, on an arbitrary rule, on property which does not exist. To pay it, they are consuming their capital; they can nei ther stock their farms, nor maintain their families, but by encroaching on their substance. How could it be otherwise, when the price of wheat had fallen from 110s. a quarter to 85s. in the last two years, and every other species of agricultural produce in the same proportion? The merchants and bankers are equally loud and emphatic in their denunciation of this iniquitous tax; the petition from the merchants * Many of the speculations published in the Report of * Gold and silver coin annually raised and coined in the Bullion Committee had been completely falsified by South America: events. The restoration of peace in 1814, and last year, had had the effect, by stopping the foreign expenditure, of bringing back the specie even more rapidly than ever he had contemplated. But after so long a foreign expenditure as that since 1808, it was not a favorable exchange of a few months which would bring things back to their former level. This would require a considerable time." -Earl of LIVERPOOL's Speech, May 17, 1816, Parl. Deb xxxiv. 574. |