Letters to the Mob by Caroline Norton
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Victorian Women Writers ProjectLetters to the Mob (1848): a machine-readable transcription Norton, Caroline (1808-1877)

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Letters to the Mob by Libertas (Caroline Norton) 21 p. Thomas Bosworth London

1848

The transcribed copy is from the New York Public Library.

All quotation marks, hyphens, dashes, apostrophes and colons have been transcribed as entity references.

All apostrophes and single right quotation marks are encoded as ’.

Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed; all hyphens are encoded as ‐ and em dashes as —. French Latin

1996-07-15

Perry Willett, general editor.

finished data entry, TEI-conformant encoding and proofing

Letters to the Mob. By Libertas. Reprinted from the “Morning Chronicle.” London: Thomas Bosworth,

215 Regent Street. 1848. Price 6d., or 4s. Per Dozen, for Distribution.

(front) London [/] Printed by George Barclay, Castle Street, Leicester Square.

LETTERS TO THE MOB. LETTER I.

I THOUGHT to head this, “A Letter to the People,” but you are not people. You usurp their name; you represent yourselves as acting on their behalf; but they disown you and fear you. They look with alarm on your tumultuous gatherings. They stand on the defensive against your attacks. They distrust you. They know you to be sections, more or less dangerous, of disturbers of the public peace.

“By obedience,” says good old Jeremy Taylor, “we are distinguished from herds of beasts and heaps of flies, who do what they list, and are incapable of laws, and obey none.” So convinced are the majority of your countrymen of the truth of this axiom—so persuaded that the throne of true liberty stands on that boundary line where due obedience is met by just protection, that they dread the very sound of your riotous assembling; your tread seems to shake the foundation of every man’s home as you pass!

Page 4 And it is so. But this you do not believe: you are led by men in whose minds the instinct of restiveness has been awakened by late events abroad, as some horses become unmanageable when others gallop rapidly by them. You are so transformed into monkeys and parrots, that you raise the banner and shout the motto of a foreign people in our streets, as if you had no country and no language of your own. You are so drunk with the spirit of revolt as to think it admirable that Irish delegates should cross the sea to whine and crouch, like beaten hounds, at the feet of a foreign Government, declaring themselves slaves, and supplicating aid to enable them to raise the standard of rebellion at home. You speak of kings and rulers as if they were all so many Belshazzars, who, in the hour of their feasting, had seen the hand come out and write on the wall that their kingdoms had departed from them. You are full of vague hopes and expectations. In the general scramble for concessions now going on all over Europe, surely something can be granted or seized for you! What?—that is the question. What do you want? “We want Repeal,” say the Irish. “We want the Charter,” say the Chartists. “We want Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!” say the mob. These are dazzling words—dazzling especially to poor men—to those classes who labour always, struggle often, and seldom enjoy. Will you test their translation among the people we import them from? Can you read it in the banishment of our workpeople, driven destitute from their shores,

Page 5 to the embarrassment of the employers, the ruin of the employed?—in the election proclamations of Ledru-Rollin, where the shadow of the blind giant Despotism already darkens the path so lately levelled for Freedom?—in the fierce attempts to smother the voice of the one courageous journalist who spoke of the errors of the new Government?—in the interference with the possession of all property, and the profits of all trade?

In no spirit of rebuke, but with earnest sympathy, I say to you—Beware of these cries. “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, And these are of them.” The Chartist dream of equality is the most cruel of all the temptations with which mob-traps are baited; for it is at once the most specious and the most false. There can be no equality, any more than there can be a sea without a shore! Superiority is not a thing of man’s devising, but of God’s appointing. Gradation is His law. Let any honest, intelligent man examine, or stand by while others examine, a class at one of the national schools. He will there see “the common brotherhood of man” as God ordained it. He will see, ranged side by side, the weak and the strong, the teachable and the stubborn, hopeless stupidity and wonderful clearness of intellect; and the conviction of the consequent future inequality of their positions in life will be a self-evident proposition in his mind. The only verification that exists of the fabled phoenix is the necessity of rulers. From the ashes of that

Page 6 nondescript thing called “Government” for ever rises the living principle, if not the bodily copy, of the past. From the fragments and dust of broken thrones, or desecrated scaffolds, it shapes itself anew; an emblem of the great fact necessary for the constitution of human society. Call it King, Emperor, Dictator, President—or, by a noun of multitude, the National Assembly, the Sovereign People—call it what you will, it is there—the evidence that equality cannot subsist, is not expected to subsist; that the mass must be governed; that a change of governors is all that the most complete revolution can achieve. Is it not, then, a melancholy thing to see the perverted submission with which men who disdain to be subjects to law are content to be slaves to faction—men who raise an outcry against the control of a class, and will yet be led to destruction by an individual? If I could preach to the people one text, brief as their respite from toil, and simple as their needs, it would be this:—“Fear your governments less and your leaders more.” Beware that your so-called leaders be not mis-leaders. Do not be made blind sacrifices to one man’s vanity, another man’s anger, or the ambition of a third. When Coriolanus led the Volscians, he led them not for their advantage, but to avenge the wrongs he himself had suffered. Gray, in his perfect Elegy, has made touching allusions to “village Hampdens.” We have the converse of the image in many a Brummagem Coriolanus! In a celebrated work on the art and strategy of war,

Page 7 while giving directions for sieges, &c., the expression perpetually occurs, “If you can afford to expend men” (that is, if the loss of a few hundred lives will not cripple your power to work out future plans) “take the town or fort thus,” &c. The Brummagem Coriolanus can afford to expend men ad libitum. He is not called upon to endure in the aggregate those several terms of imprisonment allotted to such of his followers as are snatched, at hazard, by the police from the throngs of a turbulent mob. No income-tax, or absentee-tax, can be deducted from his means to support the families of men whom his oratory has sent to the gaol or the hospital. Character, liberty, earnings, and savings, may have been “expended,” but in vain! Men may be paid meanly,—God knows, often too meanly,—for hard labour; but rioting is the one employment for which no wages can be had; for the capital expended in which there is no return! I write this, not because I do not sympathize with the people, but for love of them. To remind them that to overshoot a mark is as fruitless an aim as to come short of it; that to revolt is to overshoot the mark of reform. I write, not to check their advance, but in dread of their failure. Heart and soul with them, not against them. Desirous that they may not be, to leaders and workers-out of theories, what their own tools are them; neither less or more: some broken and destroyed, some worn out in doing or attempting the work in hand. I write, because I feel ashamed as an Englishman of the recollection of that paltry riot which

Page 8 lately sent pickpockets and lamp-breakers to shout at the very gates of the palace where a Queen and her new-born babe lay sleeping; and yet more ashamed of the distrust evident among the most respectable classes as to the expected conduct of the masses on Monday.

“Stands England where it did,” that such distrust should gain ground? Are our people unlinked from, or oppressed by, our aristocracy? Are they unrepresented, any section of them, in Parliament? Are they compelled, from the utter want of sympathy and justice in those above them, to seek assistance from those beneath them? Let the mob-leaders themselves reply. LETTER II.

YOU have lately been called to these meetings on pretence of sympathising, in your several sections, with the people of France; of putting out addresses of congratulation to their Provincial Government; of “fraternizing” (that is the cant phrase) with the new Republic. The United, or rather Disunited, Irishmen (for with them fraternization does not, like charity, “begin at home”) have been foremost and loudest in their expressions of sympathy. With whom do you fraternize? On what grounds do you rest your con-Page 9 gratulations? The answer seems easy. We congratulate that noble people who have shaken off the yoke of tyranny; who have banished their false-hearted King and his family; who behaved with so much moderation in the hour of victory, and with so pure a sense of disinterestedness, that they shot a man only for stealing a silver spoon in the Palace!

In Burke’s time, when another revolution called forth similar demonstrations from clubs and societies now forgotten, that great statesman and orator observed,—“I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they really have received one.” Let the congratulators and fraternizers of the present day consider the saying of one, to whose charge it can scarcely be laid that he was not a true lover of liberty. Let them also consider the present condition of Paris—of that Paris which is the heart of France. Much is said of the tranquillity which reigns there. That great pulse of the country stands still, and we are told to consider it a sign of health. Paris is calm! So is a vessel struck at sea, which trembles stationary on the waves before it is ascertained whether the shock she has received will sink her or permit her to make for the haven. Paris is calm;—its banks are broken, tradesmen ruined, the Savings’ Bank (that storehouse of poor capitalists) suspends its payments, or makes them in a compulsory paper currency. Employment is wanting, though forced through unnatural channels, by unnatural means. Men’s minds “fail them

Page 10 for fear.” They stand in a gasping pause, waiting they know not what; watching their Government, watching those balloon-statesmen who have risen to a height they cannot measure, to descend they know not where; prepared alike to witness the accident of their safety, or the catastrophe of their fall. What is there in all this to awaken a spurious and morbid sympathy, a spirit of emulation, with France? What is it that Englishmen and Irishmen consider it would be worthy and wise to imitate? Of the moderation shewn by the populace we will not speak; where no foe stood to confront them, there could be no opportunity for mercy. If the cold ferocity, which once made the world shudder at such savage antics as dressing the hair on the severed head of the Princess de Lamballe, is extinct in the breasts of the French people—of that people whose dreadful women (no longer “Poissardes”) appear in the new character of “Vesuviennes,” sworn to fire Paris with torches kept for the purpose—it is indeed a thing to thank God for, if not to congratulate them upon. May it prove so! May the infant Republic remain unbaptized in blood! Meanwhile, let us consider the sort of moderation shewn. There was, a few years since, in Paris, a prince, the heir-apparent to the throne. He was brave, generous, noble, a good son, a tender brother. He was what any of you might most wish your sons to be, and his parents lost him early, as some of you have no doubt also lost sons. A frightful accident called him suddenly from this world’s uncertain pros-Page 11 pects of grandeur. He died beloved, lamented. In the tumult of the Revolution the chapel at Dreux was hushed and darkly calm. He lies there, ungrieved by the exile of those discrowned and aged parents, who shall weep no more by his tomb! When the widow and orphans of this prince presented themselves in the Senate of their country—in the Senate where laws are made to protect the feeble and punish the wrong-doer—the people, whose moderation you applaud, whose success you would emulate, gave the telegraphic signal of exile and beggary, by pointing muskets and bayonets at that defenceless woman and her children. Their property is forfeit to the state: moderation granted them their lives. There was also in Paris, some few years since, a princess, sister to that prince. She was a lady of great genius as well as perfect disposition. She encouraged art, and was benevolent to the poor. She worked with her hands, as some of you workpeople do, and made a statue, casts of which many of you must see daily hawked about the streets of London—the statue of Joan of Arc, one of her country’s heroines. She, too, died young, and in her death-hour the innocent hallucination of her religious mind was that she saw heaven open, and its angels beckoning her to approach. The people, whose justice you applaud, have seized the rents which were the property of her husband and her orphan son. They have seized the fortune of the Duchess of Nemours, which was unfortunately put into the French rentes. They have seized the Brazilian fortune which was the dower of Princess

Page 12 Joinville; they have seized the Spanish dower of the Duchesse de Montpensier; the Condé property, left by the will to the Duc d’Aumale; the property of Madame Adelaide, bequeathed by that excellent princess to Madame de Montjoie, and other subjects. If moderation consists in not cutting the throats of women and children and unresisting foes, congratulate them on their moderation. They have created a deficit in the revenue, which they vainly attempt to fill by confiscations and sequestrations, forced gifts, black-mail levied under the name of patriotic subscriptions. They have taught the working men to look for a sort of Utopia of labour, an imaginary system of independence of all mutual obligation between masters and men—which can never exist—and the expectation of which will entail the certain ruin of thousands, and the probable martyrdom of some on whom the French mob now rely. Paris was, beyond most cities, employed in what is termed industrie de luxe. By banishing their court, by degrading their aristocracy, by destroying the credit and fortune of their rich financiers, by expelling foreigners who spent their wealth in Paris, they have taken the bread out of the mouths of their own artizans. The rich man’s pleasures were the poor man’s earnings. The large salaries, the gilded vanities, the toys of pomp, are gone—but with them are gone the fuel for the poor man’s fire, the loaf for his children’s food. “A bas l’aristocratie!” “Vive l’égalité!” Good. But where now to find a market for those quaint devices of ornament, those fanciful traceries, those fili-Page 13 gree productions which formed the staple trade of thousands? Barren and withered as the trees of liberty they have transplanted, is the prospect of their new and unemployed condition. Even plunder cannot help them. The rising cry, “A bas les riches!” will not save them. The circulation of a few rich men may make the fortune of thousands; the division of the capital, even of many rich men, would give but a miserable fraction a-piece to that amazed and starving mass. Is it on this state of things that you would congratulate France? Be warned in time. On the false translation of this cant word “Fraternization” may depend at this moment, in more countries than one, the adverse fate of millions. Ruined tradespeople, stagnated commerce, an impoverished, economizing, or absentee aristocracy, may teach thousands to ban, instead of bless, those who taught them to utter it. You cannot reverse the order of nature. You may stir a pond, so as to bring sticks, stones, and leaves, to the surface; they sink when it subsides. Do you believe that the French Government can continue to support the working classes? Do you believe that the credit of other classes can be supported for commercial purposes by a compulsory paper currency, which may be the fictitious representation of funds that do not exist? Friends, I could shew you the assignats of a former revolution. They were kept as curiosities, because they availed nothing as payment.

But you will say, “We struggle for our rights; we want equality of taxation; we want an extension

Page 14 of suffrage; there is still much to do for the people of England.” I agree with you. I think there is still much to be done for the people of England, and I think there is much that will most certainly be done. I desire it, as you do, but I believe you are taking the wrong road. I believe that the men who have persuaded you that intimidation, and popular cries echoed from France, will help you to your ends, not only retard your march, but risk your ruin. You are at this moment, many of you, placing your lives, characters, and fortunes in the guidance of men to whom you would not trust the casting up of a ledger or the management of a farm. They would be incompetent, you think, for that; and yet you hold them fitter to legislate for you than the Government of your own country!

In the Commination—read at stated periods in our Church Service—there are these sentences:—“Cursed is he that removeth his neighbour’s land-mark!” “Cursed is he that causeth the blind to go out of his way!” There are land-marks of the mind—set there by education, custom, and religion: there is blindness of the mind—the ignorance which has not been instructed to see things justly. In my heart I should dread, if I were one of your leaders, the secret echo of that curse; if, from dishonest vanity or selfish fury, I removed those land-marks, and availed myself of that blindness, to lead you to fruitless insurrection. I should shrink from the memory of those party cries which, when they

Page 15 grow too loud, are only silenced by the filling in of obscure graves. Pause! there is yet time. Your best friends stand in the ranks of those you would approach as foes. LETTER III.

I HAVE said that your best friends stand in the ranks of those you would approach as foes. You demur to this: you disbelieve it. I would reason the point, as with men willing to hear both sides, but whose misfortune it is that only one side addresses you. By whom have the measures of improvement, already undertaken in behalf of the people, been urged and carried? By the aristocracy. They do not always suggest those measures; they do not always agree upon them. Matters are disputed among them, as they are disputed among you; but, as a class, they are haters of oppression, and honest pioneers of progress. They are workmen of intelligence, as you are the workmen of production. In opposing them, you break the machinery, and burn the factories, where only the work can be done which you yourselves want executed. Why should

Page 16 you think you are capable of doing their work in addition to your own? Why should politics be the one trade that requires neither study nor apprenticeship? Men cheerfully acknowledge their incapacity in other matters, but no one will acknowledge his incapacity in this. A man knows he cannot make buttons, but he will not believe he cannot make laws. You are deluded by perpetual reference to France. “France has its Provisional Government! France has its sovereign people! France has its ‘Albert, ouvrier!’ France has its Government of workmen, instead of a Government of aristocrats!” Here is your mistake. France has not a Government of workmen: even “Albert, ouvrier,” does not belong to that class. You might as well say, PEEL ouvrier—making allowance for gradations of talent. Albert was educated as a lawyer, was a master manufacturer, editor of the Atelier newspaper. I do not say the gentlemen composing the French Provisional Government are not as fit for the task as any others: time will shew. A stately ruin lies cumbering the soil of France: we have yet to see what will be built in its stead; we have yet to see whether these fallible men will merely substitute their own mistakes for the mistakes of other fallible men. But I say it is not a Government of practical working men, any more than your being represented by Alfred Tennyson, Mr. M’Culloch, Mr. Senior, Sir James South, and Jackson, ouvrier, would be a Government of working men. It is a theatrical pretence; it is an

Page 17 oligarchy, an aristocracy on a different model from that to which you are accustomed—an old friend (or, if you please, an old enemy) with a new face. “Rise! shake off tyranny, and govern yourselves!” is the phrase: “Let us govern you,” is the translation. I did not think that any words of John Mitchell’s could be of use to lovers of order, but I find these:—“If ever it behoved men to look facts in the face, and neglect words which have no facts under them, it behoves us now.” The somewhat Irish proposal to “look facts in the face,” is what I also cordially advise. At this moment, in England, the advocacy of “the rights of the people” is the favourite enthusiasm of our young nobility. Their heads, their hearts, and their speeches are full of it. It is not too much to say of the great families of this country, as of the deaths of the first-born of Egypt, that “there is not a house in which you have not one friend.” A few certainly, of our aristocracy are licentious, idle, useless;—their women, insolent, overbearing, capricious. How would you yourselves like to be judged by, as a class, the bad drunken characters among you? The majority live in the earnest and religious performance of the active duties of life. But you say they are your foes. Who tells you so? Your leaders—those men who desire to supersede them in their natural position, with you, of superiors. As dependants, you have a right to claim them as benefactors; as opponents, you can only struggle with them to your ruin. In Richard the Second’s time, when thousands

Page 18 rose to avenge one man’s wrong, one man’s undeniable, undoubted wrong—after man was slain, the young King spurred his horse forward among his rebellious subjects, exclaiming, “Do you want a leader? I myself will be your leader.” Friends, do you think you could find no leaders in the class above you? leaders who would not waver in the hour of difficulty, or abandon you in the time of danger? I think you might. “Look facts in the face,” as Mr. Mitchell advises. This very metropolis, into whose armed and shielded heart you entered yesterday as a hostile demonstration—this very London, where angry delegates and excited workmen were to meet at all points to murmur and to threaten, is at present under survey. For what? That the aristocracy may be provided with fair gardens and noble buildings? That new palaces may be constructed for royalty? No. But that the poor may have a more equal share of life’s common comforts; that they may breathe pure air; that they may be more securely sheltered; that fever and sickness may sweep fewer of their numbers into a premature grave.

Was this done as a concession to you? Did you insist upon it? Did you even propose it? No. It is one small fraction of a general plan “for bettering the condition of the people,” which occupies the minds of those classes your leaders would teach you to view with abhorrence—those who, I repeat, are the only workmen to do your work. You may sneer at the comparison: but it is a true one. As there are dyes which cannot be made fast colours without certain ingredients, as there are productions incomplete till finished by the hand of a cunning and skilful artisan, so there is world-work to be done which requires that upper class you view with so much jealousy. They work with a tool you have not got. That tool is leisure. They do what, even if you had the will, the power, and the education necessary, you could not do for want of time. I live amongst this class. I see these men working at their trade of politics. A cotton mill is not more fatiguing, nor, in some instances, more destructive to health. I have seen as much hard work and mental anxiety in this as in the conduct of any other business; and I have seen as honest men working at it as any boaster among you. What you need is, not the rising of class against class, but to grow strong by the union of classes. What would benefit you is not the overthrow or intimidation of a particular Government, but that whatever men are “in power,” as it is called, should really have the power to carry out such measures for you as the exigencies of the time require. Generation after generation grows grey, and we are still learning the fables of the “Belly and Members,” the “Dog and the Shadow,” the value of the withe that binds the fagot so that it may not break! You are workmen, and they are lords and gentlemen: their sons go out in the ships some of you build, and protect your commerce in manufactures which others of you produce. The disunion of classes, whose interests are as the warp and

Page 20 woof which form the texture of one web, cannot be ruin to one class only. The intelligent middle class read a lesson to turbulence yesterday which many morrows will not banish from the minds of Englishmen. It was read calmly though sternly to the mob and to their leaders. Let us hope it will not be forgotten. “Come to us as friends to claim a service: come to us as petitioners to explain a grievance: but do not come to us as highwaymen with mortal terror as an inducement to aid: WE are THE PEOPLE, and we will not suffer the People’s Charter to be brought to our doors.”

If you must needs cast wistful looks to France, cast them for warning, and not for example. The Démocratie calculates that, by the time the Convention meets, there will be in Paris alone 800,000 persons out of work and starving. Meanwhile another of Ledru-Rollin’s proclamations shews how that preacher of equality would fain be dictator of France. His style, indeed, is altered; his new proclamation forcibly recalls O’Connor’s “moral force” orations. He is for marching troops from “Birnam Wood to Dunsinane,” masked by a whole grove of olive boughs. But the mask is vain. With more cunning than caution, with more insolence than boldness, enough is evident to prove the determination to coerce that “universal suffrage” which the French enjoy. Let it be a timely warning to you. Watch these men and their impracticable plans. Wait. Did you ever yet give an order for goods without seeing at least a sample in a finished

Page 21 state, so as to judge of its design, its probable durability, its value in the general market? Do not be ashamed to own yourselves in error. Claim help from your Government and aristocracy, instead of from those who forsake you “in the time of trouble.” The shaking of public credit, the frequency of private bankruptcy, re-act on each other in times of popular commotion. Let disturbances begin how they will, they end by being a question of finance. The heaviest, the most unequal, the most oppressive taxes that can fall on a people, are the taxes on Revolution. The triumph of mobs, in many foreign cities, you have read in our newspapers. Their ruin as individuals you will not read there. No one will be at the pains of recording it. Be warned: when you urge your rights, or when you would enforce them, be sure that you are bartering value for true liberty and not paying forfeit for empty rebellion.

London: Printed by George Barclay, Castle Street, Leicester Square.

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