Tag Archives: Parliament

AS THE year 1899 drew to a close, Europeans and Americans began to wonder when, exactly, the nineteenth century would end and the twentieth century begin. Most people thought that this would take place at midnight of December 31, 1899, but historians disagreed. They pointed out that the first hundred years after the birth of Christ had ended with the final seconds of the year 100. Therefore, they said, the twentieth century would not begin until January 1, 1901. As they toasted the new century that New Year’s Day most people in Europe and America were satisfied and hopeful. Life was better for them than it had been for their fathers and grandfathers, they were certain that it would be better still for their sons and grandsons. They believed in human progress and looking back over the century just past, they could find good reasons for this belief. There had been no widespread fighting in Europe since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. The last war between European powers, the Franco-Prussian War, had taken place in 1870. Since then, thirty years of peace had brought tremendous benefits to the advanced countries of Europe. The growth of industry and trade had steadily enriched these countries and raised their living standards. With the spread of education, millions of people had learned to read and write. Democratic ideas were advancing everywhere; by now, most European countries had law-making assemblies with elected members and more people had the right to vote than ever before. As the powers had acquired territories on other continents, European ideas, beliefs and methods had come to dominate the entire world. Europeans were proud of their civilization and confident of the future. True, they had problems at home and abroad, but they were sure that their parliaments and …

BY 1789, the first year of the French Revolution, England had traveled further along the road that would one day lead to democracy than had any other country in Europe. She had a law-making body called the Parliament which was more powerful than the king. She had a two-party system which gave the voters a choice of ideas as well as a choice of candidates. Members of the conservative party, who were called Tories, were chiefly nobles, wealthy landowners and people who strongly supported the Church of England. The Whigs, as members of the liberal party were called, consisted mainly of middle-class business and professional men and the Dissenters, religious groups which had sharp differences with the Church of England. The king’s cabinet of ministers were chosen from the party with the most votes in Parliament. The cabinet was responsible to the people’s elected representatives in Parliament and therefore indirectly responsible to the voters themselves. The chief member of the cabinet was called the prime minister; he and other members of the cabinet actually took care of most government business in the name of the ruling king or queen. The English monarch had become a ruler with very limited powers. In addition, the people of England were protected by a Bill of Rights. The king could not change or suspend laws passed by Parliament. Elections were to be held frequently and the king was not to interfere with these elections in any way. Any person charged with a crime had a right to a speedy trial before a fair-minded jury. Cruel and unusual punishments were forbidden, as were extremely high Fines. Yet, England still did not have true democracy, for the right to vote was granted only to those who owned a large amount of land. Since most of the …

THE ENGLISH regarded themselves as a free people — but they did not seem to believe in freedom for others. Many of them were engaged in the African slave trade. They shipped manufactured goods from England to America, carried slaves across the Atlantic to the West Indies and brought cargoes of sugar and cotton back to England. It was against the law to ship slaves home to England, yet there seemed to be no law to prevent ordinary Englishmen from being treated as slaves by their own countrymen. The government did nothing to protect them from being kidnapped and forced into years of unwilling service aboard ships or on West Indian plantations. Since the public accepted such practices without much protest, it is hardly surprising that another kind of slavery was allowed to develop in England during the early period of the Industrial Revolution. At that time the large factories were run by water power, which meant they had to be located near swift-running streams in the country, often miles from any population centre from which workers could be hired. Factory owners did not have to depend upon adult workers to run their factories. Most of them used children. Hundreds of boys and girls from overcrowded poorhouses and church orphanages were turned over to factory owners. Children as young as four or five were put to work picking up bits of cotton from the floor. Older ones watched machines and tied thread together whenever there was a break. Their working day started at five or six in the morning. They had an hour or less for dinner and continued working until seven or eight in the evening. A West Indian slave master who visited one of these factories was shocked by the long hours. “I have always thought myself disgraced …

FEAR HUNG over the Yorkshire countryside in northern England. It was the spring of 1812, a spring the people would long remember. Hardly a night passed without some frightened countryman hearing the tramp of marching feet or the sound of gunfire. Sometimes shouts rang out and flames lit up the sky as some building was mysteriously set on fire. The most frightening sound of all was a gentle tapping on a cottage door in the dead of night. The man who heard it knew what it meant — a visit from members of a secret society of mill workers. Why had they come? Possibly to demand his firearms, or to threaten him with a lashing or even death unless he kept certain information to himself . If he himself happened to be a member of the society, he could expect his visitors to insist that he join them in raiding a nearby cotton or woolen mill. Such mills, or cloth factories, dotted the Yorkshire countryside and were the main targets of the secret society. Most of the mill owners had been warned. The society had sent them unsigned letters, threatening to raid their mills unless they stopped using labour-saving machinery such as weaving frames. The owners of small mills usually became so terrified they stopped using the machines. Those who continued to use them ran the risk of having their mills destroyed by fire. Usually the raiders simply broke in to smash the weaving frames and other machinery that did the work of men. William Cartwright, the owner of one of the largest textile mills in the area, was not easily frightened. He believed in progress and to him progress meant using machines, for they could do the work faster and cheaper than men. Whenever he installed new machinery in …

When Samuel Adams, his cousin John Adams and the rest of the delegates from Massachusetts arrived in Philadelphia, they found themselves very unpopular. Cousin John complained that he was avoided as if he had some sort of contagious disease. The delegates from other colonies looked upon the men from Massachusetts as radicals and did not like their wild ideas about protecting American rights with force, if necessary. Patrick Henry of Virginia made a speech pointing out that it was no longer possible for any of the colonies to stand alone. They had to unite, to work together with other colonies for the good of all. “I am not a Virginian,” he cried, “but an American!” Most of the delegates to the Congress were still loyal to the king, but, like Patrick Henry, they had begun to think of themselves as Americans rather than Englishmen. More and more, they were speaking of justice, freedom, liberty and of the natural rights of man. One of the first things they did was to write a Declaration of Rights, describing exactly what rights they claimed for themselves. The colonists‚ declared the Congress, were “entitled to life, liberty and property,” and had never given any “foreign power” authority to change, or to take away, any of those rights without consent. The Congress also stated that it was the right of Englishmen and of all free people to govern themselves. Since the colonists were not represented in the British Parliament, they were entitled to have their own law-making bodies. The colonial legislatures were the only lawmaking bodies that had authority to tax and to make laws for the various colonies. At the same time, the Congress recognized the right of the king to veto laws passed by the legislatures. The Congress also passed a plan known …

Due to the taxes on tea, many of the colonists began drinking coffee or cocoa, or bought tea smuggled in from Holland. Within a few years, the British tea trade with the colonists dropped from 900,000 pounds to 237,000 pounds and in England the warehouses of the East India Company were filled to overflowing. The East India Company was Britain’s largest and most important trading company and to save it, Parliament passed the Tea Act. The East India Company was given a monopoly on tea trade with the colonies — that is, it was the only company allowed to sell tea to the Americans. It was also permitted to sell its tea through its agents directly to retail stores. This plan would cut out the profit made by British and American shippers and importers. Even after the tax had been paid, the British tea could be sold in the colonies at a price far below that of smuggled tea. The British believed they had hit upon the perfect way to solve the troublesome tea problem. The colonists would rush to buy tea at a low price, the East India Company would be saved, the government would collect its tax and everyone would be happy. To the surprise of the British, nothing of the sort happened. The Americans were angrier than ever. The merchants feared that if the direct-selling plan of the Tea Act was successful, England would decide to sell other goods in the same way, and many businessmen would be ruined. It was clear, too, that England had deliberately kept the tax on tea to show that Parliament had the right to tax colonial imports for the purpose of raising money. Leading American lawyers denied that Parliament had such a right. An import tax on low-priced tea was just …

Another unpopular step England took after the war was to reorganize her defense system in the colonies. The French and Indian War had proved to the British that the colonies could not be depended upon to defend themselves. Some new system had to be worked out in North America, to defend not only the colonies, but also Canada, Florida and the wilderness east of the Mississippi. England decided to leave this task to a standing army of ten thousand British redcoats. Such an army would cost a great deal of money. Taxpayers in England were already paying very high taxes and could not be asked to pay more. Their taxes supported the powerful British navy, which protected the colonies as well as the mother country. It seemed no more than fair that the colonies should pay at least part of the expenses of the standing army in North America. The soldiers were there, after all, for their own protection. Accordingly, the colonies were given a year to raise the money themselves. They were warned that England would have to tax them if they failed to do so. For a year the colonists did nothing. They saw no need of supporting an army they had not asked for and did not want. Since the French forces had been driven from American soil, a large standing army seemed unnecessary. The colonists suspected that the real purpose of the army was to strengthen British control over all the colonial governments. England’s law-making body in London, the British Parliament, finally passed the Stamp Act in 1765. It required the colonists to buy stamps from British tax collectors. These stamps were to be placed on all newspapers, playing cards, dice and almanacs sold in the colonies and also on certain papers having to do with …