THE ORTON-KENEALY CRAZE.—OPTIMIST VIEW.
THE importance of this Orton-Kenealy affair is, I think, exaggerated in the public mind. A similar agitation has occurred before, and assumed a much more dangerous form. There can be little doubt that from September, 1678, the whole middle-class of England was for months under a delusion infinitely stronger than the one which has now seized a section of the people, and under its influence was, for the time, deprived not only of its usual amount of reason, but of its instinctive reverence for justice and fair-play. The story of the Popish Plot drove the whole nation frantic. Men of characters as unblemished as the best of our modern Judges were hurried to the block -upon evidence as shadowy as that which deludes the Orton meetings, derived from witnesses in whose presence Dr. Kenealy is a man of high intelligence and repute. No rank, no career, no character protected any one who was assailed. The King's brother, the King's wife, the very King himself, were all suspected and in public places denounced for complicity in a plot the essence of which was to be the murder of the King. The passion of distrust which now so alarms observers seized on the popula-
tion, till at last they were ready to believe any prominent man in the kingdom engaged in a grand conspiracy to "stifle the Plot." That the Judges escaped the torrent of popular wrath was due to mere accident, to the fact that the one among them most prominently engaged in the inquiry so dreaded the public wrath that he lent himself to the delusion, and inflicted on men whom he knew to be innocent the irreversible sentence of death. The delusion died away almost as rapidly as it had risen, and the witnesses became the objects of an abhorrence almost as deep as the hatred of those whom they had slandered. The whole affair left a deep stain on the history of England, as the witch- murders left a stain on the history of the American Puritans, but it made no permanent impression on the character of the classes momentarily led away. They were in possession of far more power than the Orton agitators of to-day, but they effected nothing, and their madness deserves study only for its psychological interest.
This Orton delusion will die away too, and from the changed manners of the time, without the irreparable injury involved in the shedding of innocent blood, and it has as yet, as far as I see, revealed nothing except ignorance of which a nation should be ashamed. The mobs who collect wherever Dr. Kenealy goes are not shouting for plunder, or bloodshed, or a redistribution of property, or any kind of immediate gain to themselves ; are not bribed, are not drunk, are not even riotous in the old and anarchical sense of the term. On the contrary, they are doing their best in an ignorant and silly way to obtain re- dress for what they imagine to be a wrong, and to right a man whom they consider to have been unjustly or wickedly con- demned. The spirit they evince, utterly misdirected as it is, is the old spirit which has helped to make England free and great. The thing to be dreaded in a mob, from the historian's point of view, is not the misdirection of its enthusiasm, or even of its passion, but the moral badness of the enthusiasm itself, the degrading nature of the idea about which it is enthusiastic. In this case there is no such badness, no such degradation. This mob is not shouting for Barabbas, but for a hero who, whatever his life, or his morals, or his manners, is, as they believe, wrong- fully deprived of a position which in their eyes is one of romantic grandeur. They are fighting for the rightful heir, displaying, no doubt in an unreasoning and ridiculous way, pre- cisely the feeling which, when well directed, we all admire and dignify as loyalty, fidelity, and pity for the dispossessed. We do not reprehend, but rather reverence the Portuguese who turned out in arms to restore an impostor, Sebastian, to his throne, for we forget the folly in admiration of self-sacrifice; and these rough and ignorant people, with their coarse shouts and hoarse laughter, all unromantic as they are, are still acting under just the emotions which moved the Portuguese. That they should regard the Courts of Justice as the oppressors and the Judges as the tyrants is, no doubt, most lamentably unfortunate ; but that is only because by a strange accident these officials are the repre- sentatives of a power which, pro hac vice, the populace conceive to have acted in defiance of justice. They would have thundered against Kings, or Billions, or Peers with even more acerbity, had they been the actors in the romantic drama. To them, those they assail are not judges, legislators, statesmen, as they are to the better-informed, but simply powerful persons, who for unknown motives have done a great wrong, and must be compelled to undo it. To them, Dr. Kenealy is not even a libeller ulcerated with disappointment, but a man who has stepped out of the educated class to defend the poor, and make the proud tremble, and reveal to the ignorant how little they know of the characters of the great. That they should be so ready to believe evil of the great is, no doubt, to be regretted ; but the fault is one which is not confined to them, nor one which it lies in the mouths of people who delight in 44 Greville Memoirs" to condemn, as if those who display it were outside the pale of human tolerance. Ignorance is a curable evil, and the suspiciousness will pass away. It is, I think, observable in the whole history of the world that terror and its first product, suspiciousness, is the usual accompaniment of the first dawning of political intelligence; terror of all power, suspicion of all who exer- cise it. The class which believed Titus Oates's wicked romances, which accepted the warming-pan story as gospel, which could not be convinced that Monmouth was illegitimate, and died fighting for the non-existent certificates in the invisible "black box," were hundreds of them yeomen who became in another generation of all classes the most conservative and trustworthy depositaries of power. The spread of a poor education, the diffusion of cheap papers, the stir of the age have woke up whole classes to attend to affairs which as yet they do not understand,—do not,
in their dazed and eye-rubbing condition, as yet even see ; but that they are awake will not be, by and by, an evil but a good. Men who know workmen better than I can pretend to do say that the first difficulty of man- aging them when they begin to be intelligent, to form unions, and to act in bodies, is to restrain their "preter- natural suspiciousness," their disposition to see themselves "done" on every hand, their inability to take character into consideration when judging their employers. They strike against the just and the unjust with equal readiness, and this not from overpowering selfishness, but from inability at first to discriminate between them,—an inability which dies away till the workmen are able to select arbitrators who are more just than the referees constantly selected by those above them. A new couche sociale is coming forward, not indeed to assume power, but to obtain a share of it—to be visible, in fact, in the land—and it is displaying the faults which in all ages have distinguished new classes when they first assert themselves in the light.
There are two other points in connection with this Orton affair upon which the alarm of the Respectables seems to be exaggerated. The Orton dupes are not threatening the State. On the contrary, nothing is more remarkable than the way in which they seem to have caught from those above them the regular methods of English political agitation,—public assemblies, open-air meetings, petitions to Parliament, remon- strances to Members, and at last the election of the leader of the agitation as a Member of Parliament. The meetings are tumultuous, but they end in resolutions. The language used is violent, but its burden is that Parliament should do justice, and the Queen be released from evil advice. The abuse of the Judges is disgusting, but it is hardly worse than the abuse of the Bishops in 1831, when the sight of the episcopal dress in London inflamed the mob to fury. Grant to the leader of the agitation any character you choose, and still, when the first idea of a mob is to send Jack Cade to convince the House of Commons, a great advance has been made towards reasoning self-government. It is in popular hatred of institutions, not in a popular effort to enlighten and improve them, however foolish or misdirected, that public danger lies. "Down with the Queen's Bench 1" is the dangerous cry, not, "Change the Judges" sitting there. And finally, as to the language which sells the Englishman, and so provokes the disgust and detes- tation of the cultivated, it may be doubted if they ever can understand the true weight of words with the people just beginning to be able to read. They swallow in their ignorance anything in print, but they do not keep it down. The mass of English-speaking men have always delighted in throwing off a burden of re- straint and formality which oppresses them, in indulging a half-savage Rabelaisian license, in displaying a rough insolence which they either mistake for humour, or which makes them feel themselves free. It is just the same in America. Nothing said here of the Judges can compare either in violence or in brutality with the abuse lavished in 1872 on President Grant, who was denounced as thief, drunkard, debauchee, and traitor, and elected by heavy majorities all the same. It is a way of grumbling, and however mucli it may mean in the mind of the Editor who is educated, in the mouths of those who read his diatribes it has possibly little more meaning than the word "bloody" with which they emphasise, as it were, their most amicable conversation. The talk that goes on in the parlour of a village alehouse is much of the same kind, but for all that, the village sleeps calmly on for centuries. The change is, that a speaking-tube now stretches from the pot-house to the Manor Hall and the Magistrates' meeting-room.
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