CHAPTER III - OUR NATIONAL POLICY, 1815-1868—Continued

Summary

REFORM

The policy of the early Victorian era was well summed up in the terse formula Peace, Retrenchment and Reform, but in discussing this formula, it will be more convenient to reverse the order of sequence; to illustrate first the nature and scope of the measures of reform contemplated, and then proceed to show that the successful issue of these measures was dependent on measures of retrenchment inseparable from a policy of peace.

Superior in importance to all other measures of reform was the reform of the agency that had supreme control over the rest. Such, indeed, was its recognised superiority that, spelt with a large R, it has in parliamentary phrase appropriated to itself a particular, and even an exclusive use of the term.

Government is the exercise by a few of the power necessary for the protection of all, a power that may be acquired by assumption or delegation. Its professed purpose is to maintain order, to prevent the strong from plundering the weak, and to assure to every man the greatest possible share of the produce of his own labours. But all governments have been subject to the law of human nature that a man will, if he can, take from others anything they have which he desires; and this is in its turn subject to the universal law that action and reaction are equal and opposite, under the operation of which, when the constituted guardians have become plunderers, the reaction of the community has terminated their authority by revolution or limited it by reform.