THE FREE-TRADE SPEECHES OF MR. VILLIERS.* ALTIMMIET, as a rule,

old speeches, even on burning questions— perhaps we should say when they are on burning questions, on the Laureate's theory that passion leaves dry what it sweeps through—are dreary reading, the publication of the chief addresses which, between 1838 and 1852, the now venerable Member for Wolverhampton delivered on the subject of Freetrade, is a step both the propriety and the wisdom of which will be at once seen. Of all Members of Parliament whose careers come within one's vision, Mr. Villiers approaches, perhaps, nearest the realisaticn of what Mr. Spencer calls " the straight man." In a lucid political memoir, which precedes the republished speeches in these volumes, and which errs, if at all, in being too modest, we find that Mr. Villiers, while studying at Hayleybury—but for weak health in youth, he would have gone to India, and probably would not have been heard of again— read Malthus, Mackintosh, and McCulloch. His studies in

political economy made him a Free-trader, a supporter of the principles of Huskisson and Canning, a devotee to what he him

self, in one of the best of his speeches, has called " commercial liberty." In 1832, he acted as Assistant-Commissioner under the Royal Commission for inquiry into the administration and practical operation of the Poor-law. This inquiry, says his biographer, "brought him into direct contact with the labouring classes, and introduced him to one of the most instructive branches of political science. He actually touched the political facts that surrounded him,' and it was the real apprehension of the condition and needs of the people he then gained that constituted one of the sources of his strength during the prolonged opposition he afterwards met with, when he came to deal with some of the gravest economical questions of our times." When he came forward for Wolverhampton at the General Election of 1835, his programme was ready and his course was clear. The one he never abandoned, from the other he never swerved. Social and political pressure was brought to bear upon him with a view to detaching him from a course which was considered " vulgar," and his championship of which undoubtedly stood in the way of his political promotion. But neither seems to have had any effect upon, him whatever ; his hereditary and aristocratic " grit," perhaps that " cheery stoicism " which Carlyle so admired—unhappily, from a distance—seem to have rendered him proof against all seductions. He was ridiculed in Parliament. He was told that he was a Robinson Crusoe standing alone on the island of opposition to the Corn laws. He was informed—and not always so respectfully as by Mr. Disraeli, who had a curious respect for him—that he had only one speech. Yet there is no evidence in these speeches, even in such of them as were addressed to popular and excited audiences in Drury Lane Theatre and elsewhere, that remarks of this kind affected him in any way whatever. He was content to speak of his exertions thus coolly and unpretentiously at Manchester :—

*

"By constantly nibbling away at the net, the little mouse at last made a hole big enough for the lion to get out. And it is on this principle that year after year I go on nibbling away—though the task is no pleasant one, I can assure you—hoping each time to make the hole in the horrid net of monopoly a little bigger, until at last the British Lion shall be free."

It may be doubted if Mr. Villiers, after the Free-trade cause was practically won, was very generously treated by many of those for whom, and in advance of whom, he fought ; though he was thoroughly appreciated by Mr. Bright and Cobden, and also by the general mass of the Free-traders outside the Anti-Corn-law League. On this subject, Cobden wrote, in his warm-hearted way, in a letter which was alluded to by Lord Granville, when unveiling the Villiers statue at Wolverhampton in 1879 :—" I have trod upon his heels, nay, almost trampled him down in a race, where he was once the sole man on the course. When I came into the House, I got the public ear and the Press (which he never had as he deserved). I took the position of the Free-trader. I watched him then ; there was no rivalry, no jealousy, no repining ; his sole object was to see his principles triumph. He was willing to stand aside and cheer me on to the winning goal ; his conduct was not merely noble, but god-like." When the Leaguers resolved to " testimonialise " Cobden alone as the incarnation of their principles, Cobden wrote to Mr. Villiers, in case he should be annoyed, and thus speaks of the result :—" He has returned me a noble answer, just like himself. I could cry over it, and kiss the hand that penned it." But if there is any doubt as to one section of the Free-traders not fully appreciating their Parliamentary leader, there is no doubt at all that Mr. Villiers's Whig friends, in spite of the characteristic exertions made by Cobden on his behalf, behaved somewhat shabbily to him. He was first offered the Vice-Presidency of the Board of Trade, at the time when his brother, Lord Clarendon, was President ! Afterwards he was asked to accept the Governorship of Bombay, but the East India Company, then (1846) supreme, refused to confirm the appointment, on account of his connection with the Anti-Corn-law agitation. It was not till 1859 that his services to the country were recognised, by his appointment to the office of President of the Poor-law Board, with a seat in the Palmerston-Russell Cabinet. For seven years he discharged the duties of this office, and did good work which is not yet forgotten. But the fall of the Ministry of which he was a member meant, at his age (sixty-four), retirement from official life. There is no proof that he resented or even felt what to other men would have seemed neglect. Mr. Villiers belongs, indeed, less to the class of official politicians than to that of what Lord Beaconsfield, when speaking of Cobden, called " great Members of Parliament "—it would, of course, be impertinent at present to seek to assign him his position in the class—who are powerful by reason of their principles, and the persistency and purity of motive that distinguish their advocacy of them.

The author of the Life of Lord George Bentinck bore testimony to " the terse eloquence and vivid perception of Charles Villiers." All things considered, this criticism will be found to be justified by the speeches republished in these two volumes. They are not eloquent, in the Gladstonian sense. They are not fired by such a "social imagination" as that of Cobden, nor can the admirers of Mr. Villiers claim for him very much of the skill in intellectual fence which made his leading coadjutor in the cause of Free-trade so much feared and respected, both in Parliament and on the platform. There is in them nothing of Mr. Bright's fire or humour ; one can never conceive Mr. Villiers comparing Constitutional progress by "vehement jerks" to Captain Cattle's watch, which went tolerably well if it was put on a quarter of an hour every morning at breakfast, and half an hour every day at dinner. Yet there is in these volumes a great deal of dry light, and even of dry, if unconscious humour. Take this, by way of example :—

" The other day I heard a Cabinet Minister lamenting the injustice and folly of making a free people pay 40 per cent. more for their food than they need do, in order to support a monopoly. Nothing could be more just than what he said ; only, unfortunately, when he said it, he was talking of Jamaica and the negroes, and not of England and her people. But as I cannot of course suppose that this Minister cares more for an African than for an Englishman, I expect that when I bring on my motion for the repeal of the Corn-laws he will express the same indignation at Englishmen paying 40 per cent. more than they ought for their food, as he did at the injustice imposed on the negroes of Jamaica"

Like Cobden, and ultimately Peel, Mr. Villiers was much affected by the actual sufferings the poor endured during and

in consequence of the Protectionist regime. Like Mr. Bright, too, be appealed to the religious sense of his hearers. Thus• there is neatness, and something more, in such a sentence as this :—" I cannot conceive anything more immediately within the province of the servants of Him who said, Feed my people,' and ' The labourer is worthy of his hire,' than to inculcate their Master's great lessons of charity, by enabling the poor, through honest industry, to feed themselves."

But the best quality of Mr. Villiers's Free-trade speeches, especially in Parliament, is their clearness,—clearness of statement, clear perception, and calm exposure of Protectionist fallacies. We do not know a better storehouse of the purely statistical arguments against Protection than these volumes; the statement which he read to the House of Commons in 1839, and which appears at p. 91 of the first volume, showing the value of the wages of all the productive classes of the country except the agricultural labourers, under different prices of provisions, is especially well put. As an example of Mr. Villiers's skill in exposing a popular fallacy, the following may be quoted:— "It is contended that Protection is part of a system, and that the landed interest ought to be protected as well as the interest connected with manufacture. The motto of these logicians is, 'Live and let live,' which is strangely like, Take and let us take ;' for if examined it will be found to be the defence of one injustice to the community at the cost of another. But, in the first place, it is no defence of the policy arraigned to show that taxing the consumer for the benefit of the producer is done in more cases than one. Again, there is a convenient fallacy in this mode of arguing, for it implies an equal application of the principle of Protection to every interest that is protected; whereas in this case, while the landowner has a protection of from SO to 100 per cant. and upwards, the manufacturers in no instance are protected to a greater amount than 30 per cent., and in most cases less."

Here, again, is the statement of a distinction so pithy that one wonders why it ever needed to be made at all :

" It is very important to distinguish clearly between what is called agriculture and the ownership of land. These interests are in many respects distinct ; but because they are the same in some respects, the landowners claim for themselves all the arguments usually advanced in support of the laws that have reference solely to agriculture. The fact is, the connection between the cultivation of land and its ownership is not nearer than that between a house and the business carried on in it ; or that between the merchant and his banker who may lend him the capital to conduct his business ; or that between the manufacturer and the person of whom he purchases the raw material. These respective interests are in some material points distinct, and nobody confounds them ; and there is no more reason for confusion between the interests of the cultivator and the owner of the soil than between the other interests. The landowner may hardly know where his property is ; he may be unable to distinguish one kind of produce from another ; he may lire abroad, and know no one connected with his property but the receiver of his• rents. The cultivator, on the other hand, may be equally ignorant of any of the circumstances connected with the ownership of the land beyond the price he pays for its use."

Mr. Villiers's speeches are, for the time at which they•were delivered, singularly free from passion, or from anything of the character of personality. This is about the strongest thing hesaid in the course of his Parliamentary crusade, and we quote it less for its strength than for its conciseness, which ought to put to shame the long-winded and strident " land-nationalisa tion " writings of the day :

"Nothing ever was more shameless than the manner in which the State has been deprived of its due amount of the Land-tax by a gross violation of the bargain the landowners made with the Crown when it was imposed. It was strictly in lien of the feudal services by which alone their lands were held, and for which 4s. in the pound on the rental were required—clearly an inadequate commutation for the inconvenience to which such services would have exposed them ; but which, did it yield what it ought, would now cover the whole amount of the Excise, and thereby dispense with it. If the Land-tax now paid its proper quota, it would yield thirteen millions a year, instead of little more than one million ; and by causing the assessment to be fixed upon the valuation of the land made 150 years since, the public have been defrauded of the difference. But the plea of a special burden borne by the landlords of England is unquestionably the most barefaced pretext for the Corn-laws that was ever put forward : it is matter of history that there is no country in Europe where the feudal system has prevailed, in which the landowners and the aristocracy have made such favourable terms with the Crown as in England. In every other, whether Austria, Italy, Prussia, Belgium, France, they have submitted in lien of services to a considerable direct tax on their land, bearing a large proportion to the whole taxation of the country."

It is odd that the only thing in these volumes which can be considered to be at all ill-natured was said of Mr. Gladstone, when (in 1844) President of the Board of Trade. " As far as myexperience goes," said Mr. Villiers, at a rather heated meeting in Covent Garden Theatre, "this young statesman is not of the stuff of which martyrs are made." This, however, simply proves Mr. Villiers's perception of character not to have= beewso " vivid " as his perception of facts and of principles.