February 2i, igi8 
Land & Water 
15 
But Walker made no reply ; he sat solidly on a S.A.A. box, 
and no one could get a word out of him. 
That night all his military enthusiasm had vanbhed. Fatigue 
parties walked within a hundred yards of him unchallenged. 
Signallers came and went undisturbed ; and when he saw a 
figure, carrying a huge sandbag, loom up before him, he merely 
mumbled, " Who are you ? " without getting up from the 
box he sat upon. 
" R.E.," answered the figure. 
And a long stout man with a huge moustache, like a Bairns- 
father car-toon, plumped himself down beside him. 
" Terrible war this, mate," said the Engineer. 
" Oh, bloomin' terrible." 
" What's your job ? " 
" Damn it all. I just sit 'ere over the gun ; and if the S.O.S. 
goes up I fire." 
"iWhat's the S.O.S. now, mate ? " 
" Four greens. But it won't never go up. Boche won't 
never attack." 
" Many of your crowd about ? " went on the sympathetic 
fatigue-man. 
" Yes, there's a gun over there, and another over there, 
and one behind the ridge. Four of 'em in all. Awful life, 
believe me. We 'ave to learn pages of stuff about what we'd 
do if the Boche breaks throusrh." 
" And what would you do, mate ? " 
" Drop a ruddy barrage just behind the wood in front, catch 
the Boche consolidating, or some rot. I don't know, and 
don't care. I'm sick of the war." 
"You're not the only one," said the Engineer, rising. 
" Well, I must be getting along. Cheerioh, mate." 
" Cheerioh, Kid." 
And the ungainly figure swayed away into the night. 
" You've missed your chance right enough. Kid," said 
Steve, two days later. 
" 'Ow do you make that out ? " grunted Walker. 
" Why, 'aven't you heard there was a Boche spy over 'ere 
two nights ago ? But he got away." 
" Boche spy ? What did he look like ? " 
" 'E was a big fat feller, so they say, and 'e'd got a moustache 
like one of them fellows that cove Bairnsfather draws, carrying 
a sandbag, so they say — -'Ere, what's up, mate ? You look 
mighty queer." 
" No, no. I'm all right ; carry on with the yam." 
" Well, he came down the Bapaume Road, 'e did, and then 
went on towards Thiepval." 
But Private Walker was not listening ; for almost the first 
time in his life he was thinking very hard and very straight. 
Effect of the New Reform Bill : By Jason 
No prophecies in politics have been made to 
look more ridiculous by the event than prophecies 
of the effects of Bills for the reform of Parlia- 
ment. This applies alike to hopes and to fears. 
The Duke of Wellington declared of the first 
Reform Bill that it proposed', a new form of government 
incompatible with monarchy. Most of his followers took the 
same view that the Bill meant the destruction of the rule 
of law and — what was to them the same thing — the rule of 
property. Lord Grey took just the opposite view. " I am 
indeed convinced that the more the Bill is considered the less 
it will be found to prejudice the real interests of the aristo- 
cracy." He said on another occasion that it would give the 
whole body of the aristocracy " a general influence more 
congenial to their true character and more effectual for securing 
'to them the weight that they ought to possess." For Grey, like 
Macaulay, believed, as Mr. J. R. M. Bbtler has put it, in 
his important book The Passing of the Great Reform Bill, 
that all that was necessary " was to open the gates of the 
Ginstitution wide enough to admit a manageable number of 
the besieging force and then to close them again firmly." 
Macaulay gave a philosophic basis in the manner of Burke to 
the general theory underlying the Bill, " the higher and 
middling orders are the natural representatives of the human 
-race. Their interest may be opjwsed in some things to that 
of their poorer contemporaries, but it is identical with that 
of the innumerable generations that are to follow." 
Amongst the Radicals there were some who took the same 
.view as Wellington. They fought for the Bill as if it had been 
a Bill for enfranchising the workpeople and not merely the 
middle classes. They were the victims of an intoxicating 
illusion. This is the way of life ; Nature loves to gild every 
object for which men strive, leaving them to discover its true 
worth when it has come into their eager hands. Francis 
Place, a man in many respects of great perception and insight, 
said : "It seems remarkably strange that Lord Grey, whose 
intention it always was to stand by his order, should have 
insisted on carrjdng out a reform of the House of Commons, 
the inevitable result of which could not fail to be the total 
destruction of that order, and of every other privileged order 
and person." Cobbctt, whose confidence in his own judgment 
remained unshaken till the day of his death, went not less 
wildly astray, and the workpeople of the factories who streamed 
out of the mills to meet the coach that brought with it the new 
issue of his paper were taught to expect from that measure 
little less than the Millennium. He had little love for the 
Whigs, of whom he said that they had been led to church with 
a halter, but he made an idol of their Bill which they gavo to 
England. 
It was indeed the co-operation of the Radicals and the 
demonstrations of workmen who were themselves to wait 
another generation before receiving the vote that compelled 
the Lords to give way. The agitations of '1831 and 1832 
were the result of a combination between two classes that had 
little love for each other — the middle classes and the working 
classes — and the Whig Government that forced the Lords to 
accept the Bill spent part of its time and energy in putting 
working-class reformers in prison. 
The history of the reformed Parliament is a striking proof 
of the justice of Macaulay's estimate of the effect of the 
Reform Bill. Most of us were brought up to regard the 
achievements of the reformed Parliament as an unqualified 
triumph. That Parliament seemed to have done wonders ; 
it reconstructed the Poor Law, it set up representative govern- 
ment in the towns, it passed a Factory Act, it even made 
formal recognition of the claims of popular education by a 
small grant of public money. But if we want to understand 
why the Reform Bill had as powerful an effect in exasperating 
the working classes as it had in reconciling the middle classes, 
we have to consider what the conduct of that Parliament 
looked like to the idealists who had fought for the Bill as 
the promise of democracy. The new Government refused 
to make food cheaper, to make newspapers cheaper, to give 
the ballot. It did nothing to humanise life for the poor. 
It was only after five hundred men had gone to prison for a 
cheap press that the Government reduced the stamp duty on 
newspapers from ^d. to id. These were its omissions ; some 
at least of its deeds were not less provocative. 
The workpeople had found themselves becoming more and 
more, as the industrial revolution destroyed the old economy, 
the instruments of a great and inhuman power. The towns 
they lived in, the hours they worked, the wages they received, 
the general conception of the kind of life that was proper for 
them, which permeated all the institutions of society, stamped 
them as a subject population without dignity or rights. 
Reform was to put an end to this, but instead of emancipation 
reform brought the new Poor Law, the regime of the work- 
house, the principle that the f)oor man must either starve or 
sell his handloom and seek the shelter of the nearest Bastille. 
Thorold Rogers said of the Poor Law of 1834 that it was 
necessary, harsh, inopportune, unjust. The middle classes 
saw its necessity, the working classes its injustice. When 
the Bill passed through the House of Commons, twenty men, 
led by Cobbett, Fielden and Walter, of the Times, de- 
nounced it, and 319 members supported it. It may be 
questioned whether the upper classes would ever have dared 
to pass such a Bill without the help of the middle classes, who 
had become, as Macaulaj' would have put it, part of the 
recognised garrison of the existing order. 
This cruel disillusionment produced the Chartist movement. 
As a political revolt Chartism was a tragical failure, though it 
had important consequences seen in the legislatioru)f the forties. 
It made Lord John Russell and many another politician 
appreciate the truth that the condition of the people of 
England was a question of urgent importance. It gave great 
help to Shaftesbury in his struggles with Lord Londonderry 
and the other opponents of his efforts to abolish the scandals 
of the mines. It strengthened the hands of Fielden in passing 
the Ten Houi"s Bill. But when the movement had been 
suppressed the enfranchisement of the workmen seemed as 
remote as ever. The story of the resumption of the struggle 
is told in Mr. George Trevelyan's admirable Life of John 
Bright. As Mr. Trevelyan points out, the defenders of the 
existing regime in 1866 would have been wise if they had 
acted on the principle on which Macaulay defended the 
passing of the Bill of i83'2, if they had admitted into the 
garrison part of the besieging population. But the opponents 
of the enfranchisement of workmen adopted a policy that was 
