The Development of Modern Europe Volume II by James Robinson & Charles Beard

Author:James Robinson & Charles Beard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jovian Press

SOCIAL REFORMS IN ENGLAND

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FREEDOM OF DISCUSSION AND RELIGIOUS TOLERATION

While England was transforming herself into a democracy by modeling her Parliament and her local government, the people gradually gained the right freely to discuss political questions in the newspapers and in public meetings and to express religious opinions differing from those sanctioned by the government without thereby sacrificing the possibility of holding office.

Freedom of the press from governmental censorship is commonly regarded as having been established in 1695 by the refusal of Parliament to renew an old law providing for such control. However, in times of disturbance, the government adopted repressive measures, as for instance during the French Revolution and in 1819, when there was extensive popular agitation. Moreover the stamp duties on newspapers and advertisements hampered the publication of cheap journals for the diffusion of political information among the masses and were systematically used by the government for this purpose. In 1819 the tax was extended even to leaflets and tracts which had hitherto been allowed free circulation. The necessity of paying an eight-cent tax on each copy made the average price of a newspaper fourteen cents, while the price of the London Times was eighteen cents. In addition to these stamp duties there was a special tax on paper, which increased its cost about fifty per cent.

These “taxes on knowledge,” as they were called, were attacked by those who advocated popular education, and also by the political reformers who wanted cheap newspapers through which to carry on their agitation. In 1830 a society was organized in London for the purpose of conducting a campaign against stamp duties. Some reformers openly defied the law by issuing political journals unstamped. The Poor Man’s Guardian bore the motto “established contrary to law to try the power of right against might.” The publisher of this journal adopted the ruse of sending waste-paper parcels out at the front door to engage the attention of the police while the regular copies were rushed out of the back door to be distributed to the public.

The laboring class was by no means alone in the struggle for a free press. Eminent men, such as Grote and Bulwer Lytton, the novelist, joined in the movement for the repeal of the obnoxious taxes. In 1833 the tax on advertisements and in 1836 the stamp tax were reduced, bringing the price of most of the London papers down to ten cents each. Twenty years later the attacks of Cobden and Bright on the stamp duty and the tax on advertisements resulted in their entire abolition; and in 1861 the duty on printing paper was removed, thus giving England a free press, although special privileges in the form of low postal rates are not afforded to the newspapers as in the United States.

No less important to democracy than freedom of the press is the right of holding public meetings and criticizing the policy of the government. In common with all other European monarchies, England, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, imprisoned,

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