Introduction
Reaction,
Reform, Revolution, and Romanticism: 1815-1848
The
European powers met at the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) to decide how to
proceed now that Napoleon had been defeated. Conservative sentiments,
exemplified by the views of Prince Metternich of Austria, predominated at this
congress. Although the final settlement was not punitive or humiliating to
France, it did represent an effort by conservative leaders to reject changes
instituted during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, to restore
traditional groups and governments to power, and to resist liberalism and
nationalism. As a result of this and other developments, the aristocracy
regained some of its prominence, monarchs such as Louis XVIII (brother of Louis
XVI) returned to power, and armies intervened (as in Spain and Italy) to crush
threats to the status quo.
Nevertheless,
movements for national liberation and liberal reform surfaced during the 1820s,
1830s, and 1840s. In the 1820s and 1830s, Greece and Belgium gained independence
and less successful nationalistic movements arose in Italy and Poland.
Liberalism, encompassing demands for greater freedom, constitutional government,
and political rights, was particularly strong in Western Europe. In England a
series of legislative acts in the 1830s and 1840s clearly recognized liberal
demands. In France a revolution in 1830 brought to power groups more open to
liberal ideas.
A
climax came in 1848, when revolutions erupted across Europe. Although each
revolution was different, in general the middle and working classes demanded
changes in the name of nationalism or liberalism. At first, established
governments weakened or fell, but the revolutionaries found it difficult to
remain unified once power was in their hands. Soon groups standing for
authoritarian rule took advantage of this disunity and regained power.
The
conservatism and liberalism that characterized so many of the political
developments of this period were reflected in certain artistic and literary
styles. Romanticism was the most important of these, reflecting, in different
ways both conservatism and liberalism. From its beginning in the late eighteenth
century, it spread until it became the dominant cultural movement of the first
half of the nineteenth century. Romanticism rejected the formalism of the
previously dominant Classical style, refused to be limited by Enlightenment
rationalism or the stark realism of everyday life, and emphasized emotion and
freedom.
The
documents in this chapter focus on (1) conservatism (What were some of the main
characteristics of conservatism? What did it stand against? What policies fit
with conservative attitudes? In what ways did the Congress of Vienna reflect the
conservatism of the period?), (2) liberalism and movements for reform (What did
liberalism mean in the first half of the nineteenth century? What reforms did
liberals demand? What was the nature of reform movements, as exemplified by
Chartism in England?), (3) the revolutions of 1848 (In what ways did the
revolutions of 1848 bring to a head some of the main trends of the period? Who
might be considered the 11 winners" and "losers" in these
revolutions? Why did a revolution not occur in England at the same time?), and
(4) the nature of Romanticism, particularly as it is revealed in literature and
art (What were some of the ties between Romanticism and conservatism? How was
Romanticism related to liberal and even revolutionary ideals?).
What
emerges from these selections is a picture of Europeans trying to deal
politically and culturally with the legacy of the French Revolution and the
Enlightenment. The economic and social developments of the period will be
covered in the next chapter.
English
Liberalism
Jeremy
Bentham
The
roots of liberalism are deep and varied, stretching back to the writings of John
Locke in the seventeenth century and further. By the time liberalism started to
flourish during the nineteenth century, it had a particularly strong English
tradition. Perhaps the most influential of the early -nineteen th-cen tury
English liberals was Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). He is most well-known as the
author of the theory of utilitarianism and for advocating reform of many English
institutions. The ideas and efforts of Bentham and his followers, who included
James Mill and John Stuart Mill, formed one of the mainstreams of English
liberalism and liberal reform in the nineteenth century. The first of the
following two selections comes from Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles
of Morals and Legislation (1789) and focuses on the principle of utility. The
second is from his A Manual of Political Economy (1798) and indicates his views
toward governmental economic policy.
Consider:
What exactly Bentham means by the principle of utility; what, according to the
principle of utility, the proper role of government in general is; his
explanation for the proper role of the government in economic affairs.
1.
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain
and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as
to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong,
on the other chains of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They
govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make
to throw off our subjection, will serve to demonstrate and confirm it. In words
a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject
to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and
assumes it for the foundation of that system,
the
object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of
law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in
caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.
But
enough of metaphor and declamation: it is not by such means that moral science
is to be improved.
11.
The principle of utility is the foundation of the present work: it will be
proper therefore at the outset to give an explicit and determinate account of
what is meant by it. By the principle of utility is meant that principle which
approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency
which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose
interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words, to promote
or -to oppose that happiness. I say of every action whatsoever; and therefore
not only of every action of a private individual, but of every measure of
government.
111.
By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce
benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case
comes to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the
happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is
considered: if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the
community: if a particular individual, then the happiness of that individual.
IV.
The interest of the community is one of the most general expressions that can
occur in the phraseology of morals: no wonder that the meaning of it is often
lost. When it has a meaning, it is this. The community is a fictitious body,
composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were
its members. The interest of the community then is, what?-the sum of the
interests of the several members who compose it.
V.
It is in vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding
what is the interest of the individual. A thing is said to promote the interest,
or to be for the interest, of an individual, when it tends to add to the sum
total of his pleasures: or, what comes to the same thing, to diminish the sum
total of his pains.
VI.
An action then may be said to be conformable to the principle of utility, or,
for shortness sake, to utility (meaning with respect to the community at large)
when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater
than any it has to diminish it.
VII.
A measure of government (which is but a particular kind of action, performed by
a particular person or persons) may be said to be conformable to or dictated by
the principle of utility, when in like manner the tendency which it has to
augment the happiness of the community is greater than any which it has to
diminish it. . . .
The
practical questions, therefore, are how far the end in view is best promoted by
individuals acting for themselves? and in what cases these ends may be promoted
by the hands of government?
With
the view of causing an increase to take place in the mass of national wealth, or
with a view to increase of the means either of subsistence or enjoyment, without
some special reason, the general rule is, that nothing ought to be done or
attempted by government. The motto, or watchword of government, on these
occasions, ought to be-Be quiet.
For
this quietism there are two main reasons:
1.
Generally speaking, any interference for this purpose on the part of
government is needless. The wealth of the whole community is composed of the
wealth of the several individuals belonging to it taken together. But to
increase his particular portion is, generally speaking, among the constant
objects of each individual's exertions and care. Generally speaking, there is no
one who knows what is for your interest so well as yourself -no one who is
disposed with so much ardour and constancy to pursue it.
2.
Generally speaking, it is moreover likely to be pernicious, viz. by being
unconducive, or even obstructive, with reference to the attainment of the end in
view. Each individual bestowing more time and attention upon the means of
preserving and increasing his portion of wealth, than is or can be bestowed by
government, is likely to take a more effectual course than what, in his instance
and on his behalf, would be taken by government.
It
is, moreover, universally and constantly pernicious in another way, by the
restraint or constraint imposed on the free agency of the individual. . . .
.
. . With few exceptions, and those not very considerable ones, the attainment of
the maximum of enjoyment will be most effectually secured by leaving each
individual to pursue his own maximum of enjoyment, in proportion as he is in
possession of the means. Inclination in this respect will not be wanting on the
part of any one. Power, the species of power applicable to this case - viz.
wealth, pecuniary power - could not be given by the hand of government to one,
without being taken from another; so that by such interference there would not
be any gain of power upon the whole.
The
gain to be produced in this article by the interposition of government, respects
principally the head of knowledge. There are cases in which, for the benefit of
the public at large, it may be in the power of government to cause this or that
portion of knowledge to be produced and diffused, which, without the demand for
it produced by government, would either not have been produced, or would not
have been diffused.
We
have seen above the grounds on which the general rule in this behalf - Be quiet
-rests. Whatever measures, therefore, cannnot be justified as exceptions to that
rule, may be considered as non agenda on the part of government. The art,
therefore, is reduced within a small compass: security and freedom are all that
industry requires. The request which agriculture, manufactures and commerce
present to governments, is modest and reasonable as that which Diogenes made to
Alexander: "Stand out of my sunshine." We have no need of favour -we
require only a secure and open path.
Secret
Memorandum to Tsar Alexander I ~ 1820:
Conservative
Principles
Prince
Klemens von Metternich
The
outstanding leader of the conservative tide that rose with the fall of Napoleon
was Prince Klemens von Metternich (1773-1859). From his post as Austrian
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Metternich hosted the Congress of Vienna and played
a dominating role within Austria and among the conservative states of Europe
between 1815 and 1848. Both in principle and in practice, he represented a
conservatism that rejected the changes wrought by the French Revolution and
stood against liberalism and nationalism. The following is an excerpt from a
secret memorandum that Metternich sent to Tsar Alexander I of Russia in 1820,
explaining his political principles. While not a sophisticated statement of
Political theory, it does reflect key elements o conservative attitudes and
ideas. f
Consider:
What threats Metternich perceives; how Metternich connects "presumption
" with the middle class; how this document reflects the experience of the
revolutionary and Napoleonic periods; the kinds of policies that would logically
flow from these attitudes.
Europe,
I a celebrated writer has recently said, Jait aujourd'hui piW a 1'homme desprit
et horreur a 1'homme vertueux."
It
would be difficult to comprise in a few words a more exact picture of the
situation at the time we are writing these lines!
Kings
have to calculate the chances of their very existence in the immediate future;
passions are let loose, and league together to overthrow everything which
society respects as the basis of its existence; religion, public morality, laws,
customs, rights, and duties, all are attacked, confounded, overthrown, or called
in question. The great mass of the people are tranquil spectators of these
attacks and revolutions, and of the absolute want of all means of defense. A few
are carried off by the torrent, but the wishes of the immense majority are to
maintain a repose which exists no longer, and of which even the first elements
seem to be lost. . . .
Having
now thrown a rapid glance over the first causes of the present state of society,
it is necessary to point out in a more particular manner the evil which
threatens to deprive it, at one blow, of the real blessings, the fruits of
genuine civilisation, and to disturb it in the midst of its enjoyments. This
evil may be described in one word -presumption; the natural effect of the rapid
progression of the human mind towards the perfecting of so many things. This it
is which at the present day leads so many individuals astray, for it has become
an almost universal sentiment.
Religion,
morality, legislation, economy, politics, administration, all have become common
and accessible to everyone. Knowledge seems to come by inspiration; experience
has no value for the presumptuous man; faith is nothing to him; he substitutes
for it a pretended individual conviction, and to arrive at this conviction
dispenses with all inquiry and with all study; for these means appear too
trivial to a mind which believes itself strong enough to embrace at one glance
all questions and all facts. Laws have no value for him, because he has not
contributed to make them, and it would be beneath a man of his parts to
recognise the limits traced by rude and ignorant generations. Power resides in
himself; why should he submit himself to that which was only useful for the man
deprived of light and knowledge? That which, according to him, was required in
an age of weakness cannot be suitable in an age of reason and vigour amounting
to universal perfection, which the German innovators designate by the idea,
absurd in itself, of the Emancipation of the People! Morality itself he does not
attack openly, for without it he could not be sure for a single instant of his
own existence; but he interprets its essence after his own fashion, and allows
every other person to do so likewise, provided that other person neither kills
nor robs him.
In
thus tracing the character of the presumptuous man, we believe we have traced
that of the society of the day, composed of like elements, if the denomination
of society is applicable to an order of things which only tends in principle
towards individualising all the elements of which society is composed.
Presumption makes every man the guide of his own belief, the arbiter of laws
according to which he is pleased to govern himself, or to allow some one else to
govern him and his neighbours; it makes him, in short, the sole judge of his own
faith, his own actions, and the principles according to which he guides them. .
. .
The
Governments, having lost their balance, are frightened, intimidated, and thrown
into confusion by the cries of the intermediary class of society, which, placed
between the Kings and their subjects, breaks the sceptre of the monarch, and
usurps the cry of the people -the class so often disowned by the people, and
nevertheless too much listened to, caressed and feared by those who could with
one word reduce it again to nothingness.
We
see this intermediary class abandon itself with a blind fury and animosity which
proves much more its own fears than any confidence in the success of its
enterprises, to all the means which seem proper to assuage its thirst for power,
applying itself to the task of persuading Kings that their rights are confined
to sitting upon a throne, while those of the people are to govern, and to attack
all that centuries have bequeathed as holy and worthy of man's respect -denying,
in fact, the value of the past, and declaring themselves the masters of the
future. We see this class take all sorts of disguises, uniting and subdividing
as occasion offers, helping each other in the hour of danger, and the next day
depriving each other of all their conquests. It takes possession of the press,
and employs it to promote impiety, disobedience to the laws of religion and the
State, and goes so far as to preach murder as a duty for those who desire what
is good.
The
Tables Turned: The Glories of Nature
William
Wordsworth
Romantic
themes were reflected in poetry as much as in other cultural forms. The British
poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) focused early on romantic themes in his
work. He emphasized the connection between the individual and the glories of
nature. Wordsworth gained much recognition in his own lifetime and was
eventually appointed Poet Laureate of England. The following poem, "The
Tables Turned, " was first published in 1798.
Consider:
How this poem might be viewed as a rejection of the Enlightenment; the ways in
which this poem relates to themes stressed by Chateaubriand.
UpI
upI my Friend, and quit your books; Or surely you'll grow double: UpI upI my
Friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble?
The
sun, above the mountain's head, A freshening lustre mellow Through all the long
green fields has spread, His first sweet evening yellow.
Booksl
'tis a dull and endless strife: Come, hear the woodland linnet, How sweet his
musicl on my life, There's more of wisdom in it.
And
harkI how blithe the throstle singsl He, too, is no mean preacher: Come forth
into the light of things, Let Nature be your Teacher.
She
has a world of ready wealth, Our minds and hearts to blessSpontaneous wisdom
breathed by health, Truth breathed by cheerfulness.
One
impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Sweet
is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous
forms of things: - We murder to dissect.
Enough
of Science and of Art; Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with
you a heart That watches and receives.
The
Congress of Vienna
Hajo
Holborn
Hindsight
allows historians to evaluate diplomatic events with a sharply critical eye.
Often great settlements between nations have been criticized for not taking into
account the historical forces that would soon undo the stability that the peace
treaties were supposed to establish. Although this critical view applies to the
Congress of Vienna, there are historians who see it as relatively successful,
particularly in comparison with the settlement after World War I. One of these
historians is Hajo Holborn of Yale University. In the following selection
Holborn evaluates the Congress of Vienna from the point of view of what was
realistic for the parties at that time.
Consider:
Why Holborn feels that the Congress of Vienna was a constructive peace treaty;
how other historians might criticize this view.
The
Vienna settlement created a European political system whose foundations lasted
for a full century. For a hundred years there occurred no wars of world-wide
scope like those of the twenty-odd years after 1792. Europe experienced
frightful wars, particularly between 1854 and 1878, but none of them was a war
in which all the European states or even all the great European powers
participated. The European wars of the nineteenth century produced shifts of
power, but they were shifts within the European political system and did not
upset that system as such.
The
peace settlement of Vienna has more often been condemned than praised. The
accusation most frequently levelled against the Congress of Vienna has been that
it lacked foresight in appraising the forces of modern nationalism and
liberalism. Foresight is, indeed, one of the main qualities that distinguishes
the statesman from the mere political professional. But even a statesman can
only build with the bricks at hand and cannot hope to construct the second floor
before he had modelled the first by which to shelter his own generation. His
foresight of future developments can often express itself only by cautious
attempts at keeping the way open for an evolution of the new forces.
It
is questionable how successful the Congress of Vienna was in this respect. None
of the Congress representatives was a statesman or political thinker of the
first historic rank. All of them were strong partisans of conservatism or
outright reaction, and they found the rectitude of their convictions confirmed
by the victory of the old powers over the revolutionary usurper. Still, they did
not make a reactionary peace. They recognized that France could not live without
a constitutional charter, and they knew, too, that the Holy Roman Empire was
beyond resurrection. The new German Confederation represented a great
improvement of the political conditions of Germany if one remembers that in
Germany as well as in Italy the national movements were not strong enough to
serve as pillars of a new order. In eastern Europe, furthermore, the modern
ideas of nationality had hardly found more than a small academic and literary
audience. A peace treaty cannot create new historical forces; it can only place
the existing ones in a relationship most conducive to the maintenance of mutual
confidence and least likely to lead to future conflict. The rest must be left to
the ever continuing,and never finished daily work of the statesmen.
In
this light the Vienna settlement was a constructive peace treaty.
Liberalism
Defined
David
Thomson
Although
liberalism varied throughout Europe in accordance with the circumstances facing
each country, there were broad similarities among the various liberal ideas and
demands during the first half of the nineteenth century. In the following
selection David Thomson, a Cambridge University historian who has written
extensively on France and Great Britain, summarizes the common elements of
liberal doctrine and attitudes in continental Europe.
Consider:
How these doctrines and attitudes differ from conservatism; why liberalism would
be more appealing to the middle class than to the aristocracy or the working
class; the significance of the French Revolution for the devel
opment
of liberal doctrines and attitudes.
Liberalism,
in its continental European sense more clearly than in its English or American
sense, was like nationalism in that it rested on the belief that there should be
a more organic and complete relationship between government and the community,
between state and society, than existed under the dynastic regimes of the
eighteenth century. Instead of government and administration existing above and
in many respects apart from society - the exclusive affair of kings and their
ministers and officials - they should rest on the organized consent of at least
the most important sections of the community, and they ought to concern
themselves with the interests of the whole community. The ideas that Americans
had asserted in 1776 had still not been accepted by European governments: ideas
that "governments are instituted among men" to secure individual
rights, and derive "their just powers from the consent of the
governed." European liberals stood, fundamentally, for these American
ideals. The biggest obstacles to a broader basis of government were the powers
and privileges of the aristocracy and the Church, and the lack of privileges of
the merchant, business, and manufacturing classes. Thus the spearhead of the
liberal attack against feudal rights and clericalist power was, in each European
country, the underprivileged middle and professional classes. It was these
classes, backed in the course of events by the peasants and by the Paris mob,
that had been the central driving force of the French Revolution, and the chief
gainers from it.
In
doctrine, therefore, continental liberalism derived from the rationalist
movement'of the eighteenth century which had made so corrosive an attack upon
inequality and arbitrary power. Its most characteristic method was parliamentary
government; it sought in constitutional arrangements and in the rule of law a
means of expressing middle-class interests and opinion, a vehicle of social
reform, and a safeguard against absolutist government. It was distinct from
democracy, or radicalism, in that it favored ideas of the sovereignty of the
people; it wanted an extension of the franchise to include all men of property
but to exclude men without property; it valued liberty more highly than
equality; and it appealed to broadly the same classes as the growing sense of
nationalism. To liberals, the French Revolution had condemned itself by its
excesses: the Reign of Terror and mob democracy had bred the era of reaction and
led to military dictatorship. The most desirable regime was either a
constitutional monarchy, guaranteeing certain rights equally to all citizens, or
a parliamentary republic, resting on a restricted franchise but upholding the
equality of all before the law. Their objections to the settlement of 1815 were
less that it violated nationality than that it restored absolutism and
threatened to restore aristocratic and clerical privileges.
The
Triumph of the
Middle
Classes: 1848
Charles
Moraze
The
revolutions of 1848 have been at the center of historical debate for a long
time. To some, 1848 represents the end of the system set up by the Congress of
Vienna; to others it represents the great battle between the forces of
liberalism and conservatism; and to still others, it represents the point at
which liberalism, nationalism, socialism, and Romanticism met. Perhaps the most
persistent historiographical tradition views 1848 as a point at which history
made a "wrong" turn. Some aspects of this historical debate are
reflected in the following interpretation of 1848 by the French historian
Charles Moraz~. Here Moraz~ views the revolutions from a socioeconomic
perspective, emphasizing the revolutions of 1848 as a great victory for
middle-class capitalism.
Consider:
According to Moraz~, the economic factors that helped cause and end the
revolutions of 1848; how Moraz~ supports his conclusion that this was a victory
for middle-class capitalism; in what ways the aristocracy and working classes
"lost. "
Thus
the revolts of 1848 were an explosion of liberal nationalism which failed,
although their effect was to shake the feudal structure so thoroughly that it
gave place to a capitalist and bourgeois law, supporting individual ownership,
based on a code like that of France. The year 1848 saw the last ineffectual
flicker of Romanticism and the first great victory for capitalism.
Eastern
Europe then became middle class and shed its tenacious traditions, its
feudalism, castes, trade guilds and time-honoured ways of life. It entered the
age of codified law, which was kept well up to date by great elected assemblies,
and guaranteed the owner his land and the industrialist his credit. In
Frankfurt, Rome or Paris there had been little mention of railways, but it was
they which had broken up the rigid framework of credit based on personal estate;
and by their demands a new monetary and financial world was created, enabling
the railways to expand into new areas. The agricultural crisis activated a
revolution in the urban industrial economy. Order was re-established in Europe
as in England, for gold from the New World no longer enriched either an
antiquated feudalism or a radical socialism, but rather strengthened the
financial economy imposed by the railways, which gave its shape to capitalism.
The
1848 revolution saw the definitive failure of socialism. French theorists who
had severely criticized the middle-class indifference to poverty as being barely
concealed under an affectation of charitable virtue, could not seize power in
spite of the vehement eloquence of Proudhon, who dominated the debates in the
republican assemblies; they could not even prevent the disastrous failure of the
national workshops which were a caricature of the dreams of the first socialist
age. Outside France, English chartism collapsed in ridicule, for the worker
across the Channel was definitely no revolutionary. In Germany, Marx and his
friends had tried to take advantage of the revolutionary movement to win support
for their own brand of socialism. After having launched their celebrated
manifesto in Paris, they had gone back to Cologne to replace the too liberal
Kolnische Zeitung, on which Marx had been a collaborator some years earlier, by
the Neue K61nische Zeitung. But Marx was expelled in 1849. The crisis of 1846-8
deprived English landlords of the precious Corn Laws and the feudal lords of
eastern Germany of the gangs of serf labour and Austria of serfdom itself.
Middle-class capitalism was the great victor. From 1850 onwards it was to
flourish with extraordinary vigour with the new supplies of American and
Australian gold.
The
Age of Paradox: 1848 The English Exception
John
Dodds
Although
threatened by movements such as Chartism, England avoided the revolutions that
struck almost every other European nation in 1848. Why? In the following
selection from The Age of Paradox, John Dodds addresses this question.
Consider:
Whether the content of the Chartist Petition of 1838 supports Dodds'
interpretation; how this interpretation differs from that of Moraz~,other
differences between England and continental European nations at the time.
What
saved England from the whirlpool of revolution that engulfed the Continent in
1848? Here was a country in which six sevenths of the adult male population
could not vote and where the representation in the Commons was so unfairly
distributed that the great congested center of Manchester, with twice the
population of Buckinghamshire, returned only two members as against the latter's
eleven. Hunger and possible starvation looked just as ghastly to the Liverpool
Irishman or the Glasgow operative as it did to the French workman. "It is
quite new," wrote Greville, "to hear any Englishman coolly recommend
assassination." How did England escape catastrophe?
In
the first place, the Chartist leadership was divided within its own house. Such
"moral force" men as Lovett would have nothing to do with the
seditious threats of those who urged violent opposition to the Government. The
leadership of the "physical force" group was itself vacillating:
witness Feargus O'Connor's performance on Kennington Common. There was, too, a
new and growing class of superior artisans - notably those essential to the
great engineering developments in factories and railways- who wooed
respectability, trusted in the developing organization of trade unionism to
secure their rights, and threw their social weight with the middle classes. And,
unlike the French, the English middle classes were one with the aristocracy in
defense of the established order; the householders who patrolled the streets on
April 10th as special constables were more important as symbols of a national
esprit than they knew. Moreover, England had an aristocracy of which even the
more stiff-necked members had the sense to bow constitutionally before the
inevitable, and many of whom exerted themselves actively to temper the winds of
distress. The energetic philanthropic and liberal efforts of such men as Lord
Ashley, Sir William Molesworth, Lord Morpeth, and Lord Dudley Stuart (friend of
Poland and champion of Kossuth) told heavily. The repeal of the Corn Laws, too,
had come just in time; and there had never been any question about the freedom
of the British press. The result of all this was that even the underprivileged
Englishman felt that he was living under a constitutional government, that he
could appeal to a sympathetic Queen and her "most honourable
ministers" for relief. Hence an almost pathetic faith in monster petitions.
Street barricades were simply not an Englishman's way of life. He might march
endlessly with angry banners, but under such a friendly monarchy he would never
tear up his own trees in Hyde Park to block Constitution Hill.
Chapter
Questions on Reform
1.
In a debate between liberals and conservatives of the early nineteenth
century over how the French Revolution should be evaluated, what points would
each side make?
2.
In what ways might conservatives find Romanticism to their liking? What
aspects of Romanticism might appeal to liberals?
3.
Analyze nineteenth-century conservatism, liberalism, and Romanticism as
alternative ways in which Europeans attempted to deal with the changes in
Western civilization that had been occurring since the second half of the
eighteenth century.