The British public, thrilled by the news of his heroic achievements, fully sympathised with the victorious general. The thanks of both Houses of Parliament were voted to him and the army, and the Duke of Wellington expressed in the House of Lords the highest admiration of his generalship. Sir Charles Napier became the civil governor of the province which his sword had won for his Sovereign; and he showed by the excellence of his administration that his capacity as a statesman was equal to his genius as a general. He encouraged trade; he carried on extensive public works; he erected a pier at Kurrachee, extending two miles into the water, and forming a secure harbour; he organised a most efficient police; he raised a revenue sufficient to pay the whole expenses of the administration, giving a surplus of 90,000, which, added to the prize-money, brought half a million sterling into the Company's treasury in one year. The cultivators of the soil were protected in the enjoyment of the fruits of their industry; artisans, no longer liable to be mutilated for demanding their wages, came back from the countries to which they had fled; beautiful girls were no longer torn from their families to fill the zenanas of Mohammedan lords, or to be sold into slavery. The Hindoo merchant and the Parsee trader pursued their business with confidence, and commerce added to the wealth of the new province. The effect of these reforms was conspicuous in the loyalty of the Scindians during the revolt of 1857.Whilst these indignant sentiments were uttering, the petitions for economical reform were pouring in from all parts of the country in such numbers that the table of the House appeared buried under them. The House went into committee upon the subject, and then Dunning rose and introduced his famous motion for a resolution in these words:"That it is the opinion of this committee that the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished." Dunning declaimed in language bold and unsparing, and expatiated at great length on the alarming influence of the Crown, purchased by the lavish expenditure of the people's money, the people thus being made the instruments of their own slavery. He censured in stinging terms the treatment of the economical plans of Burke, the treacherous terms of approbation with which Ministers had received them, and then had trodden on them piecemeal till they[265] had left of them the merest shred. He trusted the nation would still resent this audacious mockery of reformthis insult to the most distinguished patriots. This was the way, he contended, that this Administration had again and again actedadding ridicule to oppression. Dunning's motion was carried, at a late hour of the night, by two hundred and thirty-three votes against two hundred and fifteen.
ONE:The Government now resolved to follow up the vigorous step they had so tardily taken, by the prosecution of O'Connell and several leading members of the Association. They were arrested in Dublin on the 14th of October, charged with conspiracy, sedition, and unlawful assembly. The other gentlemen included in the prosecution were Mr. John O'Connell, Mr. Thomas Steele, Mr. Ray, Secretary to the Repeal Association, Dr. Gray, proprietor of the Freeman's Journal, Mr. Charles Gavan Duffy, editor of the Nation, Mr. Barrett, of the Pilot, and the Rev. Messrs. Tyrrell and Tierney, Roman Catholic priests. Mr. O'Connell, with his two sons and several friends, immediately on his arrest, went to the house of Mr. Justice Burton, and entered into recognisances, himself in 1,000, with two sureties of 500 each. The tone of Mr. O'Connell was now suddenly changed. From being inflammatory, warlike, and defiant, it became intensely pacific, and he used his utmost efforts to calm the minds of the people, to lay the storm he had raised, and to soothe the feelings he had irritated by angry denunciations of the "Saxon." That obnoxious word was now laid aside, being, at his request, struck out of the Repeal vocabulary, because it gave offence. Real conciliation was now the order of the day.
ONE:Attention was now turned to a matter of the highest importance in a commercial, an intellectual, and a moral point of view. The stamp duty on newspapers had been the subject of keen agitation for some months, and newspaper vendors had incurred repeated penalties for the sale of unstamped newspapers; some of them having been not only fined, but imprisoned. A general impression prevailed that such an impost was impolitic, if not unjust, and that the time had come when the diffusion of knowledge must be freed from the trammels by which it had been so long restrained. A deputation, consisting of Dr. Birkbeck, Mr. Hume, Colonel Thompson, Mr. O'Connell, Mr. Grote, Mr. Roebuck, Mr. Brotherton, Mr. Wallace, and Mr. Buckingham, having, on the 11th of February, waited upon Lord Melbourne, to ask for an entire abolition of the stamp on newspapers, he promised to give his most serious attention to the matter; and he kept his word, for on the 15th of the next month the Chancellor of the Exchequer brought the subject before Parliament, and announced the intentions of Government with regard to it. He stated that it was proposed to revise the whole of the existing law respecting stamp duties, first by consolidating into one statute the 150 Acts of Parliament over which the law was at present distributed; secondly,[402] by the apportionment of the various rates on a new principlenamely, by the simple and uniform rule of making the price of the stamp in every case correspond to the pecuniary value involved in the transaction for which it is required. The effect of this change would be to reduce the stamp duty upon indentures of apprenticeship, bills of lading, and many others of the more common instruments, and to increase it upon mortgages and conveyances of large amounts of property. It was intimated that the proposed Consolidation Act would contain no less than 330 sections. With regard to the stamp on newspapers, then fourpence with discount, it was proposed to reduce it to one penny without discount. This would be a remission of a proportion, varying according to the price of the newspaper, of between two-thirds and three-fourths of the tax. To this remission Parliament assented, and the illicit circulation of unstamped papers was in consequence abandoned. Some of the members very reasonably objected to any stamp whatever on newspapers; but the time was not yet come when Government would venture entirely to remove it, although the advantages which must necessarily arise from such a proceeding could not but have been foreseen. It was considered unfair that the public at large should pay for the carriage of newspapers by post; and it does not seem to have been remembered that, as only a portion of them would be transmitted in this way, an injustice would be committed by demanding payment for all. The difficulty of the case was, however, in due time, easily surmounted; and political knowledge was, by the change even then made, in a great degree exempted from taxationa good preparation for the time, which was not very far off, when a newspaper of a high order might be obtained, even for the reduced price of the stamp.Ulster 2,386,373 3,320,133 346,517 170,598
TWO:THE MINT, LONDON. Population. Valuation. Greatest number
TWO:[See larger version]In this utter desertion, the king prevailed on Lord North, who was already Chancellor of the Exchequer, to accept Grafton's post of First Lord of the Treasury, with the Premiership. Lord North, eldest son of the Earl of Guildford, was a man of a remarkably mild and pleasant temper, of sound sense, and highly honourable character. He was ungainly in his person and plain of countenance, but he was well versed in the business of Parliament, and particularly dexterous in tagging to motions of the Opposition some paragraph or other which neutralised the whole, or turned it even against them. He was exceedingly near-sighted, so much so, that he once carried off the wig of the old Secretary of the Navy, who sat near him in the House. For the rest, he was of so somnolent a nature that he was frequently seen nodding in the House when Opposition members were pouring out all the vials of their wrath on his head. He thought himself a Whig, but if we are to class him by his principles and his acts of administration, we must pronounce him a Tory.
The court-house on the day of nomination presented a striking scene. On the left hand of the sheriff stood a Cabinet Minister, attended by the whole body of the aristocracy and gentry, Protestant and Catholic, of the county Clare. On the right stood Mr. O'Connell, with scarcely a single gentleman by his side. But he was "the man of the people" and of the priests, and so he was master of the situation. Mr. Vesey Fitzgerald was proposed by Sir Edward O'Brien, and seconded by Sir A. Fitzgerald. The Ministerial candidate first addressed the freeholders. He was an accomplished gentleman and an excellent speaker. Mr. Sheil, who was present, remarked that he delivered one of the most effective and dexterous speeches it had ever been his fortune to hear. His venerable father, who had voted against the union in the Irish Parliament, was now on his death-bed, and the knowledge of the[274] contest had been kept from him, lest the excitement should hasten his departure. In alluding to him, and to his own services to the county, Mr. Fitzgerald's eyes filled with tears, and there were few amongst his opponents, excited as they were against him, who did not give the same evidence of emotion; and when he sat down, although the great majority of the audience were strongly opposed to him, and were enthusiasts in favour of the rival candidate, a loud and unanimous burst of acclamation shook the court-house.CHARING CROSS, LONDON, IN 1795.Pitt, though he remained determined against our continuing to send soldiers to Germany, was so elated at the success of Frederick that, on the meeting of Parliament, on the 1st of December, he supported the vote of six hundred and seventy thousand pounds as a subsidy to Prussia, George having entered into a new convention with Frederick to defend his Electorate. Pitt, on the same occasion, pronounced a glowing eulogium on Clive's proceedings in India. This great Minister had, in fact, formed the most extensive designs for the colonial aggrandisement of England, and the repulse of France in those quarters. At his suggestion, Lord Loudon had been sent to North America, and as he had failed to render any service, General Abercrombie had gone out to supersede him. Pitt already, however, had his eye on a young officer, Wolfe, whom he deemed the true hero for that service; whilst, on the opposite side of the globe, he was watching the proceedings of another young officer with immense pleasurenamely, Clive. These two remarkable men, under the fostering genius of Pitt, were destined to destroy the ascendency of France in those regions, and to lay the foundations of British power on a scale of splendour beyond all previous conception.
