r ^v /- 'jy/ STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, \ •<: Anieles Cat STATE NORMAL SCHOOL. ^ ^/ Los Angeles, Cal. GLEANINGS OF PAST YEARS, 1843-78. BY THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P. Vol. I. THE THRONE, AND THE PRINCE CONSORT; THE CABINET, AND CONSTITUTION. NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 743 AND 745 BUOADWAY. 58 I GLEANINGS OF PAST YEAKS, 1875-8. BY THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P. THE THRONE, AND THE PEINCE CONSORT; THE CABINET, AND CONSTITUTION. NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 713 AND T-J5 Eroauway. PREFACE. These occasional productions extend over the long terra of thirty-six years : years eminently anxious, prolific, and changeful. No attempt has heen made to bring compositions, sug- gested in various degrees by the time as -well as by the subject, into the precise forms of thought or expression, which at this date I might have been inclined to choose for them. Such an effort, in impairing their identity, would abate the limited interest or value vrhich can alone belong to them. Any changes made have been as follows : — 1. Corrections of typographical errors. 2. Verbal amendments, with a view to simplicity and clearness. 3. Substitutions, in a very few instances, of phrases which justcr taste might at the time have sug- gested ; without any alteration of the thought. 4. Cases, also very rare, in which on any special ground it seemed right to specify a change, smaller or greater, in opinion. These last cases alone are of any even the smallest Tl PREFACE. importance; and, that the reader may clearly perceive them, they are dealt with in Notes, and the date of 1878 is attached. Essays of a controversial kind, whether in politics or religion, and classical essays, are not included in the collection. W. E. G. Hawauden, Decemher 1878. CONTENTS. I. DEATH OF THE PRINCE CONSORT. An Address delivered at Manchester on the 23rd of April, 18G2, before the Association of Lancashire and Cheshire Mechanics' Institutes. PAOB 1. Gloom in the district 1 2. Sympatliy witli Her Majesty 2 3-5. Peculiar pressm-o of Her bereavement .... 2 6-8. The Prince Consort's full and ordered life ... 4 9-11. His principle applicable to the lives of all ... 7 12-lfi. The Association ; its examinations ..... 10 17. The older tests of training. . . .-^ . . . . 1* 18, 19. Competitive examination 11 20-25. Examination, how related to the present age . . 16 II. LIFE OF THE PRINCE CONSORT— COURT OF QUEEN VICTORIA. (Vol. I.) 1. News of the Prince Consort's death 23 2. Memorials 24 3. General Grey's Work 25 4. Mr. Helps's Edition of tlie Speeches .... 26 5. Mr. Martin's Life (Vol. I.) 27 Vlll CONTENTS. PAOB 6, 7. The early life 27 8, 9. King Leopold, his tutelary friend 28 10. Baron Stockmar 30 11. The Marriage 32 12. Social and political effects 32 13. Peculiar relation of the Koyal Couple v . . . 33 14. Proposal of the Duke of Wellington 34 15, 16. The Prince's conception of his position .... 36 17. Its effect not local only 37 18, 19. British Constitutional King.-hip 37 20, 21. Ministerial crisis of 183'J 39 22-5. Great influence of the Sovereign 41 26, 27. Hierarchical constitution of English society. . . 44 28. The better-known forms of the Prince's activity . 46 29. Older and modern forms of Kingship .... 47 30. The Prince's nationality of type 49 31. His precocity 49 32, 33. His Speeches 50 34-40. His mental attitude in Keligion 52 41,42. His piety 58 44, 45. The national treasure and loss 69 HI. LIFE OF THE PKINCE CONSORT. (Vol. IL) 1-3. Mr. Martin and his subject 63 4. Growing estimate of the Prince 65 5,6. Tlie Prince and the Exhibition of 1 851 ... 66 7, 8. The change in the political atmospliere 1852-1861 68 9. Comparison with the case of Mr. Pitt .... 70 10. Three forms of his activity 71 11. The attack in January 1854 72 12, 13. The Sovereign's right to personal counsel ... , 72 14. Tiio theory of Baron Stockmar 75 15-17. His historical misconceptions 76 18. His confusion of distinct characters 79 CONSENTS. IX PAGE 19, Vigour of the pferogatives generally 80 20, 21. Initintioa in grants of public money 81 22. The Crown Lands ; the Army 82 23. Occasion of the Baron's exposition 83 24, 25. His proposed change in the Kingly office ... 84 26-8. Effect on the position of Minibters 86 29-32. The Prince's plan for the regulation of Public Wor- ship 88 83. Education of the Eoyal Ciiildren 92 34, 35. Basis prepared by Slockmar . 93 36, 37. The Prince as a whole 95 IV. LIFE OF THE PRINCE CONSORT. (Vol. III.) 1,2. Martin's Biography 3. Its tendency to widen into History . . 4. Motive unjustly imputed 5. The Prince as an authority on the Crimean Wi 6, 7. Historical policy in regard to Turkey . 8-10. The Prince on the motive of the Crimean War 11. In accordance with official evidence . 12-14. On the European Concert 15. Comparison of 1853-4 with 1875-7 . . . 16. Integrity and independence of Turkey . . 17, 18. The Royal and popular view of the terras of P 19. The Crimean War attained its immediate end 20-2. Failure of reform in Turkey .... 23, 24. Altered tone of the public mind as to war 25, 26. Increase of Blilitary and Naval Estimates 27, 28. Failures not attributable to parsimony . 29. The Prince's Memorandum on the Army 30-2. Tlie Court and the Aberdeen Ministry . ■ 33. Abortive issue of the Sebastopol Inquiry 34. Value of party organisation .... 36, 37. Mr. Martin and the Duuubian Principalities 38. Coucluiiiou ir caco 97 98 99 100 102 103 105 106 110 110 -112 114 114 116 118 120 122 122 125 126 128 129 CONTENTS. V. THE COUNTY FRANCHISE, AND MR, LOWE THEREON. 1-3. Present relation of the question to parties and page individuals 131 4. Its position above the level of party 133 5-7. Parliament before and after the Reform Act , . 134 8, 9. Presumption established for extension .... 137 10. Supposed distinction of town and county . , . 139 11. Comparative selfishness of classes 139 12. Passion in town and country 140 13. Element of mental training 141 14, 15. Presumption for enfranchisement generally . . 142 16-19. Objection from numerical snperiority .... 144 20. Argument for equality of dealing 145 21-3. Not for equality of men ; English love of inequality 148 24-8. Extension thus far proved safe 150 29,30. Prophecies of evil falsified 154 31. Probable effect on parties 156 32. Argument for going on or back 158 33, 34. Faults admitted do not suffice to condenm exten- sion 159 35. Danger of gerontocracy and of ploutocracy . . . ] 00 36-8. Power of the individual in the modern State . . 161 39, 40. Expensiveuess of Elections 164 41. Exercise by the towns of their function of choice . 165 42-5. Prevalence of localism 166 46. Dread of redistribution of seats 168 47. Against excessive eiptctution from improvements. 169 CONTENTS. Zl VI. LAST WORDS ON THE COUNTY FRANCHISE. PAGE 1. Summary of arguments on tl 10 main issue . . . 171 2. Limitation of statements in Mr. Lowe's Reply . . 173 3-6. First presumptive pleas for enfranchisoiueut . . 175 7-9. Judgments of tlie great and the poor on the public questions of the time . 176 10. And on Christianity in its early days \ . . . 180 11. The enlistment of this maximum of active power on behalf of the State 180 12. Phantom-objections 182 13-15. Plea that there is now no intolerable evil . . . li?3 16. PJea of the hopeless minority 184 17. Plea of tlie homogeneous class 185 18. Plea of the want of demand 186 19. America 186 20. France 187 21. The claim to every supposition consistint with possibility 188 22. The two opposite views of the suffrage ■/ . . . 18^ 23. Article and demands of Mr. Arch li)l 24. The charge of class-purpose 191 vn. POSTSCRIPTUM ON THE COUNTY FRANCHISE. 1. Coailjutors in the inquiry .... 2. Government by the leisured classes i^ 3. Subserviency and dependence . . 4. Improving effect of tlie suffrage . , 5. The argument in terrorem 6, 7. Comiiarativo liability or error. 8. Facts of superior judgment in the mass 9-11. Rooted mainly in moral causes . 193 193 194 196 197 197 198 199 VIII. KIN BEYOND SEA. FAGB 1. De Tocqueville and De Beaumont ..... 203 2. Keciprocal benefactions of England and America . 203 3. American development unexampled 204 4-6. Eeaemblances of political habit between the two countries 206 7-9. Necessary and historical limit upon those resem- blances 208 10. Early management of the American Colonies -^ . 211 11-13. Brief animadversion on America 212 14-16. The peaceful trophies since the Civil War . . . 214 17, 18. Some comparative disadvantages of ours. . . . 216 19-24. Formation of the central power in the two countries 219 25, 26. The Fourth Power in the United Kingdom . . . 223 27, 28. Seats of Ministers in Parliament 224 29. The Crown, how guarded .' 226 30. Its prerogatives 227 31-3. Constitutional Kingsliip , 228 34. The Sovereign's dismissal of Ministers .... 230 35, 36. Other power and influence of the Sovereign . . . 232 37. The Sovereign and the Crown 234 38. Tlie Sovereign and the Ministers 235 39-41. The first power of the State 236 42, 43. Gradual formation of the Cabimt v . .. . . 238 44-50. Tlio Prime Mini.^tur and his cullcagues .^. . . 240 51. Anomalies of the Constitution 244 52, 53. Its subtle changes by time 246 54. How related to the national chni actor . . . . 247 55, 56. Conclusiou ,»..217 DEATH or THE prince consort. AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT MANCHESTER ON THE 23UD OF APRIL, 1862, BEFORE THE ASSOCIATION OF LANCASHIRE AND CHESHIRE mechanics' INSTITUTES.* 1. Ladies and Gentlemen, — Although the duty in which we liave just been engaged is a cheerful one, the season at which I come among you is, hut too notoriously, a season of gloom in the district, and even in the city. In this busy region, all the forms of liuman industry are grouped around one central stock, which gives them their vitality ; and they droop and come near to dying when, as now, the great cotton harvest is no longer wafted over the Atlantic to employ and feed tlie people. If the positive signs of distress do not glare in your streets, it is, I appre- liend, because the manly and independent character of the Lancashire workman makes him unwilling to parade, or even to disclose, his sufferings before his fellow-men. None can doubt the existence of a torpor scarcely ever equalled in its intensity, and wholly without parallel in its cause. At points of the horizon in these counties, the * Published in 1862. This Address was delivered shortly after the death of the Prince Consort; and during the pressure of the Cotton- famine. 1. B 2 ADDRESS AT MANCHESTER. eye suggests regret even for the un^yonted thinness of the canopy of smoke, which bears witness to the partial slumber of the giant forces enlisted in your ordinary service. Earely ^Wthin living memory has so much of skill lain barren, so much of willing strength been smitten as Avith palsy ; or has so much of poverty and want forced its way into homes that had long been wont to smile with comfoi-t and abundance. Nor is the promise of to-morrow a compensation for the pressure of to-day. On the con- trary, if the present be dark, the signs of the immediate future may seem darker still. 2. In times like these the human mind, and still more the human heart, searches all around for consolation and suppoi-t. Of that support one kind is to be found in observing that trials the most severe and piercing are the lot not of one station only but of all. And perhaps in tlie wise counsels of ProAddence it Avas decreed that that crushing sorrow which came down as sudden as the hur- ricane, scarcely yet four months ago, upon the august head of our Sovereign, should serve, among other uses, that of teaching and helping her subjects to bear up under the sense of atiliction and desolation, and should exhibit by conspicuous example the need and the duty both of mutual sympathy and mutual help. In many a humble cottage, darkened by the calamity of the past winter, the mourning inhabitants may have checked their OAvn im])a- ticnce by relleeting that, in the ancient I'alace of our Kings, a Woman's heart lay bleeding; and that to the supreme place in birth, in station, in splendour, and in po\\'er, Avas noAV added another and sadder title of pre- eminence in grief. 3. For perhaps no shai-por stroke over cut human Ha-cs asunder than that which in December last parted, so far DEATH OF XnK PRIXCE CONSORT. 3 as this world of sense is concerned, the lives of the Queen of England and of her chosen Consort. It had been obvious to us all, though necessarily in different degrees, that tliey were blest with the possession of the secret of recon- ciling the discharge of incessant and wearing public duty with the culti\ation of the inner and domestic life. The attachment that binds together wife and husband was known to be in their case, and to have been from the first, of an unusual force. Through more than twenty years, whith flowed past like one long unclouded summer day, that attachment was cherished, exercised, and strengthened by all the forms of family interest, by all the associated pursuits of highly cxiltivated minds, by all the cares and responsibilities which suiTound the Throne, and which the Prince was called, in his own sphere, both to alleviate and to share. On the one side, such love is rare, even in the annals of the love of woman ; on the other, such ser^'ice can hardly find a parallel, for it is hard to know how a husband could render it to a wife, unless that wife were also Queen. 4. So, then. She, whom you have seen in your streets a source of joy to you all, and herself drinking in with cordial warmth the sights and the sounds of your enthu- siastic loyalty, is now to be thought of as the fijrst of English widows, lonely in proportion to her elevation and her cares. Nor let it be thought that those who are never called to suffer in respect to bochly wants therefore do not suffer sharply. Whereas, on the contrary, it is well established, not only that though the form of sorrow may be changed with a change in the sphere of life, the essence and power of it remain, but also that, as that splieie enlarges, the capacity of suffering deejjens along ^\■ith it, no less than the opportunities of enjoyment ai'o 13 2 4 ADBEESS AT MANCHESTER. multiplied. Tlierefore all the land, made aware, througli the transparent manner of it, what was the true character of her life, has acknowledged in the Queen not only a true, but a signally afflicted mourner. And rely upon it that, even in the midst of desolation, she is conscious of our sympathy, and has thrilled more deeply to the signs of her people's grief on her behalf than ever, in other days, to their loudest and most heart-stirring acclamations. 5. And you, my friends, such of you in particular as have felt by your firesides the touch of this most tiying time : if perchance many among you, turning in the day of need and trouble to the Father of all Mercies, have mingled with your prayers for your own relief another prayer, that She may be consoled in her sorrow and strengthened for her work during what we hope will be the long remainder of her days, that loyal prayer will come back vnth bless- ing into your OAvn bosom, and in the effort to obtain com- fort for another you will surely be comforted yourselves. 6. If the mourning of the nation for the Prince Consort's death was universal, yet within certain precincts it was also special. One of those precincts surely must have been the Association to promote Avhose purposes we are gathered here to-night. You had iu him a Head ; and a Head standing towards you in no merely titular relation, but one Avho, as his manner was, gave reality to every attribute of his station, and, in lending you his name, im- parted to you freely of his thought and care to boot. His comprehensive gaze ranged to and fro between the ba.se and the summit of society, and examined the interior forces by which it is kept at once in balance and in motion. In his well-ordered life there seemed to be room for all things — for every manly exercise, for the study and practice of art, for the exacting cares of a splendid DEATH OF THE TRTNCE CONSORT. 5 Court, for minute attention to every domestic and patcmal duty, for advice and aid towards the discharge of public business in its innumerable forms, and for meeting the volnn- taiy calls of an active philanthropy : one day in considering the best form for the dwellings of the people ; another day in bringing his just and gentle uifluence to bear on the relations of master and domestic servant ; another in suggesting and supplying the means of cultui'c for the most numerous classes; another in some good work of almsgi\dng or religion. Nor was it a merely external activity which he displayed. His mind, it is c^adcnt, was too deeply earnest to be satisfied in anything, smaller or greater, with resting on the surface. With a strong grasp on practical life in all its forms, he united a habit of thought eminently philosophic; ever referring facts to their causes, and pursuing action to its consequences. Gone though he be from among us, he, like other worthies of mankind who have preceded him, is not altogether gone ; for, in the woi'ds of the poet — '* Yonr heads must come To the coUl tomb ; Only the actions of tlie jnst Smell sweet and blossom in their dnst."* So he has left for all men, in all classes, many a useful lesson, to be learnt from the record of his life and character. 7. For example, it would, I believe, be difficult to find anywhere a model of a life more highly organised, more thoroughly and compactly ordered. Here in Manchester, if anywhere in the Avorld, you know what order is, and what a power it holds. Here we sec at work the vast * Shirley, ' Ajax and Ulysses,' Sccue ill. b ADDRESS AT MANCHESTER. systems of machinery, where ten thousand instruments are ever laLouring, each in its own proper place, each with its own proper duty, but all obedient to one law, and all co- operating for one end. Scarcely in one of those your own great establishments are the principles of order and its power more vividly exemplified, than they were in the mind and life of the Prince Consort. Now this way of excelling is one that we all may follow. There is not one among us all here gathered who may not, if he will, especially if he be still young, by the simple specific of giving method to his life, greatly increase its power and efficacy for good. 8. But he would be a sorry imitator of the Prince who should suppose that this process could be satisfactorily performed as a mechanical process, in a presumptuous or in a servile spirit, and with a view to selfish or to worldly ends. A life that is to be active like his ought to find refi-eshment even in the midst of labours ; nay, to draw refreshment from them. But this it cannot do, unless the man can take up the varied em]iloymcnts of the world with something of a childlike freshness. Pew are they who carry on with them that childlike freshness of the earliest years into after-life. It is that especial light of Heaven, described by Wordsworth in his immortal ' Ode on the llecollections of Childhood ' : that light — '■a'^ " which lies about us in our infancy," which attends even the youth upon his way; but at length — " the Man perceives it die away, And fade into tiie light of common day." Its radiance still plays about a favoured few : they ore those few who, like the Trince, strive earnestly to keep DEATH OF THE PRINCE CONSORT. 7 themselves unspotted from the world, and are victors in the strife. 9. In beseeching, especially, the young to studj^ the ap- plication to their daily life of that principle of order which hoth engenders diligence and strength of Avill, and like- wise so greatly multiplies their power, I am well assnvc^d that they will find tliis to be not only an intellectual but a moral exercise. Every real and searching effort at si'lf- improvemcnt is of itself a lesson of profound humility. For we cannot move a step without learning and feeling the waywardness, the weakness, the vacillation of our movements, or without desiring to be set up upon the Rock that is higher than ourselves. Nor, again, is it likely that the self-denial and self-discipline which these effoi-ts undoubtedly involve will often be cordially under- gone, except by those who elevate and extend their vision beyond the narrow scope of the years — be they what wo admit to be few, or what we think to be many — that are prescribed for our career on earth. An untiring sense of duty, an active consciousness of the perpetual presence of Him Avho is its author and its law, and a lofty aim beyond the grave — these are the best and most efficient parts, in every sense, of that apparatus wherewith we should be anned, when with full pnrpose of heart we address our- selves to the life-long work of self-impi'ovement. And I believe that the lesson which I have thus, perhaps at once too boldly and too feebly, presiimed to convey to you in words, is the very lesson which was tanght us for twenty years, and has been bequeathed to us for lasting memoi'y, by the Prince Consort, in the nobler form of action, in the silent witness of an earnest, manful, and devoted life. 10. But, although this world embraces no more than a limited part of our existence, and although it is certain 8 ADDRESS AT MANCHESTER. that we ought to tread its floor with an upward and not Avith a downward eye, yet sometimes a strong reaction from the dominion of things visible and carnal begets the opposite excess. A strain of language may sometimes be heard among us which, if taken strictly, would imj)ly that the Almighty had abandoned the earth and the creatures He had made ; or, at the least, that if He retained any care at all for some portion of those creatures while con- tinuing to be inhabitants of the world, it was only care how to take them out of it. It is sometimes said that this world is a world only of shadows and of phantoms. We may safely reply that, whatever it is, a world of shadows and of phantoms it can never truly be ; for by shadows and by phantoms we mean vague existences, which neither endure nor act : creatures of the moment, which may touch the fancy, but which the understanding does not recognise ; passing illusions, without heralds before them, without results or traces after them. With such a description as this, I say, our human life, in what- ever state or station, can never correspond. It may be something better than this ; it may be something worse, but this it can never be. Our life may be food to us, or may, if we will have it so, be poison ; but one or the other it must be. Whichever and whatever it is, beyond all doubt it is eminently real. So surely as the day and the night alternately follow one another, does every day when it yields to darkness, and every night when it passes into dawn, bear with it its own tale of the results which it has silently wrought upon each of lis, for e\dl or for good. The day of diligence, duty, and devotion leaves us richer than it found lis ; richer sometimes, and even commonly, in our circumstances ; richer always in our- selves. But the day of aimless lethargy, the day of DEATH OF TUV. PRINCE CONSORT. 9 passionate and rebellious disorder, or of a merely selfish and perverse activity, as suix'ly leaves us poorer at its close than avc were .at its beginning. The whole ex- perience of life, in small things and in groat, what is it ? It is an aggregate of real forces, which are always acting upon us, we also reacting upon them. It is in the nature of things impossible that, in their contact with our plastic and susceptible natures, they should leave us as we were ; and to deny the reality of their daily and continual influence, merely because we cannot register its results, as we note the clianges of the l)aronieter, from hour to hour, would be just as rational as to deny that the sea acts upon the beach because the eye will not tell us to-morrow that it is altered fi-om what it has been to-day. If we fail to measure the results that are thus hourly wrought on shingle and in sand, it is not because those results are unreal, but because our ■sasion is too limited in its powers to discern them. "WTien, instead of comparing day with day, we compare century with century, then we may often find that land has become sea, and sea has become land. Even so we can perceive, at least in our neighbours — towards whom the eye is more impartial and discerning than towards ourselves — that, under the steady pressure of the experience of life, human characters are continually being determined for good or CA-il ; are developed, confirmed, modified, altered, or undermined. It is tlie ofiice of good sense, no less than of faith, to realise this gi-eat truth before we see it, and to live under the conviction, that our life from day to day is a true, poAverful, and searching discipline, moulding us and making us, Avhethcr it be for evil or for good. 11. Nor are these real efPects wrought by unrtnil instru- ments. Life and the world, their interests, their careers, 10 ADDRESS AT MAN'CHESTER. the varied gifts of our nature, the traditions of our forefathers, the treasures of laws, institutions, usages, of languages, of literature, and of art ; all the beauty, glory, and delight with which the Almighty Father has clothed this earth for the use and profit of His children, and which Evil, though it has defaced, has not been able utterly to destroy; all these are not merely allowable, but ordained and appointed instruments for the training of mankind. They are instruments true and efficient in themselves, though without doubt auxiliary and subor- dinate to that highest instrument of all which God has prepared to be the means of our recovery and final weal, by the revelation of Himself. 12. Thus, then, we arrive at a point which plainly ex- hibits the ennobling tendencies and high moral aims of an institution such as this, when it is worked in the spirit that alone befits our nature and condition. Let me now address to you a few words on a marked feature of the institution— that feature with which in particular we are to-night concerned — I mean its examina- tions, to which reference is made in the eighth paragraph of its printed list of its objects. They evidently form not only a living and chief portion of its practice, but also a test of its power over the people ; and it is manifest, from the results they have produced — from such results as Avith our own eyes we have witnessed in this hall to-night — • that they have struck deep root in the mind of the com- munity around you, and are likely to exercise in future a material influence upon conduct. 13. The use of examinations in this country, not alone, but with honours and prizes variously attached to them, as a main stimulus and sup])ort to mental cultivatioti, is in a veiy great degree peculiar to the present century. DEATH OF TnK PRINCE CONSOET. 11 Examination on trial, in one form or another, may he said to have constituted, nearly from its commencement, the basis of the practical system of our ancient Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Perhaps those Universities have been the means of commending- to the countiy the example it lias so largely followed. These examinations have ac- (juired progressively more and more of "weight in our famous ])ublic schools. They now supply the only pass- port to the Civil Service of India, richly endowed as it is Avith emoluments, and heavily charged with duties and responsibilities. Admission to the Civil Service at home had been long the subject only of a political patronage wliich was, erroneously as 1 think, believed to be an essential part of the machinciy of the Constitution, and the sole effectual substitute for the nxder methods of government formerly in use by prerogative or force. But it is now in some degree admitted that the privilege of entering the Ci\al Service of the countiy — and, indeed, the service of the country generally ought to be thrown open, as widely as may be, to its yoiith at large. And some progress has been made, by the method of examina- tions, both in securing the State against the intrusion of the unworthy, and in widening the way of access for those who aspire to prove themselves worthy of the honours and rewards of civil office. The like engine of competitive examination has been more freely applied to the highest — I mean the scientific — department of the army. At about the same time with the adoption of these last-mentioned improvements, the University of Oxford instituted, Avith great wisdom and forethought, that system of circuits for local examinations throughout the country whicli nu't at once with public acknowledg- ment and approval, and Avhich was speedily and happily 12 ADDKESS AT MANCHESTER. imitated from one or more other quarters. But none of these efforts touched the great masses of the people. They too, however, have been at least pai'tially reached by the widening circles of the movement. A proposal is, aj yon know, under the consideration of Parliament, which aims at the establishment of the principle, that the merit of the pupils proved by elementary examination shall henceforth be, if not the sole, yet the main condition on which the money of the State, supplied by the taxes of the country, shall be dispensed in aid of primary schools. This, it may be said, is still prospective. But at least we have, in tlie Association of Lancashire and Cheshire Mechanics' Institutes, one living proof of the progress made, without aid either from old endowment or from the public purse, by the principle of examinations, with the condition of competition, and with the attraction of honour or reward. How strictly true is this assertion must be more familiarly known to many among you than to me. 14. I Avill not attempt to draw here, and now, a full picture of the association, but will only give in proof of Avhat I have said a very few facts and figures. First, as regards the general condition of the district. We find that the involuntary leisure forced on the popu- lation by tlie contraction of the cotton trade has been attended by a decrease of crime. In Blackburn, for instance, where the crisis is felt with the utmost severity, the charges heard by the borough magistrates in the first quarter of the year 1857 were 721 ; in the first quarter of the year 1862, although the population must have grown, the charges were only 524. Now, we may naturally expect a decrease of drunkenness to accompany popular distress, because the means of indulgence luive been contracted. But, on tlie other hand, we might not Drvrn of tiiJ': trtxck consort. 13 be greatly sui-prisod. if there were a positive increase of those offouces to which men are tempted in a prijicipal degree by want. Applpug these considerations to the case of ihvckbum, we find the following results. The charges other than for drunkenness in the first quarter of 1857 were 464 ; in 1862 they were 380. There is, my friends, consolation in tliese facts, which I hope will long sur^•ive the painful occasion that has brought them into view. 15. It also appears from the returns, that, speaking generally, while ciime has decreased, the attendance upon classes, and the use of the means of mental culture, have increased. Now, my friends, there are beautiful and famous passages in ancient writers, where statesmen and orators describe the refreshment with which literature had supplied them, amid the cares of life and the pressure of public affairs. AVithout any disparagement to such representations, it is a far more touching piclure to behold the labouring man, shut out by no fault of his own fi'om the occiipation that gives him bread, yet uncon- quered in spirit and resource, and turning to account his vacant hcjurs in pursuits which strengthen and enlarge the faculties of his niiud. 16. It would, however, be unjust to set down to the credit of this Association, or of those institutes which it binds together, more than a modest share in the general improvement of your social state. But let us observe more closely their actual progress. The members, formerly 2000, are now from 6000 to 8000. Four years ago, 500 persons passed the preliminary examinations ; this year there are 1500. Four years ago, 214 passed the public and final examination ; this year there are 730. What is more remarkable than all the rest is the fact that, 14 ADDRESS AT MAN-CHESTKR. of 1 80 persons who have to-night received honours and certificates, the number who draw their subsistence from weekly wages is no less than 177. Two of these are wholly unemployed ; 83, between men and women, are weavers; fully 150 appear to belong, in the very strictest sense, to the labouring class. Again I say, here are the signs, for that class especially, of hope and real progress ; of hope which will, I trust, bear its fi'uit, and abide with them when ripened into certainty, long after the clouds of the present visitation shall, if it please God, have passed away. 17. I have said to you, my friends, that the extended use of the instrument of examinations is eminently character- istic of the age in which we live. I would almost ventui^e to say that, amid all the material and all the social changes by which the period has been distinguished, there have been few that are greater or more peculiar than this. Tlie older methods of education, which had been in use in European countries, generally invited from students, with more or less of strictness, voluntary performances, which were intended to afford general evidence of competency ; and which, where they were regularly exacted, were made conditions of the certificates of proficiency given by Uni- versities and other learned bodies, and by them called Degrees. These exercises and exhibitions were the in- vention of remote ages, and were in all probability well adapted to the exigencies of those periods. Eut in the time of your immediate ancestors they had become gener-. ally and even grossly ineffective ; and the instinct, so to speak, of the present age has prompted it, instead of reviving the ancient forms which had died out, to have recourse to the new method of examinations. 18. These examinations are in a great number of TKATn OF THE PRIXCK CONSOUT. 15 instances competitive ; that is, tliey offer to the candi- dates one or more specific prizes, the possession of which, by particuhir competitors iuvolvcs the exclusion of others. Tliis form of examination lias great advantages. It raises to a maximum that stimulus which acts insensibly but powerfully upon the minds of students, as it were, from behind ; and becomes an auxiliary force augmenting their energies, and helping them, almost without their know- ledge, to surmount their dilliculties. It is not found in practice, so far as I know, to be open to an objection which is popularly urged against it ; this, namely, that it may elicit evil passions among the candidates, because it makes the gain of one the loss of another. I believe that, on the contrary, the pursuit of knowledge is found to carry with it, in this respect, its own preservatives and safeguards. Even in athletic sports, the loser does not resent or grudge the fairly won honours of the winner ; and, in the race of minds, those Avho ai'e behind, having confidence in the perfect fairness of the award, are not so blindly and basely selfish as to cherish resentment against others for being better than themselves. Again, it is a recommendation of purely competitive examinations that they bring the mat- ter to the simplest issue ; for, in nice cases, it is a much easier and safer task for the examiner to compare the per- formances of a candidate with those of another candidate, than to compare them "\\ith some more abstract staiidard, existing only in his own mind. On the other hand, it is a disadvantage of this system that the honours given at difi'erent times, purporting to be eqiml, are given to un- equal merit : for the number and excellence of the com- petitors varies fi'om one occasion to another ; and tlie winner of one year may, on this account, be inferior to the loser of another. 16 ADDRESS AT MANCHESTEK. 19. Miicli may, in truth, be said in praise or in dis- paragement of one method of examination as compared with another. Into controversy of this kind I do not propose to enter, further than to say that I think the highest value belongs to the competitive species in cases like that of admission to the Civil Service of the State, where a main object is to bar the way against the action of corrupt or inferior motives in those who appoint. In the long-run, the simple, clear, and self-acting method of an open com- petition will probably be found more ade(;[uate than any other agency to contend against the wakeful energies of human selfishness, ever on the alert, first to prevent the adoption of improvements, and then to neutralise and mar their operation. 20. But what I would, on the present occasion, specially endeavour to biing to yoiu- attention is the general cha- racter of this instrument of examination, as it is under- stood and as it is applied in the present century, and in the institution with which we have now to deal. The essential character of it I take to be this — that the candi- date, instead of himseK producing a piece of work, and asking to be judged by it, offers and opens his mind to the examining authority to be tested, searched, and, so to speak, even ransacked, in such manner, and by such questions and processes, as that examining authority shall choose. The adoption, or wide extension, of such a method as tlus marks an epoch in the history of study. It shows that we have overlived the time when the greater part of those who engaged in the pursuit of knowledge were enamoured of its beauty, and loved it for its own sake, with a devout and tender love. In the childhood of mental culture, it was the prerogative of a few, and the mere possession of it constituted a high distinction. So, likewise, us in thoso DEATH OF THE PRINCE COXSOUT. 17 days legal rights were ill defined and protected, commerce vs^as circumscribed, nations were sharply severed, and but few of the careers of active life were open, it naturally happened that, in the case of many persons, mental culture had little to compete with for their regard. In circum- stances like these, it might not be needful constantly to apply a strong stimulus from without. The very novelty and freshness of knowledge, in ages just emerging from darkness and disorder, gave it a powerful charm for the imagination, over and above its hold upon the intellect ; it was piu'sued by a spontaneous movement from within, with passion as well as with con\'iction ; and those who so pursue it do not need to be goaded in their onward course ; their service is a service of love, and, like the love of youth for maiden, it is its own incentive and its own reward. 21. But when society has passed into what is distinct- ively, and in many respects truly, termed a progressive state ; when the personal rights of men are as secure in the outer world as in the closest retirement ; when a thousand new careers of external life are opened, and its attractions in a thousand forms are indefinitely multiplied ; when large numbers can engage, not merely in labour for subsistence, but in the pursuit of wealth ; and when a desire to rise upon the social ladder takes possession of whole classes, if not on their own behalf, at least on behalf of their children ; then there arises a compound danger. First, lest the value of knowledge for its own sake should be wholly forgotten ; and, secondly, lest even its utility in innumoralilc respects for the comfort and advancement of life should pass, in great measure, out of view. 22. Now, my friends, it is in such an age as this that we are living. That same attraction or necessity of wages, I. 18 ADDRESS AT MANCHESTER. which takes the poorer child, either in town or village, from school at too early a period, is but the exhibition for one class of a pressiu'e felt by all. With the wealthier it is pleasure, with the needier it is gain ; but all classes and all circles are alike in this, that our youth are in danger of undervaluing solid mental culture, and of either neglecting or shortening its pm'suit by reason of the increased alliu'ements, or the more urgent calls, of the outer sphere of life. Although knowledge is in so many ways auxiliary to art and to commerce, yet this is a matter not so palpable to the individual that we can rely on it to enable him, as it were, to speculate upon a distant benefit, which concerns others as well as, or it may be more than, himself; and to forego for its sake advantages which lie nearer at hand, which appertain directly to his own career, and wliich are on the level of every man's understanding. Long, accordingly, after trade and manufactures had begun, one hundred years ago, their upward spring, education and art seemed rather to decline than to advance among us. At length a day of awakening came. Christian philanthropy, we may do well to remember, was first in the field on behalf of the masses of the people ; but after a while,. it found itself in partnership with an enlightened self-interest on the part of individuals, and with the political prudence of the Government. JSlow, for a long course of years, all three have prosecuted their work in remarkable harmony one with another. Long may their union continue, and its golden fruits teem and glow over all the siu'face of the land ! 23. A piincipal form, in which they have well developed their united activity, has been the form of examinations; and I must in candour say that, among all the particular DEATH OF THE PRIXCE CONSORT. 19 applications of tliis principle, I have seen none more re- markable than that which we have met to-night to com- memorate and to encourage. For here it is not leisure, wealth, and ease wliich come to disport themselves as athletes in intellectual games : it is the hard hand of the worker, which his yet stronger ^\'ill has taught to wield the pen ; it is Labour, gathering up with infinite care and sacrifice the fragments of time, stealing them, many a one, from rest and sleep, and offering them up, like so many widows' mites, in the honest devotion of an effoi-t at self -improvement. 24. There are those, my friends, who tell us that exami- nations, and especially that competitive examinations, are of no real value ; that they produce the pretence and not the reality of knowledge ; that they give us, not solid pro- gress, but conceit and illusion. I freely admit that this modem method is likely to rear, as far as we can judge, no greater prodigies of learning than did the simple and spontaneous devotion of the olden time ; perhaps, if we are to look only at individual cases of pre-eminence, none so great. But I say that the true way to imitate the wisdom of the olden time is this : to watch the conditions of the age in which we live ; to accept them thankfully and freely, as at once the law of ProA-idence for our guidance, and the gift for our encouragement : and Avhen we learn by experience that tlio tools with Avhich other generations wrought are not suited for the work that is given us to do, then to find, if we can, some other tools which are. 25. It is not too much to say that the experience of half a century, as well in the Universities as elsewhere, appears to have shown that the method of examinations is the best, and perhaps the only, method by which, in the c 2 20 ADDRESS AT MAJTCHESTEK. England of the nineteenth century, any due efficiency can be imparted to the general business of education. I do not, indeed, deny that a certain trick or craft may be practised in them ; that some may think more of the manner of displaying their knowledge to a momentary advantage, like goods in a shop-window, than of laying hold upon the substance. But I say that these abusive cases will be the exceptions, not the rule. I say that those who so unjustly plead them against the system forget that this very faculty, of the ready command and easy use of our knowledge, is in itself of immense value. It means clear perception, it means orderly arrangement. And, above all, they forget what I take to be the specific and peculiar virtue of the system of examinations, namely this, that they require us to concentrate all the faculties of the mind, with all their strength, upon a point. In and by the efforts necessary for that cencentration, the mind itself, obtaining at once breadth of grasp and in- creased pliability and force, becomes more able to grapple with great occasions in the subsequent experience of life. 26. Therefore, my friends, again I say let us accept frankly and cheerfully the conditions of the age in which our lot is cast, and let us write among its titles this — that as it is the age of humane and liberal laws, the age of extended franchises, the age of Avarmer loyalty and more firmly established order, the age of free trade, the age of steam and railways ; so it is likewise, even if last and least, the age of examinations. Let me add, it is the age in which tliis powerful instrument of good, formerly the exclusive privilege of the more opulent, has been extended, perhaps most conspicuously of all by this group of institutions, to the people. And I give you this for my concluding word ; that, if that rrince of whose bright career and chai'acter l>EATn: OF THE PKINCE CONSORT. 21 I lately spoke were now among us, none, we may be sure, would more cordially than he claim honour for a system which, in such thoroujyh hannony with the whole spirit of English laws and institutions, aims at enabling every one, in every rank of the social scale, the lowest like the highest, to give proof of what mettle he is made, and to turn to the best account the gifts with which, by the bounty of his Heavenly Tathcr, his mind has been endowed. n. LIFE OF THE FEINCE COXSOPtT— COrr.T OF QUEEX VICTORIA * Vol. I. London, 1875. 1 . The clay which announced throughout the land the death of the Prince Consort was a day of universal gloom. The heart of the nation was touched by the suddenness with which indisposition had assumed the face of danger, and interest had grown into alarm ; and there was a prescient observation, at an early stage of the illness, that the con- stitution of the illustrious patient did not seem to oifer that stout resistance to the advances of disease which his favourable age, and his tall, manly, well-proportioned form would have seemed to insure. The purity of his life, the integrity of his character, his varied talents and accomplishments, and the active share in public under- takings, so often and so judiciously assumed, had gradually acquired for him a strong and deep liold upon the esteem of the British people. But the deptli of that sympathy and sorrow which accompanied the catastrophe was prob- ably a tribute to the sorrow of tlui Queen, in a yet greater degree than to the signal merits of her husband. It was felt, by a just instinct, that love and loss conjointly had * 'Life and Speeches of the Prince Consort — Court of Queen Victoria' (by Etononsis). Publishe|uililislieil for ciroulation abroad in one of the volumes of Baron Tauchnitz, Leipzig, 1876. 24 LIFE OF THE PKINCE CONSOET perhaps never, amidst all the varieties of life, been raised to so high a pitch : that no woman had ever leant more fondly, and no queen had ever had so much cause to lean. The weight was now doubled ; while the strength was halved, and the joy and comfort gone. Accordingly, there was a real and genuine desire of the whole people to be partners in her great affliction, in no conventional or secondary sense, but by trnlj bearing a portion of it along with her. I speak neither wholly nor even peculiarly of the highest circles. On the contrary, the sentiment deepened, as it widened, with every step downwards from class to class, even to the very base of society. 2. To the same mixed feeling, with the same dominant reference to the Sovereign, may have been partly due the remarkable multiplication in all quarters of the local Memorials, which by degrees covered the land. With respect to the most conspicuous of these, the gorgeous structure near the western extremity of Hyde Park, it may perhaps be said that its extraordinary magnitude of scale and sumptuousness of execution may in future days be deemed to assert a greater superiority to other mortals, on behalf of the Prince Consort, than even his pure and lofty reputation can be expected to sustain. In any case, we may say of him with truth what the greatest Italian poet of this century, Giacomo Leopardi, has said of Dante : — " lo so ben Che saldi men che cera, e men ch' arena. Verso la fama che di te laseiasti. Son bronzi e marmi."* Happily we have sure memorials of his mind, and faith- * Rudely and slightly rendered in the following lines: — "Matched with the fame Of thy great name, [Bronze COTJET OF QUEEN "VTCTOEIA. 25 ful chroniclers of his histoiy ; and it may be confidently- expected, while it must be ardently desired, that not only our own time, but futiu'e generations also, may continue to prize the recollection of a life lifted far above the ordi- nary level of princely existence, and not only meritorious, but even typical for nations and men at large. 3. Before taking notice of the work of Mr. Martin,* we must briefly refer to the two other ofPeiings of loyal commemoration which were already before the world. In 1867 General Grey compiled, under the direction of Her Majesty, a memoir of ' The Early Years of the Prince Consort,' from 1819, the year of his birth, to the birth of the Piincess Royal in 1840. Originally prepared for private circulation, it was afterwards given to the public ; and the intended prosecution of the work was announced in the closing sentence of the volume. But, no long time afterwards, the hand of the writer was cold in death. The work of General Grey was even more communicative, threw even more light upon the personal histories and the domestic interior, than the later biography. He had been chosen to discharge a labour of love, implying on the pai-t of his Sovereign the liighest confidence. Never was that confidence better deserved. Besides possessing the other qualities needed for his important functions, he was a man loyal with no common loyalty ; and his long standing at the Court gave liim the power, which younger men cannot Bronze is but wax, And Marble sand. To baiHe Time's attacks, And stealthy hand." From G. Leopardi, ' Sopra il monumento di Pante che si preparava in Kiionze.' * 'Life of the Prince Consort,' vol. i., 1875. 26 LIFE OF THE PRIJTCE CONSORT be expected equally to possess, of acting in all points the part of a faithful friend. The " fierce light that beats upon a throne " is sometimes, like the heat of that fiimace in which only Daniel could walk unscathed, too fierce for those whose place it is to stand in its vicinity. The inci- dents of a Court retain, down to our day, their fascination, and we are old-fashioned enough to hope it may not soon be lost ; yet it can hardly be denied that it is girt about with a relaxing atmosphere, and that a manful constitu- tion, or adequate refreshment fi'om other sources, is re- qtiired in order to secure a robust health, in mind and character, to its favoured residents. Had the bodily strength of General Grey been equal to his mental sound- ness and manly truthfulness of stamp, he would still have been among us, with many coming years of usefulness to reckon. 4. A more recent, but not less loyal or judicious, relation to the throne, was that of Sir Arthur Helps ; whose death we have been called, within the last few months, to mourn. So early as in 1862, he had been chosen to edit the Speeches of the Prince ; and he had prefixed to them a most able and most discriminating introduction, only second in interest to the Speeches themselves. These were eagerly and extensively read by the nation ; and they unqiiestionably have that in them which ought not to die. 5. It was much that, after the removal by death of these two admirable servants of the Crown, her Majesty should be able to select for tlic definite execution of a task hitherto only attempted in fragments a biographer of such high qualifications as Mr. Martin. He has brought to the execution of a task necessarily arduous the saine fine hand and accurate discernment with which he had previ- ously rendered the image of some of the best Latin poets, COURT OF ftUEEX VICTORIA. 27 in tlic guise of liuppy and elegant Euglisli translations. It is, however, unnecessary for us, writing many months after the appearance of the work, to repeat in detail the praises which have been justly, and more promptly, awarded to Mr. ^klartin already by authontative and respected organs of the periodical press.*' We have only to wish that he may continue as he has begun. Perhaps we should add the expression of a hope that the nature of his subject-matter may not again impose upon him any such necessity of entering largely into the detail of foreign policy as he encountered in the painful case of the Spanish marriages. Even the valuable documents and the authentic histoiy he has here furnished want something of the charm of a biography. Eut the interest of the Eoyal portrait, which it has been Mr. Martin's duty to draw, is one not to be exhausted with the run of a successful work. The study and contemplation of the MAN will remain permanently fi-uitful of the most improv- ing lessons to eveiy learner in the school of human nature. The whole action of the Prince, in its manifold relations both to English society and to the constitution of the country, still forms a subject of deep interest to all who are interested eitbcr in free institutions generally, or in the peculiar form of them under which we live. And the amount of calamity we have suffered by his death has, perhaps, not even yet been fully apprehended. 6. It is not our intention to enter largely into the narra- tive of a life of which the general features are so well and widely known ; especially as we cannot doubt that Mr. Martin's work will in no long pei-iod obtain access to a wider circle of readers, through republication in a popular Quarterly Review for January 1857, pp. 108-110, 28 LIFE OF THS PRINCE CONSOET form, than is permitted by its present size and price. But we shall carefully select our points of reference. And there is one anecdote of the Prince's childhood, recorded by Count Arthur Mensdorff, wliich exhibits in very early times the base, so to speak, of his character. " One day, when we children, Albert, Ernest, Ferdinand, Augustus, Alexander, myself, and a few other boys, were play- ing at the Rosenau, and some of us were to storm the old ruined tower on the side of tlie castle, which tiie others were to defend, one of us suggested that there was a place at the back by which we could get in without being seen, and thus capture it without difficulty. Albert declared ' that this would be most unbecoming in a Saxon kiiiglit, who should always attack the enemy in front.' And so we fought for the tower, so honestly and vigorously, that Albert, by mistake, for I was on his side, gave nie a blow upon the nose, of which 1 still bear the mark. I need not say how sorry he was for the wound he had given me." * 7. The boy was father of the man ; and from the high standard which he had thus early, and thus earnestly, presented to himself, he never deviated. He was also happy, beyond almost all other men, in the aids which he received. His education seems to have been conducted with all the care, the steady direction of means to an end, the determination to turn all minds and all faculties to the very best account, which distinguishes the Germans beyond any people ol Europe. It seems as though there were no disturbing clement of waste iu their moral and intellectual world ; and this extraordinary and noble thrift early became a governing principle, and a great power, in the life of the Prince Consort. 8. Eut he had higher advantages even than those of a careful and elaborate training, in the constant and all'ec- Mr. JIartin, p. 7 ; Oeneral Grey, p. 57. COTTRT OF QUEEN VICTORIA. 29 tionate attontion of two men, each iu himself remarkable, and both devoted in an extraordinary measure to his vrol- fare, as well as to that of the Queen, with whom in a long vista of anticipation we arc told that his destiny was almost from the very first conjoined (Martin, p. 14). They were men not only of p;roat gifts, hut singularly adapted for their work of wardcnship. 9. One of them was King Leopold, Piince of Saxe- Cohurg by birth, sovereign of Belgium by a happy selection and adoption. This sovereign must undo;ibtedly be reckoned among the great statesmen of the nineteenth century. As a monarch, he gave a living example of all the lessons which are to be learned from the free institu- tions of the world, and some part of which, at least, he may have originally gained from his association with, and residence in, England. Called to the throne under circum- Btances more menacijig than those of his neighbour and father-in-law, Louis riiilippe, he lived in prosperity and died in honour, while the heir of the more splendid lot closed his days in obscurity and in exile. And it may not be an unreasonable opinion that, had France been governed from 1880 onwards with the enlightened frankness of King Leopold, the Orleans dynasty might still be un the throne, and Alsace and Lorraine still might bear the insignia of France ; "Trojaque nunc stares, Priamiquearx alta maneres." Th(> column of the Place Vendome would not be in ruins, nor the Hotel de Ville in ashes. Married in early life to Princess Charlotte of England. he stood in the Hue of succession to the very same position which his nephew, Piince Albert, was afterwards to hold. By the early death of that princess, which was so deeply 30 LIFE OF THE PEINCE CONSORT-^ and, as is now known in the light of hxter disclosures,* so deservedly lamented, the cup was dashed from his lips. But, without doubt, the exact reproduction of the same situation, for others so near and dear to him in the next generation, must have heightened in his mind that interest in their well-being which his relationship of itself could not but inspire, and which the early death of the Duke of Kent (in 1820) gave him an appropriate opportunity of bringing into action with reference to the Princess Victoria. 10. One of his great acts of tutelary friendship was to bring upon the scene Baron Stockmar, a person who was to contribute as directly, and perhaps with a yet larger effect, to the safe and happy direction of the Prince's life. Copious memoirsf of the Baron were printed three or four years back by his son, in Gei'man, and were translated into English. But, notwithstanding their near association with persons and matters so interesting to the nation, they did not take any extended hold of the public mind. The almost idolising ardour of filial affection in the author of the book failed to redeem a number of errors in point of taste and propriety. Fortunately the character of the person commemorated was so high as to sur\ive and sui'- mount the injudicious and obtrusive commemoration. In the pages of Mr. Martin, Baron Stockmar appears in his just place and relation to things and persons ; which of course is not that of the Olympian Zeus of modern Europe. Of great and cultivated gifts, he was a man aljsolutely disinterested, not merely in the sense of superiority to * See QuaHcrhj Itcvicw for Jan. 1873, Art. 1 : a monioir, uot a criticism. t ' Memoirs of Raron Stockmar.' V>y his son. Baron K. von Stock- mar. Translated from tJie Uermau by G. A. M. Lonijuiuus, 1872. COURT OP QUKEN VICTORIA. 31 pecuniary inducement, bnt in the power of casting, as it were, himself out of himself, so as to attain a complete identification with those on whose behalf he a|lvised or acted, for all the purposes .to \\liifh the advice or action might belong. To a fearless independence he added, as Mr. Martin truly says, a penetrating judgment of men and things (p. 15), and an inexhaustible fund of devotion. Eminently cosmopolitan in the framework of his mind, he was free from national limitations ; and was able both to appreciate for liimself,* and to instil into anothcu- in a remarkable degree, the true character of the British Con- stitution, a product of our insular soil which is not only without a parallel, but in its subtler parts almost without analogy elsewhere. It is commonly seen, by even the most intelligent of foreigners, as pictux'cs are seen in gas- light, Avith a strong projection of their more glaring colours, and a total, or at best very serious, loss of their more delicate, cool, transparent shadows and graduating touches. From 1816 to 18c} 1 the Baron had been resi- dent in England as the private secretary of Prince Leopold, and the comptroller of his household. He had also acted as the organ and represcMitativc of the Prince in the difficult negotiations A\liiuli followed his acceptance of the Belgian crown ; and which were well qualified, as may be seen by the readers of the recent * Life, of Lord Palmcrston,' to exercise and develop the capacity of any man for statesmanship. Ketiring to Coburg in 18;31, lie obeyed in 1836 a new call of King Leopold for his aid, and became a main agent in the happy and wise conspiracy, of which the King was probably the first author, for dis- * See, for examples, Martin, vol. i. pp. 110, 111. But llie subject recurs inf. Ko. III., j>p. 75 sqq. 32 LIFE OF THE PRINCE CONSORT posing all circumstances towards the marriage of the young Prince Albert with the future Queen of England, and for fitting him to adorn the exalted station. The succession of Princess Victoria had now no contingent impediment in its way ; and it was time to make prepai-a- tion for smoothing her arduous upward path with the best of all appliances. 11. The plan in view was bold, but not more bold than wise. It evidently was to make a preparation ideally perfect, but yet to leave choice as entire and free as if there had been no preparation whatever. A golden halo of romance thus invested the early life of these young and illustrious persons. The whole narrative really re- calls the most graceful fictions of Avise genii and gentle fairies, besetting mortals with blessings, and biassing their fates to bliss. It was as where the highest skill combines with bounteous soil and beneficent climate to secure the golden harvest. There never can have been an instance in which public and domestic aims were more thoroughly harmonised ; though there have been so many where the human hearts and lives of Royal persons have been as lightly sacrificed as if they had been creatures doomed to vivisection in tlie interests of science or of curiosity. 12. This comprehensive forethought did not fail to secure even a political reward. The palaces of England became shrines of domestic happiness ; and the Court exhi- bited to the nation and tlie world a pattern of personal con- duct, in all the points most slippery and dangerous for a wealthy country, with a large leisured class, in a luxurious age. Idleness was rebuked by the unwearied labours of the highest persons in the land ; vulgar ostentation grew pale in the face of a splendour everywhere associated with COtTRT OF QUEEN VICTOKIA. 33 duty, and measured by its ends ; impurity could not live in so clear an atmosphere ; even thrift had its tribute of encouragement, where hospitalities truly regal and un- ■wearied Avere so organised as not to put disdain upon the homely unatti-active duty of living within an appointed income. All these personal excellences were seen and appreciated by the public ; and they conti'ibuted, perhaps no less than wise legislation, and conduct inflexibly con- stitiitional, to draAv close the ties between the people and the throne. 13. The ciilminating point of the- interest with which the life of the Prince Consort should be regarded is one at Avhich it is really inseparable from the associated life of the Queen. They are ideally the obverse and reverse of the same medal ; nay, actually, the several moieties of the same whole. And, thus considered, they supply the one normal exhibition of a case in which the AVoman- ruler of a great empire, herself highly endowed with both character and intelligence, has rested as it were on the background of another consummately accomplished exist- ence, and has enjoyed the benefit of all its qualities, and all its energies, as amply as if they had belonged to her own original store. Happy marriages, it may be thank- fully acknowledged, are rather the rule among us, than the exception ; but even among happy marriages this marriage Avas exceptional, so nearly did the union of thought, heart, and action both fulfil the ideal, and bring duality near to the borders of identity. Not uncommonly, the Avif'e is to the husband as the adjective is to tlie substantive. And beyond doubt the great faculties aiid com])rehensivc accomplishments of Prince Albert fully cntilled him to claim a hus])and's place. But the hus- band's place was in this case modified l)y the position. I. D 34 LIFE OF THE PEINCE COIfSOET The Prince exactly appreciated the demands of the throne upon its occupant, and the consequential demands of his wife upon himself. He saw that it was his duty to live in, for, and through her, and he accepted with a marvel- lous accuracy of intellectual apprehension, and with an imswerving devotion of his heart, this peculiarly relative element in a splendid existence. 14. On one occasion, at least, he was led to describe in words'^' his own life-long function. In the year 1850, nearly at the point of bisection of his married life, the Duke of AVellington strongly urged upon him that he should assume the office of Commander-in-Chief. In this recommendation we see at once one of the many instances of the Duke's enthusiastic attachment to the Sovereign, and an undoubted indication of faculties tending to decline with the lapse of years. The characters of the Queen and of the Prince stood so high, that the first announcement of his acceptance of such an office might have given pleasure. But every man acquainted with the spirit of Parliamentary government must at once have seen it to be indefensible, and in a high degree inconvenient. It is, indeed, to be desired that a very close relation of senti- ment between the Sovereign and the Army should be permanently maintained. But the Army is, after all, a great department of the State ; and departments of the State can only be administered in this country by persons responsible to Parliament. There are, indeed, some features in the office which recommend that its contact with Parliament should be mediate, and not direct. Tlie discipline of the Army is a subject so grave, so delicate, and associated at such a miiltitude of points with the ♦ Speeches, j>. 76. COUKT OF QTJEEN VICTORIA. 35 interests and feelings of the governing class, that it should be as little as possible exposed to the influence of Parlia- mentary pressure ; a pressure nowadays much more apt to be exercised in the interest of class than in that of the public. The responsibility, therefore, of the Com- mamler-in-Chief is covered by that of the Secretary of State. Eut this protection is not exemption ; and the authority of Parliament is entire with respect to the mili- tary as well as the official head. Now, the responsibility of public ofiii'crs in these days does not usually clothe itself in the hard material forms of impeachments and attainders, as it did in other times. It is sufficiently sus- tained and enforced, for the most part, through the immensely quickened action of opinion, and through an increased susceptibility to its influence. Tlie ultima ratio with us is no longer fraught with peril to life, liberty, or estate, b\it simply means removal from office. This power, however, is indispensable ; and the case of the Duke of York may serve to show that it is no mere phantom. Ikit it is quite plain that no such power could have been exercised, or even discussed, in reference to the husband of the Queen, without affecting the Throne ; to which he was so closely related, that whatever injured the one must have brought the other more or less into question. Now, in such a matter, there should be no more and less. It follows that, whatever might have been the guarantees afforded by his character for wise and unimpeachable conduct, there was a radical and incurable fault in the Duke's suggestion. The Prince could not fulfil the very first among the conditions of fitness for the office : he could not be removable. • 15. Yet, how great was the teni])tation to an active mind, conscious of the capacity, and filled with the desii'e D 2 36 LIFE OF THE PKINCE CONSORT to render service to tlie nation, for once at least to seize the opportunity of claiming to give that service in a form in which it would bring the valuable reward of a daily and palpable appreciation. The recommendation, thus attractive in itself, proceeded from a Statesman of four- score, and from the man who, of all the land could boast, stood fii'st in the public estimation. It might well have been mistaken for a safe proposal. We cloiibt whether a merely intellectual superiority would have saved the Prince from this serious danger ; this trap, laid in inno- cence by most friendly hands. But his intellectual superiority was backed by a noble power of moral self- denial. And so he found his way to the heart and root of the matter. In a letter to the Duke, he describes the position of the " female sovereign," and proceeds as follows : — " This reqifires that the husbaticl should entirely sink his own imlividnal existence in that of his wife ; tliat he should aim at no power by himself or for himself ; sliould s-lura all ostentation ; assume no separate responsibility before the public; but make his position entirely a part of hers, fill up every gap which, as a ■woman, she would naturally leave in the exercise of her regal functions, continually and anxiously watch every j'art of the public business, in order to be able to advise and assi.st her at any moment, in any of tlie multifarious and difficult questions or duties brought before her, sometimes international, sometimes political, or social, or persomil. As the natural head of her family, su])eriutendeut of her household, manager of her private afl'airs , sole confidential adviser in politics, and only assistant hi tlie com- munications with the I fficers of the Government; hi; is, Ijcsides, the hu.sband of the (Jueen, the tutur of the roval children, llio private tccrctary of the Sovere'gn, and her pcinianent IMinister." 10. In this admirably large description we seem to find but one venial error of a word. It is not in the epitliet COUBT OF QVKKN VICTOUIA. 37 confi(lcntioi'tant sphere of action all things moA-ed, for her, automatically. The quantity of what is expected from a Sovereign, in a state of society like ours, is double and quadruple of what the working force of a single mind and will can readily supply. By the Prince's close union with the Queen, and by his energy, his method, and his judgnu'ut, the motive power was at once doubled, while from the close harmony of the two, singleness of impulse and operation Avas fully maintained. 28. We have, in these pages, rather endeavoured to bring into view what we think to have been the less observed parts of the Prince's action, than dwelt upon such forms COrRT OF QUr.KX VICTORIA. 47 of his useful activity as arc better known. Inptinctivcly remote from ideology, he had an energetic tendency to- wards social improvement in every form, and herein especially towards those reformatory schemes which were calculated to bring into view new modes of coping with social mischief; as well as those which tended to raise the level of culture and to refine common life by the habits and appliances of art. When the subjects of his care and attention are brought together, they form a whole so formidable in amount, that tlic mind is struck and almost shocked at the lavish expenditure of brain- power which they must have required, amidst all that splendour ^^ hich is readily mistaken for ease by the care- less beholder ; and Avonder becomes less, as pain becomes more, at that sapping and exhaustion of vital forces, Avhieh probably made openings for disease, and prepared him to succumb to it in the early maturity of his manhood. 29. But in truth the form of self-saci-ifice practised by the Prince seems to be the prime, and perhaps the only, way in which, under the circumstances of modem times, the nobleness of the Eoyal character can be sustained. The changes which have affected the position of Sovereigns and their families among us are in many respects fraught with moral danger, and with temptation in peculiar forms, not easily detected. Of old, the King had all his splen- dours and all his enjoyments weighted by the heavy cares, and verv real and rude responsibilities, of government ; and "uneasy lay the head that wore a crown." It was a truth as old as the time of Troy, when other gods and warriors slept, but Zeus alone was Avakeful.* Thus it was that power, and luxuiy, and, what is far more insi- Uiatl, ii. 1. Comp. x. 1-4, 48 LIFE OF THE ruiiyCE COS^SORT dious, flattery, were then compensated and kept in check. In the British Monarchy, the lodgment of the various parts of this great wliole, making up a King's condi- tion, is changed, and their moral equilibrium put in jeopardy. There are still gathered the splendours, the enjoyments, all the notes of homage, all the eager obe- dience, the anticipation of wishes, the surrender of adverse opinions, the true and loyal deference, and the deference wliieli is factitious and conventional. To be served by all is dangerous ; to be contradicted by none is worse. Taking into view the immense increase in the appliances of material ease and luxury, the general result is, that in the private" and domestic sphere a Eoyal will enjoys at this epoch, more nearly than in any past generation, the piivileges of a kind of omnipotence. At the same time, the principal burden of care, and all responsibility for acts of adniinistration, and for the state of the country, is transferred to the heads of otliers, and even the voice of the lightest criticism is rarely heard. In these circum- stances it remains singularly true, tliat the duties of a Court entail in their full scope a serious and irksome task, and that there must be much self-denial, and much merit, in their due discharge. Eut it is also in other duties, principally remote from the public eye, that the largest scope is afforded for the patient and watchful labour in l)ublic affairs which, balancing effectually mere splendour and enjoyment, secui'cs the true nobleness of kingship against the subtle inroads of scliishness, and raises to their maximum at once the toil, tlic usefulness, and tlie influence of the British Throne. Never, jtrobably, under any circumstances, be they favourable as they may, can th(!se rencli a higher point of elevation than they had attained by the joint efforts, and during the married life, COTTKT OF QIEEX VICTORIA. 49 of tlic Qucon and the Prince. Nor can we well over- value that addition of masculine energy to female tact and truth which brought the working of British lloyalty so near the standard of ideal excellence. 30. We proceed to some matters more exclusively personal to the Prince. A German by birth, he never lost the stamp of Germany ; no true man can wholly lose the stamp of his own country. A mildly foreign mark upon his exterior and manner, together with the perpetual pre- sence of a manifest endeavour to turn every man's con- versation, every man's particular gift and knowledge, to account for his own mental improvement, most laudable as it was, yet may have prevented his attaining that charm of absolute ease in his intercourse with the world which he is known to have possessed in the circle of his family. They certainly retarded the growth of his popu- larity among the wealthy and the great, who are, and may, w^e fear, always remain, not the least censorious among the several classes of society. 31. The precocity of the Prince seems to have been not less remarkable than were his solidity and his many-sided- ness. In this respect, indeed, all lloyal persons enjoy such advantages, through the elaboi'ateness of tlieir training, the devotion of those who surround them, and their large opportunities of contact with tlie choicest minds, that almost in all cases they seem to exhibit a number of the signs of maturity much earlier than do those in a less ex- alted station. What was specially noteworthy about the Prince was, that in his precocity there was nothing showy, or superficial, or transitoiy. Though he had hardly crossed the threshold of manhood wlien he arrived among us, he gave no signs of crudity, never affected knowledge he did not possess, never slackened in, and never concealed, that I. £ 50 LIFE OF THE PEINCE CONSOET anxiety to learn which seemed to accompany as much his social leisure as his working hours. There seemed, again, to be no branch of human knowledge, no subject of human interest, on which he did not lay his hand. 32. This early and multitudinous development, which received a share of assistance from the incidents of Koyalty, and which in him nature had supremely favoured, however dazzling and however real in the advantages it supplies, has likewise at least one great drawback. It is not favourable to the energetic concentration without which the human mind can hardly reach to greatness, and of which it is plain that he was eminently capable. It is impossible to say what growth may have been reserved for the Prince during his later years ; but some of the most remarkable and complete among the Speeches — which constitute, after all, his very best memorial — belong to the earlier portion of the series ; and it might be difncult to assign to the later moiety of it any marked superiority over the first. The circumstances of his life may have thwai'ted the bias of nature ; but undoul)tcdly these Speeches seem to show the exercise, in a very remarkable degree, of the three combined faculties of terseness in expression, of concen- trated attention, and of completeness in thought. 33. At the age of thirty, in 1850, he delivered a speech Avhich contains one of the very best descriptions of the mind and character of Sir Robert Peel. This description is, among its other features, highly sj'mpat]u;tie. It be- tokens a real intimacy; and there is no other of the same stamp. In truth, the character of Peel, in some intellec- tual and many moral qualities, was not without pointed resemblance to his own.* His short speech at the meeting * Speeches, pp. 121-4. COUKT OF QUEEX VICTOKIA. 51 of the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy, in 1S54, affords a remarkable example of handling at once succinct and exhaustive.* The speech at Birmingham, for the Midland Institute, in 1855,f and the speech at Aberdeen, for the meeting of the British Association, are excellent. But to our mind the Prince never surpassed in compre- hensiveness, in his fearless truthfulness, and in delicacy of touch and handling, his address at the festival of the Koyal Academy, in 1850, when he was still but thirty. After treating of the character of Sir Charles Eastlake, he proceeds to the general subject : — ~ " Gentlemen, the production of all works in art or poetry requires in their conception and execution, not only an cxerci.>e of tlie in- tellect, bkill, and patience, but particularly a concurrent warmth of feeling and a I'ree How of imagination. This renders them most tender plants, which will thrive only in an iitmo.s| here calculated t" maiiitiiin tlmt warmth; aiul that atmosphere is one of kindness — kindness towards the artist persiin;illy, as well as towards his produ'tion. An unkind word of criticism passes like a cold blast over tlieir [(jy. the.-e] tender shoots, and slirivels lliem up, checking tlie lli)\v of the sap, which was rising to produce, perhaps, multi- tudes of flowers and fruit. " But still, criticism is absolutely necessary to the develij)ment of art, and the injudicious prai&e of an inferior worJc becomes un insult to superior genius. "In this nspeet our times are peculiarly unfavourable, when compared with those when JMadonnas were painted in the scclu- siou of convents. For we liave now, on the one hand, tlie eager competition of a vast ariay of arti.-ts of every degree of talent and skill, and on the other, as judge, a great public, for the great cr part wholly inieducated in art, and thus led by professional wiiters, who often t-trive to impress the public with a great idea of their own artistic knowledge by the merciless manner in which they trt at works which have cost those who produced them the highest ellorts of uiiud or feeling. * Speeches, pp. 146-8. f -^^f'^- P- ^62. E 2 52 LIFE OF THE PRINCE CONSORT "The works of art, by being publicly exliibited and offered for sale, are becoming articks of trade, follawing, as such, the unrea- soning laws of markets and fasliion ; and public and even private patronage is swayed by their tyrannical influence." * In these evils he finds the ground for the existence of the Academy, which has done much to deserve the public confidence, but yet to which he does not hesitate fi'ankly to point out its own besetting danger. 34. We pass on to a still higher matter. "Where so warm and so wide an interest is felt in one departed, there cannot but be much desire to know what, in this agitated and expectant age, was his mental attitude with respect to religion. On this great subject there has been some degree of reserve, which we should be the last to blame ; for at a time of sharp division, and of much fashionable scepticism as well as bigotry, loving hands, such as those which tend the Prince's memory, are little likely to expose a cherished reputation to the harshest and most penetrating forms of criticism. For the public, however, the matter has now become one of history. The nation knew, during the lifetime of the Prince, all, perhaps, that it had a right to know. They knew that he was a religious man. In his earliest youth, f at the period of his con- firmation, to which, in Germany, a peculiar cliaracter attaches, he declared with energy his resolved adoption of the Christian profession. To its public duties he paid a regular homage. His life was known to be of a pure and severe morality, of an incessant activity in duty, of an exemplary tone in the various domestic relations. The confidence of the country, won upon these grounds, was Bcalcd by the obvious presence of a determined and even Siiccches, p. 123. f JIartin, p. 10. COURT OF QUEKN VTCTOEIA. 53 far-i'pacliing Protestantism.* Tlie Prince was friendly to an cqu'-ility of civil riglits independent of religious pro- fession ; but with such a frame of opinion for himself, and with his marked earnestness of character, a certain degree of thecjlogical narrowness, inherited rather than personal, may have formed an ingredient in his views of the religious system of the Latin Church, even when considered apai't from its latest and most extravagant developments, of which ho lived to witness some bold beginnings. 35. So far as can be gathered incidentally from those who find admittance to the inner circles, not much is to be added to the outline which met the public eye. Nothing has been learned to show that his mind was deeply im- pressed with the value or the particulars of dogmatic orthodoxy. "With his refined culture, he could not but repel the crude vulgarities which sometimes discharge themselves from the pulpit, and lurk in forms of popular religion ; and it is extensively believed that the Church owes to the Prince's influence and suggestion the appoint- ment of the able Prelate who fills the see of Worcester, in substitution for a person of more popular and showy type, but of far less learning, capacity, and governing force. "What was more than this was the conviction, which all intercourse with the Prince conveyed, as to his own ruling notions of daily conduct. His life was, in truth, one sustained and perpetual effort to realise the great law of duty to God, and to discharge the heavy debt which he seemed to feel was laid upon him by his high station, and by the command of the means and sources not less of usefulness than of enjoyment. As a watch wound up * Speeches, p. 10. 54 LIFE OF THE PRINCE CONSORT obeys its mainspring till it has all run out, so he, at all moments, seemed to be answering the call of an inward voice, summoning him to learn, to think, to do, to hear. In all ranks and forms of life this is a noble, au edifying spectacle ; and it is more noble and edifying in proportion as the elevation is greater, and the object visible from a wider range. 36. Some religionists will be tempted hereupon to say how sad it was that one who came so near to the kingdom of God should not have entered in. Some will simply hold the description we have given to be that of a dry self- righteousness, which cannot stand in the day of account. A third class, whose doubts and scruples would command more of our sympathy, would ask themselves how it was that a man who thus earnestly and faithfully set himself to do the di^-ine will did not accordingly appreciate at their fullest value those specific revelations of truth, in the form of doctrines and institutions, which Christians in general have accepted as the most effectual sources of regenerative power, both for the individual, as established by personal experience, and for society, as written on the long scroll of history during eighteen centuries. But this opens a question alike broad and deep, and we can only glance for a momfcnt along the vi^ta. 37. Let us endeavour to sketch a frame of religious sense and conviction different from that of the Prince. We take a hnman soul profoundly conscious of the taint and power of sin ; one given to the contemplation of the character of Christ, and shocked at its own immeasurable distance from the glorious image of the Master; one pained, not only with the positive forms of corruption, but with the pervading grief of general imperfection and unworthiness, and with the sense how the choicest por- COURT OF QVKEX VICTORIA. 55 tions of the life strangely run to waste, how the best desig-us are spoiled by faulty actuation, how there are tears (in the touching language of Bishop Beveridge) that want washing, and repentance that needs to be repented of. Such an one feels himself engaged in a double warfare, against evil witliout, and against evil within ; and finds the last even fiercer than the first. To deprive one so minded of any fraction of what are termed the doctrines of grace, of such lights as shone upon the souls of Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, and Saint Bernard, is to di'ain away the life's blood of the spirit, and lay him helpless at the feet of inexorable foes. For a nature such as this, religion is not only a portion or department of conduct, but, by a stringent necessity, the great, standing, solemn drama or action of life ; that in which all mental powers, and all emotions of the heart, are most constantly and intensely exercised ; and the yearnings, efforts, and con- flicts which belong to the external order are as nothing compared with those which are to God-wards. ^,,38. But, as in the Father's house there are many man- sions, so there are vast diversities in the forms of character He is preparing to inhabit them. However true it maybe that all alike have sinned, it is far from true that, all have sinned alike. There are persons, though they may be rare and highly exceptional, in whom the atmosphere of purity has not been dimmed, the forces of temptation are coin])aratively weak, and at the same time the sense of duly is vigorous and lively. Hence the temper which trusts God and loves Him as a Father is not thwarted in its exercise by habitual perversity, nor associated with so crushing a sense of the sinfulness that debars us from ap]troach to Him, or of the need of a Saviour, and a Sacrifice, and of the gift and guidance of the Holy Spirit 56 LIFE OF THK PRIXCE CONSORT working in us that we may have a good will, and with us when we have that good will. Persons such as these, ever active in human duty, need not be indifferent about religion ; on the contrary, they may be strongly religious. They may, as the Prince did, condemn coldness, and com- mend fervour.* They may " give their heart to the Purifier, their will to the Will that governs the universe;" and yet they may but feebly and partially appreciate parts of Christian doctrine ; nay, they may even, like Charles Lamb, the writer of these beautiful and powerful words, hold themselves apart from its central propositions. So it may come about that the comparative purity of a man's nature, the milder form of the deterioration he inherits, the fearless cheerfulness with which he seems to stand and walk in the light of God's presence, may impair his estimate of the warmer, more inward, and more deeply s]nritual parts of Christianity. Further, they may alto- gether prevent him from appreciating the Gospel on its severer side. He may generously give credit to others for dispositions corresponding with his own : and may not fully perceive the -necessity, on their behalf, of that law which is made, not for the righteous, but for the ungodly and the profane, of those threatenings and prohibitions wherewith the Gospel seeks to arrest reckless or depraved spirits in their headlong course, to constrain them to come in, and to rescue them as brands from the burning. In a word, ho may unduly generalise the facts of his own mental and moral constitution. 39. We do not admit that the dissent, or only faint or partial adhesion, of these exceptional human beings to the ancient creed of the Christian Church detracts from ♦ Speeches, pp. 132, 134. COCEX OF aiKKN vrCTOBIA. 57 its just authority ; but we should bo slow to charge the iiiaik"|uacy of their doctrinal concci)tions upon moral defect, or to deny the truth, force, and value of the heart- service which they may and do render, and render with affectionate humility, to their Father and their God. The Christian dogma is the ordained means of generating and sustaining the religious life ; but the Almighty is not tied to the paths He marks out for His servants, and we are nowhere authorised to say there can be no religious life except as the direct product of the Christian dogma in its entirety. 40. We might, if space permitted, exhibit largely another class of cases, where the receptiou of the Gospel seems to be determined to a particular and by no means normal form of conditions of personal character. There is a highly popular kind of Christian teaching, which dwells more or less congenially within the precincts of various communions, and of which it is the distinguishing charac- teristic, that while it retains and presents, with some crudity, the doctrine of the Fall, an Atonement by sub- stitution, the intensity of sin, and the final condemnation of the wicked, it reduces the method of deliverance to a formula of extreme simplicity. A ccu'tain reception of Christ, not easy to describe psychologically, is held to bo the only door to spiritual life. It conveys a salvation in itself immediate and complete ; and not only entails the obligation, but supplies the unfailing motive for walking in the way of Christian obedience towards moral perfection. Parity of mind and natural balance of character supplied lis, in the case formerly presented, with the key to the problem ; whereas the doctrinal scheme now before us rather commends itself to those who are suddenly awakened to a sense of gross neglect or transgression, and who ai*e 58 LIFE OF THE PEINCE CONSORT in this sense at least ehikllike, that the elements of theii characters are few and simple, and their minds unused to what is profound,, or delicate, or complex. A summary presentation and settlement, so to speak, of the religious account between God and the soul, is that which most accords with the general form of their mental habits. These two distinct modes of apprehending religion, so much contrasted, seem to have in common the important points that each may be sincere, and for the individual efficient, but that neither have the solidity necessary for continuous transmission : and the likelihood is, that a great share of the efficacy they possess is derived from that general atmosphere of Christianity in which we live, and much of which we may unconsciously and without moral choice (Trpoat'peo-ts) inhale. 41. We proceed to quote from the Speeches a passage addressed to a conference on education in 1857, which distinctly testifies not only to the earnest piety of the speaker, but to his clear and advised convictions : — " Our Heavenly Fatlier, in His boundless goodness, has made his creatures tiiiit they shnuld be hap])y, and His wisdom lias fitted His means to His ends, giving to all of them dilferent faculties and qualities, in using and developing which they fuUil their destiny, and, running their uniform course according to the prescription, they find that iiappiness which He lias intended for them. Man alone is born into tliia world with faculties far nobler than the other creatures, reflecting the image of Him who has willed that there sl;ould be beings on earth to know and worship Him, but endowed with the power of self-determination. Having reason given him for his guide, he can develop his faculties, place himself in harmony with his Divine prototype, and attain that haiii)ines3 which is ofTcretl to him on earth, to be compktrd hercalter in entire union with Him through the mercy of Chiist. But he can also have tlie.se faculties unimproved, nnd mi>s his mission on earth. He will then aink to tlie level of the lower animals, foifeit COUItT OF QTTEENVICTORIA. 59 hafipiiK ss, and scpnrate from his God, wlioin he did not know liow to lind." * There are men who are religious hy temperament, though sceptical in their intellect. Such was not the case of the Prince. He had been trained in Germany under influences rather of the rationalising than the orthodox party, but his religion had a firm ground, as must be manifest from this passage, in his mind not less than in his heart. 42. It will, moreover, as we think, be observed with pleasure that as years rolled on, though the flower of life was still in full blow, an increasing warmth of tone pervaded the Prince's sentiments in this great matter. On an occasion secular enough for such as are disposed so to take it, namely, that of presenting colours in 1859 to a battalion of his regiment, he breaks forth copiously into terms of truly Christian and paternal affection : — "May God's best blessing attend you, shield you from danger, support you under difficultie.s, cheer you under privations, grant you nioiieration in success, contentment under discipline, liumdity and gratitude towards Him in prosperity." * 43. More than thirteen years have now passed since the Prince was gathered to his fathers : and his character belongs to history. To such a man it is no compliment to treat of him in a strain merely courtly and eulogistic. He will shine most in the colours which the truth supplies : he would have been the first to reject adula- tion, and to disapprove excess. It is Init the naked and cold truth, that we possessed in hiin a treasure; that he rais(>d the inlluence and usefulness of our highest institu- tion to its highest point ; and that society has suffered * Speeches, p. 191. 60 LIFE OF TEE PRINCE CONSOUT heavily from the slackening of the beneficial action to which he so powerfully contributed. At Windsor, the noblest and most complete of all the abodes of European Eoyalty, in the beautiful chapel built by Henry VII. eastward from St. George's, and after- wards given to AVolsey, lies the effigy of the Prince, which Avill probably stand with the public and with posterity as, in a proper and especial sense, his monument. The outlay by her Majesty upon the interior of the building in the endeavour to bring it up to the standard of her love, must have been very large ; and the result is that, without losing its solemnity, it has attained exceed- ing splendour. Roof and floor, walls and windows, altar and sedilia, ancestral, royal, sacred effigies, marbles sculp- tured and inlaid in colour, all bear the stamp of a more than queenly magnificence; and the criticism which a very few points might invite with reference to the details of execution may be omitted, lest it should jar with the conspicuous and noble harmony of the work as a whole. The pure white marble figure of the Prince reposing on his altar-tomb, amidst all these glories, vividly presents the image of his stainless character and life, persistently exhi])itcd through all the sumptuous fascination and array of brilliancy which lay along his earthly path. 44. Over the tomb of such a man many tears might fall, but not one could be a tear of bitterness. These examples of rare intel]i.";cnces, yet more rarely cultivated, witli tlieir great duties greatly done, are not lights kindled for a moment, in order then to be quenched in the blackness of darkness. While they pass elsewhere to attain their consummation, they live on here in their good deeds, in their v(>iierated memories, in their fruitful example. As even u fine figure may be eclipsed by a COURT OF QUEEX VICTORIA. 61 gorgeous costume, so during life tlie splendid accompani- ments of a Prince Consort's position may for the common eye thro-'V the qualities of his mind and character, his true humanity, into shade. These hindrances to effectual perception are now removed ; and Ave can see, like the forms of a Greek statue, sovei'ely pure in their hath of southern light, all his extraordinary gifts and virtues; his manly force tempered with gentleness, playfulness, and love ; his intense devotion to duty ; his pursuit of the practical, Avith an unfailing thought of the ideal ; his combined allegiance to beauty and to truth ; the elevation of his aims, with his painstaking care and thrift of time, and methodising of life, so as to waste no particle of his appliances and powers. His exact place in the hierarchy of bygone excellence it is not for us to determine ; but none can doubt that it is a privilege which, in the revolu- tions of the years, but rarely returns, to find such graces and such gifts of mind, heart, character, and person united in one and the same individual, and set so steadily and firmly, upon a pedestal of such giddy height, for the instx' action and admiration of mankind. m. LIFE OF THE PRIXCE CONSORT. Vol. II. London, 1876.* 1. The production of a Biography in a scries of single Volumes Avould not commonly be a safe experiment on the appetite or patience of the public. But, in the pre- sent instance, reliance may be placed upon an interest sustained and stimulated by the reason of the case. The whole career of the Prince Consort, and the free exhibi- tion of the life of the Sovereign and the surroundings of the Throne, which the work has involved, form a picture which must bo interesting, so long as Britons conceive their Monarchy to be a valuable possession ; and must be edifying, so long as they are capable of deriving benefit from the contemplation of virtue thorouglily " breathed " with activity, guided by intelligence, and uplifted into el(;vated station as a mark for every eye. Mr. Martin's handiwork is well known to the world. It neither culls for criticism, nor stands in need of commendation by way of advertisement. In producing all that can give interest to his subject, free scope seems to have been judiciously allowed him. In one respect only, so far as we can judge, he has been rather heavily weighted in running * Pulilishoil in tlie Church of England QuaHerlij Eetiev: for January 1877. Republished at Leijizig, 1877. 64 LIFE OF THE PRINCE CONSORT. his race. Perliaps with a view to gratifying the taste of J{oyal and ex-Royal readers from Germany, he has found it needful to carry his readers somewhat freely into the labyrinthe details of German politics during the years 1848-50, when the empire was in embryo, and when the attitudes of the various powers and influences at work were imperfectly developed, and for the most part neither dignified nor becoming. The Prince took an active, almost an officious, but a thoroughly patriotic, interest in them ; and if he did not find a clew to guide him through the windings, or disclose any signal gift of political prophecy in what he wrote, he, at least, set a good example in his disposition to cast aside the incum- brances of dynastic prejudice, and to hold language which had justice and liberality for its rule. It may seem singular, but we take it to be the fact, that he applies a stronger and sharper insight to the Eastern question, as it emerged in 1853, than to the problems offered to his notice by the land of his birth. 2. The main interest, however, of this Biography, which is, we believe, to secure for it a place in our permanent literature, will not, perhaps be found to He so much in the treatment of this or that current question of its time, as in the figure and character of the man, as a man, who is its subject; in the light it throws upon the difficult question of his position as a Prince Consort, and in the conti-iljution it supplies towards defining tluit important position for the future as well as for the past. 3. The excellence of the Prince's character has become a commonplace, almost a by- word, among us. It is easy to run round the circle of his virtues ; diffitult to find a point at which the line is not continuous. He was with- out doubt eminently happy in the persons who principally LIFE OF THE PEINCE CONSOET, C5 contributed from without to develop his capacities, and determine his mental and moral, as well as his exterior, life ; namely, in his uncle, his tutor, and his Wife. 13ut how completely did the material answer to every touch that it received ; how full, round, and complete it was, as a sculpture ; how perseveringly and accurately did the Prince apply a standing genial conception of duty and action to the rapid stream, it might be said, the torrent,* of the daily details of life ; how much of interest — amidst incessant action, and without the tranquillity necessary for systematic thought — he presents to the class who have no taste for mere action, to the philosophic student ; how nearly the life approximates to an ideal ; how it seems to l;iy the foundations for a class and succession of men, if only men could be found good enough, and large enough, to l)uild themselves upon it. Mr. Martin has been im- pugned by an acute writer* for the uniformity of hia laudatory tones. Now, doubtless, it would be too much to expect a drastic criticism of the Prince's intellect in a work produced under the auspices of an adoring affection ; l)ut an honest impartiality prompts us to ask whether in the ethical pictxu'e here presented to us there really is a single trait that calls for censure. If there is anything in the picture of the Prince that directly ii-ritates the ci'itical faculty, is it not "That fine air; That pure severity of perfect light,"t I which was insipid to Queen Guinevere in the heyday of her blood, but to which she did homage when the equili- brium of her nature was restored ? 4. There can be little doubt that the Prince will be • Nonconformiit, Dec, 9, 1876. f Tennj-son's ' Guinevere.' I. F 66 LIFE OF THE rilllSrCE COKSORT. remembered in future generations with something quite different from that formal and titular remembrance, -which belongs to his rank in its relation to the Throne, and which is accorded (for example) to Prince George of Denmark. There has not yet been time to determine his exact place among the " inheritors of renown," fulfilled or unfulfilled.* The silly importunity which has urged Pope Pius IX. to dub himself "The Great" was doubly wrong: wrong, as we think, in urging him to clutch at what he will never get: wrong, beyond all question, in requiring him to fabricate at a stroke a title which has not, and, from its nature, cannot have, yet inured : inasmuch as it can only be conferred by the general sense of an impartial, that is, a succeeding age.* For it is thus alone that the phrase acquires its dignity : securus judicat orhis terrarnm. Ma- nufactured by a contemporary clique, it is entitled to no more respect than the forged antiquities which are daily passed otf upon the ravenous appetite of collectors. All that we can venture in this case to propound is, that, with every fresh gush of light upon the Prince's personal his- tory, there is a corresponding growth in his claims to admiration and celebrity, and an intimation of his finally taking a higher rather than a lower place among the departed sons of fame. 5. At the same time, it would probably be too much to hope that tbe third Volume of Mr. Martin will raise the Prince above the second, as the second has, we think, raised him above the first. The period of the Great Exbibition of 1851, which entailed upon him arduous and constant labour, was ].robably the climax of his career. This narrative appears to establish his title to the honours * Sliellpy's'AJonais.' LIFE OF THE riUNCE CONSORT. 67 of its real origination.* Its nearest analognc in past history would appear to have been the Fi-auktbrt fair of the sixteenth century. The mischievous system of nar- rowing the usefulness of commerce for mankind by what was called Trotcction had not then been methodised, and the productions of diffei'ent coun4;ries, where adequate channels were open, flowed by a natural process to a com- mon centre. But great discoveries are commonly to be found in germ, either unobserved or imperfectly deve- loped, long before their publication, which marks the stage of maturity in their idea, and makes them part of the general property of mankind. So came the printing- press, so came the steam-engine ; and, in this sense, when on July 30, 1849, twenty-one months before the opening, tiie Prince propounded at Buckingham Palace his concep- tion of the Great Exhibition, as it might be, to four mem- bers of the Society of Arts, he established his title to the practical authorship of no small design. In it were comprised powerful agencies tending to promote the great fourfold benefit, of progress in the industrial arts, of increased abundance or diminished stint of the means of living among men, of pacific relations between countries founded on common pursuits, and of what may be termed fi'ee trade in general culture. 6. It was a great work of peace on earth : not of that merely diplomatic peace which is honeycombed with sus- picion, which bristles with the apparatus and establishments of war on a scale tar beyond what was formerly required for actual belligerence, and which is potentially war, though still only on the tiptoe of expectation for an actual outbreak. It was a more stable peace, found-jd on * Chap. XXXV. vol. ii. 223-5. V 2 68 LIFE OF THE PKINCE CONSOET. social and mental unison, which the Exhibition of 1851 truly, if circuitously, tended to consolidate. And if, in the quarter of a century which has since elapsed, counter influences have proved too strong for the more beneficial agencies, let us recollect that many of the wars which have since occurred have been in truth constructive wars, and have given to Europe the hope of a more firmly knit political organisation ; further that, even if this had not been so, the influences of theory and practice associated with the Great Exhibition would still have earned their title to stand along with most other good influences in the world, among things valuable but not sufiicient. 7. During the last decade, however, of his years, from 1852 to 1861, wars, as well as rumours of wars, became the engrossing topic of life and thought to many a mind, which, if governed by its own promptings, by the true direction and demand of its nature, would have battened only on the pastures of national union and concord. The Crimean "War, taken with its fore- and after-shadows, began early in 1853, and closed in 1856; it was followed by the Indian Mutiny, and this by the French war panic of 1858-60, which, more than any other cause, encouraged as it was by no small authorities, altered the disposition of the British people in a sense favourable to, and even exigent of, enlarged military and naval establishments. This, Ave think, was a great misfortune to the Prince, in regard both to the mental movement which required a congenial atmosphere and exercise, and to the eventual greatness which would have been its natural result. He was properly, and essentially, a man of peace. The natural attitude of his mind was not that of poh^mical action, but of tranquil, patient, and deliberate tliought. IIFE OF THE PRIXCE CONSORT. 69 It was as a social philosoplier and hero that he was qualified to excel, rather than as a political or military atlilete. It is true, indeed, that the searching fire of continual struggle educated those Royal persoiiages, whose destiny in other days or other lands has lain heyond the precincts of the Constitutional system. But it is the very pith ami essence of that system to remove from Sovereigns, and to lay upon their recog-niscd and official s(irvants, the heavier portions of that responsibility and strain, under wliich a governing will, lodged in a few human brains, or in one only, takes up into itself, and directs, while controlling, the collected force of an entire community. Doubtless even now Hoyalty — we speak of Constitutional Hoyalty — acts out in idea, with a certain reality, the contentions which it observes and superin- tends, and with which at particular points it may actually intermix ; but, as a rule, its share in them is an indirect and mediate share. Princes are rather moons than suns in the political firmament ; and the traufjiul atmosphere in which they dwell, while more favourable in some of its aspects to a reflective and impartial habit of mind, is not calculated to foster the strongest tissue, or develop the hardiest forms, of character. "NVliile the Peers of England are more remote than the Parliamentaiy Commoners from living contact with the great seething mass of a highly vitalised community, and while the popular House must, with all its faults, remain, so long as the Constitution keeps its balance, our highest school of statesmanship, so the Throne, though vexed more than enough with labours and with worries of its own, yet, in relation to the sea of political stiifes, remains sheltered within an inner and landlocked haven, and the mental habits which it tends 70 LIFE OP THE PRINCE CONSORT. to generate will be less masculine thougli more amiablo accordingly. S. If there is force in these remarks, they will apply scarcely more to a Constitutional Sovereign than to one who attained to such a degree of moral and mental identi- fication with the greatest of all Constitutional Soyereigiis as did the Prince Consort. They have also a peculiar and individual application to a mind the rich gifts of which were not wayward and unruly, but fitted themselves at every point into the mould sxipplied for them l)y his position, and became in consc(j^ucnce an admirable and typical example of what that position, genially appre- hended and employed, is calculated to produce. In this view, those who most highly estimate the Prince's work may well regret that the line of mental movement represented by the Great Exhibition came soou to be deflected towards a different region of human activity. In that region mankind at large is at once excited and morally enfeebled by rivalries and conflicts liardly ever in their outset generous, and marred from the beginning of the world by their tendency to degenerate, from their first intentions, in the direction of more violent and wide- sweeping passions, more greedy selfishness, and deadlier feuds. 9. A parallel maybe di-awn between the Prince Consort and Mr. Pitt, in regard to one striking characteristic of their respective careers. They were both men loving peace. Each of them began, very early in life, to hold a position of liigh command, and of profound importance to the public welfare, in the midst of pacific ideas, plans, and expectations. Each of them achieved a reputation of the highest order in connection with this line of thought and action. Upon each of them, and singularly enough upou LIFK OF THE rrjXCE CONSOET. 71 each of tlicm at the age of tliirty-threc, there fell what, but for the knowledge that in all mysteries of our life there lies hid hut a deeper and larger Providence, we might call an ugly trick of fortune ; an imperious change, not in the man, hut in external circumstances, -wliicli overrule the man, and which carry him, perforce, out of a work Avell beloved, and more than well begun, into a plac(! and function of opposite couditiuns, less congenial, and less adapted to favour the development of his chaiactcr by leading him up to the highest point of its capacity. Before 1853 England had only to look with sympathy upon the sufferings and disorders of the Continent, wliile she watched and made provision for her own internal condition. But from that day until the sad day of the Prince's death, slie was ever in actual struggle, or in anticipation of struggles deemed probable ; and this great change in the nature of the cares and occupations offered to the Prince, in the normal bill of fare, so to speak, made ready for him, was to him very much what the Revolu- tionary War was to Mr. Pitt. With a diiference indeed of degree, for the Prince was not over-weighted and absorbed as Mr. Pitt was from 1793 onwnrds, but with an identity of general outline, each of these changes broke up the perfect harmony that subsisted between the man and his occupation, and probably abstracted something from the ultimate claims of each to pre-eminent renown. 10. The Prince's life from day to day was, however, not a life fashioned by haphazard, but one determined by con- scientious premeditation. Wliat he said, he had usually written, what he did, he had projected. When an impor- tant subject presented itself, his tendency and practice was to throw his thoughts on it into shape, and to har- monise its practical bearings with some abstract principle. 72 LITE OF THE ritlNCE CONSORT. Though a short, it was a very full and systematic life. So regarding it, we may say that his marital relation to the Sovereign found a development outwards in three principal respects. First, that of assistance to the Queen in her public or political duties. Secondly, in the govern- ment of the Court and household. Thirdly, in a social activity addressed to the discovery of the wants of the community, and reaching far beyond the scope of Parlia- mentary interferences, as well as to making provision for those wants, by the force of lofty and intelligent example, and of moral authority. 11. The public mind had for the moment lost its balance at the particular juncture when, for the first time, the inter- vention of the Prince in public affairs became a subject of animadversion. It was at the beginning of 1854, during the crisis of expectation before the Crimean War, the calm that precedes the hurricane. A very short time, and a single day of explanations from Lord Aberdeen and Lord Russell, then the leaders of the two Houses of Parliament, sufficed to set right a matter which we now wonder that any should have had either the will or the power to set Avrong. It was a matter of course that the Queen's hus- band should be more or less her political adviser. It would have been nothing less than a violence done to nature if, with his great powers and congenial will, any limits had been placed upon the relations of confidence between the two, with respect to any public affairs what- soever. Had he been an inferior person, his interference would doubtless have been limited by his want of capacity. Eut he being, as he was, qualified to examine, cora])re- hend, and give counsel, the two minds were thrown into common stock, and worked as one. 12. We must go one step further. It does not seem LIFE OF THE PiaxCE CONSOET. 73 easy to limit the Sovereign's right of taking friendly counsel, by any absolute rule, to the case of a husband. If it is the Queen's duty to form a judgment upon important proposals submitted to lier by her Ministers, she has an indisputable right to the use of all instruments which -will enable her to discharge that duty Avith effect; subject always, and subject only, to the one vital condition that they do not disturb the relation, on which the whole niachineiy of the Constitution hinges, between those ]\linisters and the Queen. She cannot, thcTcfore, as a rule, legitimately consult in private on political matters Avith the party in ojiposition to the Government of the day ; but she will have copious public means, in common with the rest of the nation, for knowing their general views through Parliament and the Press ! She cannot consult at all, except in the strictest secrecy : for the doubts, the misgivings, the inquiries, which accompany all impartial delil)eration in the mind of a Sovereign as well as of a subject, and which would transpire in the course of promiscuous conversation, are not matters fit for exhibition to the world. The dignity of the Ci'own requires that it should never come into contact with the public, or with the Cal)inet, in mental dishabille ; and that the words of its wearer sliould be ripe, well considered, few. For like reasons, it is plain that the Sovereign cannot legitimately be in confidential communication with many minds. Xor, again, with the representatives of classes or professions as such, for their views are commonly narrow and self- centred, not freely swayed, as they ought to be, by the paramount interests of the wliole body politic. 13. We have before us, in these pages, a truly nonnal example of a personal councillor of the Queen, for ])ul)lio aif airs, in her Husband ; and another, hardly less normiJ, in 74 LIFE OF THE PHINCE GONSOKX. Stockmar. Botli of them observed all along the essential condition, without which their action would have been not only most perilous, but most mischievous. That is to say, they never affected or set up any separate province or authority of their own ; never aimed at standing as an opaque medium between the Sovereign and her Constitu- tional advisers. In their legitimate place, they took up their position behind the Queen ; but not, so to speak, behind the Throne. They assisted her in arriving at her conclusions ; but those conclusions, once adopted, were hers and hers alone. She, and she only, could be recog- nised by a Minister as speaking for the Monarch's office. The Prince, lofty as was his position, and excellent as was his capacity, vanished as it were from \'icw, and did not, and could not, carry, as towards them, a single ounce of substantive authority. If he conferred with Lord Palmerston on matters of delicacy, belonging to the rela- tion between the Sovereign and the Secretary of State, it could only be as the Queen's messenger, and no word spoken by him could be a final word. Let us revert to an illustration already used.* As the adjective gives colour to the substantive, so he might influence the mind of the Queen. But only through that mind, only by informing that supreme free-agency, could his influence legitimately act ; and this doctrine, we apprehend, is not only a doctrine wholesome in itself, but also indisputable, nay, wliat is more, vital to the true balance of the English Monarchy. On the other hand, as the Queen deals with the Caoiuet, just so the Cabinet deals with the Queen. The Sovereign is to know no more of any dift'ering views of dilfcreiit Ministers than they are to know of any col- * Sup. p. 33. LIFE OF TIIK riilKCE CONSOUT. l o lateral rc])ix'st']itativcs of the Munarcliicul oflice ; tliey are an unity belbre the Sovereign, and the Sovereign is an unity before them. All this, it will be observed, is not a description of matters of fact, but a setting forth of wliut the ])riucii)les of our Monarchy presui)pose ; it is a study from the closet, not the forum or the court; and it would ha\e been more convenient to use the masculine gender in speaking of an abstract occupant of the Tlirone, but for the fact that we have become so thoroughly disused to it under tlie experience of forty happy years. 14. Steady and sound, however, as would appear to luive been the application of these principles to practice, on the part of Baron Stockmar, and, in his higlier and more difficult position, of the Prince, we take leave to (lucstioii the theoretic representation* set forward by the one and accepted by the other ; as well as countersigned by the biographer, at a period of calm, very different from the political weatlier which prevailed at the moment of its production. This representatiun is conveyed in a long letter, dated January 5, 1854, and consisting of two parts. In the second and much the shorter of the two, it is held that the Prince " acts as the Queen's private secretary, and that all else is simply calumnious"; and the right of Her Majesty to the assistance implied under this modest name is justly vindicated (pp. 554-7). Put the first portion of the letter contains a Constitutional dissertation, Avhicli was in no manner required for tlio support of these rational propositions, and which is based, as we think, mainly upon misconception and confusion, such as we should not have expected from a man of tho Paron's long Pritish experience and acute perceptions. Vol. ii. pp. 5(5-7. 76 LIFE OP THE PKINCE OONSOET. His main propositions appear to be these : that again and again, since the Ecforni Act, Ministers have failed to sustain the prerogatives of the Crown; that the old Tories, who supported these prerogatives, Avere extinct, and that the existing Tories were (p. 546) " degenerate bastards"; that the Whigs and " politicians of the Aberdeen School" were conscious or unconscious republicans ; that the most jealous Liberalism could not object to " a right on the part of the King to be the permanent President of his Ministerial Council" (p. 547) ; that Premiers were apt to be swayed by party interests ; that no penalty for Minis- terial obliquities now remained but that of resignation : that this was insufficient to secure good conduct from the bad or the incapable ; that the Sovereign should take part at the deliberations of his Council ; that the centre of gravity had been shifted by the Act of 1832 from the House of Lords to the House of Commons ; that a well- merited popularity of the Sovereign was to support the House of Lords against the dangers of democracy, and his direct action in tlie Government to be a vis medicatrix natures (p. 551) for maintaining prerogative, and for supplying all defects by a judgment raised above party passions. Yet the right of the Crown is to be merely moral (p. 549) ; and in the face of it, Ministers would act, as to their [legislative ?] measures, with entire free- dom and independence ; but, as to policy and administra- tion, tlio Sovereign is primarily chai'ged witli a couti'ol over them, which he should exercise through the Premier (p. 549). 15. Thus the Earon. A congeries of propositions stranger in general result never, in our judgment, was amassed in ordiT to exjdain to the unlearned the more mysterious lessons embraced in the study of the British Monarchy. LIFE OF Til]': rillNCE CONSOKT. tl Taken singly, some of them are truisms ; some are qualifi- cations, -vrhich usefully restrain or neutralise the com- panion statements. Some also are misstatements of history ; others of fact. Eor example. The Parliamen- tary Constitution had its centre of graA'ity in the Ilouso of Commons, not in the House of Lords, before, as well as after, the Reform Act. The House of Lords, in fact, has resisted the will of the House of Commons since the Reform Act, more than it did before the passing of that great statute. The gravest change, then, effected in re- gard to the House of Lords, was this : that, under the old system, the Peers had in their own hands the virtual appointment of a large section of the House of Commons ; whereas now, although their influence in elections is still great, it is exercised through and by what is supposed to be, and in general is, a popular and voluntary vote. The Reform controversy was admirably argued on both sides ; not perhaps worse on the side of the op]ioncnts of Refoz'm; some of whom, following up a subtle disquisition of philosophical polities, set out in a previous number of the Edinburgh Review, pointed out unanswerably that singular economy, by which the old close boroughs had cusliioncd off, as it were, the conflicts between the two Houses ; and then predicted with truth, though likewise with exagger- ation, that when once the House of Lords ceased to assert and express itself by this peculiar method within the House of Commons, it would be driven upon the alternative of more frequently pronouncing an adverse judgment. 16. Again, Baron Stockmar teaches that the prerogatives of the Crown had been abandoned by successive Ministries, and had no longer any party ready to defend them. It "\\ oiild be much nearer the truth to say that there was no ; 8 LIFE OF THE PHINCE CONSOET. longer any party disposed to assail them. But what means the Earon hy "the prerogatives of the Crown"? Are they prerogatives as against the Ministers? or pre- rogatives as against the Parliament, or the popiilar hranch of it ? As against the Ministers, the Sovereign's pre- rogatives hefore the Reform Act were : firstly, that of appointing and dismissing them ; secondly, that of ex- ercising an influence over their deliberations, which was, as the Baron says, in one of his qualifying passages, in the nature of a moral right or influence. The first of these is virtually a right of appeal from the Cabinet to the Parliament, or the nation, or both : and no such con- spiciious instance of its exercise can be cited from our pre-lleform history as was supplied by William IV. after the lleform Act, in the month of November 1834, Avitli no sort of reason and (it is true) without success, but also without any strain to the Constitution, or any penalty other than the disagreeable sensation of being defeated, and of having greatly strengthened and reinvigorated by recoil the fortunes of the party * on whom it had been meant to inflict an overthrow. As regards the prerogative or power, which gives the Monarch an undoul)ted locus standi in all the deliberations of a Government, it remains as it was ; and it is important or otherwise, exactly in proportion to the ability, the character, the experience, and, above all, the attention, which the Sovereign of the day brings to bear upon it. 17. If there be differences, they are not at all the differences which Baron Stockmar indicates. It is, indeed, certain that the Monardi has to deal Avith the popular power in a proximate instead of a remote position : but sc; Sup. p. 38, inf. p. 325. LIFE OF THE rrjNCE COXSOET. 79 have the Ministers. It is likewise true, that there was once a party of King's friends (as well as a large number of tlie nominees of Peers) within the House of Commons, by means of whom he could operate to a certain extent, in an unavowed manner, upon or against his Ministers. But of this party we lose all trace after the reign of George III. ; so that it supplies no standing ground for the Earon. It is, perhaps, also true that the subordination in the last resort of the lloyal to the national will, when expressed through the Constitutional organs, whicli was fact before the Reform Eill, has been more patent and admitted fact since that measure became law. The dying throes of independent Kingship gave for a moment a real l)ang to the self-centred mind of George lY., and even impaited a certain interest to his personality, when after many struggles he consented or gave way to the Bill for lloinan Catholic Emancipation in 1829, 18. Baron Stoekmar, however, appears to confuse the prerogatives of the Crown, which are really represented by Ministerial action in the face of the Legislature, with the personal rights of the Sovereign in the face of and as towards his or her Ministers. And here the (piostion must be cleared by another distinction, of which, in this rather confused and very disappointed letter, he takes no notice : the distinction between the statutory powers of the Crown and those immemorial and inhc^rent powers, •which have no written warrant, which form the real and genuine prerogative, and which also form a great oral tradition of the Constitution : resembling in their unwritten character what is called the privilege of Parlia- ment, but differing from it in that tbey are perfectly well defined. In the mouth of Baron Stockmar, tlie plural word Prerogatives appears to include both classes of 80 LIFE or THE PraNCE CONSOET. these powers, which only ignorance can confuse, though sometimes, even in high official places, ignorance does effectually confuse them. Accepting the phi'ase for the moment, we ask which of these statutory prerogatives have, since the E,eform Act, been forfeited or impaired through the timidity of the Governments down to 1854, or, we might perhaps add, of succeeding Governments ? The question is most important, for, by dint of the prerogative proper, and of these statutory powers, the Ministers, sustained as they are by the Sovereign behind them, form a great part, not only of the executive or deputed, but of the ultimate and supreme governing foi'ce in tliis country. 19. In order to test the doctrine of Baron Stockmar, lot us enumerate some examples of the vigour of the powers of the Crown. We have already spoken of the great prerogative of dismissal of Ministers as it was illus- trated in 1834. Surely the prerogative of appointment of Bishops sufficiently proved its animation, against the remonstrance of the Primates and a body of their Suffragans, in the case of Dr. Hampden. The prero- gative of peace and war did the same in 1857, when Lord Palmcrston carried on, at the charge of the country, a war in China, which the representatives o£ the people, the stewards of the public purse, had condemned. It was only upon the general election to which he had recourse that he received the sanction of the country for what he had done. And tlic prerogative of dissolution must have been in a healthy state in 1852 to enable a Government, supported only by a minority, to perform tlie work of the session, and to carry the Supplies, before asking the judgment of the constituencies on its title to exist. LIFE OF THE PIUNCE CONSORT. 81 20. There is, indeed, but one preroj^ativc of the Crown, so far as we are able to read the Constitutional history of tlie country, or rather but one of any groat sif^nificance, which has suffered of late years. It is the initiative iu proposing grants of public money. This prerogative, if such it is to be called, has been seriously and increasingly infringed, to the great detnraent of the nation. And tliis by a double process. The House of Commons was very rarely disposed, before the Reform Act, to press upon the Administration of the day new plans or proposals involv- ing public outlay. After the lleform Act, there was manifested a vicious tendency to multiply these instances, -which, however, produced no very serious consequences for the first twenty or twenty-five years, but which has become a great public mischief, since the increasing wealth of the most active and influential classes of the country has brought about a greater and wider indifl'er- ence to economy in the public expenditure. Local claims, and the interests of classes and individuals, are now relentlessly and constantly pressed from private and irre- sponsible quarters ; and though the House of Commons still maintains the rule that money shall not be voted except on the proposal of the Crown, yet it permits itself to be pledged by Addresses, Resolutions, and even the language of Eills and Acts, to outlay in many forms, and these pledges it becomes morally compulsory on Govern- ments in their turn to redeem. 21. But, in addition to the activity of private, pro- fessional, and local greed, and the possible cowardice of Ministers in resistance, it must be noted that the House of Lords has done very great mischief in this respect, by voting into Bills the establishment of officers and appoint- ment of salaries, and sending these Bills to the Commona I. o 82 LITE OF THE TEIXCE CONSORT. •with all such portions printed in italics, a conventional expedient adopted in order to show that they are not pre- sented as parts of the Bill, but only as indications of the view or wish of the House of Lords ; in matters, however, in which they have as a body no more right or title to any view or wish at all, than the House of Commons has or had to send in italics, or by any subterfuge, to the Lords a direction as to the judgments to be given in appeals. Here, then, we have a real case in which a power of the Crown has been greatly and mischievously weakened. But this is a power which probably forms no part of prerogative properly so called. "VVe apprehend that it rests upon no statute, but only on a wise and self-denying rule of the House of Commons itself. The Crown, as such, has no immediate intez'est in it whatever ; and there is not the smallest reason to suppose that Baron Stockmar knew to what solid truth in this one respect he was giving utterance, or that he in any way cared about the matter. 22. There is, indeed, one genuine Crown right which has been somewhat disparaged of late years ; and that is its title to the Crown Lands. By degrees, it became the custom for the Sovereign, on accession, to surrender the life-interest in those properties to the State, in return for a life-income called the Civil List. But this transaction in no way affected the legal right of the next heir to resume the lands on the expiry of the aiTangemcnt. It is undeniable that members of Oppositions, and the blamable connivances of party, have of late years, in vaiious instances, obtained by pressure from the Governments of the day ari'angemcnts Avhich touch the reversionary iuterost. The qu(>stion is too oom])lex and m;my-sidcd for exposition here : but it may be said with truth, first, LIFE OF TnF> PRINCK CONSORT. 83 that the state has dealt liberally as a tenant inulcr a life- Iciise with the estates given to its control ; and, secondly, that the suhjcct is in a Constitutional -view a small one. Neither shall we here investigate the curious doctrine — in one sense novel, and in another obsolete — of those who contend that the Sovereign has a peculiar relation to the AjTuy, involving some undefined power apart or different from its general relation to the executive portion of the business of government. We shall only observe that, in this country, the standing Army is itself extra-Constitu- tional, and that its entire dependence upon Parliament has been secured, not as in the case of the Civil Services by a single provision, that of requiring annual votes for its support ; but also by the further precaution of granting only by annual Mutiny Acts those powers for enforcing discipline which are necessary for its manage- ment. Not even a colourable plea can be set up for an exceptional power or prerogative in respect to the Anuy. 23. As to the occasion of Baron Stockmar's letter to the Prince, the truth seems to have been this : A most unreasonable and superficial clamour had been raised against the intervention of the Prince as a counsellor, an adviser, in the performance of the Queen's public duties : a clamour due to the peculiar susce})tibilities of his time, the aberration of a portion of the press, and the very undue disposition of what is questionably called "good society " to canvass in an ill-natured manner the character and position of one who did not stoop to flatter its many vulgar fancies, and whose strictly ordered life was a continual though silent rebuke to the luxurious licence that large portions of it love and habitually indulge in. Instead of dealing with this practical matter in a practical manner, Bai'on Stockmar was unhappily tempted to stray Q 2 84 LIFE OF THE TEIKCE CONSOET. iuto the flowery fields of theory. S^avib sui floridi sentier.'^ His Constitutional knowledge, apart from liis working common-sense, which he did not think good enough for so high an occasion, was, after all, only an English top-dressing on a German soil : and hence he has given a perfectly honest hut a most misleading exposition of a great subject, highly needful to be rightly appre- hended everywhere, and of course most of all in Courts. 24. One of his propositions is that the King, if a clever man — for so (p. 549) it seems to be limited, and we do not envy those who would have to pronounce the decision "Ay" or "No" upon the point, nor indeed do we know who they are — shall " make use of these qualities at the deliberations of his Council." Now this, to speak with a rustic plainness, is simply preposterous. We take first the ground, which would be called the lowest. If the Sovereign is to attend the Cabinet, he must, like other Cabinet Ministers, adapt his life to its arrangements, spend most of the year in London, and when in the country be always ready to return to it at a moment's notice. Perhaps it may be thought that, as would be only seemly, Cabinets could, as a rule, be postponed to suit the con- venience of so august a personage. It would be almost as easy to postpone the rising of the sun. But let us suppose him there, not on his throne, but in his arm- chair. He must surely preside ; and in that case wliat becomes of the First Minister ? It is a curious, but little observed, fact of our history, that the ofiice of First Minister only seems to have obtained regular recognition as the idea of personal government by the action of the King faded and became invisible. So late as in the final • Manzoni, ' CiiKjue JIaggio.' LIFE OF THE PHINCE CONSORT. 85 attacks upon Sir Robert Walpole, it was one of tlie charges against him that he had assumed the functions of First Minister. The presence of the King at the Cabinet either means personal government — that is to say, the reservation to hira of all final decisions which he may think fit to appropriate — or else the forfeiture of dignity by his entering upon equal terms into the arena of general, searching, and sometimes warm discussion ; nay, and even of voting, too, and of being outvoted, for in Cabinets, and even in the Cabinets reputed best, impoi-t- ant questions have sometimes been found to admit of no other form of decision. 25. Now such is the mass, detail, and technical diffi- culty of public affairs in this great Empire, that it would be an absolute cruelty to the Sovereign to put him through these agonies; for it is no trifiing work and pain to hammer into form the measures and decisions which are, when promulgated, to endure the myriad-minded, myriad- pointed criticism of the Parliament, the press, and the country. At present, the Sovereign is brought into contact only with the net results of previous inquiry and deliberation, conducted by other and, as the Constitution presumes, by select men. The Baron's proposal is to immerse him in the crude mass of preliminary pleas and statements, to bring him face to face with every half- formed Anew, to compel him to deal with each plus and minus known and unknown, quantity in and by itself, instead of submitting to him only the ascertained sum of the equations. The few remarks now offered are far indeed from exhibiting exhaustively the huge demerits of this unwise proposal ; but they may serve to prove or indicate that either, while intolerably cumulating labour, it must Borely impair dignity and authority ; or, if it aims at 86 LIFE OF THE FEINCE COIS'SOET. preserving these, the end can only be gained by making the King the umpire and final arbiter of deliberations, to "which he listens only for the assistance of his own judg- ment. That is, they not simply alter, but overturn, the Constitution, by making a personal will supreme over the ascertained representative will of the nation. 26. If, however, the ofiice of the First Minister would have suffered by the last-named proposal, it seems that compensation was to be given him at the expense of his col- leagues. We shall not record any dissent from the general view of the remarkable controversy between the Crown, or Court, and Lord Palmerston ; which is to the eifect that, in the main, the Sovereign was right in demanding time and opportimity, of course with a due reserve for the exigencies of urgent business, for a real, and not merely a perfunctory, consideration of draft despatches. But with this there seems to have been combined a demand that the drafts of the Foreign Minister should be submitted to the SovcreigTi only through the head of the Government. It is laid down (p. 300) tliat the First jMinistcr, as well as the Foreign Secretary, is bound to advise the Crown on questions of Foreign policy; and, we are told, it was accordingly demanded (p. 302) — " Thfit the despatches submitted for her approval must therefore pass Ihrough tlie hands of Tjord Jnhn RusscH, who, if he slumlil think tliey required material change, should accompany tliem with a statLment of his reasons." 27. It is unquestionable that the Prime Minister, who is entitled to interfere with, and in a well-organised Cabinet is constantly invoked by, every Department, has a special concern in Foreign affairs. lie will, therefore, have some- thing to say upon the drafts prepared b}' his colleague* IIFE OF TEE PEmCE CONSOET. 87 But tliis, according to the soimd law of established prac- tice, he will say to his colleague ; and the draft, as it goes to the Sovereign, will express their united view. Instead of this, the proposal seems to have been that the di'afts prepared by the Foreign Minister should be discussed and settled between the Prime Minister and the Sovereign. Now almost any system nlay be made workable by con- siderate and tender handling ; but the method now before us, issuing as a hard abstraction, would justly be said to degrade an office of a dignity and weight second to none after that of the Head of the Government. The transmis- sion through the First Minister seems indeed to have been agreed to, wrongly as we think, by Lord Palmcrston (p. 309) ; and Stockmar in his ^[cmurandum apparently extends this system to all the Ministers, for he says that the control of the Sovereign would be "exercised most safely for the rest of them through the Premier." Tims tlie Premier would stand between them and the Sovereign. The Baron failed to perceive that this involves a funda- mental change in their position : their relations to the Crown become mediate instead of immediate ; they are no longer the confidential servants of Her Majesty ; he is the sole confidential servant, they are the head clerks : he is in the closet, they stand in the hall without. 28. To some readers these may appear to be mere subtle- ties. They certainly escaped eyes of great acuteness when those of the Prince Consort, and of Bai'on Stockmar, passed over them. But eveiy trade has its secrets. The baker and the brewer, the carpenter and the mason, all the fraternity of handicraft and production, have, where they understand tlieir business, certain nice minutioi of action, neither in- telligible to nor seen by the observer from without, but upon which niceties the whole efficiency of their work, 88 LIPE OF THE PEIXCE COJfSOKT. and the just balances of its parts, depend. There is no- where a more subtle machinery than that of the British Cabinet. It has no laws. It has no records. Of the few who pass witliin the magic circle, and belong to it, many never examine the mechanism which thoy help to work. Only the most vague conceptions respecting its structure and operations are afloat in the public mind. These things may be pretty safely asserted : that it is not a thing made to order, but a growth ; and that no subject of equal importance has been so little studied. We need not wonder if even to the most intelligent foreigner, who gets it up as a lesson from a school-book, it is an unsolved riddle. "VVe may be thankful that the mistaken reasouiugs of Baron Stockmar never baffled his good sense in practical advice, and that his balloon, even after careering wildly in the fields of air, always managed, when about alighting on the earth, to find its way home. 29. We will now turn to another chapter, where Mr, Martin deals with the Papal Aggression, and with the thoughts which the controversy at that time stirred in the mind of the Prince. He went to work, as his manner was, to "analyse" (p. 341) the crisis, in its Anglican rather than in its Eomeward aspect, with philosophical assiduity ; and he laid down the principles which he conceived to indicate the true path towards a remedy. The evil he conceived to be the introduction of Eomish doctrines and practices by the Clergy against the will of their congregations, under the assumption of a sole autlio- rity. And the cure he found in three propositions, thus expressed (p. 343) : — " Tliat the Lnity have an equal share of authority in the Church with the Clergy, LIFE OF TnE PRINCE COXSOKT, 89 " That no altoration in the form of Divine Service shall there- fore be made without the formal consent of the Laity. " For any interpretation given of Articles of Faith without their concurrence." From these, he thought, ■woulcl spring a " whole living Church constitution," in government and doctrine. 30. Of these propositions we put aside the first, not only because it is expressed without historical or theological precision, but also and mainly because it is an abstraction. Nor need we dwell upon the third, because, after another quarter of a century's experience, it has not been thoi;ght necessary, either by Laity or Clergy, to call for any new interpretation of xVrticles of Faith. But the second touches a matter Avhicli has invited legislative handling — namely, " the form of Divine Service." And the readers of Mr. Mai'tin will at once be struck with the glaring fact, that the basis for legislation Avhich was suggested by the Prince is totally diifercnt from that which was accepted by Parliament on the recommendation of the Archbishops and the Earl of Peaconsfield. Nor is the difference of a speculative character ; the lines on which the two work out their results are lines which cut across one another. In making good this proposition, we shall assume, of course — but it is a very large and generous assumption — that the Act will be both impartially and learnedly worked by the tribunals. So regarding it, we observe that the very rule which the Prince sets up, the Archbishops and the Prime Minister have induced Parliament to trample under foot. The rule of the Prince is that existing prac- tice is so far to be presumed right practice that it shall not be altered without consent of Laity and Clergy. The basis of the Act is that existing practice, however esta- blished by length of time, and however acceptable both 90 LIFE OF THE PEIJS^CE CONSOET. to Laity and Clergy, may at any time be challenged by three parishioners, who may never have even seen the inside of the church as "worshippers, and, unless the will of the Bishop intercept the process, is to be overset if it he inconsistent with the judicial, that is the literal, mean- ing of the words of a statute passed in 1661. Further, it is now the presumable duty, imposed by law upon the Clergy, of themselves to alter their practice, even against their own inclinations and those of the congregation, where it is not in conformity with the exact prescriptions of that statute in any one of the myriad details which it comprises. 31. It is true that, where a trial is demanded, the Bishop may stop it. AVe do not doiibt that this power, without which the Act would have been even far worse than it is, will be rationally and prudently exer- cised by nearly all the Bishops. But the difficulty of so using it will, to the most honest and enlightened mind, be very great : in one or two instances, which it would be invidious to name, we can hardly hope that it will be considerately employed ; and if but one Bishop out of twenty-eight or thirty be suitable to their purpose, the wire-pullers at the centre will put up in that diocese their three puppet-parishioners, and seek so to rule the whole country. The whole spirit and tendency of the Act go to narrow discretion ; to curtail freedom enjoyed for generations with satisfaction to all ; and to tighten practice according to a rule adopted more than two cen- turies ago, and to such intei-pretations of that rule as may bo pronounced by judges, nearly the whole of whom are not only ignorant of ecclesiastical history and law, but apparently as unaware as babes tliat such ignorance is either a disqualification, or even a disadvantage, I'or the exercise of their office. But this tendency and spirit of IIFE O? TnE PItlNCE CONSOET. 91 the Act is aiul has Leon felt to be so intolerable, that it has been (iixaliticd by the iuti'rpolation of an arbitrary- power, which may extin^niish the Act in Diocese A, give it absolute and unrestricted sway in Diocese B, and a mode of operation adjusted to as many points between these extremes in Dioceses from C to Z. 32. Now the Prince's plan sets out upon another line of movement. Not denying the authoi'ity of the law, nor impeding its ultimate enforcement, it introduced ct)llaterally into our system a new sanction — namely, a sanction for things established by usage. They Avere not to be altered ■without consent of Laity and Clergy. This was his simple project of change. "Where that consent was obtained, and the desii-e for a change established, still they could only be altered in the direction of conformity with the law, which remained apj)lieable in all its rigour, and withoiit any spurious triad of parishioners or any inter- vention of an arbitrary veto, to unestablishcd novelties. We have surely here a very notable competition between the plans of the Archbishops and of the Prince. " Look here upon tliis picture — and on this." The Prince was ever regarded with some jealousy and apprehension by Churchmen : yet some of them may be tempted to wish not only that his most valuable life had been largely prolonged, but that he had been Primate of all England in 1874. We should not then have been trembling at this time in fearful anxiety to learn whether a great and historic Church, rich in work and blessing, rich in traditions, and richer still in promise, is or is not to be the victim of the follies committed in 1874.* * It is needful to correct an error into which Mr. Martin has fallen, not unnaturally, in a matter lying beside the main scope of his task. 92 LIFE OF THE PUINCE CONSOET. 33. It was to be expected that one wliose life was so steadily held under the control of conscience should deeply feel the responsibilities attending the education of the Eoyal childi'en. In no station of life is there such a com- mand, or such a fi^ee application, of all the appliances of instruction. The obstacles which it places in the way of profound and solid learning are indeed insurmountable. Tliis disability is perhaps compensated by the tendency of the station itself to confer a large amount of general infor- mation, and of social training. Our young Princes and Princesses have grown up under a sense of social respon- sibility far heavier than that which is felt by, or impressed upon, children born and reared at the degree of elevation next to theirs. In a religious point of view, however, their dangers are immense : and they are greatly aggra- vated by the fact that, after the earliest periods of life are passed, and anything like manhood is attained, they do not enjoy the benefit of that invaluable check upon thought and conduct which is afforded by the free com- munication and mutual correction of equals. They have He says in p. 338 that after the Papal Brief " the country was put upon the alert, and the progress of proselytism stayed." Chronolo- gically, this is not so. It was shortly after the Papal Brief that the great rush of secessions took place. Then it was tliat Cardinal Alanning carried into the Roman Church those peculiar and very remarkaide powers of government to which she at least has not refused a sphere. Then departed from us Mr. James Hope Scott, Q.C. ; a man who may, with little exaggeration, be called the (lower of his generation. With and after them went a host of others. It was eminently the time of secessions. It may be dillicult to say whether the Pa])al Brief seriously acted one way or the othei*. For it was very closely followed by the Judgment in the Gorham case, and this may in all likelihood have been the principal cause of a blast whii-h swept away, to their own great detriment as well as ours, a large por- tion of our most learned, select, and devoted clergy. LIFE OF THE TKINCE CONSOET. 93 no equals : the cases in whicli a friend can be strong enough and bold enough to tell them the whole truth about tlieniselves are of necessity exceptional. It is much if, as in England, tlie air of Courts is not tainted with actual falsehood. The free circulation of truth it hardly can permit : and the central personages in them are hereby deprived in a great degree of one of the readiest and most effective helps for their salvation, while, at the same time, they are set up as a mark to attract all the wiles of the designing and the vale. 34. It is well known, to the infinite honour of Her Majesty and of the Prince, how, especially in the con- spicuous instances of the Dowager Lady Lyttelton and of the excellent Dean of Windsor, the best provision M'hich love and wisdom could suggest was made for the religious training of the Roj'al offspring. In this department, as well as in others, the Prince looked for a principle, and a defined scope. As early as March 1842 (p. 175) the inevit- able Baron had supplied a Memorandum on the subject. He reverted to it in July 1846 (p. 183) ; and laid it down that it coiild not be too soon determined in what principles the Prince of Wales should be brought up. He deprecated the frame of mind which leads to indiscriminate conserva- tism, desired freedom of thought, and a reflective ap])re- ciaf ion of practical morality as indispensable to the relation between Sovereign and people. And then he proceeded to the question of religion. The law required that " the belief of the Church of England shall be the faith of the members of the lloyal Family " (p. 185) : and this law must be obeyed. Eut sliould not the young Prince's mind in due time be opened to changes in progress, and to the probable effect of discoveries in science ? Society, says the Baron, is already divided into two classes. The first is composed 94 LITE OF THE PRINCE CONSORT. of those who hope for improvement from increased know- ledge of nature, and attention to the laws of our being ; which will work out the results intended by the Creator. Of the hicrophants of this class the Baron, while he favours them, has not hesitated to write thus : "a con- stant war is carried on openly, but more generally from masked batteries, by this class of persons, on the pi'evail- ing religious opinions " (p. 186). " The class contains the seeds of important modifications in the opinions and religious institutions of the British Empire." 35. Then we have the second class, whom the Baron succinctly describes as " the advocates of sup 'rnatural reli- gion." This is frank enough : and no attempt is made to disguise the fact that the issue raised was between Christianity and Theism. The account given of this class is given ab extra, and not as in the other case from within the precinct. It is, accordingly, as might have been expected, fundamentally inaccurate and misleading. " The orthodox believers regard the supernatural poitions of Christianity as the basis which sustains its morality, and as the sole foundations of government, law, and subordi- nation." Of misrepresentation Baron Stockmar was in- capable ; but we have here a strange amount of ignorance. lie might as well have said that supernaturalists were men who did not cat or diink, and ^vho held that corporal life was only to be sustained by Divine gi-ace, which was tlie sole foundation of running and jumping. A man who lives in the second story of a house rests only, it seems, upon the air, and not upon the first story and the base- ment. But, in truth, the Christian morality enjoys all the supports which belong to the morality of Stockmar, while it is lifted by the Incarnation to a higher level, with a larger view, and a place nearer to God. We could not IIFE OF THE I'EINCE COXSORT. 95 expect him to have wasted his time in reading the -n'orks of theologians, which, however, he thought himself quali- fied to describe. Yet he ought surely to have lvno\\n that 8t. Paul expressly deduces the binding character of reli- gion (Rom. i. 19, 20) from the book of ]S"ature, and also regards offences against Nature as a distinct and deeper category of sin (Jhul. 26, 27). Xor would it have been unworthy of him to bear in mind that Dante has placed the violent against Nature in a deeper condemnation even than those M'ho are violent against God (' Inferno,' Canto XIV. and XV.). The Baron must have been a good deal puzzled to reconcile his own unequivocal condemnation of supernatural religion Avith his frank recognition of a legal necessity for training in the Anglican system of belief. Upon the whole we must say, even with the gratitude every Englisliman should feel towards this faithful friend and adviser of his Sovereign, the Memorandum, as it is presented by Mr. Martin, has too much the appearance of one of the "masked batteries " which it describes. Eut parental wisdom was not to be seduced even by this great uuthonty, and the arrangements for the education of the Prince of AVales were made, we believe, in the old Chris- tian fashion. 36. It is not, however, as a model cither of theological or of political opinion that any human being can profitably be proposed for exact imitation, or that we think the Prince will be longest and best remembered among us. In the speculative man there remained much more of the German than in the practical. His contemplation and study of the living and working England were alike assiduous and fruitful ; and this man, who never sat upon our Throne, and who ceased at the early age of forty-two to stand beside it, did more than any of our 96 LIFE OF THE TEINCE CONSORT. Sovereigns, except very, very few, to brighten its lustre and to strengthen its foundations. He did this, by the exhibition in the highest place, jointly with the Queen, of a noble and lofty life, which refused to take self for the centre of its action, and sought its pleasure in the unceasing performance of duty. There has been, beyond all doubt, one perceptible and painful change since his death : a depression of the standard of conduct within the very highest circle of society. In proof of this melancholy proposition, we will specify that branch of morality which may fairly be taken as a testing-branch — namely, conjugal morality. Among the causes of an incipient change so disastrous to our future prospects, we should be inclined to reckon the death of the Prince Consort, and the disappearance from public view of that majestic and imposing, as well as attractive and instruc- tive, picture of a Court which, while he lived, was always before the eyes of the aristocracy and the nation. 37. Neither this book, nor any book written from a pecu- liar point of view, can ever supply a standard history of the period it embraces. It may, nevertheless, supply — and we think it has thus far supplied — a valuable contri- bution to, and an indispensable part of, such a history. This alone more than justifies the publication. But it has a yet higher title in its faithful care and solid merit as a biography. From the midst of the hottest glow of worldly splendour it has drawn forth to public contempla- tion a genuine piece of solid, sterling, and unworldly excellence ; a, pure and lofty life, from which every man, and most of all every Christian, may learn many au ennobling lesson ; and on which he may do well to meditate, when he communes with his own heart, in liia chamber, and is still. IV. LIFE or THE PRINCE CONSOET. Vol. III. London, 1877.* 1. The labours of Mr. ^Martin on the life of the Prince Consort have been marked by a conscientious dilij^ence not less noteworthy than his talent and his equitable temper. With these qualifications, and with the free access to the innermost centres of confidential information, which has been so graciously accorded to him by the Sovereign, he has in his two former Volumes presented to us a personal portraiture of the Piince Consort so complete that it scarcely allows the addition of a touch. The biographer, as he proceeds along the course of the revolving years, can indeed lengthen the ample catalogue of actions wise and good ; and can show how time, as it gives new force, depth, and dignity to the human coun- tenance, even into a prolonged old age, so also imparts a riper mellowness, and a more compact solidity, to mental faculty and work. 2. Monumental commemoration, which reminds man of his weakness even more than of his strength, and which has been carried farther pcrbaps in tlie case of the Prince Consort than of any other distinguished personage, has something in it that jars, when it goes beyond the modesty of custom. Yet every statue and memorial of the Prince * Published in the Church of Emjland Quarterly Review for Januar* 1878. I. H 98 LIFE OF TTIV. rP.TNHE CONSnUT. may in some sense be considered as a sermon made visil)le. He is one of the few, the very few, characters on the active stage of modern life, in whom the idea of duty seems to be actually impersonated, and to walk abroad in the costumes of State. It is good for us to be taken back, again and again, to see the spectacle, and so to learn its lessons. After making every allowance for a work composed almost within the precinct of a Court, and without pretending to determine the precise place which history will finally accord to him upon the roll of great- ness, we are safe in saying that upon the extended surface of society we may travel far and wide, before the eye is blessed with so strong and happy a combination of mental and of moral force. K^or can it be questioned that siich combination is more precious to mankind in exact propor- tion as its seat is found, and its activity developed, near to the summit of the social fabric. Born with all these faculties to a high station, and lifted up by marriage to one of unusual splendour, it was his fate, being torn away in the very flower of his manhood and the vigour of all his gifts, to add to the lustre of his career that peculiar touch of pathos given by the master artist of heroic character to his Achilles ; to whom the consummation of his glory was only permitted on condition of the shortening of his life* In the attentive reader of this Volume will probably deepen the impression he may have received from those which preceded it, that few indeed have been the lives, in this curiously chequered age of ours, which upon the whole come nearer to the standard which in genei-al we contemplate rather than attain. 3. This repeated presentation to the public eye of such Iliad, B. ix. 410-0. LIFE OF THE PEINCE COXSOET. 99 a picture, "vvith all its elevating and all its caliiiiiig iiiliueiicc's, is indeed so wholesome that we feel anything rather than displeased with Mr. Martin when he informs us, in his Preface, that the work has in spite of him outgrown the limits which he had appointed for it, and that it must extend through a fourth of these large and portly Volumes. The consequence, however, is, that it assumes, as we proceed, the character less of a biography, and more of a history. It may also be stated with f^ome confidence that for a final history of the times, and of the great events it touches, it is both too near and too brief. Mr. Martin has evidently been guided in his course by the consideration that the history of the period he has here to traverse was really a part of the Prince's life ; so opera- tive was the force that he had exerted in the making of it. Of this the Prince himself, for once, allows himself to speak in significant terms : — "Tho things of all sorts that are laid on onr shon'dcrs, i.e. on mine, are not to be told. People ft el th it a certain powtr exists, which has not thrust itself ostentatiuubly forward, and tlicrefuio they fancy it must ho doing harm, even althuugh the results of what it does must all be admitted to be good." — P. 457. 4. There arc, indeed, those who surmise that this ex- tension of Mr. Martin's plan has been effected in order to carry back the public mind in large detail to the associations of the Crimean War, and thus to revive the sentiments of hostility to Russia which at that epoch naturally and warrantably prevailed. But, even apart from the remem- brance of the high auspices under which he writes, we know of nothing to justify the imputation to him of a mischievous and paltry trick. Tlie imputation itself is probably due to the exultation with which the portion of H 2 100 LIFE OF THE PRINCE CONSOKT. our newspaper press that is hostile to the suhject races in Turkey has gloated on his reference to the cruelty with which, in some instances, our wounded were treated by the Russian soldiers as they lay on the battle-field. This is an excess to be severely reprobated. Prince Menschikoll alleged, in justification, that English prisoners had made use of concealed revolvers (p. 159) to shoot down their captors ; but this must have been rare, for he finds it necessary to put in other excuses also, which are frivolous. Attempts have, however, been made to treat this pro- ceeding as parallel to the wicked, and indeed fiendish, proceedings of the Turks in mutilation and cruel torture on the fields of recent battle. To compare the two is truly minima componere magnis. To give no quarter, and to put an end to the life of the wounded, is one thing ; to mutilate, to torture, and to burn them is another; and these are the practices, too well attested, of the last few months.* Mr. Martin for a moment happens to deviate from his usual impartiality, when he seems (p. IGO) to match the simple privation of life with this more than bestial delight in torture. We do not know if it has ever been stated to him, as it has been to us, on the authority of Lord Gough, that there were too many acts of this description committed by the British soldiers, in the war of the Punjaub, on their wounded and disabled enemies. 5. There is a supposition, much more rational as well as mueh more charitable, which may tend to account for Mr. Martin's having altered and enlarged his plan at this par- ticular juncture. For this alteration has enabled not only to show the part which the Prince took in all the anxieties * See, e.i]., the article of Mr. Forbes, in The Nineteenth Century for November, p. 571. LIFE OF THE rillNCE CONSORT. 101 of the Crimean War, but to give us the Prince's evidence in his own detailed and repeated hinguage as to the policy in furtherance of Avhich it was undertaken. So much has been recently stated, or mis-stated, in regard to the aim and motive of that war, that nothing can he more season- al)le than the opportunity he offers us of learning some- thing on the suhjcct from high and dispassionate authority. For the authority is, in truth, very high. We are to regard the Prince Consort as having been while he lived the mind's eye, so to speak, of a Sovereign who entered with energy into all great transactions. There was such a standing partnership, and common movement of the two, combined with such a harmony of character and feeling, that we may regard the will of either one as speaking for both ; and, jointly, they had unrivalled means from day to day for estimating what the French call the " situation." From near presence, and close and constant intercourse, reaching far beyond established forms, they knew not only the resolutions of the Aberdeen Cabinet, but the interior mind of all those members of it who had special titles to exercise an influence on its foreign policy. Of these the most important were Lord Aberdeen as Prime Minister, and Lord Clarendon as Foreign Secretary. Next to them came Lord Palmerston, on account of his great knowledge and experience in foreign affairs ; and with him Lord John Bussell, as the leader of the House of Commons, and as the person who had taken the seals of the Foreign Office on the formation of that Ministry, and who resigned them shoa-tly afterwards to Lord Clarendon, without doubt for the very sufficient reason that no man can efficiently dis- charge in conjunction, especially at a time of crisis, the duties of the Foreign Department and those attaching to the Leadership of the Commons. 102 LIFE OF THE PEINCE CONSOET. 6. It is a favourite idea with some, that we have hail handed down from a remote date a traditional policy of upholding- the Ottoman Empire, like Portugal or Belgium, without much regard to collateral questions. We helieve it would he difficult to establish this doctrine by historical evidence. To those who care to examine the question ever so little, we recommend an examination of the speech of Lord Holland in the debate of January 29, 1828. It was delivered at a time when we were engaged in a policy of coercion against Turkey, out of which, just before, had grown the battle of Kavarino. Lord Holland appeared to show in that debate that we had indeed ancient alliances with Russia, that we had no treaty at all with Turkey before 1799, that the treaty then concluded was only for seven years, that it was simply part and parcel of our mili- tary measures against France. And it commenced with these words: "His Britannic Majesty, connected already with His Majesty the Emperor of llussia by the ties of the strictest alliance, accedes by the present treaty to the defensive alliance which lias just been concluded between His Majesty the Ottoman Emperor and the Emperor of Russia; " together with certain limiting words, which need not be cited in this place. 7. It would be curious to ascertain the precise date at which the idea was first broached, tliat British interests required the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire. "We have little doubt that it is posterior to the debate whicli has just been cited, and that it was far from being gene- rally recognised by the statesmen of the last generation. It may pro])ably be traced in the policy of 1840, and the armed assistance lent to the decrepit Empire against its Egyptian vassal. It grew, however, with ra])idity, fos- tered by the rather womanish suspicions and alarms on LIFE OF THE PIIINCE COXSORT. 103 behalf of India, of which Russia gradually became tlie object. It has grown with greater rapidity since tlie Crimean AYar, in proportion to the increased susceptibility of the country, which has almost learned to regard political alarm as standing in the first class of its luxuries, those namely which are daily and indispensable. 8. It may boldly be affirmed that this doctrine of British interests, as involving a necessity of upholding the Ottoman Empire, was not the avowed doctrine of the Ibitish Government in the proceedings immediately anterior to the Crimean War. Some there are at the present day who believe that war to have been a war for liritisli in- terests, founded upon the traditional policy of maintaining the Porte, with all its crimes, in its " integrity and inde- pendence," as the proper bulwark of our own sway in India. Others have thought that we undertook the war upon a ground certainly more chivalrous ; that, seeing a weaker country oppressed by a stronger one, we generously interfered on behalf of the weak against the strong. Of course, such a theory provokes the question, how far it is to reach ; and whether we, of all mankind, liave taken out a general roving commission of knight errantry — " To ride abroad redressing human wrongs."* 9. The work of Mr. Martin supplies weighty e\'idence that the policy of the Ci'imean War was based neither upon the cynical selfishness of the first of these concep- tions nor upon the high-flown Quixotry of the last. Un- less the Sovereign :nid her Consort, with their matchless opportunities of knowledge, were absolutely blindfolded, the policy which led us into the war was that of repressing * Tcnnvson's ' Guinevere.' 104 LIFE OF THE riUNCE COXSOET. an offence against the public law of Europe, but only by the united authority of the Powers of Europe. Public la.v aud European concert were in truth its twin watch- words. From the pages before us we will now supply the pooof. " Our conduct throughout,'' says the Queen, wiitini,' to Lord Aberdeen, on April 1, 1854 (p. 59), " has been actuated by unselfishness and honesty." This was at the commencement. At the close, on March 31, 1856, the Queen writes (p. 471) that to Lord Clarendon alone (i.e., alone of those in Paris) " is due the dignified position the Queen's beloved country holds, thanks to a straightforward, steady, and unselfish policy throughout." 10. So much for the British interests. On June 21, the Prince Consort delivers a speech at the Trinity House, in which (p. 69) he says : — " All these difficulties, however, may be considered to be com- pensated by tlie goodness of our cause, 'the vindication of the public law of Europe.' '' And also, he proceeds to say, by the French alliance. On July 5, he writes to the Emperor Napoleon (p. 88) : — " II mo sera en outre du plus haut int^ret d'assister a une con- centraliiin dc troupes de cette noble arnie'e, rangei; dans ce moment a cote' de la notre, pour la de'fense du dioit public europeen." On November 19 he writes to Lord Clarendon (p. 164) that the aim of the war was " to put a term at last to a policy which threatened the existence of the Ottoman Empire, and, by making all the countries bordering on the Blark Sen, (le[)end(^neies of llussia, serioii.^ly to endang(3r the bid.noc of j)o\ver." LIFE OF THE rrJXCE COXSOUT. 105 To the King of the Belgians, on February 16, 1855, the Prince writes, comphTining of the charges marie against us (p. 447) ; and, among others, of this — that we were " making a tool of France for our own objects in the East (because of India, &c.) " : — " The truth of the matter, on the contrary, ia, that a great Euro- poan question was at issue, and France and ourselves were, and still are. the only Powers possessed of the tirmness, the courage, A^o the DISINTEUKSTEDNESS tO grapplo witll it." That other and lower views gradually fotmd acceptance in lower quarters, we do not doubt. 13ut these were the views embraced at the Court, guided as it was by rare integrity, unsurpassed intelligence, and ample connaissance de cause. 11. And the language we have cited is in full harmony with the general strain of the correspondence laid before Parliament. At the outset, the quarrel was one between Russia and France in regard to ecclesiastical privileges at the Holy Places. England was but an amicus curi(e ; and, in that capacity, she thought liussia in the right. As, however, the communications went on, the Czar, unfortunately, committed his case' to a special envoy, Prince ^McnschikofF, whose demands upon the Porto appeared to the liritish Government to render hai'mony in the Turkish Empire, if they should be accepted, thenceforth impossible. In the further stages of the correspondence, which had thus shifted its ground, wo found ourselves in comr>nny with France ; and not with France only, but with Em ope. At one particular point, it must in faiiTiess be allowed that Russia, with her single rapier, had all her antagonists at a disadvantage. They had collectively accepted, and they proposed to her 106 IIPE OF THE PEINCE CONSORT. a Note, known as the Yienna Note, which she also ac- cepted ; and they afterwards receded from it, upon objection taken to it by Turkey. Russia, however, covered the miscarriage of her opponents by sustaining the Turkish interpretation of the words, and thus sheltered their retreat from the support of the document they themselves had framed. But it was not upon this mis- carriage that the dispute came to a final issue. The broken threads of negotiation were pieced together ; and, about the time when the year expired, a new instrument, of a moderate and conciliatory character, was framed at Constantinople, and approved by the Cabinets of the five Powers, still in unbroken union. It was the rejection of this plan by the Emperor Nicholas, when it was presented to him in January 1854, and not his refusal of the Turkish amendments to the Vienna Note, that brought about the war in the following March. 12. Thus far the Prince and the Queen have enabled us to vindicate the British policy against the accusation of selfishness. Let us now see how it stands on the other side, as against the charge of Quixotry. If it is wholly unwise and unwarrantable for one Power to constitute itself the judge and the avenger of European law, is it wholly wise and reasonable for two ? So far as a question of this kind can be answered in the abstract, undoubtedly it is not. It is a precedent by no means free from danger ; a couple of States cannot claim for them- selves European authority. But this was not the enter- prise on which Erance and England advisedly set out. They began their work, say from the time of the Men- schikoff mission, in close association with Austria and with Prussia; and the four together were the only Powers who, by established usage, could represent the concert of IIFE OF THE PKIXCE CONSORT. 107 Europe, in a case where the fifth, an only remaining Power of tlie first order, was itself the panel in the dock. They pursned tliis work in hai'niony through the whole of the year 1853. "With March 18.54 came the crisis. Austria urged the two leading States, England and France, to send in their ultimatum to lliissia, and pro- mised it her decided support. She redeemed the pledge, but only to the extent of a strong verbal advocacy. Without following out the subse(|ueut detail of her proceedings, she rendered thereafter to the Allies but equivocal and uncertain service ; without, however, dis- avowing their policy either in act or woj'd. It was Prussia, which at the critical moment, to speak in homely language, bolted ; the vcrj* jjolicy which she had recom- mended, she declined unconditionally to sustain, from the first moment when it began to assume the character of a solid and stern reality. In fact, slie broke up the Euro- pean concert, by which it was that France and England had hoped, and had had a right to hope, to put down tlic stubbornness of the Czar, and to repel his attack upon the public law of Eui'ope. The question that these Allies had now to deterTuine was whether, armed as they had been all ;dong with the panoply of moral authority, they would, upon this unfortunate and discreditable desertion, allow all their demands, their reasonings, their ])rofes- sions, to melt into thin air. They were, in the view of public right, perhaps entitled to decline the heavy respon- sibility of executing alone what they had counselled and designed in company with others. At least there could have been no one with a good title to reproach them. But would such a retreat, such a Xiirora^ia, by two such Powers, have been for the permanent advantages of European honour, or legality, or peace? i08 IIPE OF TnE PErN"CE CONSOE?. 13. We shall now produce evidence of the same class aa before, and from the same sources, to show that the views we have thus expressed were those of the British Court at the epoch of the Crimean War. We shall show how indisputably it was there and then believed that the continued concert of Europe would abash the offender, and settle the dispute without bloodshed; how the Powers, and especially the Power, were regarded, which paralysed that concert, and broke it up. On August 28, 1854 (p. 98), the Prince writes thus to the King of Prussia : — " The four Powers acted in perfect haniiony up to last March, when Prussia rejected the Quadruple Treaty, which Austria, with the wisest intentions, had proposed." On November 8 (p. 143) he addresses his uncle, King Leopold, and describes the danger that France may be tempted " to cherish her traditional arriere-pensees of territorial aggrandisement " : — " This danger, I repeat, Austria, Prussin, and Germany ra^iy avert, by acting with us, not in the manipulntion of protocols, wliich leave everything to tlie exertions of the Western Powers, and have no object but to make sure that no liarin is done to tlie enemy. Such a course is dishonourable, immoral, leads to distrust, and ultimately to direct hostility. Already the soreness of feeling here against Prussia is intense." And as to Prance, October 23, 1854 (p. 137) : " In Boulogne tlie army, as I now hear, was in hopes to have to fight next year with Prussia." Much later, on October 29, 1855 (p. 385), the Prince writes to Baron Stockmar : — "The position talccn up by Austria and Prussia is alone to blame for all ; and I tremble for the Nemesis!" LIFE OF THE rillNCE CONSOKT. 109 14. Mr. Martin himself, describing this condition of sentiment, says (p. 161) : — "As the trngic events of this terrible war were more and more devcluj)e(i, more and more koeuly was it felt that all its miseries and carnaii;e might have been prevented, had the German Powi r.s gone heart and hand with those of the West in telling liussia that if she persisted in her aggression on Turkey, she would have to mui t them also in the field." When, however, the fight had been fought, and tlie allied Powers were about to obtaiil the fruits of it in a Treaty of Peace, then Prussia made her claim, as one of the great Powers, to take part in the negotiations. With respect to this claim, the Prince shows, on February 16, 1855 (p. 449), that it is inadmissible. Powers must not, he says, take part in the great game of politics, without having laid down their stake : — ^& " Besides the question here is between Powers who have waged war against eaeh otlier, and wish to conclude a peace. What riglit, then, have others to interfere who have taken no part in the con- flict, and have constantly maintained that their interests are not touched by tlie matter in dispute, and that, therefore, they would. not take any part in tlie business V" Prussia was accordingly excluded from the arrange- ments between the belligerents ; and only afterwards was allowed to appear at the meetings of the Powers for the purpose of considering the general and European arrange- ments embodied in the Treaty of 1856. The restrained, and sometimes mysterious, conduct of Austria is repeatedly censured; but her case was entirely distinct. Her occupation of the Principalities had at least the air of a qualified co-operation ; her menace of an entire junction with liie Allies (p. 425) hud to do with 110 LIFE OF THE PEFNCE CONSOUT. tlie final succumbing of Uussia : and her moral weight was with them thi'oi;ghout. 15. There are those who will di^aw comparisons, mutatis nominihis, between the drama of 1853-6 and that of 1875-8. There was in each case an offender against the law and peace of Europe ; Turkey, by her distinct and obstinate breach of covenant, taking on the later occasion the place which Russia had held in the earlier controversy. There were in each case prolonged attempts to put dowu the offence by means of European concert. In 1853-4, these proceeded without a check until the eve of the war. In 1875-7, the combination was sadly intermittent; but, in the singular and unprecedented Conference at Con- stantinople, it was, at least, on the part of the assembled representatives, perfectly unequivocal. In 1854, the re- fusal of Prussia to support words by acts completely altered the situation; and in 187G-7, the assurance con- veyed to Turkey from England, that only moral suasion was intended, had the same effect. The difference was that, in 1854-5, two great Powers, with the partial support of a third, prosecuted by military means the work they had undertaken ; in 1877 it was left to Russia alone to act as the hand and sword of Europe, with the natural consequence of weighting the scale with the question what compensation she might claim, or would claim, for her efforts and her sacrifices. This outline of a parallel we may leave to the impartial criticism of our readers. 16. Thus far we have seen that the design of the Crimean War was, in its groundwork, tlie vindication of Europem law against an unprovoked aggression. It sought, thercifore, to maintain intactthe condition of the menaced party against the aggressor ; or in other Avords, to defend against Russia the integrity and independence of the Ottoman Empire. LIFE OF TTIi: PRINCE COXSOKT. 1 1 1 The condition of the Chrisliuu subjects of the roilc in general was a subject that had never before that e])0(h come under the official consideration of Europe. The internal government ef a country, it may safely be laid down, cannot well become the subject of effective con- sideration by other States, except in cases where it leads to consequences in which they have a true locus standi, a legitimate concern on their own particular account, or on account of the general peace. In the case of Greece, an insurrection growing into a ci\'il war, and disturbing the Levant, had created this locus standi ; and the inter- ference of three Powers, led by Groat Britain, had redressed the mischief. Ko like door had then been opened in the other Christian provinces of Turkey. The dispute upon the Holy Places in 1853 had very partially opened it, when liussia demanded for herself exclusively an enlarged right of inter-s-ention on behalf of the Oriental Christians. It thus became necessary, in determining the policy of the future, to take notice of the condition of the subject races. The greatest authoi'ities, and pre-emin- ently Lord Stratford de liedelilfe, believed in the capacity of the Porte by internal reforms to govern its subjects on the principle of civil equality. The resolution therefore was taken to pursue this end, but without that infringe- ment of the Porte's sovereign rights which Pussia had attempted ; and this resolution was formally embodied in a protocol at the outbreak of the war by the Allies and by Austria. The conclusion of the peace in 1856 fell to the lot of Lord Palmerston and his colleagues. In the inte;est of the Porte, and of the general peace of Europe, tlu-y cancelled the rights of separate interference preSnously possessed and claimed by Russia. They took the Piin- cipalities under a direct European protection. On behalf ] 12 LIFE or THE PEIXCE COIS^SOET. of the subject races generally, they embodied in the treaty the record of the Hatti-humayoum, or edict issued by the Sultan, which purported to establish securely the civil equality of all races and religions in Turkey. This was undoubtedly a covenant on the part of the Sultan. But it was a covenant without penalty for breach ; for the Powers expressly renounced any right to call him to account, not however, generally, but only as growing out of the communication he had made. It was thus, in cancelling the Russian treaties with the Porte, that the Powers of Europe first became, by the Treaty of Paris in 185G, responsible, in the last I'esort, for securing the government of the subject races in Turkey on principles of civil equality. 17. The terms demanded from llussia before the war had been exceedingly moderate. When the war had broken out, the Allies justly availed themselves of their under- stood right to enlarge these terms. Now, in July 1854, appeared on the ground for the first time the celebrated Pour Points. After the fall of Sebastopol, they were again enlarged ; a territorial cession, the extinction and not merely the limitation of naval power in the Plack Sea, and some provisions relating to the Baltic, were exacted from Eussia. In like manner we are now (as far as is known) witnessing the expansion of the minimised demands of the Conference at Constantinople into a real and elfective liberation of Bulgaria, the cession of Armenia, and perhaps other conditions. But what it is curious to note is the relative attitudes of the Court and tlie Cabinet of Lord Palmerston at the time of the Peace. We must look upon that Peace, according to the evidence of Mr. Martin's volume, as due to the Cabinet, and as accepted at Windsor on Constitutional grounds, ruthcrthan because LIFE OF THE PEINCE CONSOET. 113 it was approved on its own merits. On March 21, 1856 (p. 470), the Prince writes: — " The Peace is to be signed on Montlay. It is not sucli as we could l.ave wished ; still infinitely to be preferred to the prosecu- tion of the wur, with the present compliciition of general policy." The views of the Queen are expressed in a letter to the Emperor on April 3 (p. 473) : — "Although sharing in the feeling of the majority of my people, who Ihink this Peace is i)eriiai)S a little premature, I feel bound to tell you that I approve highly of the terms in whii-h it is couclieil, as a result not unworthy of the sacrifices made by us in comniou dining this just war, and as insuring, so far as this is possible, tho Btaliility and the equilibrium of Europe." 18. Even those who do not at all think the Peace to have been premature must, as Avitnesses, corroborate the opinion of Her Majesty with respect to the popular sentiment at the time. This had, during the negotiations of 1853, been calm and moderate in a high degree. It was first thrown into excitement* by the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Sinope ; which, being simply a military coup, was, under some unknown code of senti- ment, branded as a massacre. The sufferings of the Army during the winter very greatly heightened, as was luitural, the susceptibility of tlie country. But now in October 1854 the Prince writes (p. 137) tliat men, "if they have seen blood, are no longer tlie same, and are not to be controlled. . . . The cry now is for the annihihition of liussia." It was much to the credit of Lord Palmerstou and his Cabinet, that the Peace was actually made ; for * [Some would place the first symi)toms of disturbance in the balance of tlu' jiopular mind a little, but ouly a very little, earlier. — • W. E. G., 1878.] I. I 114 LIFE OF THE PEIIv'CE CONSOET. it was not without hazard to their popuharity that the work was carried through. 19. Such is, we believe, a fair outline of the case of the Crimean War, as it is exhibited in this volume. That war passed through all the phases of popularity; the people, and especially the newspapers, were so fond of it while it lasted, that they were, as we have seen, reluctant to let it end. It is an unquestionable fact, that Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, who stoutly and most disinter- estedly opposed it, and who, with the bloom of the Corn Law triumph upon them, wore before it began the most popular men in the country, lost for the time, by their opposition to it, all hold upon the general public. The war, however, soon and even rapidly waned in favour. At length it came to be looked upon by many, if not by most, as an admitted folly. The nation appeared to have come round to the opinion of Cobden and of Bright. And yet the war had attained its purpose ; which was, to repress efEectually the aggression of Kussia, and to secure to Tuikey breathing-time and full scope for the reform of its government. 20. It may be said that, after all, she did not reform her government. Most true ; but it is only within a short time that this fact has become at all generally known to our countrymen. And, moreover, this reform was not, pro- perly speaking, the object of the war, but rather an aim incidental to the conditions of the Peace. Wliy, theii, did it fall into disfavour? Because men estimated its object, not as it ai)pears in this volume, not as it was drawn out in the minds of the statesmen who made tho war, but according to their own unauthorised and exag- gerated ideas of its aim, and of the position of the several parties. Turkey, it had then been too commonly held, LITE OF Tin; i-niNCE coxsokt. 115 was a young vigorous country, only wanting an open and calm atmosphere to break out into the beauty and bloom of a young civilisation. Eussia was to be cut into morsels, or at the least to bo crij)pled by the amputation of important members. The extravagance of these antici- pations led to disappointment ; and the disappointment, for which people had themselves, or perhaps their n(nvs- papers, to thank, Avas avenged upon the Crimean War. 21. The persons wlio are really eutith;d to vaunt their foresight in this matter, as superior alike to the views of Sovereigns and of statesmen, are the few, the very few, wlio objected to the war from the beginning to the end, and who founded this objection not upon a ijhilanthropic yet scarcely rational proscription of wai- under all circum- stances and conditions, but upon a deeper insight into the nature and foundations of Mahometan poAver over Christian races, than liad fallen to the lot either of diplo- macy or of statesmanship. Of these, perhaps the most distinguished are Mr. Freeman ami Dr. Newman, both of whom in 1853 proclainunl the hopeless natm-c, not of the Ottoman as such, but of the Ottoman ascendancy. 15oth have rcpul)lisbed their works of that date, and Mr Free- man has taken a most active and able part in all the recent controversies; in which, to the surprise of many admirers, the living voice of Dr. Newman has not once been heard. 22. Independently of its actual history, the Crimean "War has in various unexpected ways left its mark upon us. The fiictitious r(])utation, the thin gloss of character, with which it invested Turkey, enaliled tbat most corrupt of States to ape with effect one great vice of civilisation, by accumulating in twenty years of peace a debt of two hundred millions. The market value of this debt is at I 2 116 LITE OF THE PKIXCE COXSOET. present at most twenty millions ; and he -svould be a san- guine man who could believe that, with the restoration of peace, it could ever reach one-fourth of the sum which Turkey pledged herself to pay. This vast amount was divided between the profits of middlemen, the peculations of Pachas, the unbounded cost of the profligacy of Sultans, the payment of old dividends out of new capitals, and, it must be added, the creation of a highly respectable iron fleet, and of an excellent war materiel, which has cost the Russians many a thousand lives. All this, "we appre- hend, has been done mainly at the charges of France and England, whose joint losses on the Turkish debt may be thought to form a sort of disastrous postscript to the Crimean alliance, and a pendant to the hundi'ed and fifty millions which they spent upon the War. 23. There were two other changes, which became per- ceptible after the conflict, and which ought, perhaps, to be referred to it as a cause. One of them is the more feverish condition of the public mind with regard to aff'airs abroad. Tlie long continuance of the French Revolutionary War, and the numerous disasters which preceded a final triumph, mainly due to the intoxication of Napoleon, fairly nau- seated the public taste, or appetite, for arbitraments of the sword. Moreover, there had been entailed upon us a debt nominally of eight, but really of nine, hundri'd millions ; a sum which probably represented more nearly a third than a fourth part in value of the entire posses- sions of the country, so that every man who thought him- self owner of three thousand pounds, in trutli owned not greatly more than two. Together with this Debt, thero was an elaborate system of protective legislation, fettering the industry by which alone our burdens could be borne LIFE OF THE PRIIfCE CONSOHT. 117 or diininislicfl, and a widely spread, and but too natural and intelligible, political disaffection. From 1815 until the Crimean period, tbe nation maybe said to have formed one great peace society ; and invasion of the island by a hostile power, though it had been brouglit so near under Napoleon, was hardly dreamt of. 24. During that period, a fresh guarantee of peace seemed to be afforded us in a close and cordial alliance with France, which seems to have been sublimated, so to speak, into a very notable personal affection between the reigning houses. In August 1855 Her Majesty, habitually measured in thought and expression, says of the Emperor (p. 351) : — "I know few penj)Io whom I liayo felt involuniarily nioro inclined to conliiie in, and speak unreseivcdlj- to; I sliuuld not fear .s;iyin<^ anything to him. I felt — I do not know how to express it — safe with him." A letter on the 29th of the same month ends as follows (p. 522) :- " Permettezqne j'exprimo ici tons les sentiments de tcndre amitie et d'aft'eetion avec lesqncls je me dis, Sire et clier Frere, de Votie Mnjeste Impe'rialo la bien bonne et affectionnee Soour et Amie, "Victoria R." And even of the Prince the Queen had reported (p. 351):— "He quite admits tliat it is extraordinary how very miicli attached one becomes to the Emperor, when one lives with him quite at one's ease, and intimately." In 1857, during the Indian Mutiny, our friendship was, as it were, reconsecrated by the invitation of the Emperor to send our troops through France on the way to the East. Yet in 1859, after two short years, our Military and Naval 118 LIFE OF THE PEINCE CONSORT. Estimates were largely augmented, and a new and very costly scheme of fortifications was proposed, under the influence of a general apprehension that invasion from France had become a probable contingency, requiring great schemes of defensive precaution. When the civil war in America led to a vast development of military power, British susceptibility fastened on the United States as its object, and the belief became fashionable that we were to be invaded in Canada. Wlien Germany had obtained, by the War of 1870-1, the greatest triumph recorded in her annals, then it was Germany that was to invade us. In the intervals of these alarms, the danger of India from Russia was always available to sustain this morbid, and somewhat womanish, excitement. 25. The second of the changes, to which we have re- ferred, has been the immense increase in the Military and JS^aval Estimates since tlie Crimean War. Without entering into minute details, it may be stated that our average annual expenditure under these heads is much more than twice the amount, at which it was placed in 1835 by the Con- servative Government of Sir Robert Peel ; and that, after setting aside special expenditure for secondary wars, the average annual charge for the years 1830-50 did not greatly exceed half what it has been for the years 1857-77. It would not be fair to ascribe the whole of this change to the altered humour of tlie public. Something considerable is due to the chauge in armaments, and the increased value of labour. Yet we believe it to be the fact that that altered humour, assiduously wrought upon by the pro- fessional spirit, and by the promoters of expenditure in general, has been the main cause of the alteration, and not a real and substantive necessity. There has been one important change made, which has of itself constituted a LIFE OF THE PRINCE CONSOKT. 119 great and most valuable economy. We have been enabled to give up, in the greater part of our colonies, the dan- gerous and costly practice of studdinjj them, under a pro- fessed notion of defence, with small fractions of the British army. This economy renders yet more striking that vast increase of charge, of which only the increased wealth of the country at large has made it, as a whole, so little disposed to complain. 26. There have been arguments used on behalf of this change of system. One of them has been the growth of Continental armaments. But the chief powers of the Continent have been engaged in wars on a large scale, with which we have had nothing to do. France, Prussia, and Austria have, each of them, had two such wars in the last twenty years. Then it has been a favourite plea that, by keeping liberal military and naval establishments, we should be placed in a state of security and saved from panics. But the result has been exactly the reverse. While our expenditure remained low, the dread of inva- sion was a thing hardly known. We make this statement advisedly, notwithstanding the rofcrencc to panics in and before 1852, mentioned by the Prince in February of that year (' Life,' ii. 433). These supposed panics we take to have been no more than whispers within the Az'my and the Court. They did not really lay hold on the public mind. But, since our charges began to be progressively and largely augmented, we have had, it may be said, a con- tinuing series of panics, with first one Power and then another as the object of our ajjprehensions. Again, it has been said, the Duke of Wellington was favourable to the new system. And that is, in some measure, true of the great Duke in his later years ; but whoever heard of it when liL! was Prime Minister, or before old age was upon 120 LIPE OP THE PRINCE CONSOKT. him? It was as he approached fourscore, during the Administration of Sir Robert Peel, that the Duke became an alarmist. But it is unquestionable that his fears were, notwithstanding his great authority, regarded by that pru- dent Minister and his colleagues as due to the commencing weakness of age, and were not allowed to act upon the amounts of force which from year to year they proposed to Parliament for the defence of the country. 27. Bi:t, lastly, it was found very convenient to ascribe the very sad sufferings and shortcomings of the winter spent before Sebastopol to the previous economies of the time of peace. Evidently an impression had been made to this effect (p. 486) upon the just and intelligent mind of the Queen herself. But what is the warrant for it? The war broke out ; and we, who had no pretensions to be a great military power, actually fought the battle of the Alma with a somewhat larger number of men than France, at that time the first military Power in the world, had been able to find and transport for the purpose. It is said, and is believed, that after that battle the British General felt a confidence in the power of the Allies at once to master Sebastopol, which the French did not feel, and that it was their negative which prevented the attempt. Next, we, who had been paralysed forsooth by economy, had assigned to us the right flank to the south of the fortress, which was the post of danger, while the French forces lay in comparalivc security between the British and the sea. Upon us, in consequence, came the heavy stress of Inkermann, and right well did our gallant soldiers bear it. True, the ranks of our Army were after- wards miserably thinned by sickness. The country was justly irritated, and demanded inquiry. The demand was met not with a single inquiry, but (little to our credit) LIFE OF THE rraXCE COXSORT. 121 vrhh no less than three. Tliere was one by a Committee of Parliament; one by Eoyal Commissioners sent to the spot; and one by a Eoard of Officers at Chelsea. They delivered three different and conflicting verdicts ; but no one of them found that the cause of the mischief lay in par- simony practised before the war ; the charge is one often and conveniently made, but never proved. 28. It is true, without doubt, that oiir organisation was deficient in various branches. But it has never been shown that the really needful improvements might not have been made within those general limits of military charge which subsisted during the reign of comparative economy. The truth we believe to be this. Our military authorities were wedded to the antiquated system of soldiering for life, which stands in diametrical opposition to the laws of military practice now universally acknow- ledged. As long as that system prevailed, it was natundly deemed the most essential point of all to keep up a force, numerically considerable, of old soldiers. To this end not only persuasion, but something like artifice, was addressed. So many i-egiments were kept in British Korth America, 80 many in the West Indies, and in other Colonial gar- risons ; because this dispersion presented the aspect of a quasi-military service, and a portion of the army was, as it were, kept out of view. The economies were accordingly thrown to some extent iipon the wrong points ; the mafcricl was very low ; a long period was allowed to pass without measures — by far the most vital of all — for improving the condition of the soldier ; and the impulse towards those measures, and towards real reform in the Army, when it did come, was a civil rather than a military impulse. Indeed, there is no reason to doubt that in his later years the Duke of "Wellington, alarmist as he had become, was also an 122 LIFE OF THE PEINCE CONSOKT. obstacle to the detailed and toilsome work of administra- tive reform in tlie Army. It had, however, been fairly begun under his pupil, Lord Hardinge, alike an able administrator and an excellent man; and it was in course of prosecution when the Crimean AVar broke upon us. 29. The Prince could not but bring from Germany military conceptions which were, as to certain aims, much in advance of those current among ourselves ; and at the epoch of the war, as well as before it, his active mind was turned to the consideration of our deficiencies. He laid his views before the Government of Lord Aberdeen in an able Memorandum (p. 185), which contains much import- ant matter. He had, indeed, so early as in his letter of February 19, 1852, to the Duke of Wellington, suggested the invaluable system of reserves, which is still so feebly and inadequately worked. In other respects, however, his paper can hardly be said to move upon the lines of Army reformers generally, since it docs not include any one of three points which with them were essential ! namely, short service for the men, abolition of purchase for the officers, and the abandonment of the expense of garrison forces in colonies other than military posts. 30. We have already pointed out that tlie character of the Volume before us is historical quite as much as biogra- phical, and we shall further notice in succession two or three points of interest on which it throws a light. The attachment of the Sovereign and her Consort to 8ir liobcrt Peel, the Duke of Wellington, and Lord Aberdeen, led them to watch with interest the working of the Aberdeen Cabinet, in which the Peelites held no less than six offices, besides having four members of their small party in the most iuiportnnt positions outside the Cabinet. The six Cabinet Ministers were Lord Aberdeen, the Duke LIFE OF THE nUNCi; COXSOKT. 123 of Arp-yll,* Sir James Graham, the Duke of Xewcastlc, ;Mr. (Uadstone, ami ^fr. Sydney Herhert. The four outside the door were Mr. Cardwcll at the Board of Trade, Lord Cannini? at the Post Office, Lord St. Germans, Yiceroy of Irehmd. and Sir John Young, Chief Secretary. Another Cahinet Jlinistcr, Sir William ^Eolesworth, was perhaps more nearly associated with tliem than with the AVliii's. Holding this large sliare of official power, the Peelitcs did not bring more than about thirty independent votes to the support of the Ministry, in addition to which they neutralised tlie Opposition of perhaps as many more members who sat on the other side of the House. Mr. Mai-tin says (p. 90), "It was apparent to all the workl that no cor(lial unanimity existed between the Peelito section of the Ministry and their colleagues." 31. This is an entire mistake. It must be stated, to the credit of all parties, but especially of the ^Yhig section of that Cabinet, that although the proportions of official power were so different from those of the voting strength in Parliament, there was no sectional demarcation, nor any approach to it, within the Cabinet. In proof of this statement, it may be mentioned that when, in the recess of 1853-4, Lord Palmerston had resigned his office on account of the impending Reform Bill, and it was desired, to induce him to reconsider his decision, the two persons who were chosen for the duty of communicating to him the wish of his colleagues were the Duke of Newcastle and Mr. Gladstone. Not even when the Eastern Question became the engrossing subject of the day was a sectional * The Duke of Argyll was invited at a very early age, on account of his hiijh personal character ami his talent, to enter the Cabinet oC Lurd Aliercii'on, but he diil nut beloUi; to the ex-olKcial corps who passed by the na\iie of Peelites, while he was iu political accordance with them. 124 LIFE OF THE rRIXCE CONSORT. division to be tracocl. It may be true, if nuances are to be minutely investigated, that the Peclite colour was on the whole a shade or two more pacific than the Whig ; but even this is true of the leading individuals rather than of the sections, and it may be safely affirmed that, of all the steps taken by that Government during the long and com- plicated negotiations before the Crimean War, there was not one which was forced, as will sometimes happen, by a majority of the Cabinet upon the minority. Eifts there were without doubt in the imposing structure, but they were due entirely to individual views or pretensions, and in no way to sectional antagonism. 32. The retirement of Lord Aberdeen was a subject of grief to the Court and to his friends ; but he was so far fortunate that, having been made the victim of a cry, partly popular and partly due to political feeling, he was saved, as was the Duke of Newcastle, from the responsibility of an act of difficult and doi;btful choice. Their friends, Sir James Graham, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Sidney Herbert, were less happy. It was their fate to join the Cabinet of Lord Palmerston, formed at a critical juncture, after some delay and difficulty, and then to quit it within a fortnight or three weeks. The cause was simply and solely this. The Aberdeen Government had resisted, unanimously and strongly, the appointment of what was termed the Scbas- topol Committee. The Palmerston Government set out with the intention of continuing that resistance. Its Head, and the majority of its members, arrived at the conclusion that the resistance would be ineffectual ; and they determined to succumb. The Peclites adhered to their text ; and, as the minority, they in form resigned, but in fact, and of necessity, they were driven from their offices. Into the rights of the question we shall not LIFE OF THE riilXCE COXSOKT. 125 inter; but, undoubtedly, they were condemned by the general opinion out of doors. Moreover, as in the letting- out of water, the breach, once made, was soon and con- siderably widened. They had been parties in the Cabinet, not only to the war, but to the extension, after the out- break had taken place, of the conditions required from llussia. But when it appeared that those demands were to be still further extended, or were to be interpreted with an unexpected rigour, and that the practical object of the Ministerial policy appeared to be a great military success in prosecuting the siege of Sebastopol to a triumphant issue, they declined to accompany the ^linistry in their course. Again they met with the condemnation of the country ; and the Prince Consort, while indicating his high opinion of the men, has recorded (p. 298 et alihi) his adverse judgment. One admission may perhaps be made in their favour. In the innumerable combinations of the political chessboard, there is none more difficult for an upright man than to discern the exact path of duty, when he has shared in bringing his country into war, and when, in the midst of that war, he finds, or believes himself to find, that it is being waged for pui'poses in excess of those which he had approved. 33. The course of the Sebastopol inquiries likewise tended to show that the high Constitutional doctrine which they had set up could not be infringed with impunity. They had held that the inquiry was an executive duty, and could only be couduct(>d aright by a Commission under the authority of the Crown. The country felt, or thouglit, it had obtained a triumph by the appointment of a Parlia- mentary Committee, which was capped, as we have said, by a Commission, this in its turn being traversed by a Board of Officers. The Committee censured the Ministers ; 126 LIFE OF THE PEINCE CONSOET. though it was phiin that, in the business of supply, they, and Mr. Sidney Herbert in particular, with an indefatig- able diligence, had run far ahead of any demands received from the camp. The Commission censured the executive departments of the army on the spot. The Board of Officers acquitted the military, and censured the com- missariat at home. No attempt was permitted to try the question to its core, as between these conflicting judg- ments. Mr. Roebuck very properly made a motion to bring the Report of his Committee under the consideration of the House, when the other two competing verdicts would have been compared with it, and with one another. The Peelites supported his motion. But he was defeated by a large majority ; so that the question Avhich broke up one Cabinet, and formidably rent another, which agitated England and sorely stained her military reputation in the eyes of Europe, remained then, and remains now, untried by any court of final appeal. Nor did this determined smothering of so great a matter cause public displeasure. On the contrary, as ~Sh\ Martin observes (p. 308), it gave satisfaction. Tlie feeling, he says tndy, was turned into other channels. " The past could not be mended — best leave it alone." The nation was befooled ; and befooled with pleasure, and by its own act. 34. A sui'vey of these years, conducted in an historic spirit, will, we think, leave on the mind, among other impressions, a sense of the great incidental evils which accompany the breaking up of those singularly, but fiuely and strongly, organised wholes, our known political parties. Together with Sir Robert Peel, nearly the whole official corps of the Conservatives was discharged in 184(5; and the discharge proved to be a final one. The Tories, when brought into office, had to supply the highest places with La& Angeles, Cak LTFE Of TUE PUINCE C0N30KT. 127 raw, that is to say, fresh, recruits. This could not he without some detriment to the public ser\-ice ; but ju.stiee requires the admission that the body of English gentiy, trained in the English foshion, affords material of great aptitude for public lil'c. There were evils on the other side much more serious than this. It took no less than thir- teen years to eli'cct the final incor{)oration of the Peelites into the Liberal party. When they took their places among its leaders, the official staff on one side was doubled, as on the other side it was almost annihilated. It is possible that to this duplication ought greatly to be attributed those personal discontents and political cross- purposes for which the Liberal party has of late years been disastrously remarkable. Moreover, for eleven out of these thirteen years of disembodied existence, the Peelites were independent members. They were like roving ice- bergs, on which men could not land with safety, but with which ships might come into perilous collision. Their weight was too great not to count, but it counted first this way and then that. It is not alleged against them that their conduct was dishonourable, but their politiral action was attended with much public inconvenience ; and even those who think they were enlightened statesmen may feel that the existence of these sensibly large segments of a representative chamber, in a state of detachment from all the organisation of party, acts upon the Parliamentary vessel as a cargo of corn in bulk acts, in foul weather, on the trim of a ship at sea. Again, as a party, they had been, like their leader, pacific and economical. Tbe effects of their separation from official Liberalism during the first Government of Lord Palmerston were easily trace- able in the policy of that Government as to various matters of importance. From tliis time onwards Lord 128 UFE OF THE PRINCE CO]SrSORT. Aberdeen was in retirement, and Peelism ceased to be, as Buch, in contact with the Court, at which it had certainly weighed as an important factor of political opinion. 35. The Prince resembled Lord Aberdeen in this, that, with an eminently just and liberal mind, he clung to traditions of Continental policy, or these traditions clung to him which were by no means uniformly liberal. We cannot but trace his hand in the recognition (p. 44) of the Five Great Powers as having been, " since the peace of 1815," the guarantors of treaties, the guardians of civilisation, the champions of right. AVhen Sardinia was struggling for the liberation of Italy, and when she had acted as a very timely ally in the Crimean ^\'ar, Belgium is emphati- cally described (p. 501) as " the only satisfactory child of the new epoch " : and in conversation with Louis Napoleon in 1854, the Prince wished, indeed, that Austria were out of Lombardy for Austria's own sake, but held that she could not recognise its title to an Italian nationality, and that she must hold it for the sake of her military frontier (p. 119). But the reconstituted Italy has thus far been in European politics a Power eminently Conservative ; and the only fear is lest she should be seduced, by the bad example of other Powers, into speculations and schemes of territorial aggrandisement. 3G. We have still to offer a remark on the important subject of the Danubian Principalities, which is touched by Mr. Martin. Subsequently to the Peace of Paris, Moldavia and Wallachia were united into one State under the name of Roumania, and after a time there was placed at its head a foreign Prince. To this measure Austria and the Porto were strongly opposed ; and we grieve to say that the influence of official England was thrown into their scale. Its adoption was mainly due to the sound instinct and the LIFE OF THE PRINCE CONSORT. 129 decided action of the people of the t^vo Provinces ; Avliich Russia at the very least thought it prudent not to thwart, and which France energetically favoured, and helped on- wards to a successful issue. Lord Clarendon expressed the opinion (p. 466) that, if these Provinces were united under a foreign Prince, such a Prince would in a few years be able to declare his independence. 37. Mr. ^lartin, strangely enough to our mind, says that events have shown how just were these apprehensions (p. 465). Is this just ? AVhat are the facts ? That for twenty years, though the misgovernment of Turkey would at any moment have afforded a pretext, lloumania remained in nearly motionless submissiun to the suzerainty of the Porte ; that she did absolutely nothing to assist the abortive Bulgarian rebellion of May 1876 ; that she showed no synqiathy with the Servian and ^Montenegrin wars of that summer ; and that she did not take a step of any kind in opposition to the Porte, until the overpowering might of llussia demanded a military passage through her territory, and virtually forced her into active hostilities. Had Turkey fulfilled the promises of civil equality which she has shamelessly and obstinately broken, but which Lord Clarendon honestly believed she would be able and dis- posed to keep, what opportunity would Roumania have had, even if so inclined, to rise against Turkey ? Did not her quietude, during nearly two years of troubles, partly bursting, and partly festering, on her frontier, show how wise it had been to give her contentment and some solidity of existence ? If Moldavia and Wallachia had continued in tlieir state of severance and weakness, it would have either been not more difficult, but much easier, for Russia to agitate them by intrigue duiiug the tranquil years 1856-75, or to issue her commands in I. £ 130 LIFE OF THE PETNCE CON^SORT. 1877 for supplying a free passage through their land to her armies. 38. But we cannot ha\re any quarrel with Mr. Martin. We must part from him in the good humour which gratitude inspires. In the production of his work, he is without doubt ministering to the just demand of a fond and un- quenchable affection in the highest place. But he is also performing a great service to the country : he gives the permanence of the written record to a life of public duty, which is certainly the most conspicuous that the nine- teenth century has witnessed. It is perhaps also the noblest and the purest : the only rival to it in these respects, that we are bokl enough to name, is the life of the noble-minded man who died as Earl Spencer, but who was better known as Lord Althorp. We venture to hope that Mr. Martin's labours will not end either witli three volumes, or Mith the fourth ; but that when his work is completed, he will with new energy reduce it to a form suited for a wide popular circulation. Outside the circle of domestic affections, the proper place for the Prince's memory to repose in is the heart of the people. V. THE COUNTY FRANCHISE, AND MR. LOWE THEREON* 1 . Mr. LowEf and I are, in some respecta, not ill fitted for a friendly duel on the subject of the representation of the people in Parliament. He did not confer, and I did not inflict, a speech on the House of Commons, when the sub- ject was recently under discussion. We are agreed, as I believe, on most questions of politics, indeed rather closely agreed on some important matters, such as public thrift, in which few agree with either of us ; and we are united, as I hope, in mutual regard. Moreover, we have already, many years ago, exhibited opposite leanings upon the question whether the general idea of extension of the suffrage is one Avhich ought to be viewed with favour, or the reverse. For my part, whatever may be the case with Mr. Lowe, I have this chance at least of relative impar- tiality, that I look upon the cause as one which calls upon me for adhesion as an individual, but not for the guidance of others in any larger ciipaeity. But further, our history has now reached a point, at which it is well that the sub- ject of a further extension of popular fi-anchises should be " bolted to the bran." For w(! are again, as we were in 1854, in 1860, and in 1866, open to one of the greatest * Reprinted from The Nineteenth Century for November 1877. t See Fortn'