Napoleon sent the British a peace proposal that Pitt received
on the last day of 1799.
In two days the Prime Minister persuaded George III that
they could not trust the French,
and Grenville sent the rejection to Talleyrand.
On 3 February 1800 Pitt explained his reasons to the
House of Commons which confirmed his policy 265-64
while Charles Fox continued to oppose the long war.
On January 24 the French army agreed to leave Egypt,
and British ships transported them back to France.
British ambassador Charles Whitworth conspired with Russians
in St. Petersburg to depose Tsar Paul who learned of the plot
on March 31 and pronounced Whitworth a persona non grata.
When Paul discovered that General Abercromby had excluded
Russian troops from the occupation of Malta, the Tsar expelled
the British diplomats and barred British ships from Russian ports.
Dundas and General Charles Grey persuaded Pitt
not to attack France.
Instead in early June a flotilla with 4,200 troops led by
Major General Thomas Maitland headed for Belle Isle
but was scattered by a storm.
On 23 June 1800 the British made another deal to subsidize
the Austrians who a day before had learned that their armies
had been devastated by Napoleon’s army
near Marengo in northwest Italy.
The British promised to provide £2 million in three installments
to support 200,000 Austrian soldiers, but Austrian envoys
signed an armistice with the French on July 28.
In August the British declined to join the peace negotiations.
Napoleon sent another peace offer to London on the 24th.
Pitt and Grenville were willing, but George III and the war
secretaries Dundas and Windham adamantly refused.
In 1800 Pitt spent £10 million raising 80,000 men.
On September 4 the French garrison on Malta surrendered.
Britain’s Alien Office helped plot an attempted assassination
that killed less than a dozen people in Paris
on December 24 as Napoleon escaped.
Having received much gold from Britain, on November 15
the Austrians ended their armistice with the French
who routed their army at Hohenlinden on December 3.
The Austrians got another armistice and then agreed to a
treaty with the French at Luneville on 9 February 1801.
They recognized France’s “sister republics” in Europe,
and the French withdrew their troops from them.
Pitt wanted to pass a Catholic emancipation bill, but on
28 January 1801 George III said that he would consider
anyone who proposed it to him an enemy.
The King told him to postpone it,
and he hoped that Pitt would not resign.
Henry Addington had been loyal to Pitt as Speaker
of the House of Commons since 1789,
but he opposed Irish emancipation.
Pitt resigned on February 5, and the King asked
Addington to form a government.
He agreed.
On the 19th George III slipped into madness again
and went into a coma on March 2.
Yet by the 14th he had recovered
and passed the seals from Pitt to Addington.
Pitt declined to shed his debts of £46,000,
and friends subscribed only £11,700.
Half his cabinet resigned with him, and Grenville
persuaded Robert Jenkinson to be Foreign Secretary.
An expedition with 16,000 troops led by General
Abercromby was sent to Egypt, but he was killed in the battle
against the French at Alexandria on March 21.
Eventually General Menou surrendered on September 2,
and the last 13,000 French troops left Egypt.
On 16 December 1800 Russia, Sweden, Denmark,
and Prussia had declared the League of Armed Neutrality.
Prime Minister Pitt learned of it on 13 January 1801,
and the next day Britain announced
an embargo against those in the league.
Grenville sent Whitworth to Copenhagen to warn the
Danes to withdraw from the League or be penalized.
They ignored this ultimatum, and he left after ten days.
On April 2 Nelson led a fleet of 34 warships
to Copenhagen where three ran aground.
A reserve squadron signaled for Nelson to withdraw,
but he claimed he did not see it and continued to fight.
The British had 250 men killed and 700 wounded.
The Danes suffered 1,600 casualties, and on the 9th
they agreed to an armistice for 14 weeks.
A cabal had assassinated Tsar Paul on March 23,
and Tsar Alexander disbanded the
League of Armed Neutrality on May 19.
Britain supplied the Portuguese with weapons from 1798
to 1800 and by 1801 had loaned them £210,688.
Spain threatened invasion, and Portugal agreed to
a treaty at Badajoz on 6 June 1801 and promised
to close Portuguese ports to the British.
Nelson’s squadron attacked Boulogne twice in August.
Britain and France signed an armistice on October 1,
began negotiating in December, and on 25 March 1802
they signed a treaty at Amiens.
The British recognized France’s territory
by the Rhine and their sister republics.
Britain held onto Ceylon and Trinidad but gave back
Martinique, St. Lucia, and Tobago to France.
They also returned the Cape of Good Hope and Guinea
to the Dutch, Minorca to Spain, Egypt to Turkey,
Elba to Tuscany, and Malta to the Knights of St. John.
The French withdrew their troops from Naples
and its four sister republics.
Britain’s Navy dominated the seas,
but France’s armies had prevailed on land.
In 1793 the British Navy had 15,000 men and 268 ships,
but by 1801 these increased to 133,000 men and 479 ships.
The British army had been reduced to 95,000 soldiers
with 48,000 militia, 24,000 reserves,
and 18,000 troops in Ireland.
The first Parliament of the British Union was prorogued
on 29 June 1801 until August 31.
In the elections of July and August the Tory Party of Addington
won 383 seats, the Whigs led by Fox got 269, and Pittites 6.
In the spring of 1801 an emergency act relieved rate-payers.
The petitioning movement continued until May
when mass meetings were held.
United Englishmen and others used hand signals and oaths.
The United Britons were organized in the north to work for
the independence of Britain and Ireland and equal rights,
and they were revived in 1802.
One of those released in March 1801 was Col. Despard
who plotted a coup and was arrested
on 16 November 1802.
He was convicted of treason and executed
with six others on 21 February 1803.
In 1802 the Royal Military College began, and the
Militia Act raised 51,500 men to defend the homeland,
and a second one in 1803 added 25,000 more men.
Both sides were violating the Amiens Treaty,
and on 21 February 1803 Napoleon told ambassador
Whitworth that the British must evacuate Malta.
After debating for two months the British instructed
Whitworth to tell Napoleon that the British would stay
on Malta for ten years and that the French army
must leave the Netherlands and Switzerland.
Bonaparte said the British could remain in Malta
if the French could occupy Otranto and Taranto
in southern Italy for a decade also.
Whitworth rejected that and departed on 11 May.
One week later George III declared war against France.
Napoleon ordered the British in France arrested
and their ships and cargoes in French ports confiscated,
and he banned imported British goods on neutral ships.
In the next few weeks French troops occupied
Naples, Brindisi, Taranto, and Hanover.
The British Navy had 192 warships to France’s 50,
and British squadrons blockaded Brest, Rochefort, Ferrol,
Toulon, and the coast from Boulogne to Flushing.
The British Navy took over St. Lucia and Tobago
from the French in June, Demefara, Essequibo, and Berbice
from the Dutch in September, and St. Domingue
from the French by December.
By January 1804 the British had raised 85,000 militia
and more than 400,000 volunteers.
The Levy en Masse Act was used to supplement the
volunteers, and doctors, clergy, and Quakers were exempt.
King George III relapsed into madness in February,
but he recovered in March and resumed
signing warrants on the 19th.
Prime Minister Addington announced on April 29 that
after the budget was approved, he would resign.
The King appointed Pitt again on May 18.
Meanwhile the Alien Office had planned a coup to remove
Napoleon who by now had security run by the Paris police
chief Dubois; they arrested 356 suspects,
and many were given long prison sentences.
Pitt’s Force Bill to expand the army
passed 265-223 on June 18.
He was so desperate for money that he sent four frigates
led by Captain Graham Moore to capture a Spanish
bullion convoy from America, and on October 5
they seized more than £1 million in gold and silver.
Spain’s Carlos IV demanded compensation, was ignored
and declared war against Britain on 12 December
and made a treaty with France on 4 January 1805,
promising to pay them 72 million francs annually.
Between 1801 and 1821 Britain passed 19 railway acts.
In February 1804 Richard Trevithick’s steam engine ran
a railway in the Penydarren Ironworks
at Merthyr Tydvil in South Wales.
Also in 1804 the landowners dominating Parliament passed
the first Corn Law to impose a tax on imported wheat
so that they could benefit from the high prices
and bad harvests during the war.
Emperor Napoleon’s peace offer to George III at the start
of 1805 was rejected by Pitt who reported his own peace
strategy to his cabinet, hoping to resolve European conflicts
diplomatically after France was defeated.
On January 14 the King gave Addington a peerage
as
Viscount Sidmouth and appointed him president of his council.
The government was divided into five factions led by Pitt, Fox,
Grenville, Addington, and Crown Prince George.
After the Archbishop of Canterbury died on the 18th,
the King and Pitt quarreled over who would be his successor.
Henry Dundas, who had become Viscount Melville
and Lord of the Admiralty, was accused of
mishandling funds and resigned on May 6.
Because the budget was increasing from £12,350,600 in 1804
to £18,864,000 in 1805, Pitt raised taxes and revived
the income tax that Addington had cancelled in 1802.
Britain was subsidizing Austria’s 250,000 troops
and Russia’s 112,000 with £3.5 million.
The British signed a provisional treaty with Russia on
11 April 1805, and Tsar Alexander ratified it on July 28.
Austria demanded £3 million, but the British offered
£1,666,665 which was accepted on August 9.
The British in August 1804 had offered Sweden’s
King Gustavus £60,000 a month to use Pomerania
as a base and to trade with Stralsund,
but he did not agree until December 3.
On 31 August 1805 Gustavus accepted £150,000 a year
for supplying 12,000 troops; but he demanded more and
on October 3 agreed to a deal to initiate troop transfer
for £62,500 and £50,000 to improve the Stralsund fortress.
On the 21st Nelson’s fleet of 33 ships with 17,000 men
and 2,148 cannons met Villeneuve’s French fleet of 26 warships
and 15 Spanish with 30,000 men off Cape Trafalgar.
The British had 458 men killed and 1,208 wounded,
but they killed 3,243 French and Spanish
while capturing 4,000 of each.
A sniper killed Nelson.
After the battle in a storm about 3,000 prisoners drowned.
William Pitt the Younger was a heavy drinker, ate too much,
and suffered from an ulcer, cirrhosis, uremia, and gout.
He died on 23 January 1806.
William Grenville had been Foreign Secretary and leader
in the House of Lords from 1791 to 1801 when he moved
closer to the Whig leader Charles James Fox.
Then Grenville succeeded Pitt as Prime Minister
and Lord of the Treasury in a Ministry of All Talents
that included Fox as Foreign Secretary, Henry Petty
as Chancellor of the Exchequer,
and William Windham as Secretary of War.
The British sent 6,000 troops to southern Africa
commanded by Admiral Home Popham, who had
developed a signal code for the Royal Navy in 1803.
They forced the Dutch to surrender Capetown
on 18 January 1806.
Fox learned of a plot to kill Napoleon, and by
informing him in February he gained release of
General Seymour, Earl of Yarmouth.
On February 26 Prussia’s Friedrich Wilhelm III
barred British merchants from Prussian ports,
and his army invaded Hanover.
The British responded by attacking Prussian ships
and taking them as prizes.
Napoleon offered to return Hanover to Britain,
and this persuaded Prussia to make a secret treaty
with Britain on June 27 for £100,000 and £1 million more
that year so that Prussians would fight the French.
The British also sent to Prussia 40 cannons,
10,000 muskets, 100,000 flints, and 3 million cartridges.
Popham initiated an expedition in April against Buenos Aires
that surrendered on June 27, capturing £1.1 million in prize
money, but the British garrison he left behind
capitulated on July 7.
Britain sent 2,000 troops on a flotilla
that attacked Buenos Aires in August.
A British force with 6,000 troops besieged Montevideo
on 3 February 1807, suffered fewer casualties than
the Spaniards and took 2,000 men prisoners.
In July about 10,000 British attacked Buenos Aires and lost
nearly 3,000 men killed, wounded, captured, or missing.
On July 3 the British lost another 3,000 men
fighting the French near Maida on Sicily.
William Wilberforce founded the Society for the Suppression
of Vice in 1802, and his bill to abolish the slave trade passed
the House of Commons in June 1804 but was defeated in 1805.
After Pitt’s death Wilberforce and Fox led the effort in the
Commons, and Grenville did so in the Lords for the Foreign
Slave Trade Bill that gained royal assent on 23 May 1806.
Fox died in September, but slavery was an issue
in the election in November.
Wilberforce was re-elected and published his 400-page
Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807,
and the Slave Trade Act became law on March 25.
In his Berlin decree on November 21 and his Milan decree
on 17 December 1806 Napoleon announced a blockade
of all British trade by his “Continental System.”
British exports in 1805 were £10,320,000,
but in 1807 they fell to £5,090,000.
After the November 1806 election the Grenville ministry
had 308 supporters and 151 independents favoring them
while the Pittite opposition was reduced to 90 seats
with 102 independents favoring them.
George III’s refusal to approve the Catholic emancipation bill
led Grenville and his partners to resign on 24 March 1807.
The King made the Duke of Portland Prime Minister again
with Robert Stewart and Viscount Castlereagh as war ministers
and the Tory George Canning as Foreign Secretary.
A British expedition against the Turks in the Dardanelle Strait
had failed in February, and the British invasion of Egypt occupied
Alexandria on 18 March, but they suffered a thousand casualties
at El Hamed in April and evacuated Alexandria on September 25.
Grenville’s government had provided £10,000 a year
for Louis XVIII and £4,000 for his brother Charles,
and the secret payments to the French émigrés
multiplied from £19,325 in 1805 to £100,849 in 1806,
but they had little effect other than enriching them.
In October 1807 the British gave Louis and Charles refuge,
but Louis was called Count Lille.
The British had been confiscating cargo on American ship
if they were going to an enemy port, and they impressed
sailors they believed were British subjects.
On June 22 the HMS Leopard attacked the USS Chesapeake
that refused to be boarded, and they killed six American sailors.
President Jefferson wanted to avoid war,
but the bill passed on December 22 restricting American
foreign trade was unpopular as the exports of the United States
dropped off from $108 million in 1807 to $22 million in 1808.
To keep Denmark from allying with France and Russia
the British sent an armada of 63 warships and 25,000 troops
on 377 transports to besiege Copenhagen on August 16.
After shelling killed 3,000 soldiers and 195 civilians,
the Danes capitulated on September 5.
The British had only 42 men killed.
In March 1808 George III refused to approve
the Reversion Bill to reduce the corrupt buying
of sinecures by members of Parliament.
Perceval was accused of using
the Treasury to influence elections,
and a motion of censure was brought against Castlereagh.
In a treaty on March 30 the British agreed to increase
their annual subsidy to Sicily’s Ferdinando IV to £400,000.
On 12 August 1807 the French and Spanish ambassadors
in Lisbon had demanded that Portugal break off trade
and diplomatic relations with Britain, arrest the British,
confiscate their property, and declare war on Britain.
Portugal’s Prince Regent Joao VI agreed to sever relations
with Britain, but he refused to go to war.
On October 18 Napoleon ordered a French army of
25,000 men to march through Spain to Lisbon.
Four days later Foreign Secretary Canning and Portugal’s
ambassador Pedro de Souza signed an agreement in which
the British would defend Portugal from invasion,
and on the 27th France and Spain
agreed to conquer and divide Portugal.
Admiral Sidney Smith sailed a squadron of nine ships
to Lisbon where Prince Joao and several hundred Portuguese
with the royal treasure departed in the English ships
on November 29 for Rio de Janeiro.
British merchants were allowed to trade
with Portugal and its colonies.
The British made agreements with the regional juntas of Spain
distributing £500,000 to Galicia, £200,000 to Asturias,
£200,000 to Seville, £100,000 to Leon,
and £100,000 to Cadiz.
They also sent 120,000 muskets,
millions of cartridges, and other weapons.
The squadron of Admiral John Purvis was blockading Cadiz,
and they helped Spanish officials capture the French Admiral
François Rosily and his five ships on 14 June 1808.
On 7 August the British rescued General Pedro Romana
and 20,000 soldiers from the island of Langeland
and took them to Santander to fight the French.
Arthur Wellesley was given command of the 15,663 British
forces that were joined by the Portuguese army
at Montego Bay in August.
On the 15th they forced a much smaller French force
led by General Laborde to retreat from Obidos to Rolica
where two days later Wellesley’s army scattered them.
On the 21st Marshal Junot’s French army of 13,000
attacked the British and suffered 2,000 casualties
compared to 720 British.
The generals Dalrymple and Burrard overruled Wellesley’s
desire to march on Lisbon and made a truce with Junot.
In the Convention of Cintra on 31 August the French
gave up Portugal, but Junot persuaded Dalrymple to
let the French army leave with their arms on the British ships.
This was severely criticized in England, but a board
of inquiry acquitted the general and approved
the armistice and the convention.
On 8 February 1808 British envoys had agreed to give Sweden
£100,000 a month starting in the spring for their fleet and army,
and King Gustav IV promised to fight the French.
General John Moore with 10,864 soldiers on hundreds
of transports reached Stockholm in May.
Moore and Gustav quarreled over strategy, and Moore
was ordered to sail to Lisbon and march into Spain.
He had 21,000 troops at Salamanca,
and General David Baird had 12,000 at Coruna.
As Moore’s army marched 250 miles in December and
January to Coruna 3,000 of his men died from exertion,
cold, and hunger, and 500 were left in hospitals.
In the battle at Coruna on 16 January 1809
each side had about 16,000 men,
but the French had 3,200 cavalry which the British lacked.
The British lost 1,200 men
and the French led by Marshal Soult about 650,
but the British took some 250 prisoners.
The British had signed a treaty of friendship
with Spain on January 14.
In early 1809 Gustav IV threatened to join France’s
Continental System if Britain did not give him £300,000
immediately, and on March 1 they agreed to do so
but promised no more than £1,200,000 for the next year.
On the 13th Karl XIII replaced Gustav in a coup.
On April 24 the British agreed to sell up to £4 million
in Exchequer bills at 5% in Vienna for Austria’s treasury.
On June 21 Britain sent an armada of 252 warships
and 400 transports led by Admiral Strachan
and General John Pitt to capture Antwerp by occupying the
islands of Walcheren and South Beveland by the Scheldt River.
On Walcheren they besieged Flushing on August 1,
and two weeks later 5,800 French troops capitulated.
In the next three months 14,000 British suffered
from malaria, and 4,000 died; only 106 had died in battle.
The British departed gradually
from November 4 to December 9.
On 15 February 1809 General William Beresford was given
command in Portugal; but on March 7 Wellesley presented
a plan to drive the French from Spain,
and he was put in charge a month later.
Regent Joao made him Portugal’s supreme general on July 27.
That month the British set up an Aid Office in Lisbon
to subsidize Portugal’s Regency Council
and Spain’s Supreme Junta.
Aid to Portugal that year was worth £270,538,
but Spain got £465,667 in cash, £2,174,097 in treasury bills,
plus 155 cannons, 200,000 muskets, and 90,000 uniforms.
Wellesley had an army of 39,000 men, and on May 11
they overwhelmed the French guard at Grijon.
The next day his cannons bombarded Soult’s 20,000 troops
at Oporto and then attacked, killing 300 French
and taking 1,500 prisoners while
only 23 British were killed with two missing.
As Soult retreated, the British captured a thousand stragglers.
During the summer the French had 250,000 troops in Spain.
On July 27 a French army of 46,138 men met 20,641 British
and 34,800 Spaniards by the Tagus River.
The battle of Talavera lasted two days,
and each side suffered more than 7,000 casualties.
Wellesley complained that the Spaniards lacked discipline,
but Parliament made him “Viscount Wellington of Talavera.”
Meanwhile the Royal Navy with 83 warships
and 18,053 troops in the West Indies forced
French Guiana to surrender on 14 January 1809.
Martinique had about 5,000 French troops;
but the garrison surrendered in February,
and the British took over the island.
A year later they occupied Guadeloupe,
followed by St. Eustatius and St. Martens.
In July a force of 166 sailors took over the French
Fort St. Louis at the mouth of the Senegal River.
In the Indian Ocean the British captured the islands
of Mauritius, Ile de Bourbon, and Ile de France,
and in southeast Asia they took
Java and Sumatra from the Dutch.
In 1809 the British Navy had 141,989 men, 108 ships
of the line, 150 frigates,
and 424 smaller warships.
Their army had 234,177 troops.
On 11 August 1809 Prime Minister Portland
suffered a debilitating stroke.
He was replaced by Spencer Percival
on October 4 and died on the 30th.
Canning and Castlereagh quarreled and fought a duel on
September 21, and Canning was shot in the thigh.
The Continental blockade affected the stock exchange,
and a record 192 bankruptcies occurred in July 1810,
a record broken by 239 in January 1811.
Wellington observed that Spaniards were easily inflamed
into violence, and they greatly increased the use of guerrilla
warfare against the French and committed many atrocities.
In 1810 the British multiplied their subsidy to Portugal by four
to £1 million in cash, bonds, and provisions that included
51,200 muskets, 7.5 million cartridges, 30,000 uniforms,
knapsacks, and shoes.
They gave Cadiz £445,000 which was less than
the previous year, and regional councils got £291,991.
Yet the total for both countries doubled from 1809 to 1810.
By February 1811 Britain had given to Spain 342 cannons,
128,040 cannonballs, 222,141 muskets,
and 43,358,455 cartridges.
Wellington’s army increased from 31,000 troop
in January 1810 to 51,000 in September,
but by then 9,405 men were sick in hospitals.
Half this army was Portuguese soldiers,
and on September 25 they had the high ground
on the Sierra do Bussaco and killed 515 French,
wounding 3,800, and taking 300 prisoners while
suffering 200 killed, 1,000 wounded, and 50 missing.
The Luddite movement began
in Nottinghamshire in March 1811.
Said to be directed by Ned Ludd from Sherwood Forest
they wanted new stocking frames replaced because
they produced shoddy products and ruined the market.
Textile workers destroyed a thousand frames
and the shoddy stockings, checking the “cut-up” trade
and temporarily raising wages.
The Government used spies in West Houghton where
the factory was burned down on 24 April 1812.
Luddism spread to West Riding in Yorkshire where
17 men were hanged, and one was transported for life.
Six men got seven years for administering oaths to spies.
In March 1813 Luddites in Lancashire broke power-looms.
The army was called in and battled the Luddites who began
food riots at Burton’s Mill in Middleton
and West Houghton Mill in Lancashire where
four workers including a woman were sentenced to death
for forcing dealers to sell food at a lower price.
Burton killed five Luddites and had his house burned down.
Fifteen men and boys were sentenced
to seven years’ transportation.
In 1813 workers in Nottinghamshire formed a union
with 2,390 members, but in 1814 an illegal combination
of employers broke it up but were not prosecuted.
The movement continued until Heathcote’s lacemaking
machine in Loughborough was destroyed in 1816.
The slow death of his daughter Amelia pushed George III
into a deep depression and his madness that persisted this time.
A regency bill passed on 5 February 1811, and Prince George
became Regent.
George III would no longer rule,
and he died on 20 January 1820.
Britain’s economy suffered in 1811 as its exports to northern
Europe dropped by 80% in one year.
Their total exports had increased to £61 million in 1810;
they fell to £39.5 million in 1811,
but they went back up to £50 million in 1812.
In 1811 a House of Commons committee agreed with
a report by economist David Ricardo that problems
were caused by an inflationary banking policy.
Gold payments to Europe had increased from 6 million pounds
in 1808 to 9 million in 1809 and to 14 million in 1810.
In 1811 in Birmingham 9,000 people were on relief,
and manufacturers were overloaded with stock.
General Thomas Graham led an allied attack against
the French siege of Cadiz on 5 March 1811,
and the French lost more men, forcing them to withdraw.
In the previous ten months the French lost more than
25,000 men to combat, disease, and starvation
to Wellington’s 4,000.
In early May at Fuentes de Oro a French army led by
Marshal André Masséna with 42,000 infantry
and 4,500 cavalry fought for three days Wellington’s force
of 34,000 foot-soldiers and 1,850 horsemen,
and the French lost about a thousand more men.
On May 16 at Albuera the 35,284 allies led by
General Beresford battled 24,260 French led by Soult,
and each side lost about 7,000 men.
Wellington’s army besieged Ciudad Rodrigo on August 11.
When General August de Marmont’s army of 58,000 men
relieved the fortress in late September, the British withdrew.
The Duke of Portland’s son William Bentinck
had been sent to Palermo in July.
In November he sent 4,500 troops to reinforce the British
at Alicante, and in December he persuaded Ferdinando IV
to accept reforms and unite their forces
under British command, release political prisoners,
and adopt a constitution with a parliament.
Wellington’s army besieged and captured
Ciudad Rodrigo in January 1812.
The merchant John Bellingham had his business ruined
by the war, and on May 11 he shot
Prime Minister Perceval in the heart.
Robert Jenkinson, Earl of Liverpool, succeeded him,
and he made Addington Home Secretary.
Castlereagh continued as Foreign Secretary.
Wellington’s men overwhelmed Badajoz on April 5
and he uncharacteristically allowed them to
loot, burn, rape, and murder for three days.
After Marmont’s army of 30,000 troops retreated from
Salamanca, Wellington’s army of 49,500
took over the city on June 17.
While Marmont’s men were strung out marching on July 22,
Wellington’s force killed or captured 13,000
while the allies lost 5,173 men.
Parliament promoted Wellington to a marquess
and awarded him £100,000.
His army was down to 40,000 when they occupied Madrid
on August 12 while France still had
more than 260,000 soldiers in Spain.
British and Sicilian reinforcements helped increased
Wellington’s army at Madrid to 72,000 troops.
On September 1 he left 18,000 troops in Madri
and led 35,000 allies who surrounded Burgos on September 19.
As General Souham approached with 50,000 French,
Wellington withdrew his army on October 22.
They marched to Salamanca where an army of 30,000 British,
25,000 Spaniards, and 20,000 Portuguese gathered.
Castlereagh had persuaded the cabinet to increase
the cash subsidy to Spain to £1 million in 1812
and to £1.2 million in 1813.
On 25 September 1812 the Cortes
had named Wellington generalissimo.
Not all the Spanish generals followed his commands,
and Francisco Balleteros was arrested for refusing.
Castlereagh tried to negotiate peace on the Iberian peninsula,
but Napoleon insisted that his brother Joseph
should remain as King of Spain.
Castlereagh also offered Sweden £500,000 in war support,
and Prince Bernadotte accepted and asked for more.
After having more than 900 ships seized by the British
and issuing 6,257 formal protests for Americans impressed
into the Royal Navy, the United States finally declared war
against Britain on 18 June 1812.
Castlereagh argued that no administration could remain
in power if they suspended the practice of impressing sailors.
Although the British dominated the seas,
they lost some battles to the Americans.
Land forces were about equal.
Peace talks began on 8 August 1814; but that month the
British invaded Maryland and burned the
White House and the Capitol building.
Wellington advised that the British had no right to take
any territory from America,
and on November 18 they agreed on peace.
On December 24 they signed a peace treaty at Ghent
that released prisoners and returned territory taken in the war,
and Prince Regent George approved it four days later.
In July 1812 Britain sent Earl William of Cathcart with
£500,000 to Tsar Alexander for Russia’s war against France.
On 3 March 1813 Britain paid Sweden £1 million for
30,000 soldiers, and later in the year Castlereagh
arranged for 50,000 British muskets, 54 cannons,
and munitions to be sent to Russia.
Britain also sent to Portugal £2.3 million in 1812
and £2.5 million in 1813.
On 2 September 1813 the British promised to support
a Sicilian division of 7,314 men.
On October 3 Britain made a treaty with Metternich
agreeing to provide £1 million for 150,000 Austrian troops.
In 1813 Britain provided a total of £11 million for its allies
that also included £3,666,666 for Russia,
£1,333,332 for Prussia, £2,200,000 for Sweden,
£1 million for Spain, and £400,000 for Sicily.
They also sent more than a million muskets.
In May 1813 Wellington’s army of 52,000 British
and 29,000 Portuguese left Portugal and entered Spain.
They forced King Joseph to withdraw from Salamanca
and retreat along his supply lines.
On June 21 the allied army of 82,000 that included
8,000 Spanish defeated about 60,000 French at Vitoria.
Both sides suffered more than 5,000 casualties,
but the allies captured 2,829 French and 151 cannons.
An allied army led by General Thomas Graham besieged
San Sebastian on June 28 and assaulted it by force on July 25,
losing over 600 men before resuming bombardment.
Marshal Soult’s army of 65,000 French relieved Pamplona,
but Wellington’s army defeated them at Sorauren
by the end of July, killing and wounding
13,500 French while suffering 7,000 casualties.
On August 31 Graham’s forces finally captured San Sebastian;
but each side had about 850 men killed
as 2,530 French soldiers were captured.
On June 25 allied troops had surrounded Pamplona,
and the garrison surrendered on October 31.
On 10 November Wellington’s army of 82,000 defeated Soult’s
62,000 by the Nivelle River and then again
by the Nive River on December 13.
The British helped Prince William of Orange return
to the Netherlands as stadtholder.
British troops besieged Antwerp
from 14 January 1814 until May.
On January 29 the British, Russians, Prussians, and Austrians
had signed the Langres Protocol agreeing to limit France
to its ancient borders rather than its natural boundaries
at a postwar conference in Vienna.
In February more than 250,000 Russian, Prussian, and
Austrian troops were invading eastern France
while Wellington’s army of 80,000
was approaching from the southwest.
He avoided trouble by retaining only 4,000
of his best Spanish troops.
A British force of 30,000 led by General John Hope
besieged Bayonne on February 24, and three days later
Wellington’s army defeated Soult’s 36,000 men at Orthez.
On March 9 at Chaumont the four powers agreed to
contribute 150,000 troops each to win the war and then
to maintain a defensive alliance in which each nation
would send 60,000 troops to whichever country was attacked,
though the British would be allowed to pay £1.3 million
in lieu of providing soldiers.
A Bourbon insurrection drove imperial troops out of Bordeaux,
and they welcomed the British on March 12.
On April 10 the British army of 49,000 led
by Wellington fought Soult’s 42,000 again at Toulouse,
but this time British casualties were twice as high as France’s.
They had not known that Napoleon had abdicated on April 6.
On 30 May 1814 the allies signed a treaty in Paris
that ceded former French territories to various nations
reducing France to its borders back in 1792.
The British received the islands of Tobago, St. Lucia,
and Mauritius (Île de France).
Tsar Alexander and his sister Ekaterina visited London,
and she got drunk and persuaded Princess Charlotte
not to wed Willem of Orange.
Castlereagh met with Metternich
when he was visiting London in June.
Then Castlereagh talked to Talleyrand at Paris in August.
He led the British delegation of 19 that reached Vienna
on September 13 for the European congress.
He claimed that the British were the only delegation
that was not penetrated by the Austrian secret service.
In November the Council of Four
(Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia) began meeting.
The Council of Eight also included France, Spain, Portugal,
and Sweden, and they postponed the
opening of the congress for several months.
Prime Minister Liverpool warned Castlereagh
not to go to war over any issue at Vienna.
On 3 January 1815 Castlereagh, Metternich, and Talleyrand
signed a defensive alliance for Britain, Austria, and France,
and six days later Tsar Alexander and Friedrich Wilhelm
accepted France as an equal partner in a Council of Five.
Wellington relieved Castlereagh on February 3,
and five days later he persuaded the Five
to condemn the slave trade.
Britain would retain the Cape of Good Hope and Guiana.
News that Napoleon had escaped from Elba
reached London on March 10.
He won over French troops and was restored
to power in Paris on the 20th.
On the 13th the Council of Eight at Vienna
had pronounced him an international criminal.
On the 25th the four powers renewed their treaty
to provide 150,000 troops each against France.
Britain offered £14 million for about
one million troops to defeat Napoleon.
British troops were already in the Netherlands,
and on the 29th Wellington took command in Brussels.
The four powers agreed to let France determine
its own political future, and the Council of Eight
at Vienna accepted this on May 12.
On June 9 the Congress of Vienna
agreed on a treaty with 121 articles.
Dutch King Willem had authorized Wellington to command
the Dutch forces on May 3 with
his son Willem as deputy commander.
This gave Wellington an army of 93,000 troops,
and Prussia’s Blucher led 117,000 allies
while Napoleon had only 125,000 French.
Wellington’s army defeated the French on June 16
at Quatre Bra, though Napoleon’s force damaged Blucher’s.
Wellington’s army of 25,000 British and 42,000 Dutch
and German troops camped near Waterloo village on the 17th.
Napoleon’s army had 7,000 more men and 90 more cannons.
They attacked on the 18th but lost 43,656 men
while the allied losses were 24,143.
In four days each side had lost a little more than 62,000 men.
Napoleon retreated to Paris where he discovered that
Police Minister Fouché had taken over.
Bonaparte abdicated again and fled to Rochefort.
France signed an armistice, and Napoleon surrendered
to Captain Frederick Maitland
who took him to England on July 24.
The former emperor pleaded,
I … throw myself upon the hospitality
of the British people.
I put myself under the protection of their laws,
which I claim from your Royal Highness,
as the most powerful, the most constant,
and the most generous of my enemies.1
On August 2 Castlereagh persuaded the allies to designate
Napoleon a prisoner in British custody for the remainder
of his life, and he was shipped the small island of St. Helena
in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
The final treaty ending the Napoleonic Wars
was signed on November 20,
and France was required to pay a large indemnity.
During the French war from 1793 to 1815 the British Empire
increased its colonies from 26 to 43 including the conquests
of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Sierra Leone, and Gambia.
The British economy was the most industrialized
and diversified in the world, and it more than doubled
from £153,920,000 in 1791 to £358,980,000 in 1821.
British exports went from £20,390,000 in 1793
to £68,400,000 in 1815.
This 22-year global war cost the British £1,657,854,518
with the military budget expanding
from £19,623,000 to £177,587,979.
Their contributions for the war effort in more than thirty states
at £65,830,228 was less than 4% of the total expenses.
British taxes during the war were about 35% of the economy.
The national debt more than tripled
from £243 million in 1793 to £745 million in 1815.
The number of troops deployed by the East India Company
increased from 90,000 to 250,000 including 31,000 Europeans.
During the years 1812-14 Britain had an army of 250,000 men
compared to France’s 600,000, Russia’s 500,000,
Prussia’s 270,000, and Austria’s 250,000.
Between 1793 and 1801 diseases in the West Indies
killed 43,747 of the 90,000 British soldiers
and 24,000 of the 100,000 sailors.
During those years British merchant ships increased
from 15,000 to 18,000 while the French vessels
dropped from 2,000 to about a hundred.
In 1815 the British Navy had 214 ships of the line,
and France had 80, Russia 40, Spain 25,
and the Netherlands none.
Between 1790 and 1820 the Parliament
lost 19 members to suicide, and 20 went insane.
Jeremy Bentham was born on 15 February 1748 in London.
He was the son of an attorney, and by the age of four he was
reading and beginning to study Latin grammar.
He played violin, went to Westminster School,
and earned a degree at Oxford in 1763.
To his father’s chagrin Jeremy never practiced law
or traditional politics.
Instead he wrote about twenty million words,
half of them unpublished, and he developed his own legal
philosophy, encouraged social reform,
and worked on codifying laws.
He hoped to do for society and legislation
what Newton had done for physics.
Bentham got the ethical idea of utility from David Hume.
In 1764 Cesare Beccaria had written in
On Crimes and Punishments about “the greatest happiness
divided among the greatest possible number.”
In 1768 Bentham’s friend Joseph Priestley wrote about
“the greatest good of the greatest number”
in his Essay on Government.
Bentham published his anonymous Fragment on Government
criticizing Blackstone’ Commentaries in 1776,
and in 1781 it gained him the friendship of Lord Shelburne
who became Prime Minister the next year
and introduced him to Etienne Dumont.
In 1787 Bentham’s Defence of Usury earned him respect,
and his most famous work, An Introduction to the Principles
of Morals and Legislation, which had circulated among
his friends since 1780, was published in 1789.
He based his practical utilitarian philosophy
on “the greatest happiness.”
Bentham began An Introduction to the Principles of Morals
and Legislation with the first chapter
on the “principle of utility” by writing,
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 the chain of causes and effects,
are fastened to their throne….
By utility is meant that property in any object
whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage,
pleasure, good, or happiness, or 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 the individual.2
Bentham believed that everything opposed to utility is wrong.
He described four sanctions that regulate morality.
The physical is based on pleasure and pain.
The political is how justice is dispensed.
The moral comes from public opinion, and the religious
is based on a superior but invisible being.
He distinguished expositional jurisprudence which explains
what the law is from censorial jurisprudence which says
what the law should be to conform to human nature.
Rational action is conceiving a desired end,
and understanding is the best way to attain it.
By means of this “hedonic calculus” Bentham attempted to
measure the positive and negative consequences of any decision.
He went beyond a simple hedonism by describing seven
dimensions of the pleasure or pain to bring
a qualitative evaluation into the measuring.
Thus one must consider the intensity, duration,
certainty, and nearness of the pleasure or pain.
In addition the results of the pleasure or pain can be
estimated in terms of fertility and purity.
Fertility means whether there will be pleasures or pains later,
and purity whether pleasures or pains
are likely to be followed by their opposites.
Finally one must consider the extent in terms
of how many people may be affected.
He classified pleasures related to senses, wealth, skill, amity,
reputation, power, piety, memory, imagination, expectation,
association, and relief, and pains are related to the opposites.
Because happiness is experiencing more pleasure and less pain,
the individual is the best judge of one’s own happiness.
Moral sensibility is based on many factors.
Actions come from intention which depends on will,
consciousness, motive, and disposition.
Intention considers the act and its consequences.
Motives relate to pleasures and pains.
He explored cases that do not merit nor need punishment,
and penalties should be in proportion to the offense.
He used these principles in deciding on the appropriate
punishments for various crimes.
In a long chapter Bentham classified offenses.
In regard to ethics a person has a duty to oneself
and to others using prudence, probity (integrity),
and beneficence (kindness).
The objectives of government are subsistence,
wealth, security, and equality.
The purpose of civil law is to distribute rights justly,
and penal law punishes violations.
In prison reform he sought to improve morals,
preserve health, invigorate industry, and spread instruction.
Unlike Kant who emphasized good intention, the
Utilitarians emphasized the consequences of one’s actions.
In 1791 Bentham published a plan for a model prison in his
Panopticon and offered it to the French National Assembly.
In 1792 he was made a French citizen, and he advised that new
government as well as that of the United States of America.
In 1802 Bentham became disillusioned with politics
and politicians because they failed to promote
the greatest happiness of the people.
That year Dumont published
Traités de legislation de M. Jérémie Bentham.
He influenced thinkers who were called “Benthamites.”
James Mill convinced Bentham to leave
the Tory party and become a radical.
He persuaded him that political as well as legal reforms
would lead to economic and social progress.
Other Benthamites included Francis Place who developed
methods of political action, David Ricardo who clarified
classical political economy, John Austin who excelled at
analytical jurisprudence, young historian George Grote,
Henry Brougham who founded the Edinburgh Review in 1802,
political reformer Francis Burdett, physician and politician
Joseph Hume, and legal reformer Samuel Romilly.
Mill and the younger Benthamites were
called the “philosophical radicals.”
Mill published some of Bentham’s works in 1812.
Bentham wrote his Catechism of Parliamentary Reform
in 1809 criticizing the established Church
and circulated it privately.
He also criticized the apostle Paul as a fanatical cleric
in Not Paul but Jesus and religion itself in his
Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion.
He considered the democratic interest universal,
and advocated annual parliaments, equal electoral districts,
reports of all speeches in Parliament,
and compulsory attendance by members.
This Catechism and his Papers upon Codification
and Public Instruction came out in 1817.
The next year he began advocating universal suffrage,
and he wrote 26 resolutions that Francis Burdett
presented in the House of Commons on June 2.
In 1818 he published his Radical Reform Bill with
Explanations and in 1823 his Leading Principles
of a Constitutional Code.
That year Dumont published some papers by Bentham
in French as Traité des preuves judiciaries
and an English translation in 1825.
That year Hazlitt noted that Bentham was better
known in Europe and in colonies than in England.
Bentham founded the Westminster Review in 1824, and its
writers included James Mill, his son John Stuart Mill,
George Grote, and John Bowring.
In 1827 James Mill published five volumes of Bentham’s
papers as Rationale of Judicial Evidence.
Bentham was one of the first to recognize animal rights.
Benthamites were involved in founding
University College in London in 1826.
He wrote the essay “Offences Against One’s Self” arguing
that homosexuality is not unnatural, and he advocated
liberalizing laws prohibiting homosexual acts;
but it was not published until 1931.
Bentham died on 6 June 1832,
and he donated his body to medical science.
His Deontology or Science of Morality
was published two years later.
Bentham wrote his essay “A Plan for a Universal
and Perpetual Peace” in 1789, but it was not published
until 1833 in The Principles of International Law.
He declared that the whole world is his domain
and that the press is his only tool.
Everyone suffers from war,
and the wise consider it the chief cause of suffering.
Bentham’s plan has two main propositions—to reduce
military forces in Europe and to emancipate colonies.
He emphasized the importance of a peace proposal,
even if the world is not ready for it, because
in that case there is a great need for ideas on peace.
He asked for the prayers of Christians, and for the
welfare of all civilized nations he had three goals—
“simplicity of government, national frugality, and peace.”
Bentham proposed that it is not in the interest of Great Britain
or France to have colonies, alliances, nor a large navy.
Perpetual treaties ought to limit troops and establish
a common court of judicature to decide differences.
However, Bentham was clearly pacifistic in stipulating
that the court not be armed with coercive powers.
As he stated later on, he relied upon
the power of public opinion.
For this reason he was especially perturbed by the secrecy
of British foreign affairs, such that he had to read the
Leyden Gazette to get any news about British diplomacy,
as there was none in the home press.
Therefore he argued strongly against
secrecy in international relations.
He also complained that newspapers always
took the side of their own nation.
“It is that we are always in the right,
without a possibility of being otherwise.
Against us other nations have no rights.”3
Bentham argued that the colonies cause nothing but trouble
for Britain and France and should be given up.
This is in the interest of the mother country because of the
danger of war, military expense, corruption by patronage,
and complication of government.
He cited Gibraltar and the East Indies specifically.
It is also better for the colonies themselves
to be self-governing.
Neither are alliances in the interest of the British
because they lead to wars.
Also treaties that give advantage in trade are artificial
economically and are not useful in the long run.
The naval forces need only be strong enough
to defend commerce against pirates.
The pacification treaties, which are to limit
the number of troops, are to be publicly announced.
Bentham described the folly of attempting
conquest and the madness of war.
In modern times it is useless to the people.
Bentham believed that trade is always
advantageous to both parties, but war is ruinous.
Establishing a judicial court is in the interest of all.
Bentham recommended a Congress of deputies from
each country that should be public in its proceedings.
Its power is in reporting its decisions to public opinion.
Here Bentham appeared to be excessively idealistic
in comparison to Saint-Pierre and Rousseau,
who felt the need for enforcement.
Bentham naively believed that if secrecy were given up,
the public would no longer support wars.
He pointed to the example of the Swedish soldiers
who refused to fight Russia.
His pacifist ideas are not wrong, but they would
depend upon enlightened public opinion.
He declared that the plunging of a nation
into war against its will by ministers is
not only mischievous but unconstitutional.
He pointed out that punishing the authors of war
does little good for the people of the nation.
Since the war-makers cannot be punished effectively,
they ought to be abandoned by the people.
However, Bentham considered this impractical in his time.
In war individual crimes are greatly multiplied;
yet they win the approval of people.
Since ministers are not deterred from misconduct,
they are easily seduced by ambition and greed into wars,
especially when shielded by secrecy.
Bentham’s plan is quite sketchy and obviously not
comprehensive, but he did show the usefulness of
disarmament and the dangers of colonialism and secrecy.
He sensed the power of public opinion but also saw
how effectively it was squelched in his time.
Unlike Saint-Pierre and Rousseau he did not really present
the executive and legislative powers for a federal system,
but he did establish the principles of an international judiciary
and open public opinion on international affairs.
Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was born on 13 February 1766
and was educated at home by his father who was influenced
by Rousseau, Condorcet, and Godwin.
In 1784 he went to Cambridge University and excelled in Latin
and Greek, and he earned degrees in 1788 and 1791.
He was elected a fellow of Jesus College in 1793.
He took holy orders in 1797 and became a curate in Surrey.
In 1798 Malthus published anonymously his famous
Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the future
improvement of society with remarks on the speculations
of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers.
In the first chapter he presented two postulates that food
is a human necessity and that the sexual passion
is necessary and will persist.
Next he noted that the growth of human population increases
geometrically by multiplying while the production of food
expands only arithmetically by adding;
but for human survival these need to grow equally.
He observed that in the United States of America with ample
land the population had doubled in the last 25 years.
If this occurred for five generations, it would multiply by
16 while food production might only increase by 5 times.
Although Malthus recognized, as did Adam Smith, that
“the rich by unfair combinations contribute frequently to
prolong a season of distress among the poor,” he
nonetheless predicted that the lack of food would result
in a drastic reduction of an expanded population
by the miseries of famine, disease, and war.
He noted the economic restraints on marrying
and starting a family, and he was concerned that
these also caused the vices of sexual immorality.
Thus he considered birth control a vice.
He found that more people would cause inflation
in prices while wages remained low.
The number of labourers also being
above the proportion of the work in the market,
the price of labour must tend toward a decrease;
while the price of provisions would
at the same time tend to rise.4
The value of land also rises making rent higher for
the workers who compete for low wages.
Unemployment increases dramatically, and in Britain
in 1818 about 1.5 million would register for parish relief.
Malthus did not foresee advances in technology that
would increase production nor better ways of preventing
reproduction nor the progressive visions of socialists
and others for equalizing economic benefits.
Yet in a capitalistic world great portions of poor people
are still involved in the “struggle for existence”
that he did predict and which influenced Darwin.
Prime Minister Pitt was so influenced by the Malthusian
argument that the Poor Laws tended to increase the population
of the poor without adding to the means for their support
that he opposed a new Poor Law.
In 1800 Malthus published the pamphlet
“The present high price of provisions.”
His ideas stimulated debate on population, and the first
comprehensive census of the population
in Britain took place in 1801.
He traveled to Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Russia,
France, and Switzerland to study economics.
In 1803 he entitled his expanded second edition
An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, a view of its
past and present effects on human happiness; with an
enquiry into our prospects respecting the future removal
or mitigation of the evils which it occasions.
In this work he accepted that moral restraint
could help limit the growth of population.
Four more editions in 1806, 1807, 1816,
and 1826 had minor revisions.
Malthus married in 1804, and this meant that
he had to give up his fellowship.
In 1805 he became the first Professor of Modern History
and Political Economy at East India College in Hertfordshire
where he spent the rest of his life.
In 1811 he became a close friend of David Ricardo.
Malthus also published his “Observations on the Effects of
the Corn Laws” in 1814 to defend agricultural protection.
Malthus wrote his Principles of Political Economy
Considered with a View to Their Practical Application
in 1820 in response to Ricardo’s Principles of
Political Economy and Taxation.
He advised that to increase wealth a nation needed to balance
“the power to produce with the will to consume.”
The enormous debt caused by the Napoleonic Wars led to
austerity and unemployment in the postwar period.
He concluded this work with a chapter
“On the Progress of Wealth,” and in the last section he applied
his principles to the distress of the working classes since 1815.
He noted the extraordinary expenses in the last two years of
the war which was followed by a “very unusual stagnation of
effectual demand” and the destruction of capital in which
both capitalists and laborers suffered.
England and America were most affected because
they had suffered the least from the war and were enriched.
For the problem of depressions he called “gluts”
he advised government spending on public works
to create jobs for the working classes.
He wrote,
The employment of the poor in roads and public works,
and a tendency among landlords and persons of
property to build, to improve and beautify their
grounds, and to employ workmen and menial servants,
are the means most within our power and most directly
calculated to remedy the evils arising from that
disturbance in the balance of produce and consumption,
which has been occasioned by the sudden conversion
of soldiers, sailors, and various other classes
which the war employed, into productive labourers.5
John Maynard Keynes, who developed this theory
of public works to relieve a depression,
wished that economists in the 19th century
had followed this idea.
Malthus concluded his book,
In prosperous times the mercantile classes often
realize fortunes, which go far towards securing them
against the future; but unfortunately the working
classes, though they share in the general prosperity,
do not share in it so largely
as in the general adversity.
They may suffer the greatest distress
in a period of low wages, but cannot be
adequately compensated by a period of high wages.
To them fluctuations must always bring more evil
than good; and, with a view to the happiness
of the great mass of society, it should be our
object, as far as possible, to maintain peace,
and an equable expenditure.6
David Ricardo was born in London on 18 April 1772
and was the third son of a Dutch Jew
who became rich on the Stock Exchange.
David began working with his father when he was 14,
but seven years later he became
a Unitarian and married a Quaker.
His parents disowned him,
but he prospered working for a banking house.
In 1799 he read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations
and began studying economics.
In 1810 he advised the Government that its gold payments
to Europe were causing inflation, and he published
The High Price of Bullion, a Proof
of the
Depreciation of Bank Notes.
He advised connecting the domestic money supply
to the nation’s supply of gold,
and this theory became the gold standard.
He became friends with Malthus and James Mill.
Ricardo made a million sterling tricking investors by selling
British securities to make them think France won the battle
at Waterloo and then after the panic buying back the securities.
Also in 1815 he wrote his Essay on the Influence of a
Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock.
He noted that the high prices for wheat during the war
had made landowners richer.
The Corn Laws recently passed intended to protect
British agriculture by banning the importation of foreign grain
until the price of wheat stayed above 60 shillings.
He opposed this protectionism because it increased rents
and led to harvesting less productive land,
directing profits to land-owners and away from industry.
Thus he advocated repealing the Corn Laws so that
more wealth would be distributed to productive people.
In August 1818 he purchased a seat in the
House of Commons for £4,000 and served as a liberal
favoring free trade until his death in September 1823.
Ricardo’s major work, On the Principles of Political
Economy and Taxation, was published in 1817
and did much to systematize economics.
He believed that the purpose of political economy
is to understand the laws regulating the distribution
of wealth to the classes and their relation to society.
His preface begins,
The produce of the earth--all that is derived from
its surface by the united application of labour,
machinery, and capital is divided among
three classes of the community; namely,
the proprietor of the land, the owner of the stock
or capital necessary for its cultivation,
and the labourers by whose industry it is cultivated.
But in different stages of society,
the proportions of the whole produce of the earth
which will be allotted to each of these classes,
under the names of rent, profit, and wages,
will be essentially different;
depending mainly on the actual fertility of the soil,
on the accumulation of capital and population,
and on the skill, ingenuity, and instruments
employed in agriculture.7
Ricardo recognized that machines can increase production,
but in the third edition of his Principles he came to believe
that “the substitution of machinery for human labour,
is often injurious to the interests of the class of labourers.”
Although using machines may increase national revenue,
they may deteriorate the condition of workers.
Luddites had begun machine-smashing riots in 1811.
He hoped that unemployment could be averted
if technological advances were gradual.
Yet falling profits can be checked by improvements
in machinery and discoveries in scientific agriculture
that lead to lower prices.
Ricardo is known for his theory of “comparative advantage”
which compares labor inputs in different countries.
Two countries with differing economies
can specialize to export what they do best.
British manufacturers exported to pay for importing food.
In the chapter on foreign trade he wrote,
If, therefore, by the extension of foreign trade,
or by improvements in machinery,
the food and necessaries of the labourer
can be brought to market at a reduced price,
profits will rise.8
Ricardo ended his book writing that “value in use
cannot be measured by any known standard;
it is differently estimated by different persons.”
James Mill was born on 6 April 1773 in the Scottish village
of Montrose and went to the academy there.
John Stuart supported his going to Edinburgh University
where he excelled at Greek and studied
moral philosophy under Dugald Stewart.
In 1798 the Church of Scotland ordained him to preach,
but in 1802 he abandoned the ministry.
He had lived with the family of John Stuart, tutoring his daughter,
and that year they moved to London.
He saw too much evil in the world to believe in a God
that is infinitely good.
Mill wrote for periodicals.
In 1806 he began working on his History of British India,
and the multi-volume work was published in 1817.
Mill met Bentham in 1808.
They became close friends, and Mill’s family
lived in a house owned by Bentham.
Because Bentham was reclusive,
Mill was the leader of the Benthamites.
In “Commerce Defended” (1808) Mill argued for free trade,
but he agreed with William Cobbett who warned that
wars have occurred over and over for the sake of commerce.
Mill urged a truce between France and Britain
for the benefit of both, and he made this appeal:
In every country, therefore, where industry is free,
and where men are secure in the enjoyment
of what they acquire, the greatest improvement
which the government can possibly receive
is a steady and enlightened aversion to war.
While such a nation remains at peace,
the faults of the government can hardly ever
be so great, that the merits of the nation
will not more than compensate them, and that society
from its own beneficent tendency will not improve.
Nothing however can compensate
the destruction of war.
The creative efforts of individuals
can never equal its gigantic consumption,
and the seeds of prosperity are eaten up.9
From 1816 to 1823 for the supplement to the Encyclopaedia
Britannica he wrote the articles “Jurisprudence,”
“Liberty of the Press,” “Education,” “Economist,”
“Benefit Societies,” “Colony,” “Prison Discipline,” “Beggar,”
and “Government” which was published in 1820.
This article presented utilitarian political theory
of the greatest happiness.
He described government as the greater number of men
combining and delegating to a smaller group
“the power necessary to protect them all.”
He believed that less government is better because
greater individual liberty provides greater happiness.
Government to function effectively
must give power to public officials.
He rejected monarchy and aristocracy because the rulers
pursue their own interests,
and he considered democracy practically impossible.
He recommended representative democracy through elections
that allow voters to select representatives who will act
for the good of the whole community
if they want to be re-elected.
Good government depends on the right constitution of checks
to have the power to prevent bad actions.
Mill explained the ideas of his friend Ricardo in the textbook
Elements of Political Economy (1821).
His 2-volume Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human
Mind came out in 1829 and described associationism
as the process of integrating sense perceptions
with ideas into a “cluster of ideas.”
He also noted that humans can associate
their own pleasures with those of others.
His teaching his oldest son John Stuart Mill
with the Socratic method is described
by the latter in his Autobiography.
In education he emphasized ethics and virtues
as well as general knowledge and even diet.
Although he agreed with Malthus about the problem
of over-population, he raised nine children.
Alexander Knox (1757-1831) had corresponded
with John Wesley as a young man
and defended him against his critics.
Knox’s Essays on the political circumstances of Ireland
in 1799 argued for parliamentary union with Britain.
The British plan for a union with Ireland was to allow
28 Irish peers and four Protestant bishops
into the British House of Lords.
Most of Ireland’s rotten boroughs would be paid off
with £1,260,000, and the rest would be given
one hundred seats in the House of Commons.
The British secret service used £30,000 to buy votes,
and on 22 January 1800 the Irish House of Commons
passed the bill by one vote.
The British Parliament approved the Act of Union in May 1800
that created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland,
and it was implemented on 1 January 1801.
The Bank of Ireland purchased the Irish Parliament
building in Dublin for £400,000.
The Church of Ireland was incorporated with the
Church of England, and Ireland still had
a Lord-lieutenant and the same laws.
The Lord-lieutenant Cornwallis withdrew in May and was
replaced by Philip York, Earl of Hardwicke, who favored
Catholic emancipation and governed until March 1806.
Trade between Ireland and Britain was unregulated
except the bounty on Irish linen remained.
Members of Parliament had to take the oath
which excluded Catholics who would not take it,
but they retained their right to vote.
Catholics still had to pay the tithes for the
Protestant clergy and maintained their own priests.
King George III and his son as Regent refused
to admit Catholics into the Parliament.
The British garrison of 25,000 troops
was kept in Ireland to keep order.
After a peace treaty in June 1802 the military in Ireland,
including troops, militia, and yeomanry,
was reduced from 60,000 to less than 20,000.
Ireland was to pay £2 of tax for every £15 paid
by Britain for twenty years.
After the union Ireland’s taxes went up 52%.
In the next fifteen years the expenses of the Irish
government tripled, and Ireland’s debt
multiplied by two and half by 1817.
Robert Emmet studied at Trinity College in Dublin
and was secretary of the United Irish
during the 1798 rebellion.
A warrant was issued for his arrest, and he fled to France
and asked for military aid for another rebellion.
Denied, he returned to Ireland in October 1802.
He worked with Thomas Russell and James Hope.
An explosion in one of Emmet’s arms warehouses
killed one man and exposed their preparations,
and in the revolt the fuses for the grenades
and landmines had not been prepared.
In July 1803 he proclaimed “The Provisional Government
to the People of Ireland” and hoped for 2,000 supporters,
but only eighty showed up on the 23rd
for the uprising on Thomas Street in Dublin.
When Emmet saw a British dragoon taken
from his horse and killed, he tried to end the revolt.
The Chief Justice of Ireland was also murdered.
Emmet fled and was captured on August 25,
and he was convicted of treason
and executed on September 20.
Russell was hanged on October 21,
and 15 other workers were also hanged.
Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847) became a barrister in 1798.
He accused the British of using violence to bring about
the Union, and he worked for
Catholic emancipation and political reforms.
He also opposed the violence of Emmet’s rebellion.
In 1815 he insulted the Dublin Corporation by calling it
“beggarly,” and he mortally wounded the duelist
John D’Esterre and offered compensation to the widow.
In 1821-22 the potato crop failed in Munster and Connaught.
In May 1824 O’Connell founded the Catholic Association.
Members had to pay one guinea a year, but the next year
he expanded it by accepting those who paid a shilling a year
as associate members, bringing in £1,000 a week
from 250,000 poor Catholics.
In 1824 the poet Thomas Moore (1779-1852) published
his Memoirs of Captain Rock as an address
to England to appeal to the middle class.
The Association was banned in March 1825, but four months
later O’Connell made it a public and private charity
to promote
public peace and “private harmony between all classes”
for “purposes not prohibited by law.”
Public opinion was changed enough to bring about the dismissal
of the Attorney General William Saurin, a religious bigot.
Also in 1825 tariff barriers between
England and Ireland were removed.
In 1828 the Association proved the discrimination against
Catholics by reporting that of 1,314 offices in the
administration of justice only 39 were held by Catholics,
and of 3,033 other offices Catholics had only 134 positions.
That year O’Connell was elected
to Parliament by County Clare.
In early 1829 the Catholic Emancipation Act
allowed Catholics to be judges and military officers
as well as members of Parliament.
A general Oath of Allegiance was more acceptable to Catholics,
but the property qualification for voting was raised to £10,
reducing the number of Irish Catholic voters
from 1,160,000 to 86,000.
The Catholic Association disbanded,
but O’Connell was re-elected by Clare.
The population of Scotland increased rapidly from
1,608,420 in 1801 to 2,091,000 in 1821 while
Edinburgh grew from 81,600 to 138,000.
Glasgow went from 83,700 to 193,000 in 1831.
In 1799 the colliers in Scotland were emancipated.
Food riots broke out around Glasgow
and Edinburgh in February 1800.
Scotland was allowed to form militia in 1802.
Good education was available in Scotland
for those who could afford to pay.
Alexander Christison taught at Edinburgh High School
and published The General Diffusion of Knowledge
One
Great Cause of the Prosperity of North Britain in 1802.
That year Henry Erskine, Francis Jeffrey, and the professors
Dugald Stewart and John Playfair organized a campaign
for reform, and in October Jeffrey, Sydney Smith,
Henry Brougham, and Francis Horner
began publishing the liberal Edinburgh Review.
Stewart taught moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh
from 1785 to 1811, and he also lectured on political economy.
In 1803 schoolmasters were provided
with modest houses and stipends.
After Pitt’s death in February 1806
Erskine was appointed Lord Advocate.
During the Napoleonic War the price of kelp
made from seaweed rose as it was used
to manufacture glass, soap, and alum.
During the early 1800s Hebrideans exported
annually more than 15,000 tons of kelp.
The rising price of wool led to
the clearing of land for more sheep.
Sheep farmers expanded because
they could pay three times the old rent.
William Symington invented a working steamship by 1803.
In 1807 people were evicted in Sutherland
by the Marquess of Stafford’s superintendent,
and more Sutherland clearances forced people
out of Strathnaver in 1814.
Also in 1807 Archibald Buchanan made the Deanston
mills the first integrated cotton mills that powered
the washing, scutching, spinning, and weaving.
The Scots had begun building more roads in the highlands
in 1803, and by 1821 they added 900 miles of roads,
improved 300 miles, and built 1,100 bridges.
Late in 1808 Jeffry wrote in The Edinburgh,
“Reforms in the administration of our affairs must be
adopted to prevent more violent changes.”
By 1813 this newspaper had a circulation of 12,000,
and in 1816 the London Times had only 8,000.
Walter Scott helped its rival the conservative
Quarterly Review begin publishing in March 1809.
Economic hardship in 1811 led to weavers forming unions
in Glasgow, Paisley, and Perth in Scotland and in Manchester,
Bolton, Preston, and Carlisle in northern England
as well as Belfast in Ireland.
The Manchester Weavers’ Committee affiliated
with agitators in the southwest.
In the great strike of 1812 weavers left work in Glasgow
and from Aberdeen to Carlisle for nine weeks
demanding their table of prices.
English Luddites tried to get the weavers
to break machines, but their strikes remained nonviolent.
The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended in 1817,
and a new law outlawed sedition.
Jeffrey was the defense attorney in two cases.
Neil Douglas in a sermon compared George III to the
corrupt Nebuchadnezzar, and he said that seats in the
House of Commons “were sold like bullocks in a market.”
He was tried for sedition on May 26; but the prosecution
was inept, and Jeffrey got him acquitted.
On July 19 Andrew McKinlay was tried
for administering unlawful oaths.
A weaver testifying for the prosecution admitted that
he was offered a reward to be a witness,
and McKinlay was also found not guilty.
The Luddite Jeremiah Brandreth led an uprising at Pentrich
in Derbyshire in June; 35 were tried for high treason,
and 23 were convicted.
Eleven were transported for life,
and he and two others were beheaded on November 7.
Also in 1817 the newspaper The Scotsman
was founded and backed reforms, and in response
Blackwood’s Magazine began and favored the Tories.
Leaders in Glasgow were arrested in February 1820.
A Committee of Organization called for a general strike
and forming a Provisional Government in Scotland on April 1,
and about 50,000 weavers and others responded.
The next day bills were posted urging people to support
a provisional government, and cavalry forced
Calton weavers to disperse near Falkirk.
On the 5th about forty weavers marched on the
Carron Iron Works to get arms,
and troops dispersed them and arrested 18 radicals.
A commission tried 47 people for treason,
and 24 were sentenced to death; but only three were hanged.
In June 1823 about 3,000 people demolished
two stone walls on the Westhorn estate.
Joseph Hume was a radical member of Parliament from
Montrose, and he and Francis Place led the effort
that repealed the Combination Acts in 1824.
In the next two years miners in the coalfields of Scotland
rose up, and in 1825 the Parliament revised
the Repeal of the Combination Acts.
In 1823 James Smith of Deanston’s subsoil plough also
greatly improved agriculture, and in 1828 Patrick Bell
invented a power-driven threshing-machine for reaping.
The Tory Party maintained a majority in Parliament from
1815 to 1830, and Robert Banks Jenkinson known as
Lord Liverpool was Prime Minister from 1812 to 1827.
He was widely respected for his integrity
and tolerance for differing views.
His character was a contrast to the profligacy
of the Prince Regent George.
The Duke of Wellington called George and his brothers
a “millstone about the neck of any Government.”
The famous general was made Commander-in-Chief
of the army occupying France in October 1815.
Britain’s population went from
12 million in 1811 to 16.5 million in 1831.
London’s population had nearly reached a million by 1800,
and by 1815 it was the largest city in the world
and its banking center.
Liverpool increased from 82,000 in 1801 to 202,000 in 1831,
Leeds from 53,000 to 123,000,
and greater Manchester went from 95,000 to 238,000.
The populations of Sheffield and Birmingham also doubled.
Manchester began using a steam-powered loom in 1806,
and by 1823 they had 10,000.
Cotton imports doubled from
50,000 tons in 1815 to 100,000 in 1825.
In 1820 nearly half Britain’s exports of produce were
cotton goods and wool yarn which rose from
80 million pounds in 1820 to 94 million in 1830.
During the war that ended in 1815 taxes had multiplied by five,
and the national debt had grown to £860 million,
which was a third of the capital wealth in the nation.
What the Government spent on the Poor Law increased by
steps from £5,418,846 in 1815 to £7,870,801 in 1818,
and this was raised from tax on landed property.
In 1814 wholesale prices were about twice what they had
been in 1790, but by 1816 they fell by a third.
Britain had 252 newspapers,
and the stamp duty on them was raised to 4d.
An act authorized the Society of Apothecaries
to examine all apothecaries in England and Wales.
Despite the Corn Bill of 1815 to keep the price of wheat
at 80s a quarter or more by prohibiting imports of cereals
that fell below the price which also included
oats, barley, rye, peas, and beans at different prices.
Malthus approved this policy, and the price of wheat
fell from 72s in March to 56s in December.
The end of war production reduced British exports
from £51 million in 1815 to £42 million
the next two years and to £35 million in 1819.
On 12 February 1815 the Chancellor of the Exchequer
Vansittart presented his budget that called for
£29 million for the Army and Navy.
Although France was paying for the British army of occupation,
the army had 49,000 troops in the colonies, 25,000 in Britain
with the same in Ireland, making 99,000.
The Navy was reduced from 100,000 men in 1815
to 35,000 in 1816.
Vansittart proposed reducing the income tax from 10% to 5%,
but on March 18 a petition signed at a public meeting
by 22,000 people in London opposed the income tax.
In 1816 Parliament refused 238-201 to renew the income tax
on property that expired after the war
because it would not have been spent on public purposes.
Vansittart also eliminated the malt tax which with the
income tax loss meant £10 million less in annual revenue.
Renewal of Exchequer bills and borrowing from the
Bank of England made the total loan £11.5 million.
The annual interest on the national debt
in 1816 was £31.5 million.
Liverpool gained an ally in the Commons by appointing
Canning to the Board of Control.
Imports of raw cotton and raw silk
nearly doubled between 1816 and 1818.
Britain’s use of raw cotton increased from
94 million pounds in 1815 to 273 million in 1831.
A bad harvest in 1816 caused the price of wheat
to go back up to 103s in December.
In July workers in Ghent had burned
in a bonfire British merchandise.
Unemployment provoked Luddism among farm workers
in the eastern counties, and it spread nearly to London.
They demanded fixed prices for wheat and beef,
and they set barns on fire, broke threshing machines,
and armed themselves with pikes and guns.
Troops killed two rioters in Cambridgeshire
and put 75 laborers on trial; 24 were sentenced to death,
and five were hanged.
The agitation spread north to the weavers, hosiers,
and colliers in the manufacturing districts.
A strike at Newcastle demanded higher wages
and a lower price of bread.
Carts of coal were dragged into towns
in Shropshire and Staffordshire.
The unemployed marched in Worcester, Coventry,
Birmingham, Chester, Liverpool, Leicester, and London.
In Birmingham nearly one fifth of the people
were receiving weekly relief.
In October bakeries and mills at Walsall were looted.
Violence broke out in the collieries and iron foundries
of South Wales and around Glasgow.
British iron production expanded from 250,000 tons
in 1810 to 700,000 in 1830.
The aging Major Cartwright and Francis Burdett agreed
to demand the vote for every ratepayer, and they started
the Hampden Club with an annual
subscription of £2 for landowners.
They used successful methods such as the open-air meetings
of the Methodists and other Evangelicals who distributed
Bibles and worked to end the slave trade.
Cartwright got 130,000 signatures on a petition.
Wilberforce tried to revive the Association for the Relief
of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor
he had started in 1812.
At a meeting in the London Tavern on 29 July 1816
Prince Frederick, Duke of York, presided on the platform
with other aristocrats including Vansittart;
but the democratic Lord Thomas Cochrane aroused
the working people, and York was booed and left.
At another meeting the next month 8,000 liverymen
passed resolutions to reduce taxes,
abolish sinecures, and reform Parliament.
Bentham’s friends James Mill and Francis Place organized
a Committee of Public Safety at a Westminster meeting
where Burdett and Cochrane began a petition campaign
with two delegates from each district.
After the Hampden Club reduced the subscription
to 1d a week, their clubs grew rapidly.
Cartwright now advocated manhood suffrage.
Ludditism revived in Nottinghamshire.
A new factory at Loughborough was destroyed,
but a jury acquitted the workers in August.
At Nottingham workers met to pass resolutions in September,
and in Lancashire machine-breakers circulated petitions.
At a meeting in Westminster the radical Henry Hunt
agreed to moderate his language.
In October mass meetings were held in Liverpool,
Manchester, Paisley, and Glasgow.
On the 10th the Regent refused to receive a petition.
In protest the Common Council re-elected
Alderman Wood the Lord Mayor.
Cobbett printed an address to workers in November
and sold 44,000 of the pamphlet for 2d.
In the first large open-air meeting on 15 November 1816
at Spa Fields with 10,000 people a tricolor flag of green, white,
and red suggested a new British republic.
Hunt argued that the poor were paying most of the taxes
on everything they ate, drank, and wore,
but the revenues were spent on the relatives
of the boroughmongers.
He urged a petition before force was applied,
but the Regent turned Hunt away twice.
Cochrane spoke at a meeting on the 25th
and was sent to prison for refusing to pay his fine.
On the 28th the Common Council voted for reform
and urged the entire Kingdom to petition.
A crowd of 20,000 on December 2 gathered at Spa Fields,
but this time they were aroused
by the more radical Thomas Spence.
He advocated equality of wealth and restoring land to the
community, and they marched to the Tower of London
to try to overthrow the Government;
but royal troops arrested those who did not disperse.
On 23 January 1817 the Convention of Delegates met
in London, and that month Cochrane presented to the
House of Commons a petition signed by 500,000 people.
They argued over manhood suffrage or household suffrage.
Moderates held other meetings and formed the Friends of
Economy, Public Order, and Reform, and they disavowed
universal suffrage and annual elections.
Parliament opened on the 28th and hissed the Regent.
As he was leaving, two panes of glass in his coach were broken.
In February the Lords and Commons both formed secret
committees to report on revolutionary plots.
Parliament suspended the Habeas Corpus Act until July,
and they passed the Treason Act and
the Seditious Meetings Act that became law in March
and were called the “Gagging Acts.”
In 1817 Britain budgeted more than £10 million less
on military forces than was spent in 1816.
Prince Regent George volunteered to reduce his income of
£50,000 by 20%, and Castlereagh claimed that officials
were also forgoing income
equal to the tax they had been paying.
The Poor Employment Act was passed
to finance public works and fisheries.
Magistrates threatened to take away the licenses
of publicans who supported petitions.
The Home Office sent out the spies Oliver, Castles,
and Edwards to infiltrate the radical groups.
Hampden Clubs dissolved, and various
debating societies suspended their meetings.
A magistrate even refused to let a mineralogical society
meet because it could lead to atheism.
Hunt continued to write for the Black Dwarf,
but he lost public support.
In 1817 Richard Carlile began promoting the works of
Tom Paine and his disciples as well as Voltaire and Diderot.
He published Sherwin’s Political Register and in 1819
changed the name to The Republican.
Carlile was often arrested, refused to pay fines,
and spent a few years in prison.
At the Spa Fields meeting on 12 February soldiers arrested
those alleged to have rioted in December,
but in the trials the juries found them not guilty.
Other demonstrations in 1817 were dispersed by force.
Democratic societies became secret conspiracies
and were more likely to turn to violence.
In June the Parliament extended the Suspension of
Habeas Corpus for six more months,
but the Suspension Act was repealed in January 1818.
A good harvest reduced the price of wheat
to 75s by September.
Two-thirds of the Government’s expenditures went to
service the national debt, and the 1818 deficit would
add to the debt £15,313,000, which was about
equal to the previous income tax revenue.
Taxes on wool, tobacco, coffee, tea, cocoa,
pepper, malt, and spirits went up substantially.
To promote charity and soup kitchens the Government
spent £1 million to subsidize the building of new churches.
Government spending for poor relief
reached a peak of nearly £8 million in 1818.
In July 1818 cotton-spinners in Lancashire went on strike
for two months, and an effort was made
to form a Union of all Trades.
In the August election the Whigs gained about thirty seats
but were still outnumbered by Tories 280-175.
Political Protestants began meeting at Hull, Newcastle, and York.
On 2 September workers attacked a large mill in Manchester,
and on the 15th a mob at Burnley released a town crier
who had been arrested for announcing a meeting of weavers.
In the fall at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle the four powers
of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia ended the occupation
of France and agreed on payment of the
332 million francs owed on the indemnity.
The four nations accepted France as an
equal power in the Concert of Europe.
Wellington attended the Congress with Castlereagh,
and he joined Liverpool’s cabinet in December 1818
as Master-General of Ordnance.
In 1819 bad harvests reduced trade, and Wilberforce’s Society
for the Suppression of Vice urged prosecutions.
In January and February mass meetings were held in
Lancashire towns, Manchester, Oldham, Royton,
and Stockport where the first union was organized,
and they demanded voting reform and repeal of the Corn Law.
By June they were planning a federation of unions.
On July 12 a large crowd gathered in Birmingham to elect
the radical Charles Wolseley their legislative representative,
but the next year he would be imprisoned
for sedition and conspiracy.
In August massive demonstrations led to the
“Peterloo massacre” at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester on the
16th when cavalry charged a crowd of about 70,000 people,
killing eleven and injuring over 400 men and women.
The Government then passed the notorious Six Acts
to prevent “training,” seize weapons, expedite misdemeanors,
ban seditious meetings and libels,
and increase taxes on publications.
Petitions were not allowed to have more than twenty signatures.
The army was increased by 10,000 men.
Robert Peel’s bill to relieve children from labor exploitation
prohibited employing children under the age of nine
and limited their work to 12 hours a day.
Robert Owen had advised ten hours.
The Poor Relief Act helped reduce expenditures
for the Poor Law steadily from 1819 to 1824.
John Gast began publishing the first trade union
newspaper, Gorgon, in 1819.
The Institution of Civil Engineers was founded in 1818
and was incorporated in 1828.
There were at least 183 prosecutions for libel
in Britain from 1817 to 1820.
Law in 1819 made gold the sole currency,
and the gold standard was restored by 1821.
Prince Regent George did not get along with his wife
Caroline of Brunswick but would not divorce her.
In 1819 she got an increase in her allowance from
£35,000 to £50,000, renounced her title
and agreed not to return to England.
After King George III died on 29 January 1820,
George IV caught pneumonia and nearly succumbed
but recovered by February 10.
Caroline came back on June 5,
and crowds demonstrated to support her.
On the 15th a mutiny by the guards
of the King’s Mews was suppressed.
On the 28th her advisor Brougham presented a plan for
state-supported primary education in the Commons,
but the distraction over Caroline made it ignored.
In January 1821 she renounced her positions and privileges
and accepted £50,000 a year for life;
but she died on August 7 of illness, or rumors said of poison.
In 1820 the spy George Edwards instigated the Cato Street
Conspiracy to kill the cabinet ministers at a dinner and then
carry their heads on pikes in the streets to proclaim the
Spencean Arthur Thistlewood the president of the
Britannic Republic;
but 13 conspirators were arrested on the 23rd.
In the trial two men testified against the others, and ten others
were sentenced to death on April 28.
Five had their penalty commuted to transportation for life,
and Thistlewood and four others were hanged on May 1.
Parliament prohibited the whipping of women.
The circulation of £5 notes fell from a value of £7,400,000
in February 1819 to £900,000 in August 1822.
In 1820 the price of wheat fell to 64s,
and by November 1822 it was below 39s.
Ricardo criticized borrowing from the Sinking Fund
(which Pitt had designated for paying down the debt)
for expenses such as wars, and he argued that keeping
the ministers poor would keep them peaceful.
In 1822 the Government saved money by reducing
the pensions for civil servants and the military.
Even though Vansittart also reduced the duties
on salt, leather, and the Irish window tax,
the year produced a surplus of £4,915,520.
The Government suspended Habeas Corpus again
and passed another Insurrection Act.
Wilberforce gave a speech in 1822 on the abolition of slavery,
and in early 1823 he and his friends founded the Society
for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery
which later became the Anti-Slavery Society.
On May 15 Fowell Buxton got the Parliament to approve
the gradual ending of slavery by declaring that children
born of slaves after a certain date would be free;
but implementing this in the colonies was problematic,
and efforts in Trinidad provoked insurrections in Guiana
and Jamaica by slaves blaming planters for not agreeing.
While serving as Foreign Minister since 1812
Castlereagh had worked 12 or 13 hours a day,
and his official papers filled 70 volumes.
He refused to give up his leadership in the Commons,
and the stress caused a mental breakdown.
Poor medical care led to his suicide on 12 August 1822.
The talented George Canning was reluctantly accepted as
Foreign Secretary and Tory leader in the House of Commons
by George IV who as King of Hanover
had his own secret service.
Canning sent Wellington to the Congress of Verona in October.
He urged recognizing the rights of the Greeks,
and he advised against intervening in the
independence struggles in Spanish America.
When Spaniards invaded Portugal, Canning persuaded
the cabinet to send troops to defend the Portuguese.
Robert Peel had been Chief Secretary in Ireland 1812-18,
and in January 1822 he became Home Secretary.
In 1823 the death penalty was removed from more than
a hundred offenses including petty theft,
and judges were allowed to withhold the death sentence
in capital cases other than murder.
Peel’s bills in the next year also reformed the prison system
by providing scrutiny for 150 minor prisons.
In 1829 his bill replaced parish constables and watchmen
with the Metropolitan Police in the London area
outside the city limits.
In February 1823 William Huskisson became President
of the Board of Trade, and he reduced import duties greatly,
lowering prices and stimulating English manufacturing.
The Reciprocity of Duties Act allowed the negotiating
of treaties with any country to lower charges on traded goods.
A Master and Servant Act in 1823 authorized jail for servants
who broke a contract while masters could only be fined.
Wages were so low that
they had only time to work, eat, and sleep.
Methodist revivals in Lancashire and Cumberland led
to 2,000 conversions in Cornwall in 1823.
Benthamites founded the Westminster Review in January 1824.
In May the Bank was required to exchange notes for legal coins.
British exports increased from £33,534,000 in 1819
to £48,730,000 in 1824.
In 1824 and 1825 the Government was able to apply
£5 million each year to the Sinking Fund for the debt
and still have a small surplus.
Joseph Hume and Francis Place persuaded
a Select Committee to repeal the Combination Acts.
Trade unions sprang up, and strikes occurred in
textiles, dyeing, mining, and shoemaking.
Also in 1824 £500,000 was spent
to make police forces more efficient.
Thomas Erskine’s bill prohibiting cruelty to animals had
passed the Lords in 1809 but was defeated in the Commons.
Richard Martin introduced a bill for the better treatment of
cattle, horses, and other livestock that became law in 1822,
and in 1824 he and Buxton founded
the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
On 3 January 1825 the British recognized the independence
of the republics of Buenos Aires, Mexico, and Colombia.
Food prices were high in 1825, and Parliament amended
the Combination Act to limit strikes.
That year the Stockton and Darlington Railway opened.
An improved economy led to a building boom in 1825,
but it went bust by the end of the year.
The London bank of Pole, Thornton & Co. failed
on December 12, causing 43 bank failures in the country,
collapse of the stock exchange, and business bankruptcies.
One week later Paris loaned London £400,000.
The Bank of England raised the discount rate
to the 5% maximum, and soon gold was returning.
The £1 and £2 bank notes
were to be withdrawn by April 1829.
The number of houses in Britain increased
from 2,100,000 in 1811 to 2,850,000 in 1831.
The unemployment of 10,000 Spitalfields
silk-weavers in January 1826 spread to the north.
In April 1826 the Duke of Wellington was sent to St. Petersburg
where he signed a protocol with the new Tsar Nicholas I
that allowed the British to mediate for Greek autonomy.
The Duke of York died on 5 January 1827,
and Wellington became Commander-in-Chief.
On July 6 Britain, France, and Russia signed a treaty
in London that would allow Greece to be independent
though under the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II.
When he refused to accept the armistice or the treaty,
the European powers intervened at Navarino
on October 20 and destroyed the Turkish-Egyptian fleet.
Prime Minister Liverpool suffered a stroke
on 17 February 1827, and he retired on April 9.
He died on December 4.
After three dukes opposed George Canning,
George IV appointed him.
Wellington, Peel, and five other ministers resigned,
and three Whigs joined the Cabinet.
Canning’s health was declining, and he died on August 8.
The King appointed Frederick Robinson, who had just
become Viscount Goderich, but he had trouble forming
a government and resigned on 21 January 1828.
He was succeeded by the Duke of Wellington,
who had to resign as Commander-in-Chief,
and no Whigs would serve under him.
Peel returned as Home Secretary and Commons leader.
Huskisson was Secretary for War and the Colonies,
but he resigned on May 30 followed by four Canningites
over quarrels involving electoral reforms
of the corrupt boroughs of Penrhyn and East Retford.
Wellington got passed a modification of Huskisson’s
sliding-scale amendment to the Corn Laws.
The Whig John Russell’s bill to repeal the
Test and Corporation Acts that had limited offices
to Anglicans became law in May.
Burdett’s motion for Catholic Relief passed
the Commons but was rejected by the Lords.
Wellington appointed the Irish Vesey Fitzgerald
to the Board of Trade; but after O’Connell
defeated Fitzgerald for the County Clare seat,
Wellington and Peel accepted Catholic emancipation.
Peel introduced the Catholic Relief Act with a four-hour
speech on 6 March 1829, and the Lords passed it on April 13.
This law made Catholics eligible for all offices except Regent,
Chancellor, and Lord Lieutenant or Chancellor of Ireland.
However, another bill raised the voting requirement
in Ireland from 40 shillings to £10.
The Whig Henry Brougham founded the Society for
the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1826 to educate
more people by encouraging them to read many publications
that included volumes of the Penny Cyclopedia
which began in 1828.
Wages in 1829 were only 6% more than they had been in 1790,
and the harvest was poor.
John Doherty came to Manchester from Ulster in 1816,
and in 1829 he founded the General Union of Cotton Spinners,
and in March 1830 he started publishing the
United Trades Co-operative Journal to promote Owenism.
In January Thomas Atwood had begun the Birmingham Political
Union of the Lower and Middle Classes.
By 1830 Britain had more than 300 cooperative societies.
George IV died on 26 June 1830 and was
succeeded by his brother William IV.
Parliament was dissolved on July 24, and in the election
250 Tories were elected; but they lost 178 seats
including 60 to the new Ultra-Tories.
The Whigs lost two seats and elected 196.
After a hard winter and spring in agriculture during the summer
workers inspired by the July revolution in France,
used the fictitious name “Captain Swing” on threatening letters.
They demolished threshing machines in the Elham Valley
in East Kent, destroying more than
a hundred machines by October.
On a vote to appoint a Select Committee to investigate
the Civil List accounts, the Tory Government lost 233-204
to a coalition of the Whigs, Canningites, and Ultras,
on 15 November 1830, and Wellington resigned the next day.
William Cobbett (1763-1835) was brought up on a farm
and was taught to read and write by his father.
After odd jobs he joined the army in 1784, and he became
a sergeant-major while serving in Canada until 1790,
reading in his spare time.
He tried and failed to bring officers to a court martial,
and he wrote “The Soldier’s Friend”
to urge higher pay and better treatment.
He married and had several children.
After a few months in France they crossed the Atlantic
to Wilmington in September 1792 and then moved to
Philadelphia where he taught English to French refugees
and translated French books.
He began writing in 1794 and published
the daily Porcupine’s Gazette 1797-99.
He was fined $5,000 for libel and returned to England in 1800.
Cobbett began the Political Register in 1802,
publishing it weekly until 1835.
In 1806 he became friends with radicals such as
Major Cartwright, Francis Burdett, and Lord Cochrane.
In 1808 Cobbett began campaigning against corruption.
He exposed the flogging of militiamen at Ely,
and on 15 June 1810 he was convicted of treasonous libel,
was fined £2,000, and spent two years in prison during
which he wrote the pamphlet Paper against Gold
to warn about the dangers of paper money.
He also wrote about the Luddites.
After the duty on newspapers was increased to 4d,
in 1816 Cobbett changed the Political Register
to a pamphlet to avoid the tax so that he could sell it for 2d;
its circulation rose to about 50,000 a week.
His journal was read by the working class, and in 1817
a magistrate in Shropshire ordered two men flogged
for distributing copies of the Register.
Cobbett was in danger of being charged with sedition
and having to pay £18,000 tax owed on his pamphlets.
He escaped to the United States,
but he came back to England in November 1819.
He started a plant nursery at Kensington
and developed a variety of maize.
He published Cottage Economy in 1822
and A Treatise on Cobbett’s Corn in 1828.
He also worked for Catholic emancipation and published
his History of the Protestant Reformation
in installments from 1824 to 1826.
In 1829 his Advice to Young Men criticized
the essay on population by Malthus.
In 1830 his book of previous articles described
the misery of the working class in his Rural Rides.
Robert Owen was born on 14 May 1771
in a market town in Wales.
His schooling ended when he was ten, and he worked as
an apprentice for four years in a draper’s shop in Stamford.
In 1789 he moved to Manchester.
He borrowed £100 from his brother and with a partner
began making spinning mules for cotton thread.
In 1792 Owen became the manager of the Piccadilly Mill,
and two years later he formed another partnership
and managed the Chorlton Twist Mills.
He joined the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society,
and he worked with the physician Thomas Percival
on the Manchester Board of Health
to improve the conditions of factory workers.
While visiting Glasgow he fell in love with the daughter of
David Dale, the philanthropist who owned the New Lanark Mills.
In July 1799 Owen and his partners bought the New Lanark mill.
He married Caroline Dale in September,
and they had eight children in ten years.
Owen managed the 2,000 employees that included
500 children who came from poorhouses
and charities in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
He worked to improve their houses and to teach them
order, cleanliness, and thrift.
He closed local shops that sold alcohol to relieve the problem
of drunkenness and opened a store where they could buy
quality goods at little more than their cost.
He was one of the first to found schools in Britain
for infants from two to six years of age along
with schools from six to twelve.
He set aside one-sixtieth of wages to pay
for sickness, injury, and old age.
In 1810 he began advocating an 8-hour workday,
and he instituted it at New Lanark.
In 1813 Owen with Jeremy Bentham and the Quaker
William Allen became partners in a philanthropic firm
that would allow members a 5% return on their capital.
Owen often expressed his philosophy that
“man’s character is made not by him but for him”
because people are formed by their circumstances.
He believed that the proper physical, moral,
and social influences from the earliest years
would result in good character.
He wrote A New View of Society; or, Essays on the
Principle of the Formation of Human Character
in 1812-13, and the first printed edition was put on sale in 1816.
At the opening of the first essay appears this quote:
Any general character, from the best to the worst,
from the most ignorant to the most enlightened,
may be given to any community, even to the world at large,
by the application of proper means; which means are
to a great extent at the command and under the control
of those who have influence in the affairs of men.10
Then he noted that three-quarters of the British and Irish
population was the poor and working classes, and many
of their characters were in vice and misery,
making them dangerous to the empire.
He also mentioned the injustice of negro slavery
in various parts of the world.
He asserted “that children can be trained to acquire any
language, sentiments, belief, or any bodily
habits and manners, not contrary to human nature.”11
He proposed that the happiness of self can be clearly
understood and practiced, and it can be attained by
conduct which promotes the happiness of the community.
He advised that children must be trained from infancy
in good habits and then later rationally educated
so that their labor can be usefully directed.
This education will impress upon them the desire to promote
the happiness of everyone without exception for sect, party,
or country based on a healthy body and peace of mind.
In his second essay Owen applied his principles to practice
so that people will be induced to have charity for all.
Falsehood and deception must be held in disgrace,
their practical evils explained, and every expression
given to truth and open conduct.
Dissensions and quarrels not adjusted by the parties
themselves were to be resolved by the manager who
explained how usually both are wrong and then
recommended forgiveness and friendship.
He advised discontinuing employing children under the age of
ten who might work a few hours a day until they are twelve.
(At this time children as young as six were working long days.)
Children were to be taught reading, writing, and arithmetic
from age five to ten without expense to the parents.
He advised that particular creeds should be avoided
but that precepts of Christianity common to all
denominations could be taught.
Houses were to be comfortable
with provisions purchased at low rates.
He believed that if measures of fair equity and justice were
adopted, they could have confidence in the lower orders.
Children were to be taught and trained without any punishment.
A national plan of education should exclude no child
and should include all modern improvements.
In the third essay Owen applied the principles to
particular situations and opened with the quote,
“Truth must ultimately prevail over error.”12
Circumstances which foster bad habits are to be removed.
Each child is to learn never to injure a play-fellow
but rather to contribute everything in one’s power
to make them happy.
Owen asked if a person with vigorous faculties may
form a rational judgment on any subject until one
has collected the relevant facts which are known.
He believed that humans are born with a desire
to obtain happiness which is the cause of all action
and continues through life and is called “self-interest.”
When knowledge received is true and extended
to the utmost without any error, then one
may enjoy all the happiness in one’s nature.
He argued that all persons were presently
irrationally trained, resulting in the misery of the world.
When truths are made evident, then every individual
will endeavor to promote the happiness
of everyone within one’s sphere of action
because this is what leads to self-happiness.
He wrote, “Were all men trained to be rational,
the art of war would be rendered useless.”13
In the fourth essay he applied the principles to government,
the goal of which is to make people happy.
To remove the existing evils in society
unwise laws must be repealed or modified.
The state lottery should be discontinued because it legalizes
gambling, entraps the unwary, and robs the ignorant.
Benevolence does not allow the destitute to starve.
He argued that the British Poor Laws compelled the
industrious to support the ignorant and idle.
Then he explained the system needed to prevent crime
and supersede these laws by forming human character.
They must correct the errors in education that cause evils.
He argued that the best governed state will be the one
that has the best national system of education.
He believed that the time had come for the British
Government to provide a national system of training and
education for the poor to form them into rational beings
and useful members of the state.
He warned that the Church which adheres to defective
and injurious parts of its system cannot be induced
to act against its apparent interests.
He hoped that a national education for the poor
that is not exclusive will destroy errors
that are in opposition to facts.
He recommended providing labor for those
who may be occasionally unemployed.
He responded to the concern about overpopulation
by suggesting that the solutions are by scientific progress
in agriculture that could feed more people
and by securing a fair distribution of wealth.
In 1815 Owen restricted child labor to those twelve and older,
and he insisted they be taught to read and write
before they begin work.
He demanded the government institute a system of national
education to prevent idleness, poverty, and crime.
He noted that the use of machinery reduced the price of
manufactured goods and so increased the demand for them
so much that more human labor was employed.
After the war ended, demand for products decreased,
and less government spending diminished demand.
Mechanical power became cheaper than labor,
causing unemployment and lower wages.
In 1817 Owen wrote a report to the Committee
of the House of Commons on the Poor Law.
He acknowledged that the competition between
human labor and machines could be stressful,
but he advised that united action could subordinate machinery.
In 1819 he began to promote the agricultural experiments
of William Falla using spade husbandry which produced
higher yields per acre than shallow plowing with horses.
In 1820 his “Report to the County of Lanark” proposed
collective farming to relieve the unemployed.
He suggested establishing Villages of Unity and Cooperation
for about a thousand people on at least
a thousand acres of land.
He argued that the most natural standard of value is
human
labor that combined physical and mental powers in action.
He emphasized the principle of united labor, expenditure,
and property with equal privileges.
Owen opposed the competitive system and preferred
the aid that comes from social arrangement which
unites the interests of individuals and society.
He proposed a plan to integrate the education of children
with their productive employment in the community
aided by the improvements of science.
Owen believed in free trade and an efficient economy,
but he also emphasized economic justice in exchange
and distribution that could produce economic growth.
He challenged the existing system of private property,
competition, and inequality.
In 1825 Owen emigrated to America to start the
New Harmony community in Indiana; but he had conflicts
with William Allen and other partners, and after expending
his fortune of $500,000 he resigned in 1828.
He warned that machinery would destroy the working
classes unless governments
were just to all who produce wealth.
He argued that machinery could diminish the need for
unhealthy and disagreeable manual labor and that
increased wealth could be diffused more equally
to remove poverty, fear of it, and ignorance.
He warned against the “dire effects of superabundance”
that had harmed workers in 1815-16, 1819, 1821, and 1825.
Owen had disciples promoting his theory and practices.
The London Co-operative Society was founded in 1824,
and its Co-operative Magazine promoted
Owenism from 1826 to 1830.
The Irish Utilitarian William Thompson (1775-1833)
may have been the first to use the term “competitive”
to describe the capitalistic markets, and he coined the
term “surplus value” that was adopted by Karl Marx.
Thompson argued that the community of goods has
not only moral benefits but also economic advantages.
He questioned “artificial needs” that lead to
“superfluous production” such as changing fashions in clothing.
He was a friend of Bentham and agreed with his utility
principle that he called the “art of social happiness”
and a new “social science” that applied political economy.
This science was concerned not just with possessing
wealth but was also with the just distribution of it
to the community with continued production.
A strong stimulus to production is the need for
“security in the entire use of the products
of labour to those who produce them.”
Security is reconcilable with exchanges that are
voluntary and possessions that are acquired by industry.
Like Owen, Thompson believed that
what people want is justice, not charity.
In 1824 Thompson published his An Inquiry into the
Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most conducive to
Human Happiness applied to the newly proposed system
of voluntary equality of wealth.
He asserted that labor is the source of wealth and that the
purpose of distributing wealth is or should be to provide
the greatest happiness for those producing it.
He noted that all men and women are capable of
achieving equal happiness from wealth.
He believed that voluntary exchanges of products increase
happiness but that the forced withdrawal
of products reduces happiness.
He advised distributing wealth to produce the greatest
equality consistent with the greatest production.
He described the moral evils and vices caused by the
forced inequality of wealth which does not add to
the happiness of the rich because it engenders vices.
Unequal wealth results in uncompensated loss
and fosters industry that is less useful.
Monopoly and misused political power cause unequal wealth.
The natural laws of distribution are compatible only with
representative government, and greater equality
removes motives for crime as well as vices.
Thompson argued that the competition of low wages is also
unfriendly to the accumulation of capital while the exhilarating
competition for increased remuneration favors production.
By removing excessive poverty and wealth from society
the vices of luxury and want would nearly cease.
Most crimes are motivated by inequality of wealth
under the pressure of poverty and misery.
He asked how could the wretched poor be virtuous?
Unrestricted competition promotes selfishness against
benevolence, wastes the talent of the female half
of the population, leads to unprofitable exertions,
provides no resources for illness and old age,
and obstructs the progress of education.
Equal security maintains natural distribution
and promotes reproduction.
Positive benefits would be less unproductive consumption,
less unemployment, less waste in the name of profits,
better health for those who had been poor, more happiness,
and balanced supply and demand.
Equal security would not be just for the few but for everyone.
Limited security allows force and fraud, exploitation of labor’s
products, and restrains exchanges to cater to favorites
while facilitating public and private plunder.
He concluded his book with this list of the ways
to bring about desirable distribution:
1. Simple representative institutions.
2. The entire abolition, under these,
of all the restraints of insecurity,
(entail, primogeniture, combination local and general,
wages-regulation direct or indirect, monopolies of knowledge
of professions, of trades, bounties, game privilege laws,
public plunder, with all other expedients incompatible
with equal security or the natural laws of distribution)….
3. The progress and diffusion of knowledge, and the
gradual perception of their real interests by all societies,
would gradually effect the remainder; that is to say,
every thing useful as to wealth, as well as to every other
means of producing happiness, in social arrangement.14
Thompson was one of the first male feminists, and he wrote
An Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women,
Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men,
to Retain Them in Political, and thence in Civil
and Domestic Slavery (1825).
This was written as a response to an
“Article on Government” by James Mill.
Thompson summarized his ideas in an introductory
letter to Anna Wheeler n which he affirmed that
“Mutual Co-operation in large numbers”
which combines interest and duty is needed
“to give equal happiness to both sexes.”
He noted that man’s superior strength that is useful
to the general happiness is balanced by the
ability of women to bear and nurture infants.
He recognized that individual competition
even with equal rights would not bring
women equal happiness with men.
However, equal political rights followed by
equal civil and domestic rights could
raise women to equal happiness with men.
He concluded this book by asking,
Shall none be found with sufficient knowledge
and elevation of mind to persuade men to do good,
to make the most certain step towards
the regeneration of degraded humanity,
by opening a free course for justice and benevolence,
for intellectual and social enjoyments,
by no colour, by no sex to be restrained?
As your bondage has chained down man
to the ignorance and vices of despotism,
so will your liberation reward him with knowledge,
with freedom and with happiness.15
Thomas Gray made Owen’s economic ideas more popular
with his Lecture on Human Happiness in 1825.
That year Thomas Hodgkin published his
Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital Against
the Claims of Capital using the pseudonym “A Labourer,”
and extracts were printed in
the Trades Newspaper with favorable editorials.
He defended trade unionism and argued that
society is held together by combinations.
He excoriated capitalists for exploiting the work of others.
Betwixt him who produces food
and him who produces clothing,
betwixt him who makes instruments
and him who uses them,
in steps the capitalist, who neither makes
nor uses them and appropriates
to himself the produce of both.16
Hodgkin acknowledged that the capitalist manager
is a worker and productive in that role
but not as a middleman or speculator.
He wrote,
The most successful and widest-spread possible
combination to obtain an augmentation of wages
would have no other injurious effect than to
reduce the incomes of those who live on profit
and interest, and who have no just claim
but custom to any share of the national produce.17
In 1827 Thompson published Labor Rewarded:
The claims of labour and capital conciliated;
or,
How to secure to labour the whole product of its exertion.
He argued that the competitive system is a barrier to freedom
of labor and the equal diffusion of knowledge.
Thompson was the first Owenite to recommend unions
as a way to introduce cooperation, but he warned that
a Central Union of All Trades would not be effective
if it competed against poorer workers in other countries.
Thompson was one of the first
to use the term “socialism” in 1827.
In 1830 he published Practical Directions for the Speedy and
Economical Establishment of Communities on the Principles
of Mutual Co-operation, United Possessions and Equality
of Exertions and the Means of Enjoyments.
He urged all those in the community to direct their physical
and mental labor to what is deemed by the general voice
to be most conducive to the general good.
1. Memoires de Marchand, 1:205 quoted in Titan:
The Art of British Power in the Age of Revolution and Napoleon by William R. Nester, p. 322.
2. The Principles of Morals and Legislation by Jeremy Bentham, p. 1-2.
3. A Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace by Jeremy Bentham
in Jeremy Bentham by Charles W. Everett, p. 221.
4. An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Robert Malthus, p. 14.
5. Principles of Political Economy by Thomas Robert Malthus, p. 430.
6. Ibid., p. 437.
7. On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation by David Ricardo, p. 1.
8. Ibid., p. 80.
9. “Commerce Defended” in Selected Economic Writings by James Mill, p. 158.
10. A New View of Society and Other Writings by Robert Owen, p. 14.
11. Ibid., p. 16.
12. Ibid., p. 39.
13. Ibid., p. 57.
14. Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth by William Thompson, p. 600.
15. An Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women by William Thompson, p. 213.
16. Quoted in The Making of the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson, p. 778.
17. Ibid., p. 779.
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