remained that there were in London revolutionary leaders and a discontented populace, and that the financial and industrial fabric of England was in many ways more shaky than was that of France. What if a revolution after the Jacobin model was to occur in London, and overturn the Constitution?

nd th

Storm

g wh

he Ch

hemse

That was the fear which in 1819 frightened the ruling class into reaction; and that was the fear which in 1832 frightened them into concession. At the latter date the situation appeared to be more perilous than it ever had been before. A revolution had actually occurred in Paris, and from France the agitation passed into England. Wellington fell; and the new Whig ministry was carried along on a huge flood of pseudo-French revolutionary feeling. Orators in London meetings wore caps of liberty, with tricolour flags unfurled above their heads. The King was insulted in the streets; Apsley House was badly damaged by the mob; and bishops had to flee for their lives. Around the metropolis a 'rural war' was raging, with all the agricultural labourers of the Home Counties in touch with the London Radicals, arrayed against the parson and the squire. The passing of the Reform Bill did not apparently allay the feeling of discontent. clubs went on exerting 'pressure from without' upon the reformed House of Commons. The rural war, after a few months of suspense, began again in the winter of 1834, while the workmen for the first time conceived the scheme of a universal strike. Parliament, seriously alarmed, abolished at one blow the whole of the house duty in order to placate the metropolitan Radicals; while it hastily passed a Poor-Law Amendment Bill in order to solve the problem of rural unrest in the Southern Counties. In all the big towns, and more particularly in London, the fight was no more between Whig and Tory, Reformer and Conservative, but between Whig and Radical.

Revolutionary

coul

The

39;1

all fo

Everything had altered by 1840. At the general election of 1837, for the first time since 1832, the Radicals positively lost ground; and Chartism, coming upon the heels of the general election, proved at all events that London was no more a revolutionary centre. When, after having held big meetings in Lancashire, Yorkshire,

е

olatz and the Midlands, the Chartists tried to take London by the storm, they failed badly; and the thinly attended meeting which was held in Palace Yard in September 1838 was a ridiculous affair. When, later, the delegates to the Chartist Convention came to London, they soon felt themselves ill at ease in an uncongenial atmosphere, and ther the eventually transferred themselves to Birmingham, as being a more suitable centre of propaganda and action. Observe that the day on which, having reached Birmingham, they issued their manifesto to the English people, was the very day on which Barbès and Blanqui, with a handful of insurgents behind them, seized several public buildings in Paris, and for a few hours held the police and army at bay. The coup de main of Barbès and Blanqui was a failure of course; both men were thrown into prison, not to be released for years. But it was a caricature of what had succeeded in 1830 and was to succeed again in 1848. Nothing of the kind happened, or could happen in England.

be

There were riots, Chartist riots, in the course of 1839; but they occurred first in Birmingham, and then, still further away from the capital, in the distant Welsh town of Newport. So that at last English public opinion realised that London was safe from the peril of a Jacobin or pseudo-Jacobin revolution. Chartism was

a thing not of London but of the provinces, not of the South but of the North. As a political movement (and we must never forget that the Chartist programme was emphatically a political programme), Chartism was the ebb of the big Radical upheaval which, having begun in 1817 and 1819, had in 1832 all but broken down the dam. As a social movement it was nothing but one of those fits of unrest which periodically disturbed the industrial North, the last and impotent outburst of what in the earlier part of the century had been called Luddism.

ELIE HALÉVY.

Art. 5.-TRAVELS AND DISCOVERIES.

1. The Voyage of Captain Don Felipe González to Easter Island, in 1770-1. Edited by B. Glanvill Corney, I.S.O. Charts and Plates. (Hakluyt Society.) 1903.

2. A New Account of East India and Persia. By John Fryer, M.D., F.R.S. Edited, with Notes and an Introduction, by William Crooke, B.A. Three vols. 1909-15. 3. The Quest and Occupation of Tahiti by Emissaries of Spain, 1772-76. Compiled from original documents, and edited, with Notes and an Introduction, by B. Glanvill Corney, I.S.O. With Charts, Plans, and Plates. Three vols. 1913-18.

4. Cathay and the Way thither. A Collection of Mediaval Notices of China. Translated and edited by Colonel Sir Henry Yule, K.C.S.I., C.B., R.E. New edition, revised throughout by Prof. Henri Cordier, of the Institut de France. Four vols. 1913-16.

5. The Book of Duarte Barbosa : an Account of Countries bordering on the Indian Ocean. . . about 1518 A.D. Translated from the Portuguese, and edited by M. Longworth Dames, I.C.S. (retired). Vol. I.

1918.

And other works.

ORAL and written narratives of voyages of discovery
have naturally occupied a conspicuous place in the
legends and the epics of maritime peoples from the
earliest historical times; and travels by land into remote
or previously unknown regions have consistently enjoyed
a similar measure of renown, with the result, as we see
to-day, that explorers who

'Wand'ring from clime to clime, observant stray'd,
Their manners noted, and their states survey'd,'

have been honoured in their lifetimes as public benefactors or national heroes, and have left undying names. The half-legendary fame of Hanno the Carthaginian and Pytheas the Massilian, the navigation of Onesicratus, the Norsemen's sagas of their voyages to Greenland and Labrador, the remarkable songs and traditions of Polynesian migrants and other ocean-rangers, all testify to the enduring public impression made by exploits of

this class. Even the reputed wanderings of Ulysses, and the mystic occupations of Æneas and Palinurus, point the same moral; while the more definite and matterof-fact writings of Herodotus, of Diodorus the Sicilian, and of Strabo, display cogitations and beliefs which those authors could not have discussed without some wider knowledge of the world than their own travels could give them, and which must therefore be ascribed to reports brought by other adventurers before their era. In later times the narratives of mediæval seafarers supplied our forefathers with a fund of information which not only advanced the science and art of navigation and promoted oversea commerce, but also helped to spread abroad the reputation of the explorers' respective nations, and to sow the seeds of progress among primitive and far-off peoples who lacked resources of their own for coming into touch with Western civilisation. Moreover, many early travellers have left written records, either in a fragmentary or a complete form, containing descriptive accounts of their journeys, of the routes they followed, the new products, foreign peoples, and strange customs they met with; thus imparting to the European world a knowledge of the Far East, or the Farthest West, which the inhabitants of those realms had never published beyond their own borders.

It was well affirmed by Peter Heylyn that a knowledge of History and Geography is necessary as well for the understanding the affairs of ages past, as for commerce and correspondency with Nations present.' And proceeding in his quaint and discursive way to emphasise the close relationship and interdependence of these two studies, each complementary and, as it were, ancillary to the other, he observes:

"'Tis true that Geography without History hath life and motion, but very unstable and at random; yet History without Geography, like a dead Carkass, hath neither life nor motion at all, or moves at best but slowly on the understanding. . . . History therefore, and Geography, if joined together crown our reading with delight and profit,' while the study of History 'without some knowledge of Geography is neither so pleasant nor so profitable as a judicious reader would desire to have it.'

Pet

It is just this blending of geography with history that imparts the charm to so many of the narratives adre penned by travellers and seamen; and a most praiseworthy labour did Richard Hakluyt, Preacher (as he usually styled himself), perform when, with incomparable

able

matic

industry and 'after much trauaile and cost' he compiled at ti his great work on 'The Principall Nauigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoueries of the English nation first printed in a single thinnish volume in 1589, but republished with additions in a much expanded form, filling three volumes, in 1598-1600.

day.

Hak

forma

ar

Hakluyt lived, as he expressed it, in an Age wherein mit God hath raised so general a desire in the Youth of this to realm to discover all parts of the Earth.' Though ca circumstances did not enable him to share in the active C1 pursuit of this quest, his mind was deeply imbued with re the sentiment for roving and research; for we find that, gh after the close of his terms as a Queen's scholar at this Westminster, Hakluyt 'had waded on,' as he tells us, 'still farther and farther in the sweete studie of Cosmo- the graphie.' He was, moreover, even at that early period Hor of his life, inspired by a great and broad-minded to. patriotism; and when, following his cousin Richard's eat footsteps, he 'grew familiarly acquainted with the har chiefest Captains at sea, the greatest Merchants and e, the best Mariners of our nation,' the happy idea occurred to him that not to preserve the records written down by such pioneers, or stored in the minds of those still living who had done no writing, would be to squander an opportunity, nay, to evade a duty. And he deemed that the interests of his country and its future generations gl of statesmen, merchants, navigators, historians, and geographers called upon him, Richard Hakluyt, to perform that task, to collect such records and print od them, and thus to

fa

ra

i

Con

عامة

'file upon the Registers of perpetual Fame the Gallantrie and 40, brave Atchievements of the People of England.'

In the words once spoken by the late Sir Clements Markham, the evil which Hakluyt set himself to alleviate was the absence of records of voyages and travels.' It is true that his predecessor, Richard Eden, had published some translations from the Decades

DOO