The Paper Cap. A Story of Love and Labor

“Our fathers were neither better nor worse than oursens, Sam, just about thy measure, and my measure.”

“I doan’t know, sir. They fought King and Parliament, and got all they wanted. Then they went over seas and founded a big republic, and all hes gone well with them – and we could do the same.”

“Well, then, you hev been doing something like the same thing iver since Cromwell lived. Your people are busy at the same trade now. The English army is made up of working men. They are usually thrown in ivery part of the world, taking a sea port, or a state, or a few fertile islands that are lying loose and uncivilized in the southern seas. They do this for the glory and profit of England and in such ways they hev made pagans live like Christians, and taught people to obey the just laws of England, that hed niver before obeyed a decent law of any kind.”

“They don’t get for their work what Cromwell’s men got.”

“They don’t deserve it. Your mark can’t touch Cromwell’s mark; it was far above your reach. Your object is mainly a selfish one. You want more money, more power, and you want to do less work than you iver did. Cromwell’s men wanted one thing first and chiefly – the liberty to worship God according to their conscience. They got what they wanted for their day and generation, and before they settled in America, they made a broad path ready for John Wesley. Yes, indeed, Oliver Cromwell made John Wesley possible. Now, when you go to the wonderful new loom that hes been invented for you, and work it cheerfully, you’ll get your Bill, and all other things reasonable that you want.”

“The Parliament men are so everlastingly slow, squire,” said an old man sitting almost at the squire’s feet.

“That is God’s truth, friend. They are slow. It is the English way. You are slow yoursens. So be patient and keep busy learning your trade in a newer and cleverer way. I am going to bide in London till Parliament says, Yes or No. Afterwards I’ll go back to Annis, and learn a new life.” Then some man on the edge of the crowd put up his hand, and the squire asked:

“Whose cap is speaking now?”

“Israel Kinsman’s, sir. Thou knaws me, squire.”

“To be sure I do. What does tha want to say? And when did tha get home from America?”

“A matter of a year ago. I hev left the army and gone back to my loom. Now I want to ask thee, if thou are against men when they are oppressed fighting for their rights and their freedom?”

“Not I! Men, even under divine guidance, hev taken that sharp road many times. The God who made iron knew men would make swords of it – just as He also knew they would make plowshares. Making war is sometimes the only way to make peace. If the cause is a just one the Lord calls himself the God of battles. He knows, and we know, that

“Peace is no peace, if it lets the ill grow stronger,
Only cheating destiny a very little longer;
War with its agonies, its horrors, and its crimes,
Is cheaper if discounted, and taken up betimes.
Foolish, indeed, are many other teachers;
Cannons are God’s preachers, when the time is ripe for
war.

“Now, men, there is no use in discussing a situation not likely to trouble England in this nineteenth century. I believe the world is growing better constantly, and that eventually all men will do, or cause to be done, whatever is square, straight and upright, as the caps on your heads. I believe it, because the good men will soon be so immensely in excess that bad men will hev to do right, and until that day comes, we will go on fighting for freedom in ivery good shape it can come; knowing surely and certainly, that

“Freedom’s battle once begun,
Bequeathed by bleeding sire to son,
Though baffled oft, is always won.

“That is a truth, men, you may all of you cap to,” and as the squire lifted his riding cap high above his head, more than two hundred paper caps followed it, accompanied by a long, joyful shout for the good time promised, and certainly coming.

“Now, men,” said the squire, “let us see what ‘cap money’ we can collect for those who are poor and helpless. Israel Naylor and John Moorby will collect it. It will go for the spreading of the children’s table in Leeds and Israel will see it gets safely there.”

“We’ll hev thy cap, squire,” said Israel. “The man who proposes a cap collection salts his awn cap with his awn money first.” And the squire laughed good-humoredly, lifted his cap, and in their sight dropped five gold sovereigns into it. Then Dick offered his hat to his father, saying he had his opera hat in his pocket and the two happy men went away together, just as some musical genius had fitted Byron’s three lines to a Methodist long-metre, so they were followed by little groups straying off in different directions, and all singing,

“For Freedom’s battle once begun,
Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son,
Though baffled oft, is always won!
Is always won! Is always won!”

Dick did not enter the Clarendon with his father. He knew that he might be a little superfluous. The squire had a certain childlike egotism which delighted in praising himself, and in telling his own story; and Annie was audience sufficient. If she approved, there was no more to be desired, the third person was often in the way. In addition to this wish to give the squire the full measure of his success, Dick was longing passionately to be with his love and his hopes. The squire would not speak of Faith, and Dick wanted to talk about her. Her name beat upon his lips, and oh, how he longed to see her! To draw her to his side, to touch her hair, her eyes, her lips! He told himself that the promise of silence until the Bill was passed, or thrown out was a great wrong, that he never ought to have made it, that his father never ought to have asked for it. He wondered how he was to get the time over; the gayeties of London had disappeared, the Leylands thought it prudent to live quietly, his mother and Katherine were tired of the city, and longed to be at home; and Harry, whose sympathy he had always relied on, was somewhere in Norfolk, and had not even taken the trouble to write and tell him the reason for his visit, to such a tame, bucolic county.

Yet with the hope of frequent letters, and his own cheerful optimistic temper, he managed to reach the thirtieth of May. On that morning he took breakfast with his parents, and the squire said in a positive voice that he was “sure the Bill would pass the House of Lords before May became June; and if you remember the events since the seventh of April, Dick, you will also be sure.”

“But I do not remember much about public affairs during that time, father. I was in Annis, and here and there, and in every place it was confusion and anger and threats. I really do not remember them.”

“Then thou ought to, and thou may as well sit still, and let me tell thee some things thou should niver forget.” But as the squire’s method was discursive, and often interrupted by questions and asides from Mistress Annis and Dick, facts so necessary may be told without such delay, and also they will be more easily remembered by the reader.

Keeping in mind then that Parliament adjourned at seven o’clock in the morning, on April fourteenth until the seventh of May, it is first to be noted that during this three weeks’ vacation there was an incessant agitation, far more formidable than fire, rioting, and the destruction of property. Petitions from every populous place to King William entreated him to create a sufficient number of peers to pass the Bill in spite of the old peers. The Press, nearly a unit, urged as the most vital and necessary thing the immediate passage of the Bill, predicting a United Rebellion of England, Scotland and Ireland, if longer delayed. On the seventh of May, the day Parliament reassembled, there was the largest public meeting that had ever been held in Great Britain, and with heads uncovered, and faces lifted to heaven, the crowd took the following oath: —

“With unbroken faith through every peril and privation, we here devote ourselves and our children to our country’s cause!”

This great public meeting included all the large political unions, and its solemn enthusiasm was remarkable for the same fervor and zeal of the old Puritan councils. Its solemn oath was taken while Parliament was reassembling in its two Houses. On that afternoon the House of Lords took up first the disfranchising of the boroughs, and a week of such intense excitement followed, as England had not seen since the Revolution of 1688.

On the eighth of May, Parliament asked the King to sanction a large creation of new peers. The king angrily refused his assent. The ministers then tendered their resignation. It was accepted. On the evening of the ninth, their resignation was announced to the Lords and Commons. On the eleventh Lord Ebrington moved that “the House should express to the King their deep distress at a change of ministers, and entreat him only to call to his councils such persons as would carry through The Bill with all its demands unchanged and unimpaired.”

This motion was carried, and then for one week the nation was left to its conjectures, to its fears, and to its anger at the attitude of the government. Indeed for this period England was without a government. The Cabinet had resigned, leaving not a single officer who would join the cabinet which the king had asked the Duke of Wellington to form. In every city and town there were great meetings that sent petitions to the House of Commons, praying that it would grant no supplies of any kind to the government until the Bill was passed without change or mutilation. A petition was signed in Manchester by twenty-three thousand persons in three hours, and the deputy who brought it informed the Commons that the whole north of England was in a state of indignation impossible to describe. Asked if the people would fight, he answered, “They will first of all demand that Parliament stop all government supplies – the tax gatherer will not be able to collect a penny. All civil tribunals will be defied, public credit shaken, property insecure, the whole frame of society will hasten to dissolution, and great numbers of our wealthiest families will transfer their homes to America.”

Lord Wellington utterly failed in all his attempts to form a ministry, Sir Robert Peel refused to make an effort to do so, and on the fifteenth of May it was announced in both Houses, that “the ministers had resumed their communication with his majesty.” On the eighteenth Lord Grey said in the House of Lords that “he expected to carry the Reform Bill unimpaired and immediately.” Yet on the day before this statement, Brougham and Grey had an interview with the King, in which his majesty exhibited both rudeness and ill-temper. He kept the two peers standing during the whole interview, a discourtesy contrary to usage. Both Grey and Brougham told the King that they would not return to office unless he promised to create the necessary number of peers to insure the passage of the Reform Bill just as it stood; and the King consented so reluctantly that Brougham asked for his permission in writing.

The discussion of these facts occupied the whole morning and after an early lunch the squire prepared to go to The House; then Dick noticed that even after he was hatted and coated for his visit, he kept delaying about very trivial things. So he resolved to carry out his part of their secret arrangement, and remove himself from all temptation to tell his mother he was going to marry Faith Foster. His father understood the lad so like himself, and Dick knew what his father feared. So he bid his mother good-by, and accompanied his father to the street. There the latter said plainly, “Thou did wisely, Dick. If I hed left thee alone with thy mother, thou would hev told her all that thou knew, and thought, and believed, and hoped, and expected from Faith. Thou couldn’t hev helped it – and I wouldn’t hev blamed thee.”

CHAPTER X – THE GREAT BILL PASSES

“In relation to what is to be, all Work is sacred because it is the work given us to do.”

“Their cause had been won, but the victory brought with it a new situation and a new struggle.”

“Take heed to your work, your name is graven on it.”

ALTHOUGH Dick pretended an utter disbelief in Grey’s prophecy, it really came true; and the Reform Bill passed the House of Lords on the last day of May. Then the Annis family were in haste to return home. The feeling of being on a pleasure visit was all past and gone, and the bare certainties and perplexities of life confronted them. For the first time in all his days, the squire felt anxious about money matters, and actually realized that he was going to be scrimped in coin for his household expenses. This fact shocked him, he could hardly believe it. Annie, however, knew nothing of this dilemma and when her husband spoke of an immediate return home, said:

“I am glad we are going home. To-morrow, I will see my dressmaker and finish my shopping;” and the squire looked at her with such anxious eyes that she immediately added – “unless, Antony, thou would like me to pack my trunks at once.”

“I would like that, Annie. It would help me above a bit.”

“All right. Kitty is ready to start at any hour. She wants to go home.”

“What is the matter with Kitty? She isn’t like hersen lately? Is she sick?”

“I think there is a little falling out between Harry and her. That is common enough in all love affairs.”

Here a servant entered with a letter and gave it to the squire. He looked at it a moment and then said to his wife – “It is from Josepha. She wants to see me varry particular, and hopes I will come to her at once. She thinks I had better drop in for dinner and says she will wait for me until half-past five.”

“That is just like her unreasonableness. If she knows the Bill is passed, she must know also that we are packing, and as busy as we can be.”

“Perhaps she does not know that the great event has happened.”

“That is nonsense. Half a dozen people would send her word, or run with the news themselves.”

“Well, Annie, she is my only sister, and she is varry like my mother. I must give her an hour. I could not be happy if I did not;” and there was something in the tone of his voice which Annie knew she need not try to alter. So she wisely acquiesced in his resolve, pitying him the while for having the claims of three women to satisfy. But the squire went cheerfully enough to his sister. The claims of kindred were near and dear to him and a very sincere affection existed between him and his sister Jo-sepha. She was waiting for him. She was resolved to have a talk with him about the Bradleys, and she had a proposal to make, a proposal on which she had set her heart.