OF
NEW YORK:
PUBLISHED BY BAKER AND SCRIBNER,
145 NASSAU ST. AND 36 PARK ROW,
1850.
Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1849, by
HENRY B. STANTON,
in the Clerk's office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern
District of New York.
S. W. BENEDICT,
Stereo. and Print., 16 Spruce St.
This Book aims to give a summary view of the most importantgeneral Reforms, which have been effected or attemptedin Great Britain and Ireland, from the period of the Frenchrevolution down to the present time. Neither history norbiography has been attempted, but the work aspires to be onlywhat its title indicates—Sketches. Large parts of it have recentlyappeared, from time to time, in the National Era, ofWashington; no expectation being then entertained that itwould assume any other form of publication. The present occasionhas been embraced to revise and reärrange the whole,and by condensation and pruning off repetitions, to make roomfor considerable additions to the list of subjects discussed, andindividuals noticed. It is even now incomplete, many menand things, which deserve a place here, being left out—somebecause I may underrate their relative importance—others becausethe limits of this work will allow only of selections.Still, it is believed that no important subject has been whollyomitted; though, on account of the vast number of those worthyto be called Reformers, it has been found impossible to make[iv]special mention of many able and excellent individuals. Thoughit may contain errors of fact and opinion, yet, as it is confinedto those phases of events, and incidents in the lives of persons,which history too seldom dwells upon, it may be found notwholly valueless to those who would examine the most interestingand instructive period in the recent annals of England.
The chronological plan of the work is, generally, to noticeprominent popular movements in their order of time, and, inconnection with each, to give sketches, more or less full, ofpersons who bore a leading part in it. But such slight regardhas been paid to chronological arrangement, that each subjectstands by itself, having only a general connection with whatprecedes or follows it.
As to my statistics, I have occasionally been compelled toreach conclusions much in the same manner as juries agree uponverdicts—consult a dozen authorities, each one differing withall the others—get the sum total of the whole, divide it bytwelve, and adopt the result.
This Book is submitted to the reader as an humble attemptto make some of the Reformers of America better acquaintedwith some of the Reformers of the Old World—to show thatthe Anglo-Saxon love of liberty, which inspires so many heartson both sides of the Atlantic, flows from the same kindredfountain—to prove that, though when measured by her ownvaunted standards, Great Britain is one of the most oppressiveand despicable Governments on earth, her radical reformersconstitute as noble a band of democratic philanthropists as the[v]world has ever seen—to induce candid Americans to make justdiscriminations in their estimate of "England and the English,"and to draw distinctions between the privileged ordersof that country and a small, but increasing, and even nowpowerful body of its people, who admire the free institutions ofthe United States, and are laboring with heroic constancy, anda zeal tempere