Britain 717
Well- to- do business men in England, however, had too much to lose to persist
indefinitely in opposition. They were close enough to some segments of the upper
class to be sensitive to its scorn, ridicule, or hostility. Men in their position, after
the war began, could not remain obstinately unpatriotic; even so, many of them
disapproved of the continuation of the French war, which interfered with their
export trade. A group of textile manufacturers at Manchester signed a petition for
peace in 1795.^13 Among the signers were Robert Peel and Robert Owen, who were
no merely passive conservatives, since Peel a few years later obtained passage of the
first English factory act, and Owen became famous in the annals of socialism. By
this time, however, whatever their views on the war (Peel resoundingly changed his
mind in 1798 with a free gift to the government of £10,000), they had ceased to
feel any sympathy for the French Revolution, or to have anything to do with the
English radical clubs. As the years passed, the business men joined with the pro-
fessional classes in repudiating republican sentiments. And as these upper middle-
class groups made their peace with the established order, the English “Jacobins,”
those who felt most strongly in 1792, and who continued to feel so, were charac-
teristically of a lower occupational status, neither the paupers nor the agricultural
laborers of whom the lower third of the English people consisted, but the industri-
ous, skilled and self- respecting men of good habits and limited income, strongly
resembling, in their socioeconomic level but hardly in their psychology or their
actions, the Paris sans- culottes as described by M. Albert Soboul.
It is a question whether England had, as a class, any such people as “intellectu-
als,” since thinking and writing were neither unduly admired on the one hand, nor
unduly looked down on by the active classes on the other. The establishment had
its intellectuals, as in Archdeacon Paley; Hannah More and others rallied to it
vigorously after 1793. Jeremy Bentham approved neither of the British Constitu-
tion nor of the Rights of Man. Various newspaper editors, such as the Joseph Gales
who published at Sheffield before going to America, were democratic radicals of a
type familiar both on the Continent and in the United States. Thomas Paine
(though considered somewhat American), with his Rights of Man of 1791, Mary
Wollstonecraft with her Vindication of the Rights of Woman of 1792, and William
Godwin with his Political Justice of 1793, all showed contemptuous impatience of
the established order, and of the kind of arguments marshaled in its defense. Mary
Wollstonecraft’s retort to Burke deserves perpetuation: “It is, Sir, possible, to render
the poor happier in this world without depriving them of the consolation which
you gratuitously grant them in the next.”^14 She and Paine had ideas on the division
of large landed estates, but Godwin, a more purely speculative thinker, had little
interest in persons who could not afford the three guineas charged for his book.
The poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Campbell, Blake, and Burns, all
resonated excitedly to the message for human rights. All except Blake and Burns
were still quite young men in the 1790’s. Burns, the most humble in origin, was the
first to lose sympathy for the French Revolution. Blake lived as an engraver in
London, and mixed in the political clubs of the city. It was Blake who helped
13 Marshall, Public Opinion at Manchester, 126.
14 Quoted by Veitch, Genesis, 169.