Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet by Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

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But were there no excuses for the mass? Was there no excuse in the spirit
with which the English upper classes regarded the continental revolutions?
No excuse in the undisguised dislike, fear, contempt, which they expressed
for that very sacred name of Liberty, which had been for ages the pride of
England and her laws--

The old laws of England, they
Whose reverend heads with age are grey--
Children of a wiser day--
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo, Liberty!

for which, according to the latest improvements, is now substituted a
bureaucracy of despotic commissions? Shame upon those who sneered at the
very name of her to whom they owed the wealth they idolize! who cry down
liberty because God has given it to them in such priceless abundance,
boundless as the sunshine and the air of heaven, that they are become
unconscious of it as of the elements by which they live! Woe to those who
despise the gift of God! Woe to those who have turned His grace into a
cloak for tyranny; who, like the Jews of old, have trampled under foot His
covenant at the very moment that they were asserting their exclusive right
to it, and denying his all-embracing love!

And were there no excuses, too, in the very arguments which
nineteen-twentieths of the public press used to deter us from following the
example of the Continent? If there had been one word of sympathy with the
deep wrongs of France, Germany, Italy, Hungary--one attempt to discriminate
the righteous and God-inspired desire of freedom, from man's furious and
self-willed perversion of it, we would have listened to them. But, instead,
what was the first, last, cardinal, crowning argument?--"The cost of
sedition!" "Revolutions interfered with trade!" and therefore they were
damnable! Interfere with the food and labour of the millions? The millions
would take the responsibility of that upon themselves. If the party of
order cares so much for the millions, why had they left them what they
are? No: it was with the profits of the few that revolutions interfered;
with the Divine right, not so much of kings, but of money-making. They
hampered Mammon, the very fiend who is devouring the masses. The one end
and aim of existence was, the maintenance of order--of peace and room to
make money in. And therefore Louis' spies might make France one great
inquisition-hell; German princelets might sell their country piecemeal to
French or Russian! the Hungarian constitution, almost the counterpart of
our own, might be sacrificed at the will of an idiot or villain; Papal
misgovernment might continue to render Rome a worse den of thieves than
even Papal superstition could have made it without the addition of tyranny;
but Order must be maintained, for how else could the few make money out of
the labour of the many? These were their own arguments. Whether they were
likely to conciliate the workman to the powers that be, by informing him
that those powers were avowedly the priests of the very system which was
crushing him, let the reader judge.

The maintenance of order--of the order of disorder--that was to be the new
God before whom the working classes were to bow in spell-bound awe; an idol
more despicable and empty than even that old divine right of tyrants, newly
applied by some well-meaning but illogical personages, not merely as of old
to hereditary sovereigns, but to Louis Philippes, usurers, upstarts--why
not hereafter to demagogues? Blindfold and desperate bigots! who would
actually thus, in the imbecility of terror, deify that very right of the
physically strongest and cunningest, which, if anything, is antichrist
itself. That argument against sedition, the workmen heard; and,
recollecting 1688, went on their way, such as it was, unheeding.

One word more, even at the risk of offending many whom I should be very
sorry to offend, and I leave this hateful discussion. Let it ever be
remembered that the working classes considered themselves deceived,
cajoled, by the passers of the Reform Bill; that they cherished--whether
rightly or wrongly it is now too late to ask--a deep-rooted grudge
against those who had, as they thought, made their hopes and passions a
stepping-stone towards their own selfish ends. They were told to support
the Reform Bill, not only on account of its intrinsic righteousness--which
God forbid that I should deny--but because it was the first of a glorious
line of steps towards their enfranchisement; and now the very men who told
them this, talked peremptorily of "finality," showed themselves the most
dogged and careless of conservatives, and pooh-poohed away every attempt at
further enlargement of the suffrage. They were told to support it as the
remedy for their own social miseries; and behold those miseries were year
by year becoming deeper, more wide-spread, more hopeless; their entreaties
for help and mercy, in 1842, and at other times, had been lazily laid by
unanswered; and almost the only practical efforts for their deliverance had
been made by a Tory nobleman, the honoured and beloved Lord Ashley. They
found that they had, in helping to pass the Reform Bill, only helped to
give power to the two very classes who crushed them--the great labour
kings, and the small shopkeepers; that they had blindly armed their
oppressors with the additional weapon of an ever-increasing political
majority. They had been told, too (let that never be forgotten), that in
order to carry the Reform Bill, sedition itself was lawful; they had seen
the master-manufacturers themselves give the signal for the plug-riots by
stopping their mills. Their vanity, ferocity, sense of latent and fettered
power, pride of numbers, and physical strength, had been nattered and
pampered by those who now only talked of grape-shot and bayonets. They had
heard the Reform Bill carried by the threats of men of rank and power,
that "Manchester should march upon London." Were their masters, then, to
have a monopoly in sedition, as in everything else? What had been fair in
order to compel the Reform Bill, must surely be fairer still to compel
the fulfilment of Reform Bill pledges? And so, imitating the example of
those whom they fancied had first used and then deserted them, they, in
their madness, concocted a rebellion, not primarily against the laws and
constitution of their land, but against Mammon--against that accursed
system of competition, slavery of labour, absorption of the small
capitalists by the large ones, and of the workman by all, which is, and
was, and ever will be, their internecine foe. Silly and sanguinary enough
were their schemes, God knows! and bootless enough had they succeeded;
for nothing nourishes in the revolutionary atmosphere but that lowest
embodiment of Mammon, "the black pool of Agio," and its money-gamblers. But
the battle remains still to be fought; the struggle is internecine; only no
more with weapons of flesh and blood, but with a mightier weapon--with that
association which is the true bane of Mammon--the embodiment of brotherhood
and love.

We should have known that before the tenth of April? Most true, reader--but
wrath is blindness. You too surely have read more wisdom than you have
practised yet; seeing that you have your Bible, and perhaps, too, Mill's
"Political Economy." Have you perused therein the priceless Chapter "On
the Probable Futurity of the Labouring Classes"? If not, let me give you
the reference--vol. ii, p. 315, of the Second Edition. Read it, thou
self-satisfied Mammon, and perpend; for it is both a prophecy and a doom!

* * * * *

But, the reader may ask, how did you, with your experience of the reason,
honesty, moderation, to be expected of mobs, join in a plan which, if it
had succeeded, must have let loose on those "who had" in London, the whole
flood of those "who had not"?

The reader shall hear. My story may be instructive, as a type of the
feelings of thousands beside me.

It was the night after I had returned from D * * * *; sitting in
Crossthwaite's little room, I had heard with mingled anxiety and delight
the plans of my friends. They were about to present a monster petition in
favour of the Charter; to accompany it _en masse_ to the door of the House
of Commons; and if it was refused admittance--why, then, ulterior measures
were the only hope. "And they will refuse it," said Crossthwaite; "they're
going, I hear, to revive some old law or other, that forbids processions
within such and such a distance of the House of Commons. Let them forbid!
To carry arms, to go in public procession, to present petitions openly,
instead of having them made a humbug of by being laid on the table unopened
by some careless member--they're our rights, and we'll have them. There's
no use mincing the matter: it's just like the old fable of the farmer and
his wheat--if we want it reaped, we must reap it ourselves. Public opinion,
and the pressure from without, are the only things which have carried any
measure in England for the last twenty years. Neither Whigs nor Tories deny
it: the governed govern their governors--that's the 'ordre du jour' just
now--and we'll have our turn at it! We'll give those House of Commons
oligarchs--those tools of the squires and shopkeepers--we'll give them a
taste of pleasure from without, as shall make the bar of the house crack
again. And then to be under arms, day and night, till the Charter's
granted."

"And if it is refused?"

"Fight! that's the word, and no other. There's no other hope. No
Charter,--No social reforms! We must give them ourselves, for no one else
will. Look there, and judge for yourself!"

He pulled a letter out from among his papers, and threw it across to me.

"What's this?"

"That came while you were in gaol. There don't want many words about it.
We sent up a memorial to government about the army and police clothing. We
told 'em how it was the lowest, most tyrannous, most ill-paid of all the
branches of slop-making; how men took to it only when they were starved
out of everything else. We entreated them to have mercy on us--entreated
them to interfere between the merciless contractors and the poor wretches
on whose flesh and blood contractors, sweaters, and colonels, were all
fattening: and there's the answer we got. Look at it; read it! Again and
again I've been minded to placard it on the walls, that all the world
might see the might and the mercies of the government. Read it! 'Sorry
to say that it is utterly out of the power of her Majesty's * * * *s to
interfere--as the question of wages rests entirely between the contractor
and the workmen.'"

"He lies!" I said. "If it did, the workmen might put a pistol to the
contractor's head, and say--'You shall not tempt the poor, needy, greedy,
starving workers to their own destruction, and the destruction of their
class; you shall not offer these murderous, poisonous prices. If we saw
you offering our neighbour a glass of laudanum, we would stop you at all
risks--and we will stop you now.' No! no! John, the question don't
lie between workman and contractor, but between workman and
contractor-plus-grape-and-bayonets!"

"Look again. There's worse comes after that. 'If government did interfere,
it would not benefit the workman, as his rate of wages depends entirely
on the amount of competition between the workmen themselves.' Yes, my
dear children, you must eat each other; we are far too fond parents to
interfere with so delightful an amusement! Curse them--sleek, hard-hearted,
impotent do-nothings! They confess themselves powerless against
competition--powerless against the very devil that is destroying us, faster
and faster every year! They can't help us on a single point. They can't
check population; and if they could, they can't get rid of the population
which exists. They daren't give us a comprehensive emigration scheme. They
daren't lift a finger to prevent gluts in the labour market. They daren't
interfere between slave and slave, between slave and tyrant. They are
cowards, and like cowards they shall fall!"

"Ay--like cowards they shall fall!" I answered; and from that moment I was
a rebel and a conspirator.

"And will the country join us?"

"The cities will; never mind the country. They are too weak to resist their
own tyrants--and they are too weak to resist us. The country's always
drivelling in the background. A country-party's sure to be a party of
imbecile bigots. Nobody minds them."

I laughed. "It always was so, John. When Christianity first spread, it was
in the cities--till a pagan, a villager, got to mean a heathen for ever and
ever."

"And so it was in the French revolution; when Popery had died out of all
the rest of France, the priests and the aristocrats still found their dupes
in the remote provinces."

"The sign of a dying system that, to be sure. Woe to Toryism and the
Church of England, and everything else, when it gets to boasting that its
stronghold is still the hearts of the agricultural poor. It is the cities,
John, the cities, where the light dawns first--where man meets man, and
spirit quickens spirit, and intercourse breeds knowledge, and knowledge
sympathy, and sympathy enthusiasm, combination, power irresistible; while
the agriculturists remain ignorant, selfish, weak, because they are
isolated from each other. Let the country go. The towns shall win the
Charter for England! And then for social reform, sanitary reform, ædile
reform, cheap food, interchange of free labour, liberty, equality, and
brotherhood for ever!"

Such was our Babel-tower, whose top should reach to heaven. To understand
the allurement of that dream, you must have lain, like us, for years in
darkness and the pit. You must have struggled for bread, for lodging, for
cleanliness, for water, for education--all that makes life worth living
for--and found them becoming, year by year, more hopelessly impossible, if
not to yourself, yet still to the millions less gifted than yourself; you
must have sat in darkness and the shadow of death, till you are ready to
welcome any ray of light, even though it should be the glare of a volcano.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

A PATRIOT'S REWARD.

I never shall forget one evening's walk, as Crossthwaite and I strode
back together from the Convention. We had walked on some way arm in arm
in silence, under the crushing and embittering sense of having something
to conceal--something, which if those who passed us so carelessly in
the street had known--! It makes a villain and a savage of a man, that
consciousness of a dark, hateful secret. And it was a hateful one!--a
dark and desperate necessity, which we tried to call by noble names, that
faltered on our lips as we pronounced them; for the spirit of God was not
in us; and instead of bright hope, and the clear fixed lodestar of duty,
weltered in our imaginations a wild possible future of tumult, and flame,
and blood.

"It must be done!--it shall be done!--it will be done!" burst out John, at
last, in that positive, excited tone, which indicated a half disbelief of
his own words. "I've been reading Macerone on street-warfare; and I see the
way as clear as day."

I felt nothing but the dogged determination of despair. "It must be tried,
if the worst comes to the worst--but I have no hope. I read Somerville's
answer to that Colonel Macerone. Ten years ago he showed it was impossible.
We cannot stand against artillery; we have no arms."

"I'll tell you where to buy plenty. There's a man, Power, or Bower, he's
sold hundreds in the last few days; and he understands the matter. He tells
us we're certain, safe. There are hundreds of young men in the government
offices ready to join, if we do but succeed at first. It all depends on
that. The first hour settles the fate of a revolution."

"If we succeed, yes--the cowardly world will always side with the
conquering party; and we shall have every pickpocket and ruffian in our
wake, plundering in the name of liberty and order."

"Then we'll shoot them like dogs, as the French did! 'Mort aux voleurs'
shall be the word!"

"Unless they shoot us. The French had a national guard, who had property
to lose, and took care of it. The shopkeepers here will be all against us;
they'll all be sworn in special constables, to a man; and between them and
the soldiers, we shall have three to one upon us."

"Oh! that Power assures me the soldiers will fraternize. He says there are
three regiments at least have promised solemnly to shoot their officers,
and give up their arms to the mob."

"Very important, if true--and very scoundrelly, too, I'd sooner be shot
myself by fair fighting, than see officers shot by cowardly treason."

"Well, it's ugly. I like fair play as well as any man. But it can't be
done. There must be a surprise, a _coup de main_, as the French say" (poor
Crossthwaite was always quoting French in those days). "Once show our
strength--burst upon the tyrants like a thunderclap; and then!--

"Men of England, heirs of glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Rise, shake off the chains like dew
Which in sleep have fallen on you!
Ye are many, they are few!"

"That's just what I am afraid they are not. Let's go and find out this man
Power, and hear his authority for the soldier-story. Who knows him?"

"Why, Mike Kelly and he had been a deal together of late, Kelly's a true
heart now--a true Irishman ready for anything. Those Irish are the boys,
after all--though I don't deny they do bluster and have their way a little
too much in the Convention. But still Ireland's wrongs are England's. We
have the same oppressors. We must make common cause against the tyrants."

"I wish to Heaven they would just have stayed at home, and ranted on the
other side of the water; they had their own way there, and no Mammonite
middle-class to keep them down; and yet they never did an atom of good.
Their eloquence is all bombast, and what's more, Crossthwaite, though there
are some fine fellows among them, nine-tenths are liars--liars in grain,
and you know it--"

Crossthwaite turned angrily to me. "Why, you are getting as reactionary as
old Mackaye himself!"

"I am not--and he is not. I am ready to die on a barricade to-morrow, if
it comes to that. I haven't six months' lease of life--I am going into
consumption; and a bullet is as easy a death as spitting up my lungs
piecemeal. But I despise these Irish, because I can't trust them--they
can't trust each other--they can't trust themselves. You know as well as I
that you can't get common justice done in Ireland, because you can depend
upon no man's oath. You know as well as I, that in Parliament or out, nine
out of ten of them will stick at no lie, even if it has been exposed and
refuted fifty times over, provided it serves the purpose of the moment; and
I often think that, after all, Mackaye's right, and what's the matter with
Ireland is just that and nothing else--that from the nobleman in his
castle to the beggar on his dunghill, they are a nation of liars, John
Crossthwaite!"

"Sandy's a prejudiced old Scotchman."

"Sandy's a wiser man than you or I, and you know it."

"Oh, I don't deny that; but he's getting old, and I think he has been
failing in his mind of late."

"I'm afraid he's failing in his health; he has never been the same man
since they hooted him down in John Street. But he hasn't altered in his
opinions one jot; and I'll tell you what--I believe he's right. I'll die in
this matter like a man, because it's the cause of liberty; but I've fearful
misgivings about it, just because Irishmen are at the head of it."

"Of course they are--they have the deepest wrongs; and that makes them
most earnest in the cause of right. The sympathy of suffering, as they say
themselves, has bound them to the English working man against the same
oppressors."

"Then let them fight those oppressors at home, and we'll do the same:
that's the true way to show sympathy. Charity begins at home. They are
always crying 'Ireland for the Irish'; why can't they leave England for the
English?"

"You're envious of O'Connor's power!"

"Say that again, John Crossthwaite, and we part for ever!" And I threw off
his arm indignantly.

"No--but--don't let's quarrel, my dear old fellow--now, that perhaps,
perhaps we may never meet again--but I can't bear to hear the Irish abused.
They're noble, enthusiastic, generous fellows. If we English had half as
warm hearts, we shouldn't be as we are now; and O'Connor's a glorious
man, I tell you. Just think of him, the descendant of the ancient kings,
throwing away his rank, his name, all he had in the world, for the cause of
the suffering millions!"

"That's a most aristocratic speech, John," said I, smiling, in spite of my
gloom. "So you keep a leader because he's descended from ancient kings, do
you? I should prefer him just because he was not--just because he was a
working man, and come of workmen's blood. We shall see whether he's stanch
after all. To my mind, little Cuffy's worth a great deal more, as far as
earnestness goes."

"Oh! Cuffy's a low-bred, uneducated fellow."

"Aristocrat again, John!" said I, as we went up-stairs to Kelly's room. And
Crossthwaite did not answer.

There was so great a hubbub inside Kelly's room, of English, French, and
Irish, all talking at once, that we knocked at intervals for full five
minutes, unheard by the noisy crew; and I, in despair, was trying the
handle, which was fast, when, to my astonishment, a heavy blow was struck
on the panel from the inside, and the point of a sharp instrument driven
right through, close to my knees, with the exclamation--

"What do you think o' that, now, in a policeman's bread-basket?"

"I think," answered I, as loud as I dare, and as near the dangerous door,
"if I intended really to use it, I wouldn't make such a fool's noise about
it."

There was a dead silence; the door was hastily opened, and Kelly's nose
poked out; while we, in spite of the horribleness of the whole thing, could
not help laughing at his face of terror. Seeing who we were he welcomed
us in at once, into a miserable apartment, full of pikes and daggers,
brandished by some dozen miserable, ragged, half-starved artizans.
Three-fourths, I saw at once, were slop-working tailors. There was a
bloused and bearded Frenchman or two; but the majority were, as was to have
been expected, the oppressed, the starved, the untaught, the despairing,
the insane; "the dangerous classes," which society creates, and then
shrinks in horror, like Frankenstein, from the monster her own clumsy
ambition has created. Thou Frankenstein Mammon! hast thou not had warnings
enough, either to make thy machines like men, or stop thy bungling, and let
God make them for Himself?

I will not repeat what I heard there. There is many a frantic ruffian
of that night now sitting "in his right mind"--though not yet
"clothed"--waiting for God's deliverance, rather than his own.

We got Kelly out of the room into the street, and began inquiring of
him the whereabouts of this said Bower or Power. "He didn't know,"--the
feather-headed Irishman that he was!--"Faix, by-the-by, he'd forgotten--an'
he went to look for him at the place he tould him, and they didn't know
sich a one there--"

"Oh, oh! Mr. Power has an _alibi_, then? Perhaps an _alias_ too?"

"He didn't know his name rightly. Some said it was Brown; but he was a
broth of a boy--a thrue people's man. Bedad, he gov' away arms afthen and
afthen to them that couldn't buy 'em. An' he's as free-spoken--och, but
he's put me into the confidence! Come down the street a bit, and I'll tell
yees--I'll be Lord-Lieutenant o' Dublin Castle meself, if it succades, as
shure as there's no snakes in ould Ireland, an' revenge her wrongs ankle
deep in the bhlood o' the Saxon! Whirroo! for the marthyred memory o' the
three hundred thousint vargens o' Wexford!"

"Hold your tongue, you ass!" said Crossthwaite, as he clapped his hand over
his mouth, expecting every moment to find us all three in the Rhadamanthine
grasp of a policeman; while I stood laughing, as people will, for mere
disgust at the ridiculous, which almost always intermingles with the
horrible.

At last, out it came--

"Bedad! we're going to do it! London's to be set o' fire in seventeen
places at the same moment, an' I'm to light two of them to me own self, and
make a holycrust--ay, that's the word--o' Ireland's scorpions, to sting
themselves to death in circling flame--"

"You would not do such a villanous thing?" cried we, both at once.

"Bedad! but I won't harm a hair o' their heads! Shure, we'll save the women
and childer alive, and run for the fire-ingins our blessed selves, and then
out with the pikes, and seize the Bank and the Tower--

"An' av' I lives, I lives victhorious,
An' av' I dies, my soul in glory is;
Love fa--a--are--well!"

I was getting desperate: the whole thing seemed at once so horrible and so
impossible. There must be some villanous trap at the bottom of it.

"If you don't tell me more about this fellow Power, Mike," said I, "I'll
blow your brains out on the spot: either you or he are villains." And I
valiantly pulled out my only weapon, the door key, and put it to his head.