Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/71

 PUBLIC OPINION 57

in 1795 were the beginning of a policy of restrictive legislation which culminated in the Six Acts in 1819, the effect of which was to completely gag the press and smother the platform. What- ever excuse there may have been for the earlier measures in the fear of Jacobinical excesses, the later statutes can only be regarded as acts of unblushing tyranny. Jephson has sum- marized the effects of these later measures as follows :

Public meetings prohibited, except such as were convened and approved by the "powers that be" or held in a house or building; public speech free only to the extent that the most ignorant, bigoted, or intolerant Justice of the Peace might in his graciousness please to permit; the right of petition, which had been wrung from reluctant sovereigns, practically annihilated — such .... was the spectacle which England, the vaunted mother of liberty, the boasted home of freedom, of free speech and of free Press, pre- sented to the world at the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century."

Yet so difficult is it to silence public opinion once it has be- come articulate, that even during this very period it waxed stronger and more powerful. Thus in the very year in which the Six Acts were passed Canning said in the House of Com- mons :

Public opinion was represented by his honorable friend [Sir J. Mcintosh], and truly represented, as possessing now ten-fold force at the present com- pared with former times. Not only was public opinion advanced, but its power was accumulated, and conveyed by appropriate organs, and made to bear upon legislation and government, upon the conduct of individuals, and upon the proceedings of both Houses of Parliament.**

Moreover efforts to revive the platform began immediately after it had received its most crushing blow. The scandal of the royal divorce aroused a bitter public feeling, far more intense than many a usurpation of power or public injustice which might have brought misery to thousands. Meetings were held, resolu- tions passed, petitions presented — and the government could not prevent them. When the queen died in August, 1821, the plat- form was already once more fully resurrected. The questions of agricultural distress and parliamentary reform afforded abun- dant material for agitation, and when the Six Acts expired by

"Jephson, op. cit.. Vol. I, p. 553.

■• Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, Vol. VI (1822), p. 1089 (quoted by Jeph- son, op. cit., VoL I, p. 544).