From Waterloo to 1848 it was hardly ever absent. Looking back from ...

From Waterloo to 1848 it was hardly ever absent.

Looking back from the serene and splendid noon of mid-Victorian prosperity, Kingsley wrote of the years when 'young lads believed (and not so wrongly) that the

masses were their natural enemies and that they

might have to fight, any year or any day, for the safety of their property and the honour of their sisters'. Young lads will believe anything. But men old enough to remember the French Revolution, or the Committees of Secrecy and the Six Acts of 1819, had their fears, too, when they reflected that as the country became more and more dependent on machines, its stability turned more and more on the subordination and goodwill of the savage masses which tended them.

To fortify the State against these and all other perils by admitting the respectable class as a body to the franchise was the purpose of the Reform Bill. For two years, beginning with the Paris Revolution of July 1830, England lived in a sustained intensity of excitement unknown since 1641. But when the dust had settled down Tories might have asked themselves what they had been afraid of, Radicals what they had been fighting for.

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