192

TRUE CHARACTER OF BRISTOL RIOTS.

his

weapon was an umbrella, which he used only to give emphasis to his swearing. As he was a moneyed man, having saved 2,000l. as a carrier, he was treated as a ringleader and hanged. The three others who were hanged had used their arms more than their tongues, had opened prisons, and destroyed private dwelling-houses; one of the three was above the station of common working men. The retired carrier was the only one who had uttered any opinions that could be called political.

It is then certain that the disgraceful riot was not of the nature of sedition or insurrection. It was not wholly calamitous, for it revealed the gross silliness of the common people, and convinced their betters that there was need of moral discipline.

Students were wont to inquire in a speculative manner whether modern Europe was in danger of being split up and deformed like the Roman empire; apparently there was no region that could send forth hordes of barbarians against such countries as Britain and France. Bristol proved to the Britons, as Lyons at the same time showed the French, that civilization bred swarms of human beings more formidable than the Huns of Attila.

Pensive talkers and writers moralized on this latent savagery; poets or romancers used the new colours to produce new effects in their scenes. The Home Office in London contributed to the King's speech a dry sentence which pointed out the expediency of establishing municipal police. The gentlemen of the United Kingdom, from whose hands

THIRD DISCUSSION OF THE REFORM BILL. 193

the Reformers were thought to be taking power, persevered quietly in the cultivation of those habits which enabled them in time of need to coerce and intimidate all spiteful ruffians, especially night poachers. The unperceived tendency of political change was towards increasing the number of intelligent and courageous gentlemen, partly by rousing the Tories to Conservative activity, partly by helping the producers of wealth to become full-blown Britons instead of mere men of business.

XXXV.

THE third edition of the Reform Bill was laid before a patient and good-tempered Parliament by Ministers whose credit was raised by their long-suffering and their discharge of duties. The Tories had relished the fulfilment of their forebodings; but no legislators had been seriously dismayed, not even the Bishops, the chosen victims of the innovators. The great measure was again discussed methodically and at leisure; and those who had been twitted with factious obstruction had their revenge; for they could truthfully boast of having forced on the Reformers a good deal of reconsidering and amending. The changes, accepted as concessions, elicited hearty thanks from at least one Tory, Lord Clive, a sensible and blameless man. The improved Bill passed with ease the turning point of the second reading. So many kept away from the division that it was carried

194

THE BILL IN COMMITTEE.

by two to one. In Committee the more obdurate Anti-Reformers began again with elastic vigour that dissection of clauses which follows a second reading. They found as many holes as ever in the tub; one anomaly appeared where another was stopped up.

The inconsistency and the ingenious fumblings of the Reformers furnished Mr. Croker and his friends with excellent opportunities for being themselves ingenious and inconsistent. Whilst they themselves did homage, democratically, to the rule of three, complaining that the moieties of Cumberland got two members each for populations much less than those of undivided counties, they could not but acknowledge that the Home Office had paid a compliment, if a clumsy one, to the thing set against population, to property indicated by taxes. For a Commission had been hard at work recasting the much tinkered schedules of boroughs.

Lord Melbourne, who disliked the whole movement, had signed a letter addressed to Lieutenant Drummond, the best of mathematical surveyors employed by the Ordnance, requesting him to arrange the half-condemned boroughs on a scale of importance, to be determined by a mixed estimate. A borough was to plead for the retention of its rights not merely that it had so many inhabited houses, but also that it was reported by the tax-gatherer as having paid so many pounds on account of luxuries such as carriages, horses, dogs, men servants, armorial bearings, and hair powder. The only result of this inquiry to which Lord Melbourne saw his way was

BOROUGHS MATHEMATICALLY CALCULATED.

195

that Old Sarum, the green mound in Wiltshire on which two East Indian potentates based their legislative power, must be the zero of the scale. The engi

neer was left to himself to settle how he would combine the elements of population and taxed luxuries to graduate those boroughs which were less impalpable than Old Sarum. The upshot of his calculation would be, that some boroughs would escape from the annihilating schedule, which had been inserted therein because they were thinly peopled; they would escape, if their few inhabitants were found to pay taxes which were not paid by the more numerous inhabitants of some other boroughs. Lieutenant Drummond, supported by a set of able men of science, who served under him and trusted his judgment, made out his list on a principle which was approved of by three or four eminent mathematicians whom he consulted. But it so happened that there was in the House of Commons a Tory lawyer who began life by heading the list of a year's mathematical students at Cambridge; he undertook to teach the House enough mathematics to convince them that the Whigs had been misled in accepting the results of the engineer's calculations.1 It has been said by a certain philosopher, who might have been a statesman too, that mathematics make a perfect mill; only if you put in peas-cods you must not reckon on getting flour. The lawyer who had been a 'senior wrangler' is reported to have put into his machine a certain

In Drummond's Life Mr. Croker is named as the daring critic; but he did not take the lead in this affair.

196

THE REAL PARTY QUESTION.

mental material called an analogy. In answering him Lord John Russell, who was not a Cambridge graduate nor intimate with the minds then characteristic of that University, began by showing that the analogy was false. He then dropped philosophy and resorted to a rough parliamentary argument. Lieutenant Drummond's way of calculating had been, said he, preferred to other ways by Sir John Herschel, a mathematical sage. Sir John, son of the William Herschel who discovered a planet, and tried to name it after King George, was an authority beyond appeal; faith in him was reasonable faith. If Sir John Herschel's letter to Lieutenant Drummond had been read out, it would have been noticed that, although he agreed with his correspondent as against his critics, he set no store by any technical calculations at all about the political importance of boroughs. The later Reformers seem to have thought that it was lost labour to estimate scientifically the two elements, population and wealth; and had they attempted it they would have avoided so illusory a test of wealth as the assessed taxes.' To those who sigh over vulgar progress this must always be a tender reminiscence, the unreformed House of Commons listening to a mathematical discourse.

In these minute and curious debates on boroughs the real party question was, whether the Whigs were favouring certain Whig landholders and certain sets of people, such as the traders of North-west Durham. The scientific computations were found to shift some boroughs from the list of those which were to be