Revolutions of 1830
The year 1830 is one of the notable dates in the 19th century. In America the victory of Jackson had just marked a fresh advance in popular government. In England the First Reform Bill began its twoyear struggle in Parliament. On the continent of Europe, revolution struck a new blow at the system of Metternich. This time the movement started in France, where the July Revolution replaced the divine-right Bourbon monarchy with the constitutional, bourgeois monarchy of the Orleanists. Explosions followed over Europe. The Belgians rose against their Dutch masters; the Poles against Russia; Italian risings seemed for a moment to have some chance in the papal states and the duchies; and, while Russia and Austria were busied in Poland and Italy, liberal gains were secured in several German states. But soon Metternich, his hands free once more, set himself patiently to restore the old order in Germany. France, it is true, was lost to the "Holy Alliance," and joined England in defending liberal Belgium against despotic intervention. But in the final result, France and Belgium were the only gainers from this period. It was to take the third great "year of revolutions," to sweep away Metternich's shattered system.
To appreciate in any measure the wonderful progress of the remaining two thirds of the 19th century, it is needful to grasp the conditions of the world of 1830. It was still a small, despotic world, far more remote from the great, progressive world of 1900 than from the world of 1600. Civilization held only two patches on the globe,- western Europe and eastern North America. In the latter, the real frontier of the United States reached less than one third the way across the continent, and politics and society were dominated by the slave power. Europe knew "Germany" only as a pious aspiration of revolutionaries, and "Italy* as a "geographical expression." Metternich stood guard over central Europe. On the east hung Russia, an inert mass, in the chains of her millions of serfs. Under the contemptible Orleans monarchy, France was taking breath between spasmodic revolutions. England herself had only begun to stir under the long oligarchic rule of her landlord class.
The rest of the globe hardly counted; a fringe of Australia held a convict camp; eastern Canada was a group of jealous, petty provinces, learning to agitate in disorderly fashion for self-government; Spanish America, prostrate in anarchy, gave as yet little hope of the coming renaissance; Japan was to sleep a generation longer; while the two largest continents were undisturbed in their native barbarism, except for England's grasp upon the hem of India and South Africa.
In Europe, England was to lead the van of progress; and in England, almost alone in Europe, reform was to come without revolution. But the England of 1830 was still mediaeval. During the great French wars from 1690 to 1815, except for the one development of ministerial government, England had retrograded politically and socially. Her society was marked by extreme inequalities between rich and poor, intensified by cruel class legislation; her government, superficially representative, had really fallen into the hands of a selfish landlord class; her boasted local self-government was intensely aristocratic; her established church was aristocratic and unspiritual. In the last half-century had come an industrial revolution - the growth of the factory system - with marvelous increase of population and growth of city life, calling imperatively for new adjustments; but the great Tory party met all calls for reform with sullen denunciation and repressive legislation which made free speech a crime. Under the system of rotten and pocket boroughs, more than half the House of Commons were the appointees of less than 200 landlords, while most of the rest represented small fantastic constituencies. Thus, reform necessarily began with Parliament itself.
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