Radical Fights of Forty Years

By Howard Evans

This the autobiographical work of Howard Evans (1839–1915) who was a British Radical and Nonconformist journalist. The book paints a vivid picture of conditions in the 19th century and how courageous reformers like John Stuart Mill, himself and his associate W. Randal Cremer stood for human rights and the beginnings of the Labour and Peace Movements.
Evans wrote in 1878, "I believe firmly that in politics as well as religion God has his own elect chosen out from the rest of the world to be the pioneers of progress".
Together with Cremer he formed the Inter Parliamentary Union and the International Arbitration League and laid the foundations for the International Court of Justice in the passionate search for an alternative to war as a solution for international disputes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: epubli
• Release date: Mar 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9783745037081

Book preview

RADICAL FIGHTS OF

FORTY YEARS

Howard Evans

(1839-1915)

Radical Fights of Forty Years

Howard Evans

The original author’s text is in the public domain and not subject to copyright

This edition (2017) is issued by the Hugh & Helene Schonfield World Service Trust which is responsible for the archives of the International Arbitration League and the Mondcivitan Republic. The Archives are now stored with the Bishopsgate Institute in London where they are available for public access. We have taken it upon ourselves to ensure that the literature and history of this branch of the peace and human rights movement are kept available for public access.

Table of Contents

LONDON SIXTY YEARS AGO.

EARLY DAYS.

THE REFORM LEAGUE.

THE PIONEERS OF LABOUR REPRESENTATION.

THE NATIONAL EDUCATION LEAGUE.

LAND TENURE REFORM.

THE AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS' AWAKENING.

THE ENGLISH LABOURER.

THE CLERGY AND THE UNION.

THE ALLOTMENTS ACT (l88o).

POOR LAW INHUMANITY.

EVICTIONS.

THE DEMAND FOR THE FRANCHISE.

THE GREAT UNPAID.

ROTTEN EGGS AND STONES.

THB DECAY OF THE UNION.

 ELECTIONEERING.

THE ECHO AND THE EASTERN CRISIS.

OUR OLD NOBILITY.

HOUSEHOLD SUFFRAGE AGITATION.

WORK ON THE ECHO.

JOURNALISTIC CURIOSITIES.

WORK AT A MISSION HALL.

LEASEHOLD ENFRANCHISEMENT

INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION.

RELIGIOUS EQUALITY.

CHAPTER I.

LONDON SIXTY YEARS AGO.

I write this chapter for the benefit of Londoners of the younger generation who are eager to secure improved social conditions, and sometimes fret at what they regard as the slow rate of progress. . . . Let me assure them that in my own lifetime the advance has been steady, laborious, constant, and that the results have been magnificent. If those of them who belong to the industrial classes could be suddenly transported to London as it was only sixty years ago, they would fly from it in disgust and horror. Take, first of all, sanitation. In 1849, Cholera swept off more than 13,000 London people in three months. An Act had just been passed—as temporarily unpopular as the Insurance Act is now—compelling houseowners to drain into the sewers, and thus the Metropolis was rid of no less than 30,000 cess-pools. I well remember what these cess-pools were like. At the end of the gardens of the row of houses where I lived was a privy, constructed over an open pit many feet deep, the contents of which were emptied into open carts at very rare intervals. There were drains of a kind, but when the rains were at all heavy they were often insufficient to carry off the downpour, and then we had to take up some boards on the ground floor and bail out the foetid water. The drains, such as they were, carried their contents straight into the river. As a small boy, going by the halfpenny steamboat from London Bridge to the Strand, I have a lively recollection of the swirling black waters of the river, the stench of which was almost intolerable. In our street was a huge churchyard, already overcrowded, where burials were frequently taking place, and also a pump upon which we partly depended for our water supply. Water was indeed laid on at each house; once a day there was a dribble of water for a short time into a water-butt; but constant service was a thing unknown, in small houses at any rate. The water was obtained from tainted sources, intakes on the Thames and the Lea being close to the great City; even the New River flowed uncovered through nearly two miles of houses to Clerkenwell. I certainly did not live in a slum; the mother of a local M.P. was our opposite neighbour, but the next parish, Bethnal Green, abounded with courts and blind alleys, the gutters of which were filled with stinking nastiness. No wonder that in the Cholera year the people died like flies. Even in 1850 about 80,000 London houses had no separate water supply.

Overcrowding was a matter of course, even with the families of skilled workmen; the bread-winner had to live near his work, for riding was an unheard-of luxury. There were omnibuses, but, as a rule, the cheapest fare was sixpence, and in many of the outer suburbs eighteenpence. Locomotion was not only dear, but difficult. Tolls were levied in the City on vehicles that were not owned by citizens, and toll gates stood on all the main roads out of London—at Mile End, Hackney, Kingsland, Islington, Edgware Road, Kennington, Camberwell, Kent Road, and elsewhere. My own daily walk to a school in the City twice a day meant over six miles’ travelling. A journey to Greenwich by rail in a kind of cattle truck, without seats or roof, was the most popular kind of recreation for the masses, although those who were flush of money sometimes went as far as Windmill Hill, Gravesend. As for long distance journeys, you had to get up before daylight to catch the one Parliamentary train, which at intervals was side-tracked to allow other trains to pass.

One curious feature of London life was the passing of Private Acts on the estates of the Dukes of Westminster and Bedford enabling those magnates to put up bars and gates on roads which had been constructed at the expense of the ratepayers. When the Chatham and Dover Railway invaded the sacred soil of Pimlico it had to cover part of its line with glass, lest it should annoy the tenants of the Duke of Westminster. When the Thames Embankment was constructed the House of Lords made a determined attempt to make it stop short at Charing Cross, because the Duke of Buccleuch’s garden reached down to the river. Every way the people of London were cribbed, cabined and confined.

That brings me to the Open Spaces, which are among the chief treasures of the Metropolis. When I was young neither Finsbury Park, nor Battersea Park, nor Clissold Park, nor Waterlow Park, nor Highgate Woods, nor West Ham Park, nor Fulham Park, nor Ravenscourt Park, nor Dulwich Park, nor Brockwell Park, nor Southwark Park, nor Ruskin Park, nor Wandsworth Park, nor Vauxhall Park, nor Forest Hill Park had any existence as Open Spaces for the benefit of the public; while Kennington Park, and Camberwell Green, and London Fields and Islington Green were disordered waste lands. A few of the parks have been given by public-spirited citizens, but nearly all of them have been paid for in hard cash by Londoners themselves. It should be noted that half a century ago many open spaces round London were being filched wholesale by aristocratic land-grabbers, more especially at Banstead, Plumstead, Epping Forest, Hampstead Heath, Coulsdon and Wimbledon Common. Their efforts were happily to a great extent frustrated by the Commons Preservation Society, among whose foremost leaders were Lord Eversley, Mr. Henry Fawcett, and Sir Robert Hunter.

One of the chief obstacles in the way of political and social reform was the high price of newspapers. The publishers of newspapers were hampered in every way—by a heavy paper duty, by a tax of is. 6d. on every advertisement, and by the Newspaper Stamp Duty. The latter had been fourpence per copy at the end of the French War, but was afterwards reduced to a penny. Sixty years ago a daily newspaper was an unthought-of luxury to a working man; few even indulged in a weekly paper, which cost fourpence or fivepence. As a lad, I attended a meeting of the Society for the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge, and regularly read Reynolds’ Political Instructor, the predecessor of Reynolds’ Newspaper. The brunt of the battle was borne by three brave printers, Watson, Hetherington, and Cleeve, who repeatedly suffered imprisonment for publishing unstamped newspapers. It was not till 1853 that the Advertisement Duty was abolished; the Stamp Duty followed in 1855, but it was not till 1861 that the Paper Duty was abolished by Mr. Gladstone, in spite of the opposition of the House of Lords, which dreaded the advance of education among the democracy. The late Lord Salisbury ridiculed scornfully the idea that anyone could learn anything worth knowing from a penny paper. The cheap periodical literature of sixty years ago was mainly represented by the London Journal and the Family Herald. Of course there were no Free Libraries; most of the stationers had circulating libraries, whose stock consisted mostly of sensational novels, too often materially repulsive because thumb-marked and greasy.

Sixty years ago the London child had to take his chance, and a very poor chance it was. The struggle for existence was severe, and resulted in the survival of the fittest from a physical point of view, and these were too often morally the unfittest. Mrs. Browning truthfully described many of the children of the slums as having no pleasures except sins, and Kingsley, in Alton Locke, spoke of such as  drunkards from the breast, harlots from the cradle, damned before they are born."

The child could hardly be said to have any rights; he was not much better off than the child of the Roman Empire, whose parents might kill it if they chose. There are plenty of ways of killing, and if a child died through neglect, brutality and sheer starvation the parents almost always escaped. The protection of the child was nobody’s business. Pauper children were too often disposed of by the apprenticement system so graphically described in Oliver Twist, and when this horrible system of child slavery was abandoned they were herded together in great barrack schools, where their mental development was hopelessly stunted, and where terrible outbreaks of ophthalmia and other diseases abounded.

Children who had actually become paupers were at any rate fed, clothed, and housed in some fashion; but waifs and strays were to be found in abundance whose lot was yet more miserable. There was no Dr. Barnardo, no Church of England Waifs and Strays Society, no Catholic Boys’ Home. The destitute child was left to take care of himself, and necessarily often became a criminal, having hardly any higher ideas of morality than a hungry wild beast. When the child became a criminal the law, of course, laid hold of him. Since the days of John Howard and Elizabeth Fry there had been great reforms in prison management, but the law was far more concerned with punishment than with reformation. There were no Reformatories, no Training Ships (except one of the Marine Society), no Industrial Schools. Merciful provisions like the First Offenders' Act were as yet undreamed of. The life of the young criminal was a steady march downhill from bad to worse.

Society never fully realised how utterly defenceless children were against the cruelty of drunken and vicious parents until Benjamin Waugh forced the unwelcome truth upon public attention. It was only about thirty years ago that he and others secured the passing of legislation for the protection of children which has been well called the Children’s Charter Act. An equally beneficent law for the protection of female children—the Criminal Law Amendment Act—was passed in 1885.

Whenever I witness the splendid work of the London Fire Brigade, I recall the frequent journeys I took in my youth to fires. Then, as now, people would go near and far in search of such excitement. Each parish had a small hand-drawn engine, usually kept in the vestibule of the church. The arrival of the parish squirt, as it was called, was usually received with shouts of derision, followed by cheers as larger engines arrived. These engines were provided by an association of Fire Insurance Companies, which, naturally, had its stations in localities where property was mostly insured, especially in the City and Westminster. The pumps were worked by hand, and the workers continually called for fresh supplies of beer. Fire escapes were left to voluntary effort, until in 1865 both fire engines and escapes were taken over by the municipal authority.

As to education, it may be confidently affirmed that sixty years ago half the children of London had no education of any value. In most of the parishes a small number of boys and girls were taught and clothed gratuitously by Church-people. They wore quaint costumes, with medals on their breasts, and were popularly known as charity brats. Churchmen and Nonconformists had also started many schools, partly supported by Government grants, the parents paying a fee of twopence to sixpence a week. In my earlier schooldays I remember my father paid sixpence. As for higher education, so cheap and general to-day, I only remember three institutions in London where a poor lad had the chance of improvement, viz., the Birkbeck Institute, the Working Men’s College, and the Evening Classes for Young Men, now known as the City of London College. Moreover, owing to late hours of work, the distance to be travelled, the meagre means of transit, and the dearness of the fares, even these were quite beyond the reach of the great majority who were anxious to better themselves. The shop where I worked did not close till past nine, and I stipulated when I started there that I should leave at eight, and so anticipated the Early Closing Movement.

Among my most vivid recollections is the