THE TAILOR WHO MADE HISTORY.*
Ma. GRAHAM WALLAS is to be congratulated on baying produced not only a clear and well-proportioned record of a singularly full and many-sided life, but a vivid portrait-study of a very remarkable man. It is noteworthy when the journeyman who raises himself by his own exertions to the position of a prosperous employer, instead of losing interest in the class from which he has sprung, devotee the bulk of his bard-earned leisure to political and other work for the improvement of their condition. It is noteworthy when a man who has won a substantial competency in trade is so superior to the temptations of social ambition that he puts aside all opportunities of obtaining access to the homes of more highly placed acquaintances, unless drawn thither by strong intellectual or moral sympathies. It is noteworthy when a man of great mental gifts and organising power persists in working for public ends through others, and steadily keeps himself in the background. It is noteworthy, again, when a man who has deliberately abandoned all faith in a future life and all thought of obtaining supernatural guidance and aid in this, who has also a keen eye for human weaknesses everywhere, and is entirely without dreams of the possibility of achieving vast ameliorative results within short periods, yet consecrates his powers and influence unremittingly to the task of leaving the world at least a little better than he found it. All, and more than all, these titles to consideration were united in Francis Place, and combine to render his personality one of quite exceptional interest.
Born in 1771, the son of the brutal keeper of a sponging. house, or private debtors' prison, off Drury Lane, Francis Place was sent to such schools as there were in the neigh- bourhood from the age of four till he was nearly four- teen. They were poor enough places of education, but such as they were Place easily rose to the top of them, and during the last two years of his school life he had the advan- tage of being under a teacher who, though generally "in- effectual," was kindly, and who lent him books, gave him good advice, and lectured him and his fellows weekly on the elements of morality. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a leather-breeches maker, and having become a highly skilled workman, he began life as a journeyman in that trade. He had only been at work for a year or two, however, when he • Ths LIfs of Franc's Mace, 1771.1854. By Graham Wallas, M.A. London : Longmans and Co. [125 was discharged in consequence of a labour dispute, with the initiation of which he had nothing to do, but which, being in it, he did his best to carry to a successful issue. In that be failed, and was, with one other, singled out by the triumphant masters to suffer a vindictive boycott. For eight months he was absolutely shut out of employment at his trade, could get hardly any other work, and was brought with his young wife and child almost to the point of starvation. The terrible privations of this period, which, however, he turned to good account by reading "many volumes of history, voyages and travels, politics, law, and philosophy," and making considerable progress in mathe- matics, doubtless had very much to do with the determination which soon possessed Place to raise himself above the position of the journeyman breeches. maker, through that of a trades- man on his own account, into a comfortable independence. In 1801, at the age of thirty, such was the credit which his strength of character, business ability, and commercial probity had won for him, that he was able to open and stock a handsomely fitted shop in a prominent position at Charing Cross ; and this venture was a complete success. Not certainly through any " sweating " of journeymen. Place always got the best work by paying the best wages in the trade, and conceded advances whenever they were asked for. He did not attempt any detailed supervision of the cutting of gar- ments, as to which, always excepting leather-breeches, he had not acquired skilled knowledge. "I knew, he wrote after.. wards, "that I could procure competent persons for those purposes, and that the most profitable part for me to follow was to dance attendance on silly people, to make myself acceptable to coxcombs, to please their whims, to have no opinion of my own, but to take special care that my customers should be pleased with theirs." And a "profitable part" it proved. For in 1817, at the age of forty-six, Place was able to hand the business over to his son, and retire on an income of about E1,100 a year, which was then very handsome, and
would be considered, even now, no poor result of sixteen years' tailoring. For the first five or six of those years he devoted himself almost exclusively to the interests of his business. In the evenings he read hard, but abstained from all kinds of public life. It was not until the celebrated Westminster election in 1807 that he first found the oppor- tunity of giving effect to the Radical principles to which, prosperous tradesman though he had become, be was always loyal, and that his singular powers as an organiser were first recognised in the political sphere. At a moment in the course of the electoral struggle when the popular prospects seemed darkest, he offered to his fellow-committee-men "to give up every other thing and attend wholly to the election till its close." Further, he said that he "would not only undertake the management, but also whatever might other- wise be necessary, which others might dislike because it was disagreeable." He was as good as his word ; entirely neg- lected his business for nearly three weeks; and worked at the committee rooms daily from seven in the morning to mid- night. His example inspired many others, and the result of their combined efforts and his co-ordinating and driving power was a great triumph for the Radicals, Sir Francis Burdett, their candidate, being returned at the head of the poll with nearly twice as many votes as those recorded for either the official Whig or the official Tory.
It was thus that Place established in Westminster politics a position of effective ascendency, which he retained for more than a quarter of a century. He retained it by the same means,—recognised organising ability and absolute devotiou of time and strength to political warfare whenever occasion required. In 1820 the sitting Members, Hobhouse and Burdett, had both been in prison for published comments of theirs on the Peterloo massacre, and Place slaved suc- cessfully to secure their return through a long protracted election. They held their seats without a contest for the next thirteen years, grieving his eager soul not a little, at times, by the Laodicean quality of their Parliamentary conduct. It was natural that when the great struggle for the Reform Bill came, even though that measure actually involved a large amount of disfranchisement in Westminster, Preston, and a few other scot and lot" constituencies, Place should be found at the centre of the most advanced wing of the Reformers, and some of the most interesting passages in the present volume are those which
tell, largely in his own words, the part which he played through that momentous crisis. The easy success of the Revolution of July, 1830, in Paris, as Mr. Wallas is careful to bring oat, was largely responsible for the change which certainly occurred in the attitude of Place himself, and very many other more moderate politicians, towards the question of a resort to force in the last extremity for the purpose of securing political reform. The following extracts from a
letter written by Place to Sir John Hobhouse, then Secretary of War, at the request of that Minister, in order that he might lay it before a meeting of Lord Grey's Cabinet, give a singularly vivid idea of the lengths to which preparations had been carried for resistance to the conduct of government by the Duke of Wellington, when he was called by the King
to form an Administration after the passage of a vote in Committee of the House of Lords hostile to the second
Reform Bill in May, 1832. It should be said that three or four
days before the date of this letter an immense sensation and a great financial effect had been produced by the issue of a placard, devised in part by Place, with the simple words, "To Stop the Duke, Go for Gold,"—by which was meant, and was understood, that "the people should take care of themselves, by collecting all the hard money they could, and keeping it, by drawing it from savings-banks, from bankers, and from the Bank of England." In the meantime Lord Grey had been asked to remain in office, but the King had not yet given him his promise to create Peers enough to carry the Bill, and the Duke's attitude in the House of Lords gave no assurance that he would allow it to pass :—
"Lists containing the names, addresses, &c., of all persons in every part of the country likely to be useful have been made ; the name of every man who has at any public meeting shown himself friendly to Reform has been registered. Addresses and proclamations to the people have been sketched, and printed copies will, if need be, be sent to every such person all over the Kingdom. Means have been devised to placard towns and villages, to circulate handbills, and to assemble the people. So many men of known character, civil and military, have entered heartily into the scheme, that their names, when published, will produce great effect in every desirable way. If the Duke come into power now, we shall be unable longer to hold to the laws ;' break them we must, be the conse- quences whatever they may ; and we know that all must join with us to save their property, no matter what may be their private opinions. Towns will be barricaded, new municipal arrangements will be made by the inhabitants, and the first town which is barricaded shuts up all the banks. Go for Gold,' it is said, will produce dreadful evils. We know it will, but it will prevent other evils being added to them. It will stop the Duke. Let the Duke take office as Premier, and we shall have a commo- tion in the nature of a civil war, with money at our command."
As history knows, the Duke was stopped, peace preserved, and Parliament reformed. It seems certain that few in- dividuals did more to secure those great results than the Radical tailor of Charing Cross. Cool, wise, resourceful, and resolute, he was at the heart of the organisation of overt measures to be taken against a reactionary Government. And so effectively was this work done that the establish- ment of such a Government was averted, and a revolution carried, without disorder. What other things Place did, such as inspiring and organising the movement, in Parliament and out of it, for the repeal of the odious Combination Laws, hindering unwise and unjust Executive interference with Trade-Unions, and drafting the "People's Charter," are all set forth in this most interesting volume. What he would never do was to be idle, not even after an attack of paralysis in his seventy-fourth year ; and he took part in the meetings
of the Anti-Corn-law League down to its triumph in 1816. Radical he always was, but Socialist never, being a devoted
friend and disciple of Bentham, and on terms of confidential intimacy with Grote and James Mill. To Joseph Hume, Place was something like a political private tutor, and that pupil, though sometimes disappointing his master, did more than any other to carry out his aims in Parliament. This
book impressively illustrates the truth of the observation which Mr. Wallas quotes on his first page from the Spectator
which announced Place's death, in January, 1854, that "few men have done more of the world's work with so little sign."
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