The Prime Minister Face to Face with the Results of the Law. lxix

his face in that House. In the next election a tenant-farmer will assuredly be proposed for a county. On that occasion, if the farmers, be they Whig or Tory, permit one of their order to be rejected as representative of their own interests, then will they deserve to be trampled under the hoofs of landlords, land-agents, and those odious creatures-toadying country attorneys-for another half-century."

MR. LIVESEY ON SIR R. PEEL.

It may be mentioned as an illustration of Mr. Livesey's political sagacity and foresight, that he repeatedly expressed the opinion that Sir Robert Peel would ultimately effect the repeal. Nevertheless he did not spare the premier; but addressed the most searching appeals to him, placing his great responsibilities in the strongest possible light. When in July, 1842, a deputation of Anti-CornLaw delegates waited upon Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Livesey was one of them; and in No. 30 of The Struggle, he gives his impressions of the interview:

"My impression was, that the deputation was exceedingly unwelcome, and that the only happy moment Sir Robert felt was that when he made his exit. Sir Robert entered the room with little ceremony, made a gentle move, and fixed himself against the corner of a sofa. He stood all the time, and almost as motionless as a statue. Ten deputies addressed the premier; the audience was most solemn; the scene most affecting; the prime minister of England standing to listen to the deputed cries and wailings and sufferings of millions of his fellowsubjects! repeated with a faithfulness, a fervour, and an awful solemnity, such as I never witnessed before. He was told honestly the real condition of the nation, and the inevitable consequences if relief was not afforded. Many an eye was flooded with tears, especially when Alderman Brooks affectingly related the privations of the poor. The repeal of the Corn Laws and freedom of trade were strongly recommended as the true remedies; and that if something be not done, the deputies stated to him plainly, a convulsion was sure to take place."

Mr. Livesey expresses his astonishment at the off-hand way in which Sir Robert dismissed the deputation by promising to bring the subject under the notice of his colleagues; and he was much pained by the remark of the premier, that he had "heard the deputation with great patience." When, however, the obnoxious laws were repealed, Mr. Livesey heartily concurred in the sentiments regarding Sir Robert, expressed by his friend and Temperance colleague Henry Anderton :

He welded brains of adverse sorts,
And solder'd all their quarrels ;
Till by their aid-corn fill'd our ports,
In French and Yankee barrels;
And while this gallant game he play'd,
State quack and swindler rumpling,
He opened Britain's doors of trade,
And doubled Britain's dumpling.

THE MANUFACTURERS AND THE REPEAL MOVEMENT.

It has now become customary to reflect upon the Anti-Corn-Law agitation as a class movement in the interests of the manufacturers. It may be true that many of the largest subscribers to the funds of the League had an eye to the improvement of their own branches of industry, and that their subscriptions were in a sense only a trade investment. But the movement as a whole was very much more than this. It was for instance of far wider significance to Richard Cobden and John Bright, who were animated by the motives of a broad and general

1xx

The Highest Sanctions Appealed to.

philanthropy. Those who took a narrower view of the crusade, helped it forward by their means and influence, but Cobden himself afterwards lamented "how few of those who fought for the repeal of the Corn Law really understood the full meaning of Free Trade principles." Mr. Livesey belonged to the few who did understand their meaning, and his labours were rendered all the more valuable and effective by the fact that they sprang from the highest philanthropic and religious motives. He did not, however, condemn the manufacturers, or discourage their proffered assistance, but says of them:

"I am neither the advocate nor apologist of the masters, and no one laments more than I do, the pride and oppression of some of the cotton aristocracy; but one thing I am confident of, that whether the men respect their masters or not, it is their duty, for their own sake, to stand by their trade, and to fight against those laws by which its very existence is at present threatened, and by which they are all likely to be entirely ruined. Let me repeat, that the greatest practical advantages, resulting from a Free Trade, would be divided amongst the working people."+

An examination of The Struggle shows that Mr. Livesey's advocacy of Free Trade principles was based on the highest grounds. And in the Declaration of Principles, published in the first number of his Preston Guardian (Feb. 10th, 1844), the question is approached from a religious standpoint:

"We consider human life a Divine gift, and as such it should be held sacred from all inroads of human cruelty and cupidity; and we would regard its gradual destruction or embarrassment, by means of laws which create starvation, as an infringement of the natural rights of man, and an offence quite as heinous in the sight of Heaven as a direct attack upon it by physical violence. These are the highest and most cogent considerations that can be urged in support of man's right to an adequate supply of food, and they are considerations which have the immediate sanction of Almighty Wisdom."

Holding these views, it is not surprising that Mr. Livesey was severe upon the clergy, who used their influence to obstruct the reform. He satirized them both with pen and pencil; and in No. 70 of The Struggle the fact is recorded that "Seven bishops-Rt. Rev. Fathers in God-opposed Lord Monteagle's motion on the Corn Laws."

In addition to the services rendered the Anti-Corn-Law movement through The Struggle and the Preston Guardian-a paper devoted to Free Trade and liberal and progressive objects, which rapidly achieved success-he also promoted the cause by the issue of small handbills or tracts of a striking and pithy character, and the publication of Illustrated Free Trade Sheet Almanacs, which were very extensively circulated.

In promoting petitions to Parliament, Mr. Livesey may be said to have done the work of an organization. In No. 7 of The Struggle, he announces:

"We will now employ persons to write as many Petitions as there are families in Preston; and every householder is invited to call for a copy, and forward it to his representative, signed by himself and all his domestics. Let the table of the House of Commons groan beneath five millions of Petitions."

A year later, in No. 59 of The Struggle, Mr. Livesey gives the petition of his own family (which he reproduces on page 23 of the "Autobiography"), and in an article urging the general adoption of family petitions, he says: "I have now "Morley's Life of Cobden," People's Ed., p. 88. The Struggle, No. 3.

Petitioning Parliament-" The Struggle's" Merits as a Teacher. lxxi

three or four of my boys writing family petitions for those who are either not able or have not time to write for themselves."

MR. JOHN MORLEY'S ESTIMATE OF 66 THE STRUGGLE."

Mr. John Morley, M.P., in his "Life of Cobden," has the following discriminating acknowledgment of Mr. Livesey's Anti-Corn-Law labours:

"A volunteer in Preston this winter (1841) began to issue, on his own account, a quaint little sheet of four quarto pages, called The Struggle, and sold for a halfpenny. It had no connexion with any association, and nobody was responsible for its contents but the man who wrote, printed, and sold it. In two years eleven hundred thousand copies had been circulated. The Struggle is the very model for a plain man who wishes to affect the opinion of the humbler class, without the wasteful and, for the most part, ineffectual machinery of a great society. It contains in number after number the whole arguments of the matter in the pithiest form, and in language as direct, if not as pure, as Cobbett's. Sometimes the number consists simply of some more than usually graphic speech by Cobden or by Fox. There are racy dialogues, in which the landlord always gets the worst of it; and terse allegories, in which the Duke of Buckingham or the Duke of Richmond figures as inauspiciously as Bunyan's Mr. Badman. The Bible is ransacked for appropriate texts, from the simple clause in the Lord's Prayer about our daily bread, down to Solomon's saying: He that withholdeth the corn, the people shall curse him; but blessings shall be upon the head of him that selleth it.' On the front page of each number was a woodcut, as rude as a schoolboy's drawing, but full of spirit and cleverness, whether satirizing the Government, or contrasting swollen landlords with famine-stricken operatives, or painting some homely idyll of the industrious poor, to point the greatest of political morals, that domestic comfort is the object of all reforms.'"*

THE INSTITUTIONAL v. THE ORGANIZATIONAL MAN.

If a person of to-day desires information respecting the great Anti-Corn-Law struggle, he will most likely be directed to Mr. Archibald Prentice's History of the Anti-Corn-Law League." In that work he will find much valuable material— but it is simply a history of the League as an organization, and not of the still wider Free Trade sentiment and movement which permeated the masses, and of which the League was only one form of expression. We will suppose that the investigator had heard that Mr. Livesey had rendered important services to the Repeal movement, and that being desirous of verifying this, he consults Mr. Prentice's volumes. He will be astonished, however, to find that Mr. Livesey's name is nowhere mentioned throughout that work; and unless he has learned to distinguish between the institutional reformer and the organizational worker, he will be at a loss to account for the omission. Perhaps no other incident could more strikingly illustrate Mr. Livesey's leading characteristic than this does. He was not an organizational man, but something rarer; indeed, he was an excellent representative of the type of man which makes organizations possible. We may, and probably shall, get histories of Temperance Leagues and Alliances, done from an official point of view, in which no mention is made of Mr. Livesey or his Temperance work, or of some other independent labourers; they may be very good books in their way, but they will not be histories of Temperance. The idea must precede the movement—must ever be kept in due prominence—or the organization will grow

"Life of Cobden " (People's Edition), p. 29.

lxxii

Fitting Acknowledgments of Splendid Services.

to be regarded as of the first importance, and the principles it is founded to teach and extend of secondary moment.

COBDEN AND BRIGHT ON MR. LIVESEY AS REPEALER AND REFORMER.

And Mr. Livesey's services to the Anti-Corn-Law movement were also fully understood and thoroughly appreciated by those who were the best judges of their value. Speaking at a meeting held in the Theatre, Preston, on March 7th, 1844, Mr. Cobden said:

"We are much indebted to one gentleman in particular in this borough, for having disseminated information in a most useful form. I allude to my friend Mr. Livesey. I don't hesitate to say, after the name of Cobbett-I might almost have added Franklin-I know of no writer who has had the happy art of putting questions of a difficult and complex character in a more simple and lucid form than my friend Mr. Livesey; and I make no hesitation in speaking thus of his work— The Struggle."*

Mr. Bright held Mr. Livesey's work in equal esteem, as may be seen from the following letter:

'Mr. Livesey was one of our firmest friends in the great conflict on the Corn Law question. His paper, The Struggle, was of great use, and I have often regretted that I do not possess a copy of it; for it told the story of the cruelty and wickedness of the Corn Law in pictures and language that could not be misunderstood. Mr. Livesey was a man of great merit-he had a great sense of justice, and his life was one dignified by constant labours in the wide field of mercy and benevolence.

"You will have abundant material for a volume from which much useful instruction may be gained. It will, I cannot doubt, strengthen the desire for good in all who read it." t

* Preston Guardian, March 9th, 1844.

Letter from Rt. Hon. John Bright, M.P., to Mr. John Pearce, dated November 11th, 1884.

CHAPTER VI.

TEMPERANCE: PIONEER AND FOUNDER.

Whoever may be the honoured instrument in accomplishing the Temperance reformation, it is God's own work, and in His own time, and by His own means, He will perfect it. -PROFESSOr Edgar.

Ir is made abundantly clear in the foregoing chapters that Mr. Livesey was an active participator in all the stirring reforms of his time. Indeed his labours in various fields of philanthropic effort were so extensive, that had he never been identified with the Temperance movement, it might still have been said of him that his long life was devoted to the service of humanity. Of a certainty no view of Mr. Livesey could be more erroneous than the one which obtains in some quarters respecting him-that he was a man of one idea. His active labours, however, in the promotion of Temperance-extending as they did over a period of fifty-four years—were of a character which fully entitle him to be regarded as the Father and Founder of the Total Abstinence movement.

Mr. Livesey's claims to pre-eminence amongst his fellow-labourers, as the founder of the Preston Temperance movement, are not weakened, but rather strengthened, by the fact that he never urged them himself. So long as a system equal to the cure and prevention of drunkenness was successfully set in motion, he cared little who was the first to originate it. Hence, when others claimed the honour, he was silent, content no doubt to let his teachings and labours speak for themselves. One thing about Mr. Livesey is especially noticeable-that he was extremely modest and diffident in speaking of himself. When, in 1867, the Rev. Charles Garrett urged him to give, in the Staunch Teetotaler, a minute account of the origin of teetotalism, Mr. Livesey hesitated. "I felt," he said, "that having been so closely mixed up with every step at the commencement, that I should seem as if writing too much about myself." And if his own reputation had alone been concerned in the matter, most likely his native modesty would have restrained him from penning the articles which were subsequently expanded into the "Reminiscences of Early Teetotalism,"* an invaluable contribution to Temperance history, in which the labours of all the pioneer reformers are most generously acknowledged.

* "Reminiscences of Early Teetotalism," by J. Livesey. London: Nat. Temp. League.