CHAPTER XIII

THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL

Objects of the School - Peace Policy-Anti-Imperialism — Bright and Cobden - Socialism Property -The Irish Question.

THE members of the Manchester School, or most of them, are in their graves. The youngest survivors must be seventy. The other day I was reading the obituary of my old friend Sir James Stansfield1 and thinking that I must be about the last left of my circle, when I received an engraving of the portrait of Sir Thomas Bazley," a leader of the Manchester School. In thanking him I said how much pleasure it gave me to know that there were two of us still alive. I received an answer from his son, saying that it was he that had sent the portrait, that his own age was seventy, and that his father, my friend, if he were alive, would be one hundred and two.

The object of the School was economical. Imperialism and Militarism it opposed on economical grounds as enemies to trade and frugality. It had nothing to do with Socialism, but on the contrary was always for the liberty to which Socialism would put an end. For [1 1820-1898. Held various high political posts; M.P. for Halifax; Under-Secretary of State for India; etc.]

[2 1797-1885.

Cotton manufacturer and politician.]

peace and reduction of armaments it pleaded as a whole on economical, its leaders on philanthropic, grounds.

2

1 "School" and not "Party " is the right term. The circle never was formed into a party, never put forth a general programme, had not even recognized leaders, though it looked up to Bright and Cobden. Its only organization was the Anti-Corn-Law League, in which it had its origin, and which brought its chiefs to the front. No doubt, on the part of the manufacturers who formed the League, self-interest was strong. Some of them, when they had gained their commercial object, or, as Cobden said with his usual simplicity, when "their gross, pocket question was settled," fell away politically, and even became Tories. The sentiment of class, manufacturer against squire, also made itself felt. Unhappily, without gross pocket questions or sectional sentiment, you will not often find a sufficient motive power; and it was by self-interest on the part of a Parliament of landowners that the Corn Law had been imposed.

That Free Trade has not made the progress in the world which at the moment of victory its English champions hoped and predicted, is true; yet the mockery with which the prophets are assailed is unjust. What has arrested the progress of Free Trade? Not change of conviction, but the political power of sinister inter

[ What follows, down to page 237, appeared in the Contemporary Review, March, 1895, Volume LXVII, pages 377-388.]

[2 Founded in January, 1839. It was dissolved July 2, 1846.]

ests, international antipathies, cultivated for the purposes of Protection, and, above all, the necessity of taxation created by bloated armaments, for the existence of which Manchester peace-mongers assuredly have not to answer. The Protectionist tariff of the United States itself was a war-tariff. While Protectionism reigned in American legislation, almost all the professors of political economy in the American Universities, and the writers on economy generally, were on the side of Free Trade.

To the taunt that the world had not continued to move in the direction of Cobden's policy, Free Trade and peace, Cobden could reply, so much the worse for the world. He could not help the revival of the war spirit, nor in 1850 could he well have foreseen it. Pitt's economical calculations were suddenly wrecked by the French Revolution. It was to the United States that Cobden looked with special hope, and there all was changed by the War of Secession. That Cobden was not free from the enthusiasm of his convictions, and that he overrated the power of his economic talisman, has already been admitted.

The League having done its work, and the bond which it created having come to an end, there remained the school of political thought which it had formed. There was plenty of room in that school for differences of opinion on particular questions, and for varieties of degree in the application of the general principles which were held in common. "To try to square the policy

of the country with the maxims of common sense and of a plain morality" was Bright's description of his own aim, and it was the general aim of his school.

Peace-mongers, Quakers, and Little Englanders were epithets freely bestowed on us by the Jingoes. If anybody can persuade himself that a Europe armed to the teeth and consuming a large part of its earnings in preparation for war is a blessing, he may call us any names he pleases. We did not preach defencelessness, or tame submission to wrong. Cobden said that in a just war, though he could not serve in the field, he would serve in the hospital. Bright was a Quaker, but he had tacitly dropped the extreme sentiments as well as the garb and dialect of his community, and never, I believe, in his later years, said anything against national defence. He was a member of a Government which had the army and navy in its charge, though he never administered, and would no doubt have refused to administer, a War Department. That he would have been extreme in his peace policy I do not doubt. But surely, for an industrial people dependent on trade for its daily bread, if not for a warlike aristocracy, his was the right extreme. The School steadfastly opposed Palmerston with his Civis Romanus sum and his Russian and Chinese wars. On the question of the war with China he beat us, and unseated our chiefs in a general election by an appeal to what he called the honour of the country. Let Palmerston's admirers read the letters of his own envoy to China,

Lord Elgin, in Walrond's excellent Life,' and say by whom the real honour of the country was best upheld. For nothing was the Manchester School more denounced than for its steady opposition to what was supposed to be the patriotic policy of perennial enmity to Russia and of propping up the Turkish Empire in Europe. What now remains of the fruits of the Crimean War but the Crimean graves, and to what has Turkish Empire come?

Another example is that of the Boer War, which the Manchester School would assuredly have opposed, as a great Manchester journal most gallantly did oppose, and the only fruit of which was the loss of two hundred and fifty millions of money and a far worse loss of honour.

It was always possible, as I can bear witness, to belong to the Manchester School, and at the same time to regard the British army and navy with the heartiest attachment and their achievements with the liveliest pride; though it was not possible for any one belonging to the Manchester School to join in the Jingo choruses of the music-halls, or to forget the responsibility that rests on every civilian who incites to war. On this subject there were different shades of sentiment among us. Some of us thought, and, as the event

["Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin, Governor of Jamaica, Governor-General of Canada, Envoy to China, Viceroy of India." Edited by Theodore Walrond, C.B. With a Preface by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D.D., Dean of Westminster. London: Murray. 1872.]