He defended toleration in the name of Penn,whose life had been published by Clarkson.He attacked the slave-owners,and so came into alliance with Wilberforce,Zachary Macaulay,and others of the evangelical persuasion.
He found,at the same time,opportunities for propagating the creed of Bentham in connection with questions of prison reform and the penal code.
His most important article,published in 1812,was another contribution to the Lancasterian controversy.In this Mill had allies of a very different school;and his activity brings him into close connection with one of the most remarkable men of the time.8This was Francis Place,the famous Radical tailor.Place,born 3rd November 1771,had raised himself from the position of a working-man to be occupant of a shop at Charing Cross,which became the centre of important political movements.Between Place and Mill there was much affinity of character.Place,like Mill,was a man of rigid and vigorous intellect.Dogmatic,self-confident,and decidedly censorious,not attractive by any sweetness or grace of character,but thoroughly sincere and independent,he extorts rather than commands our respect by his hearty devotion to what he at least believed to be the cause of truth and progress.Place was what is now called a thorough 'individualist.'
He believed in self-reliance and energy,and held that the class to which he belonged was to be raised,as he had raised himself,by the exercise of those qualities,not by invoking the direct interference of the central power,which,indeed,as he knew it,was only likely to interfere on the wrong side.He had the misfortune to be born in London instead of Scotland,and had therefore not Mill's educational advantages.He tried energetically,and not unsuccessfully,to improve his mind,but he never quite surmounted the weakness of the self-educated man,and had no special literary talent.
His writing,in fact,is dull and long-winded,though he has the merit of judging for himself,and of saying what he thinks.
Place had been a member of the Corresponding Society,and was at one time chairman of the weekly committee.
He had,however,disapproved of their proceedings,and retired in time to escape the imprisonment which finally crushed the committee.He was now occupied in building up his own fortunes at Charing Cross.When,during the second war,the native English Radicalism began again to raise its head,Place took a highly important share in the political agitation.Westminster,the constituency in which he had a vote,had long been one of the most important boroughs.It was one of the few large popular constituencies,and was affected by the influences naturally strongest in the metropolis.
After being long under the influence of the court and the dean and chapter,it had been carried by Fox during the discontents of 1780,when the reform movement took a start and the county associations were symptoms of a growing agitation.The great Whig leader,though not sound upon the question of reform,represented the constituency till his death,and reform dropped out of notice for the time.Upon Fox's death (13th September 1806)Lord Percy was elected without opposition as his successor by an arrangement among the ruling families.Place was disgusted at the distribution of 'bread and cheese and beer,'and resolved to find a truly popular candidate.
In the general election which soon followed at the end of 1806he supported Paull,an impecunious adventurer,who made a good fight,but was beaten by Sir J.Hood and Sheridan.Place now proposed a more thorough organisation of the constituency,and formed a committee intended to carry an independent candidate.Sir Francis Burdett,a typical country gentleman of no great brains and of much aristocratic pride,but a man of honour,and of as much liberal feeling as was compatible with wealth and station,had sat at the feet of the old Radical,Horne Tooke.He had sympathised with the French revolution;but was mainly,like his mentor,Tooke,a reformer of the English type,and a believer in Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights.He had sat in parliament,and in 1802had been elected for Middlesex.After a prolonged litigation,costing enormous sums,the election had been finally annulled in 1806.He had subscribed £1000towards Paull's expenses;but was so disgusted with his own election experiences that he refused to come forward as a candidate.Place's committee resolved therefore to elect him and Paull free of expense.Disputes between Paull and Burdett led to a duel,in which both were wounded.The committee threw over Paull,and at the election on the dissolution of parliament in the spring of 1807,Burdett and Cochrane --afterwards Lord Dundonald --were triumphantly elected,defeating the Whig candidates,Sheridan and Elliot.The election was the first triumph of the reformers,and was due to Place more than any one.
Burdett retained his seat for Westminster until 1837,and,in spite of many quarrels with his party,was a leading representative of the movement,which henceforward slowly gathered strength.Place,indeed,had apparently but scanty respect for the candidate whose success he had secured.Burdett and his like aimed at popularity,while he was content to be ignored so long as he could by any means carry the measures which he approved.Place,therefore,acted as a most efficient wirepuller,but had no ambition to leave his shop to make speeches on the hustings.
The scandals about the duke of York and the Walcheren expedition gave a chance to the Radicals and to their leader in the House of Commons.Events in 1810led to a popular explosion,of which Burdett was the hero.John Gale Jones,an old member of the Corresponding Societies,had put out a placard denouncing the House of Commons for closing its doors during a debate upon the Walcheren expedition.
