Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I.
WAS THE REPEAL OF THE CORN LAWS THE EFFECT OF ORATORY?
It may be of use to try to discover what really won the battle between the manufacturers and the landholders on the question of the Corn Laws. For it was a battle between those two powerful classes, and the poor man, whose cheap loaf was put forward as the principal casus belli, had very little, indeed nothing, to say in the matter except so far as his voice might be heard through the exertions of his advocates, General Thompson and Mr. Villiers, who could hardly obtain a hearing in the House of Commons; indeed, General Thompson distinctly says, in his published "Letters to his Constituents," that he was trampled on in the House of Commons, and Mr. Villiers had such powerful opposition to encounter, that, as Mr. Disraeli said in his generous tribute to the character of a political adversary, " anybody but the hon. and learned Member for Wolverhampton would have sunk in the unequal fray."
Sir Robert Peel attributed his change of opinion on the subject of the Corn Laws to "the unadorned eloquence of Richard Cobden." Mr. Cobden was certainly at once a most agreeable and a most effective speaker. Mr. Bright, who may be admitted to be a very competent judge, said in a note to me, "Mr. Cobden's speaking was to me always charming, so simple, easy, and true. He did not often rouse to passion, but his power to convince was something wonderful."
The words here applied by Mr. Bright to Mr. Cobden's speaking may truly be applied to Mr. Bright's own speaking, of which, as of Mr. Cobden's, force and clearness are the characteristics. Nevertheless the repeal of the Corn Laws was not the work of the eloquence adorned or unadorned of Mr. Cobden, or of anybody else. Neither did eloquence nor logic, nor even geometrical reasoning ever decide any great conflict of opinion, as was said by Hobbes more than two hundred years ago. If it had been contrary to the interest of men who were the ruling power in a country that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two right angles, that doctrine would have been suppressed in that country.
It was the opinion of Philip of Macedon that he could subdue the States of Greece, and that he was under no moral obligation not to use his power for that purpose. Except to enthusiastic schoolboys it appears absurd to suppose that any words, though uttered by the greatest speaker known among men, could either turn Philip from his purpose or turn the Greeks of that time into the Greeks who had fought at Marathon and Salamis, or turn himself into Miltiades or Themistocles.
It was the opinion of Charles Stuart that he had certain rights over the souls, bodies, lands, goods and chattels of the people of England, which rights, if carried out as he sought to carry them out, did not leave to the people of England any souls, bodies, lands, goods and chattels which they could call their own. The eloquence of John Pym, whether it be called adorned or unadorned, was certainly equal to the eloquence, "the unadorned eloquence," to borrow the phrase of Sir Robert Peel, of Richard Cobden. But it was not the eloquence of John Pym that settled the controversy, it was an eloquence or a logic, the nature of which is well expressed in Cornet Joyce's answer to King Charles, who asked if he had any authority in writing. Joyce pointed to a body of about one thousand soldiers mounted and drawn up behind him, and said, "that the soldiers behind him were his commission, being a commanded party out of every regiment." The courtiers, in the great struggle for liberty, laughed and jeered at the eloquence of the talking members of the Commons' House of Parliament. The landowners, in the struggle for freedom of trade, did not drive their view of the question between them and the Free-traders so far as the King did his view of the question between him and the Parliament; for as the battles of Marston Moor and Naseby settled the question of the divine right of Kings, the pecuniary resources of Lancashire, rendered more formidable by the Irish Famine, settled the question of the divine right of squires.
The extraordinary power of enchaining the attention of their audience, displayed by Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, particularly by Mr. Bright in the latter part of his career—for some twenty years ago he had not nearly the popularity he now has, inasmuch as a weekly publication, intending to damage a book which I published with my name, did not give either my name or that of my book, but described me as "a writer of Mr. Bright's school,"—may give occasion for a few words on the old and much debated question whether oratory, eloquence, or the faculty of an orator is a gift of nature, or can be taught by a teacher like those Greek professors of philosophy who professed to be able to teach eloquence, or by careful study of Demosthenes and Cicero, and other great orators.
Dogmatists have been heard to affirm that they could by education out of any human being make a great philosopher, a great statesman, or a great orator, as surely as a shoemaker out of a given piece of leather could make a good pair of shoes. Two thousand years before this dogmatic assertion was made, Socrates in the Gorgias of Plato asks Gorgias what the art was which he practised. "Rhetoric," answered Gorgias. "You are then a rhetorician?" "A good one." "And you are capable of making others so?" "I profess to be capable." It must be noted that the Greek word ῤἡτωρ, denoting a public speaker or orator as well as a rhetorician or teacher of rhetoric, the meaning of Gorgias was that he professed to be capable of making men not merely rhetoricians but orators. Cicero also wrote much with the object of showing that eloquence or the faculty of an orator was susceptible of being taught. Alas! of the hundreds of medallists, double firsts, senior, second, &c., wranglers, how few have turned out great orators, and how many have shared the fate of a certain senior wrangler who assured his clients that he would plead their cause triumphantly before the Lord Chancellor! "But, Lord! Sir," said the clients, "the Lord Chancellor would not listen to to him." Alas! for the glory of medallists, senior wranglers, double firsts, and the whole tribe of such! Eloquence is not more capable of being taught than poetry. It is as true of the orator as of the poet, that he must be born not made; and the votes and verdicts gained by studying Demosthenes and Cicero may be classed with the battles won by lessons of tactics and strategics, and the epic poems written by the rules of criticism.
It is not after a short or narrow course of observation that I have come to this conclusion. In early life I was one of a party of young men who met at the chambers of one of them to study some of the mechanical parts of public speaking—such as articulation, modulation, expression in reading aloud. Two of those who thus met became eminent—one as a parliamentary speaker, the other as a philosophical writer, and late in life as a clear and logical parliamentary speaker. But neither of these two men, who may be said to have studied oratory, became nearly so great, either as orators or debaters, as Mr. Disraeli, who did not, as far as I know, study Demosthenes or practice at a debating society; nor as Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, who also did not study Demosthenes or practice at a debating society. And one remarkable element among the materials on which my conclusion rests, that eloquence cannot be taught, is my having had an opportunity of observing Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, who were formed by nature, and not by any professional teacher like Gorgias, or any model like Demosthenes or Cicero.
Mr. Cobden once said to me that the first time he got up to speak in public he was so nervous that he hardly knew what he was saying. That nervousness would, of course, wear off in time, or at least diminish; for some public speakers have said that to the last they never got up to speak in the House of Commons without a feeling of nervousness. But Mr. Cobden would appear to have attained an extraordinary command over his mental resources when addressing a public audience. I should not think that he ever wrote out a speech, or even particular passages of a speech, on a question which he considered of special importance. He did sometimes make, or intend to make, a few short notes. I say intend to make, from the following circumstance. One evening when I was going from Spring Gardens with him and Mr. C. P. Villiers in a cab to one of the meetings of the Anti-Corn Law League, in Covent Garden Theatre, Mr. Cobden, as he tore up and threw out of the cab window a piece of paper which he held in his hand, said that, as he was obliged to speak that evening at Covent Garden, he had intended to write down some notes of what he might say, but that he had been interrupted by people wanting to see him on business, and had therefore been unable to write down anything. The result was an excellent and most effective speech.
Even when an orator appears to treat certain topics in a manner bearing some resemblance to the manner of Demosthenes, we should not be entitled to conclude that such orator was imitating or even had ever read Demosthenes. I do not remember ever meeting with such a resemblance between the manner of a modern orator and the manner of Demosthenes as occurs in a passage of a speech of Robespierre. The words of Robespierre are:—"Non, nous n'avous point failli; j'en jure par le trône renversé, et par la République qui s'élève!" These words bear a certain resemblance to the celebrated passage in the "De Coronâ":—"Ὄὐκ ἔστιν, οὐκ ἔστιν, ὅπως ἡμάπτετε, ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, τὸν ὑπὲρ τῆς απάντων ἐλευθερίας καὶ σωτηρίας κίνδυνον ᾀράμενοι; ὀυ μὰ τὸυς ἐν Μαραθῶνι προκινδυνεύσθντας. —κ.τ.λ."
I have heard a successful candidate relate that a man who stood against him for Preston—a man famous for his power of coarse invective, and of whom Mr. Pitt, when he once met him in company, said, " A clever man, but too coarse,"—called some one he was inveighing against, "an aristocratic spitting-box." I think it was Lord Stanley he thus designated. This is the nearest approach that has come within my observation to the Greek oratory. The designation given by Demosthenes to Æschines—τὸν κατάπτυστον τουτονὶ—is very lamely and imperfectly reproduced by the words "this despicable fellow," in Mr. Kennedy's translation. The power of invective, that is of applying to an opponent the language of reproach, depreciation, and contempt, has always been reckoned one of the weapons of an orator. But there is a species of language which goes beyond this, and may be described as foul and abusive—language such as is used by the lowest ruffians. I do not remember in any English orator any specimens of such filth as is discharged by Demosthenes and Æschines against each other. For instance, calling Æschines "this spat-upon fellow," and insulting the poverty of Æschines's youth and attacking the character of his mother, which last is on a level with the London waterman's scurrility, of which Johnson gave a caricature when he returned the answer to an abusive attack from a passing boat—"Your mother is a receiver of stolen goods under the pretence of keeping a brothel."
Lord Macaulay says, in the beginning of his article on "History," that it would be impossible to alter a word in some speeches of Demosthenes without altering it for the worse. The article on "History" was published in 1828. I doubt if he would have expressed the same opinion in 1844, when the article on "Barère" was published. I have read again lately the Leptines and Midias of Demosthenes and the Seventh Book of Thucydides. Demosthenes may have great power of abuse combined with little regard to truth, and Thucydides has narrated some things well; nevertheless, I place Macaulay above Demosthenes for power of invective, and above Thucydides for power of narrative; and I could not name any historian, ancient or modern, whom it is a pleasure to read except Macaulay. Mr. Kennedy's version of τὸν κατάπτυστον τουτονὶ into "this despicable fellow" is only one of many proofs that Demosthenes is untranslatable. The character of the invective partakes too much of the filth of Swift to be fit for translation into English, at least in the nineteenth century. It may have been fit when Swift wrote at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and it may be—(Dii meliora!)—again in the twentieth century. But perhaps Macaulay's article on "Barère" may give some idea to an Englishman of the effect on an Athenian of the power of Demosthenes in invective.
Whether the invective of Demosthenes or that of Æschines surpasses anything that human genius can ever again produce, as far as my limited observation extends, Lord Macaulay's invective on "Barère" appears to be a censure of no slight nature. I will venture to quote one or two sentences of Lord Macaulay's article on "Barère:"—
"In two things he was consistent, in his love of Christianity and in his hatred to England. If this were so, we must say that England is much more beholden to him than Christianity.
****
"Renegade, traitor, slave, coward, liar, slanderer, murderer, hack writer, police spy—the one small service which he could render to England was to hate her: and such as he was may all who hate her be!"
Barère, it appears, adhered to the Christian faith through the whole Revolution; through all that time when he made his Reports,—which were popularly called Carmagnoles, of which, as Lord Macaulay says, whoever has read Lord Ellenborough's proclamations can form a complete idea;—through that time, when on the day on which the Queen was dragged to her doom, he regaled Robespierre and some other Jacobins at a tavern; where, in the intervals between the beaune and the champagne, between the ragout of thrushes and the partridge with truffles, he preached his political creed: "The vessel of the Revolution can float into port only on waves of blood."
This,—that is, the union of love of Christianity and hatred to England,—this, says Lord Macaulay,
"Makes the character complete. Whatsoever things are false, whatsoever things are dishonest, whatsoever things are unjust, whatsoever things are impure, whatsoever things are hateful, whatsoever things are of evil report, if there be any vice, and if there be any infamy, all these things, we know, were blended in Barère. But one thing was still wanting, and that M. Hippolyte Carnot has supplied. When to such an assemblage of qualities a high profession of piety is added, the effect becomes overpowering. We sink under the contemplation of such exquisite and manifold perfection; and feel, with deep humility, how presumptuous it was in us to think of composing the legend of the beatified athlete of the faith St. Bertrand of the Carmagnoles."
Besides the extreme coarseness of invective of the Athenian orators, the orators, rhetors, and historians "indulged," says Mr. Grote,[1] "in so much exaggeration and untruth respecting this convention that they have raised a suspicion against themselves." "The passages of these orators (Æschines, "De Fals. Legat.," c. 54, p. 300, and "Andokides or the Pseudo-Andokides," De Pace, c. 1) involve so much both of historical and chronological inaccuracy that it is unsafe to cite them, and impossible to amend them except by conjecture."[2] "The loose language of these orators (Demosthenes, Lykurgus, Isokrates) renders it impossible to determine what was the precise limit in respect of vicinity to the coast."[3]
Nevertheless, it may be seen, as James Mill has said in his article Colony in the supplement to "Encyclopedia Britannica," from the Athenian orators that the licence of the rich and powerful and their means of oppressing the body of the people were excessive. And so far, notwithstanding the loose language and inaccuracy of the orators, some information may be gathered from them which the historians do not furnish.
In regard to what has been said respecting the opinion that oratory can be taught, it may indeed be contended that to some extent—for instance, as regards the voice and action—oratory may be viewed as an acquired art. I will take two men whose power as orators was admitted to be great, Wedderburn and Erskine, both Scotchmen, and consequently both more or less under the disadvantage of a Scotch accent when addressing an English audience. Wedderburn had practised at the Scotch Bar, before he was called to the English Bar, and is said to have taken lessons in elocution from an actor; but I never heard that Erskine took any lessons to eradicate his Scotch accent, beyond the lessons he learnt in knocking about the world, when as a boy he passed three years in the Navy, and then from eighteen to twenty-one passed three years in the Army. The line of defence adopted by Erskine for his client prosecuted by the House of Commons for publishing the Rev. Mr. Logan's tract on Hastings's impeachment, leads Erskine to make a reference to his adventurous youth or boyhood:—
"Gentlemen," he said, "I think I can observe that you are touched with this way of considering the subject; and I can account for it. I have not been considering it through the cold medium of books, but have been speaking of man and his nature, and of human dominion, from what I have seen of them myself, amongst reluctant nations submitting to our authority. I know what they feel and how such feelings can alone be expressed. I have heard them in my youth from a naked savage, in the indignant character of a prince surrounded by his subjects, addressing the governor of a British colony, holding in his hands a bundle of sticks, as the notes of his unlettered eloquence—'Who is it,' said the jealous ruler over the desert encroached upon by the restless foot of English adventurers, 'who is it that causes this river to rise in the high mountains, and to empty itself into the ocean? Who is it that causes to blow the loud winds of winter, and that calms them again in the summer? Who is it that rears up the shade of those lofty forests, and blasts them with the quick lightning at his pleasure? The same Being who gave to you a country on the other side of the waters, gave ours to us; and by this title we will defend it,' said the warrior, throwing down his tomahawk upon the ground, and raising the war-sound of his nation. These are the feelings of subjugated men all round the globe; and depend upon it, nothing but fear will control where it is vain to look for affection."
It is said that Pitt, when Erskine began his first speech in the House of Commons, took a piece of paper and a pencil as if he intended to make notes, but was observed, after listening attentively for a time, to put up the pencil and drop the paper.
Wedderburn, though he did not stand so high as an advocate at the bar as Erskine, stood considerably higher as a debater in Parliament. Perhaps Wedderburn's most successful forensic display was his Privy-Council speech, of which nothing remains but a small portion of his invective against Franklin, referring to some letters of a colonial governor, which, it was alleged, had come unfairly into the hands of Franklin, then agent of the American colonies in England. Wedderburn's invective against Franklin, one of the three—one of the triumviri, very different from the Roman triumviri—
"Henry, the forest-born Demosthenes,
Whose thunder shook the Philip of the seas;
And stoic Franklin's energetic shade,
Robed in the lightnings which his hand allayed;
And Washington, the tyrant-tamer,"
is partly taken from a tragedy then well known and popular, now never heard of, a sort of attempt of Young to rival or at least imitate Shakspeare—a vain attempt—and concludes thus:—
"Amidst tranquil events here is a man who, with the ntmost insensibility of remorse, stands up and avows himself the author of all. I can compare him only to Zanga, in Dr. Young's Revenge:—
' Know, then, 'twas I.
I forged the letter—I dispos'd the picture—
I hated—I despis'd—and I destroy.'I ask, my lords, whether the revengeful temper attributed to the bloody African is not surpassed by the coolness and apathy of the wily American?"
It is said that Franklin, though he betrayed no emotion in the public room, when he got back to his lodgings, took off the suit of clothes he wore, and never wore it again till he affixed his name to the treaty by which the independence of America was acknowledged.
Those who have had the means of the closest observation admit to the full Mr. Cobden's merits—the ability that he displayed in the organization of the movement—his perception very early that it could only be maintained by money—his knowledge of the Lancashire capitalists and his skill in convincing them of the expediency of employing their capital for the purposes of the Anti-Corn Law League, till the movement reached the point when The Times, observing the amount of the fund collected, declared it was "a great fact," and never after deserted the cause. In the summer of 1845, Mr. Cobden avowed to some of his friends that he was weary of the whole concern. Still he kept in mind that if the crops failed, and there was general distress in the towns, there was a large fund at once to draw upon and go to work with. And that was what happened. The report of the total loss of the food of the Irish was announced before our crops were gathered: and these were announced as greatly defective. Then Sir Robert Peel showed signs of uneasiness, which did not disappear till he proposed, his Bill for Abolition in February, 1846.
I have reason to think, from what I have heard from those who had the best opportunities of watching closely the whole course of the movement, that those who subscribed the money firmly believed at the time that the success was entirely due to the fabulous amount of money which had been subscribed, and which the Council of the League had in hand to carry on the agitation. Much the greater part of the money came from Lancashire, chiefly perhaps from Manchester; and what made many of the subscribing capitalists impatient at the time was that this was not fully admitted; and that, having paid for the article, they were not properly credited with what they had done.
They knew perfectly well that the fund was enormous when the famine broke out in Ireland, and that Peel surrendered from fear of the agitation being continued more fiercely than ever in consequence of the famine; and not ten men in a thousand believed the cock-and-bull story of his having been converted by Cobden's "unadorned eloquence," and that too after Cobden's very earnest and argumentative speaking had almost ceased, which it had done in the middle of 1845, two months before the Irish famine.
And what influenced Peel as much as anything was that the farmers were getting discontented, and, whatever they might think of the Manchester school, were coming over to the opinion that they had been deceived by the parliamentary protection promised them.
Of the dependence to be placed on fluency of words, or eloquence, when anything difficult is to be done, an idea may be obtained from what has been said by the most eloquent writer and one of the most eloquent speakers of his time. Lord Macaulay, in the ninth chapter of his History of History of England, has given a portrait of two men whose power, such as it was, lay in fluency of speech, one of whom has been selected for an example of patriotism by an eminent writer who, before his death, became Prime Minister of England. The two individuals characterized by Lord Macaulay are Sir Patrick Hume and Wildman.
"Sir Patrick Hume," says Lord Macaulay, "who had since his flight from Scotland lived humbly at Utrecht, now emerged from his obscurity, but fortunately his eloquence could, on this occasion, do little mischief, for the Prince of Orange was by no means disposed to be the lieutenant of a debating society such as that which had ruined the enterprise of Argyle. The subtle and restless Wildman, who had some time before found England an unsafe residence, and had escaped to Germany, repaired from his retreat to the Prince's court," But neither Hume nor Wildman succeeded in obtaining the smallest influence upon the enterprise of a man who was a statesman as well as a soldier.
Free discussion at public meetings, a free press, and a free parliament, although a vast amount of nonsense and worse than nonsense may be uttered or printed, are inseparable from a free people. Yet it has been remarked by those who have long observed closely the working of political machinery, that great powers of speech united to small powers of judgment are the curse of free governments. The man who is fitted to give the best counsel in a difficult crisis is almost never the man fitted to take the lead in a debating society or in a tumultuous assembly of any kind. There may be cases which may look like exceptions to this remark; nevertheless it has been often desired by those who have reflected on the matter that the blessings of a free government could be obtained without the addition of a curse which almost brings back some of the worst evils of despotism, under which free speech is a thing forbidden.
Those who watched the movement for the repeal of the Corn Laws from its commencement to its close noted four men as the leading spirits in that movement—General Perronet Thompson, elected Member of Parliament for Hull, June, 1835; the Right Hon. C. P. Villiers, elected M.P. for Wolverhampton, January, 1835; Richard Cobden, Esq., elected M.P. for Stockport, August, 1841; the Right Hon. John Bright, elected M.P. for Durham, 1843. The extracts from the letters and speeches of Mr. Cobden, with notices of his life, fill nearly a thousand printed pages. The extracts from the speeches of Mr. Bright, with notices of his life, fill upwards of eleven hundred printed pages.
As so much has been written about Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright I purpose to write a few words about General Perronet Thompson and the Right Hon. Charles Pelham Villiers, two men who did something towards showing what effect the Corn Laws had on the condition of all classes of men in Great Britain, and whose exertions on behalf of the poor are not assailable by such weapons as the Quarterly Reviewer has employed when he says in his review of Mr. John Morley's "Life of Cobden":—"Mr. Morley has afforded ample proof that Mr. Cobden' s misfortunes were brought about, not by his love for the poor, but by his passion for speculation."
- ↑ Grote's History of Greece, v. 453.
- ↑ Ibid., v. 450, note (1).
- ↑ Ibid., v. 452, note (1).